Francesca Rose on Objectification

09 Sep Francesca Rose on Objectification

Maybe it’s time I wrote a blog post…having hidden for long enough behind a couple of excellent guest bloggers (here and here) and then spent the rest of the time chasing others who said they’d write something for me and then didn’t….  (you know who you are….).

There’s something I’ve been pondering for a while, actually. However, between loads of really time consuming Learning admin, and dealing with things going wrong, like my banking app paying the hefty deposit on the theatre hire twice and the studio hire charge for our casting audition FOUR times …yes, Barclays, I’m looking  at you… You get the picture.

So, I’ve been wondering about objectification. Yes, OBJECTIFY – to treat a person like a tool or toy, as if they had no feelings, opinions, or rights of their own. Why this? Why now? I have never needed to run a formal casting process. Every actor who has played a part in any of my plays has been someone I knew or someone they knew. The who-you-know network was working very well, until suddenly it wasn’t. The role of Jonathan in Learning, had been played brilliantly and bravely by Michael Watson-Gray but as things worked out, we needed to re-cast. I also realised that I couldn’t wait for anyone else to do it…it was down to me.

The process of writing a breakdown for the casting call, ably helped by other members of the team wasn’t the problem. Over 200 submissions later …… (yes, nearly 250 in fact…I needed a lie down in a darkened room after looking at all of them), how on earth do you longlist and what criteria do you use? I’ll tell you what…you objectify. Looks, height, ethnicity. I did watch all the show reels…of course I did. What did they tell me…something, or maybe a lot about the quality and range of the acting, for sure. But on film…did that tell me much about their ability on stage? How old were the reels? Did they show me examples of the ‘right’ kind of drama?

Some potentially strong candidates weren’t available for the audition date but wanted to send me a video of themselves speaking excerpts from the play. I demurred because there was nothing for it but to see them in the room so that we could go on anything but looks. We needed to see text interpretation, movement, dance, voice, emotion… and above all, chemistry.

And it was a fabulous day, watching my words delivered with such variety of interpretation and meanings. Could I have predicted who we’d cast from the longlist and later, the shortlist? No. Never. But they were in the room because we liked the look of them.

Once upon a time, I had pretences as an academic in the field of my great passion – Voice. Accordingly, I find it uncomfortable to make the above claims without some references to back them up. Frustratingly, I no longer have a log-in to an academic library.  Google Scholar wasn’t much help but what a search threw up was heavily weighted towards the #MeToo movement-inspired writing (and rightly so…). I couldn’t find much on objectification in the casting process anyway, and even less about male actors.

As it turns out ,‘Casting has come to scholarly attention in the last two decades’ (Kirsten Smith, 2020) which doesn’t feel that long to me. Further, Smith quotes Thorpe (2014) saying, that it unavoidably ‘concerns the objectification of bodies’. I rest my case. But, what really destabilises me is Arifa Akbar’s comments that I found in The Guardian (2022), admittedly discussing women but nonetheless highly relevant…referring to, ‘skin crawling signs of regression….[of] women being objectified or casually derided’ in shows ‘revived from the pre #Me-Too era’. So we’re getting worse.

Oh. I’ve gone off on one now, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?

Now you don’t want Harvard referencing, do you?….oh ,alright then <yawns>

There you go…

Smith, K. On being Cast: Identity Work. Platform, 14:1&2 (2020) :36-50

Thorpe, A. Casting Matter: Colour Trouble in the RSC’s ‘The Orphan of Zhao’. Contemporary Theatre Review 24;4 (2014) 436-451

Arifa A. (2022) Objectified, derided, demeaned: sexism is still rampant on stage in the era of MeToo. The Guardian July 2022. Available at  URL: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jul/08/sexism-theatre-me-too-jerusalem-pretty-woman