“A 70-year-old man who skips around pretending to be 20”: the new era of age-neutral casting | Theater

GEraldine James was on her way to play a grandmother in the BBC TV series This Town when her agent sent her a message. “I was on the train to Birmingham,” the 74-year-old recalls. “And I got a message saying, ‘The RSC have offered you Rosalind in Stratford’ – you know, As You Like It. I said, ‘Well, that’s crazy. What are they talking about?’”

Rosalind is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved heroines. She’s also a young woman, perhaps a teenager, which is what made James’s lead role in last year’s production so surprising. “I remember, in the middle of rehearsals, thinking, ‘How are the audience going to react to this? What are a teenage girl going to think of a 70-year-old woman jumping up and down pretending to be 20?’”

Director Omar Elerian’s casting of older actors has been well-received by audiences and critics. It also reflects a coming trend. While color-blind and gender-neutral casting is now relatively common on stage and screen, casting older women in roles is much less common. But this month, Joan Chen generated early Oscar buzz with her role in Didi. She plays the mother of a 13-year-old in the film, although she is 63 in real life. Chen had to be convinced by director Sean Wang that she wasn’t too old. Meanwhile, Imelda Staunton is wowing audiences at the London Palladium with her performance in Hello Dolly. Jerry Herman’s musical portrays Dolly Gallagher Levi as “a middle-aged widow,” but Staunton is just two years shy of her 70s.

Although her age is not specified in the play, the role of Maria in Twelfth Night is usually cast in her 20s or 30s. In his upcoming production, Tom Littler, the artistic director of London’s Orange Tree, has cast Jane Asher, 78. Asher also starred in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle at the same theatre last year. “If you do the maths,” says Littler, “Jane and[her co-stars]Clive Francis and Nick Provost were all a bit older than the characters were written. They’re supposed to be in their 60s.”

But the director “couldn’t resist” the opportunity to cast three of the best light comedy performers. “They’re probably the most theatrically gifted generation we’ll ever see,” he says, “because they’re the last generation to come through the representation system.” Conventional roles in theater for women, he adds, tend to “dry up abruptly at a fairly early age.”

For James, who loved his experience on As You Like It, age-neutral casting opens up new possibilities. “Malcolm Sinclair (who plays Orlando) and I are thinking about other Shakespeare plays we could do. I’d love to do Juliet!” She wouldn’t be the first septuagenarian to fall in love with Romeo: Tom Morris cast Sian Phillips in a production at the Bristol Old Vic in 2010.

James is keen to point out that there are more roles for older women these days. But she has a recurring problem: “The leading men on TV have always had wives who are too young. But I think people are more demanding now. I think they want to see things they believe in.” Last year’s Bafta shortlist for best actress in a leading role on television proved her right: the nominations for Staunton, Sarah Lancashire, Kate Winslet and Maxine Peake were hailed as “a victory for mature women”.

Sophie Hallett of the Casting Directors’ Guild says age-neutral casting is “a discussion we intend to have with our members,” adding that “we are open to all aspects of inclusion and fair representation in the projects we are invited to act in.” Men have always had more freedom than women to play characters younger than their age – the history of television and film is a testament to this. Last year, Joaquin Phoenix, 49, played Napoleon from the age of 20 in Ridley Scott’s epic. Josephine, who was six years older than the real Napoleon, was played by an actor 13 years younger than Phoenix.

“Diversity is a cross-section,” says James. “We need to continue to create roles for older actresses because we’re representing more and more members of society.” As Littler points out, older women also make up a significant portion of the theatre audience. “In The Circle,” he says, returning to Maugham’s drama, “We just took the play seriously. And it made me think that it’s relatively rare for older people in an audience to see themselves properly represented on stage and not patronized by the writing – to be represented as people who have desires, wants, grudges, sharp minds, ambition and all the complexity of being human.”

Perhaps it is no surprise that older women are taking on younger roles. Ian McKellen, 82, may have made headlines with his Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Windsor three years ago, but Sarah Bernhardt played the same role as a 55-year-old woman in 1900. Half a century later, Peggy Ashcroft was a 50-year-old Rosalind for the RSC. “I don’t know if the trend is strong enough to say that casting is changing,” says Littler. “But it certainly should be, because there is a huge wealth of talent among older actresses.”