Why should female students, in an all-girls school, be prevented from playing traditionally male roles?
Sir, How timely to read Harriet Walter’s article on playing Brutus in an all-female Julius Caesar (Arts, Nov 29). This week I am casting our school production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which will have, as always, an all-female cast. We don’t join up with a boys’ school for productions — why would I prevent my students from playing, in the case of Three Sisters, nine of the fourteen roles?
Theatre is a set of conventions which can be created and broken by agreement. It was a convention of the time that men played the female roles in Shakespeare’s plays, but