About 15 or 20 years ago there began a push to include more actors with disabilities on stage and screen. Often, directors were encouraged to cast actors with disabilities to play characters with similar disabilities. The reasoning was simple: these are stories about people with disabilities – if we can’t make an effort to include people with disabilities in these roles, what hope can we have for any sort of inclusive casting?

After all, the tradition of “blacking up” is no longer acceptable in the creative industry. Some would even go so far as to call casting an abled-bodied woman as Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie as “cripping up”. But is this a solid argument? Would casting only disabled actors to play Richard, Duke of Gloucester, result in the employment of more actors with disabilities – or simply less productions of Richard III?

As an actor with a disability myself, I would be the first to say that we need to cast more actors with disabilities, both on stage and on screen. However quotas and strict regulations are rarely the way to institute such social change. There is another word for having such hard and fast regulations for artistic elements such as casting: ‘censorship’. 

Artists rarely respond to censorship well, even the type that’s supposed to usher forth the best outcomes. We always seem to find a way to avoid the issue entirely or, if we are provoked enough, even mock the institution being encouraged. If such quotas were suddenly required by law, my fear would be that we would no longer see any disabled characters in drama. 

Additionally, how far would we take such an actor/character-similarity requirement? Would we stop actors from playing characters that aren’t their exact age? After all, there’s a shortage of older actors getting work in the industry. Are we going to say that only people who have been diagnosed with PTSD can play war veterans returning home? Or only people who have lost their father and now might be slightly mentally unbalanced can play Hamlet? And what about characters that become disabled part way through their story, such as Stèphanie in Rust and Bone?

Ultimately, if the acting industry is to become more inclusive, it needs to start doing so through the initiative of artists already in the field, not by the forced involvement of outside bodies or wishful-thinking academics. While large corporations and commercial networks do have a social obligation to have diverse casting, we in the independent sector of the field (fringe or otherwise) need to be taking it upon ourselves to seek out more creative casting options, and expand our own imaginations when it comes to who’s involved in our productions.

The opinions expressed in DISCUSS do not necessarily represent those of IdeasTap.

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Image by Pad Kirsch, used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.