Period drama has a distinct aesthetic. It permeates everything, from the intricate costumes to the sweeping establishing shots of palaces and mansions. Whether or not the story being told is based on real events, this well-established visual language conveys a sense of veracity. The viewing public enjoys any slip-up. Who can forget the minor media storm whipped up in 2014 by a water bottle left in the background of a shot from the 1920s costume drama Downton Abbey?
There is a more serious side to this fixation on historical accuracy, however. Period dramas made in Britain overwhelmingly narrate the lives of the rich and privileged from times past, and as such tend only to cast white actors in the principal roles. When some of the most acclaimed productions in any given year are costume dramas, it means that any non-white actor is excluded from a major source of work and career advancement by default.
Criticism of this state of affairs is usually met with regret from producers, and the assertion that casting isn’t deliberately discriminatory – they’re just trying to remain in keeping with the times being portrayed. Half a Sixpence was a smash-hit West End musical set in 1960s London – with an all-white cast. When Julian Fellowes, the playwright (and the creator of Downton Abbey) was asked about this in 2017, he responded by saying, “You can’t make something untruthful,” as if he had no control as a writer over the types of fictional character in his work.
This limitation is partly responsible for the steady stream of British actors of colour seeking roles across the Atlantic, from Idris Elba in The Wire or Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave. David Oyelowo, who left the UK for the US in 2007, has often spoken about this. During interviews for the 2014 historical drama Selma, in which he played Martin Luther King, he indicated that using “history” as an excuse for only casting white actors was nonsense – it was merely a choice about which parts of history to retell. “We make period dramas here [in Britain], but there are almost never Black people in them, even though we’ve been on these shores for hundreds of years,” he said.
A growing cohort of writers and directors are choosing to approach casting differently, however. When he was working on the script for his 2019 Charles Dickens adaptation The Personal History of David Copperfield, Armando Iannucci said that he only had one actor in mind for the title role: Dev Patel, a British actor of Indian descent who was born and raised in Harrow and received some of his big career breaks playing Indian characters in films like Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The fact that the character of David Copperfield had only ever been played on screen by white actors – recently by Hugh Dancy and Daniel Radcliffe – didn’t interfere at all with Iannucci’s vision. “I say, ‘Why can’t I cast from 100 per cent of the acting talent available to me?’ It can’t be the case that a whole group of amazing actors are prevented from having lead roles,” he told an interviewer. The final cast included costume drama stalwarts such as Hugh Laurie and Anna Maxwell Martin, but also actors like Benedict Wong and Rosalind Eleazar, rarely called upon to don a cravat or a bonnet for a job.
Iannucci’s approach is generally called “colourblind casting”, since it ignores any previous assumptions about a character’s ethnicity when choosing the actor. It has been standard practice in the British theatrical world for a couple of decades now, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in particular giving major historical roles like that of Shakespeare’s Henry V to Black actors like Adrian Lester as far back as 2003.
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Bridgerton, the Georgian-era romance series that debuted on Netflix on Christmas Day, has brought these conversations about period drama, race and historical accuracy into the mainstream this year. It is the streaming platform’s most watched original series to date, having attracted 63 million viewers in its first 28 days of release. The source material – a bestselling series of romance novels by the writer Julia Quinn – doesn’t engage with questions of race at all. But when the hit-making production company Shondaland adapted it for the screen, a different vision emerged.
Initially, Bridgerton looks like it has been cast colourblind. Although the titular family is portrayed by white actors, many other aristocratic characters are played by actors of colour, with young Black heartthrob Regé-Jean Page as the Duke of Hastings, the romantic lead. In the first three episodes, there is no reference to this marvellously diverse British aristocracy, and the viewer settles into the idea that the show takes place in an alternate universe where white privilege doesn’t exist.
Then, in episode four, Page’s Duke has a significant conversation with his aunt, Lady Danbury (played with exquisite hauteur by Adjoa Andoh). She implores him not to give up on love because it is love that has created this more equal world. “We were two separate societies, divided by colour, until a king fell in love with one of us. Love, your grace, conquers all,” she says. This is a reference to the real-life theory that Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III, was mixed race, thanks to her descent from a Black member of the Portuguese royal family. In the show, Queen Charlotte is played by the Guyanese-British actress Golda Rosheuvel, and it is implied that it is because of her ascent to the throne that other people of colour have been elevated to the aristocracy. Bridgerton showrunner Chris Van Dusen has confirmed that what he intended was the opposite of colourblind casting. “That would imply that colour and race were never considered, when colour and race are part of the show,” he told the New York Times.
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Critics of the colourblind approach to casting have become more vocal as movements like Black Lives Matter have grown in prominence. Just pretending that race doesn’t exist, or that we don’t “see” it, is hardly a progressive way of reflecting our society. This shift in perspective is seen most prominently in the changing discourse around Hamilton, the blockbuster Broadway musical about America’s founding fathers that debuted in 2015. In the dying days of the Obama presidency, with the show’s stars giving poignant performances at the White House, Hamilton received near-universal acclaim for its colourblind approach to casting the roles of historical figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Five years on, when a filmed performance of the show was added to the Disney Plus streaming service in July 2020, the response was much more mixed. Although Hamilton does put Black actors and actors of colour into the roles of great white men from history, it also almost entirely skips over the question of slavery. Aside from two lines in one rap battle – “A civics lesson from a slaver, hey neighbour / Your debts are paid ’cause you don’t pay for labour” – this fundamental aspect of American history barely features. Seen from the perspective of a Trump presidency, the show’s unequivocal acclaim of George Washington as a hero felt off to many viewers, aware of the real man’s role as an active slave-owner over many decades. Colourblind casting can’t compensate for the traumatic and racist parts of history.
This critique, that casting is used to cover up the deeper structural sins of art and society, is nothing new. In 1996, the Black playwright August Wilson made a speech that articulated these problems. He traced the origins of productions that “slant their material for white consumption” back to the entertainment delivered by slaves for their white masters on plantations in the American south. “The idea of colourblind casting is the same idea of assimilation that Black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. For the record, we reject it again,” he said.
The solution is far more difficult and expensive than a few well-placed auditions for actors of colour. Black creators need proper funding and the space in which to tell stories in their own way, independent of the perpetual lens of whiteness. “We do not need colourblind casting; we need theatres,” Wilson said. Twenty-five years on, his vision is still waiting in the wings.
This article is from the New Humanist summer 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
