By Sarah Mills
STRATFORD, England (Reuters) – Celebrated British actor Geraldine James thought it was a joke when she was asked to take the lead in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest production of “As You Like It”, a comedy of young love.
A quick chat with Omar Elerian, the production’s relatively youthful Italian-born director, and James, 72, was “completely sold” on why he wanted a cast dominated by actors aged over 70, she told Reuters.
Playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s home in Stratford, central England, until Aug. 5, the production is in step with a trend for experimental casting – last year Britain’s Ian McKellan, now 84, played the student prince Hamlet. It also advances the anti-ageist cause dear to the hearts of many actors.
But Elerian, 44, says it was primarily about drawing on the experiences of his veteran cast and their enhanced power to draw out Shakespeare’s meaning.
“I thought that… people who had …come of age during the sixties and the seventies… (it) might be really interesting to have their take…on a play that is all about love and freedom and subversion of rules,” he said.
James’ experience ranges from performing in Richard Attenborough’s 1980s film “Gandhi” to Netflix series “Anne with an E”, as well as previous Shakespearean roles.
To have her playing Rosalind “is a gift,” Elerian says. She brings her craft “to a role and words that in more kind of traditional casting, we wouldn’t be able to hear”.
He sets “As You Like It” in a rehearsal room, where the actors reminisce about a show from their distant youth.
Only four of the 16-strong cast are under 70, allowing for a generational interplay that Elerian says is too rare in a society in which age is often “tolerated rather than embraced”.
James says she hopes the production will inspire other daring casting, including giving more women the fascinating parts Shakespeare wrote for old men, such as Lear and Prospero.
Her one criticism of Britain’s greatest playwright is that his best female roles, such as Rosalind, are young.
(Reporting by Sarah Mills; writing by Barbara Lewis, Editing by William Maclean)
