this r srs post
Aug. 22nd, 2007 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI was really excited to see Ken Branagh's As You Like It on HBO last night. As You Like It has always been one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, because a.) Rosalind, the female lead, is fantastic and funny and b.) it is ON CRACK. A typical example of As You Like It logic goes like this:
Celia: If my father banishes you into the wilderness, I'll come with you! Because I cannot live without you, beloved cousin (and in conclusion, totally cousins) and you can pretend to be a boy and I'll be a girl and it'll be just like we're - er - brother and sister! Yes!
Rosalind: Cool, and you know what, since we're running off into the wilderness and your dad's threatening to kill me anyways, let's kidnap the court jester and make him come be our pet! It'll be funny!
Celia: ROCK ON. :D!!!!!
So: great play. And while Ken Branagh may have his quirky moments, they often just imbue added hilarity to the proceedings; for example, the genius decision to cast Keanu Reaves as Denzel Washington's Evil Brother in Much Ado About Nothing. FANTASTIC. Also, the critical reviews were great. So, I figured, what could go wrong?
. . .
Branagh decided to set the play in an enclave of Western traders in Japan. Without touching on the great cultural appropriation debate, this turns out in some ways really cool just in terms of imagery; the calligraphic poems that Orlando hangs on the trees in honor of Rosalind are gorgeous and I kind of want a screencap of the tree with poems falling from all its leaves to icon. In other ways, though, it leads to certain issues - especially with casting. The western "court" is entirely European except for a single sumo wrestler; good and evil brothers Orlando and Oliver are cast black, but also clearly high-ranked among the European court. Since the setting is specifically among the Western traders, I didn't have a huge problem with this.
But then the action of the play moves to the Forest of Arden, where we meet the forest-dwellers - who are almost all played by Asian actors. Purely in terms of the setting, this makes sense; once you move out of the sheltered Western enclave of Japan, one can expect to meet the actual Japanese. It's the choice of the specific characters, and how they're played, that bothers me. Silvius, a shepherd, loves Phebe, who falls in love with the disguised Rosalind, who - disgusted by Phebe's pride - insults her and sets her back up with Silvius. It's a comic situation in the play, but when blonde Rosalind/Ganymede stands there describing how the Asian-cast Phebe's "inky brows" and "black silk hair" are completely unattractive to her - and then on to say how unappealing Phebe is in general - I was cringing in my seat. (Well, on my parents' bed, where I was watching it because our regular TV is broken, but that's neither here nor there.) Aside from Phebe and Silvius, the only other Asian-cast character with a speaking role was William, romantic rival to Touchstone the fool. William was played very short and very comical, and his one scene with actual lines consists of Touchstone taunting him for his lack of courtly manners and then decisively laying claim to their shared love interest, Audrey (cast white). Again, I was cringing.
Some of this, especially the Phebe/Rosalind scenes, may have been intended as commentary - I hope it was, and if anyone else saw the production I would love another take. But to me it read as - well, as above, problematic to a significant degree. I am the more confused because, after hunting down various reviews, none of them mention this at all except occasionally to briefly comment that the cast is almost entirely Western and the setting is pretty.
(In other notes, the production was very pretty, but parts of it were not to my taste - the music made it much slower-paced than I feel an As You Like It should be, and Rosalind was a bit histrionic - and a lot of the dialogue that would have made her less so was cut. But Romola Garai as Celia was fantastic, Orlando was hot, and Alfred Molina was mostly great in his Touchstone scenes. Which was something.)
Celia: If my father banishes you into the wilderness, I'll come with you! Because I cannot live without you, beloved cousin (and in conclusion, totally cousins) and you can pretend to be a boy and I'll be a girl and it'll be just like we're - er - brother and sister! Yes!
Rosalind: Cool, and you know what, since we're running off into the wilderness and your dad's threatening to kill me anyways, let's kidnap the court jester and make him come be our pet! It'll be funny!
Celia: ROCK ON. :D!!!!!
So: great play. And while Ken Branagh may have his quirky moments, they often just imbue added hilarity to the proceedings; for example, the genius decision to cast Keanu Reaves as Denzel Washington's Evil Brother in Much Ado About Nothing. FANTASTIC. Also, the critical reviews were great. So, I figured, what could go wrong?
. . .
Branagh decided to set the play in an enclave of Western traders in Japan. Without touching on the great cultural appropriation debate, this turns out in some ways really cool just in terms of imagery; the calligraphic poems that Orlando hangs on the trees in honor of Rosalind are gorgeous and I kind of want a screencap of the tree with poems falling from all its leaves to icon. In other ways, though, it leads to certain issues - especially with casting. The western "court" is entirely European except for a single sumo wrestler; good and evil brothers Orlando and Oliver are cast black, but also clearly high-ranked among the European court. Since the setting is specifically among the Western traders, I didn't have a huge problem with this.
But then the action of the play moves to the Forest of Arden, where we meet the forest-dwellers - who are almost all played by Asian actors. Purely in terms of the setting, this makes sense; once you move out of the sheltered Western enclave of Japan, one can expect to meet the actual Japanese. It's the choice of the specific characters, and how they're played, that bothers me. Silvius, a shepherd, loves Phebe, who falls in love with the disguised Rosalind, who - disgusted by Phebe's pride - insults her and sets her back up with Silvius. It's a comic situation in the play, but when blonde Rosalind/Ganymede stands there describing how the Asian-cast Phebe's "inky brows" and "black silk hair" are completely unattractive to her - and then on to say how unappealing Phebe is in general - I was cringing in my seat. (Well, on my parents' bed, where I was watching it because our regular TV is broken, but that's neither here nor there.) Aside from Phebe and Silvius, the only other Asian-cast character with a speaking role was William, romantic rival to Touchstone the fool. William was played very short and very comical, and his one scene with actual lines consists of Touchstone taunting him for his lack of courtly manners and then decisively laying claim to their shared love interest, Audrey (cast white). Again, I was cringing.
Some of this, especially the Phebe/Rosalind scenes, may have been intended as commentary - I hope it was, and if anyone else saw the production I would love another take. But to me it read as - well, as above, problematic to a significant degree. I am the more confused because, after hunting down various reviews, none of them mention this at all except occasionally to briefly comment that the cast is almost entirely Western and the setting is pretty.
(In other notes, the production was very pretty, but parts of it were not to my taste - the music made it much slower-paced than I feel an As You Like It should be, and Rosalind was a bit histrionic - and a lot of the dialogue that would have made her less so was cut. But Romola Garai as Celia was fantastic, Orlando was hot, and Alfred Molina was mostly great in his Touchstone scenes. Which was something.)
