skygiants

Yeah, I'm not sure either - when it was just Bertha and Bessie, I felt like it was pretty likely that the casting was deliberate and meant to be saying something about race and class and power dynamics (and I was not sure how to feel about it either), and then the woman who played Bessie also turned out to also be cross-cast as Blanche Ingram and that destabilized my theories a bit. But the music and costuming for Bertha did evoke for me a very blues-singer vibe in a way that made me think that they had a black woman in mind for the part .... but then I also wondered if that was me bringing too much of a USAmerican context to it -- I think of that tradition as specifically African-American, which is somewhat to the side of both Jane Eyre and the National Theater!

(Semi-relatedly, I also couldn't find a coherent paradigm for the combo-casting of Helen-Adele-John - I can see a throughline with Helen and Adele, and with Helen and John, but I'm at an absolute loss to find something that connects all three of them.)