HowlRound Theatre Commons: With the theatre industry’s recent interest in casting trans actors, Jenet Le Lacheur—a transfeminine Brit who earned recognition, before coming out, in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child—has already performed in the two roles they’ve always wanted to star in. Even better: the roles were with directors capable and responsive enough to make the most of Le Lacheur’s talents and expertise as a genderqueer performer.
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I appreciated the irony that the writer herself calls out at the end of this article, and agree that, from the sounds of it, it was a beautiful production because it was also queer. I love how they incorporated the genderqueer subtext to the story, and think it works very well with the script and this production's vision for the text. I just recently saw the all-female cast of Julius Caesar in Frick Park, in which Marc Anthony was played by a trans actor. Unlike the production of Hamlet mentioned here, there was very little integration of this actor's personal identification into the text, however merely knowing that did change the audience's perception of the story. Caesar and Marc Anthony's relationship all of a sudden became that much more complicated and rich, Marc Anthony's constant lingering on the edges of the club of "male" senators as almost an outcast from the beginning, took on a different connotation and stung more. Like in Hamlet, the production did not try to mask any of their actors as other from what they were, but also simply cast for the story itself. The underlying challenge of Marc Anthony's gender identity and how that fit into the rest of their world, gave depth and texture to the story already on the stage in a beautiful and heart-wrenching way.
I find it fascinating how the gender identity of the title character was simultaneously treated as unremarkable and also intertwined so tightly into the plot of Hamlet, without compromising the integral parts of the storyline. The surveillance state setting serves to illuminate the scrutiny that many people who are trans/nb must feel from people around them- waiting for them to “decide,” questioning their every move and how it relates to the gender they want them to be. The pronouns that the characters use to refer to Hamlet is an added dimension that the director and the actors use to convey their relationship/intimacy with Hamlet in one word- in this sense, the choice of pronouns immediately sets up tension- or confidence and friendship- in every interaction. The relationship Hamlet has with their father is another way the production explores gender, and specifically how that transition or struggle can reflect on those you love. Hamlet never came out to their father, but holds him in such high regard that they can’t help but mimic his masculine habits. Oftentimes, ‘twists’ on Shakespeare can seem irrelevant or poorly developed into the production and text as a whole, but this production seems to have used gender politics both as a storytelling device, and simply as a thing that exists in the world.
What I like the most about this queer production of Hamlet is that the queerness of the characters was “to be treated as unremarkable”. I am no actor but I can agree that this is the dream for queer characters in media. Over the summer, I fell in love with the HBO TV show Euphoria for a similar reason. I was drawn to the show because I heard it had queer characters and closely reflects the high school environment I grew up in, but the reason I felt so deeply connected to the plot and the people in the show was of this notion of “unremarkable” queerness. The queer aspect of their identity is not the primary focus of all of the plot that exists, or is not the focus of the people that interact with them. This representation of queerness is one that feels real, because for myself, and for many others, “unremarkable” is how our lives are. The piece of media feels so much more relatable and realistic to me when the queerness is subtle like this. This is a piece of theatre I wish I could have seen.
There is a lot to be said not only for the creativity of the production and creative teams of this show, but also for the confidence of the actors. Even with greater acceptance for the LGBT community in the United States, we still have a ways to go on the topics of nonconforming and nonbinary gender identities. And yet, just like the goal to make Hamlet's queerness "unremarkable", productions like this one give me hope for queer actors and characters becoming more commonplace in theater so that a show like this is not something that requires courage to pull off. This idea is reflecting of the goals of the LGBT community as a whole; to be unremarkable would mean that the stigmas around the LGBT community has lifted, at least partially. I also think that the self awareness of this article to understand that it defies the purpose of the play by calling so much attention to Hamlet's gender identity is significant to the progress of the reception of this kind of theater. As long as reviews of productions that incorporate discussions of topics like gender identity harp on that aspect of the performance, there is little hope of moving forward and helping queer actors become a standard in the theater community independently of their gender identity.
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