Sarah Sands: Is any woman man enough to play Miss Trunchbull?
Sarah Sands
Sunday 27 November 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sarah-sands/sarah-sands-is-any-woman-man-enough-to-play-miss-trunchbull-6268530.htmlThe inspired casting of Bertie Carvel as Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, one of the year's greatest performances, owes something to the RSC's employment policies. Casting has to be blind to sex and race. Now I am not sure whether a woman could ever play the role again – or, indeed, anyone else but Mr Carvel. It is his role, in the same way that Mark Rylance is now synonymous with Johnny "Rooster" Byron in Jerusalem. The soft-voiced, sadistic, sports-mad headmistress with her leather coat and whistle is a glorious creation.
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This Christmas, the public needs cheering up. Put away your subtlety and angst. We want laughter and comforting resolution. For this season, Hackney does not evoke social deprivation but panto. And we may be on Skid Row, but we have not lost our twin British talents for cross-dressing and double entendres, being a nation with no rivals in the arena of sexual disguise and repression. Cross-dressing began as a theatrical response to the social convention that it was unseemly for women to appear on stage. Shakespeare wrote in some superb cross-dressing heroines: Viola in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It – boys playing girls dressed as boys.
