"Shaddap you face!" - what Trevor Nunn should have told critics of his all-white casting policy for "The Wars of the Roses"

Theatre director Sir Trevor Nunn has got himself into a terrible pickle by insensitively casting nothing but white actors in The Wars of the Roses, a distillation of four Shakespearean history plays. Actors' union Equity and Arts Council England have criticised this racist outrage, and professional race-hucksters have condemned it as a “whitewashing” of history (er...huh?). According to Equity, asking 22 white actors to portray 22 figures who would undoubtedly have been white “effectively locks minorities out of the cultural picture [and] flies in the face of the huge conversation taking place in British media at present, of the very real progress made in recent years to increase diversity in our industry.” The union also complained that the cast contained not a single actor who “identifies themselves as having a disability”.

This last comment reminded me of a remark once addressed to me by an elderly Irish gentleman in a solar topee as we gazed at the seemingly endless, smooth ramp leading up to the entrance of the Mortuary Temple of Hatsepshut at Deir el Bahari: “God, they must have had a lot of disabled people in Ancient Egypt.” Let’s face it, the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief isn’t going to be helped by actors dressed in late medieval costumes whizzing around the stage in wheelchairs.

Simon Mellor, executive director of arts and culture, Arts Council England said: “This production seems out of step with most of British theatre where casting that ignores an actor’s race is increasingly the norm…Whilst we do not fund the Rose Theatre, we expect organisations we fund to actively ensure their programme, and the artists that create it, reflect the people of contemporary England.”

But the Wars of the Roses didn’t actually take place in contemporary England, did they? If they did, they must have passed me by. And while Richard III might conceivably have identified himself as “having a disability”, I doubt if many of his Plantagenet homeys were black (or they might have popped a cap in his sorry ass earlier in the proceedings).

While Simon Mellor is on the subject of funding, maybe he needs to be reminded that the money he sprays around to so little effect is OUR BLOODY MONEY. And we – the people whose monery enables him and his colleagues to dispense largesse amongst what Simon would no doubt describe as the “vibrant, edgy contemporary arts community” – do not, according to every opinion poll conducted in this country during the past decade, share his multicultural obsessions, and utterly reject the art clique's social engineering agenda.

As for Equity, well, as far as I’m aware it has pretty much always been controlled by lefties. It was the last closed shop union in Britain, and remained one until 1988, when Margaret Thatcher’s hated junta – aided, oddly, by European legislation – outlawed such restrictive practices. Given that actors are overwhelmingly left-wing and that conservative theatrical types live in fear of ostracism, I don’t suppose many voices are raised in protest whenever Equity supports cultural Marxist causes. But if I were a white actor – especially given the inherent uncertainty of the profession – I’d be outraged that my own union was campaigning against my interests. But I don’t pay for Equity through my taxes, so that’s their business.

On the whole, Sir Trevor responded sensibly to the criticisms:

“The connections between the characters, and hence the narrative of the plays, are extremely complex, and so everything possible must be done to clarify for an audience who is related by birth to whom. Hence, I decided that, in this instance, these considerations should take precedence over my usual diversity inclination.”

Makes sense to me – and, I suspect, to the majority of the audience who will be buying tickets for the production at Kingston’s Rose Theatre next month. (Just a pity Trev had to indulge in cultural cringing by bigging up his own past support for “diversity” in casting. He should simply have told his attackers to bugger off and mind their own business.)

A final note on the theatrical profession’s obsession with diversity. Years ago, we took our son to a production of A Christmas Carol at the Lyric, Hammersmith. It wasn’t bad, but the actor playing Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, was Italian. Now, I’m very fond of Italians, but this particular actor spoke in an accent so thick that it was (to this English speaker, at least) well nigh impenetrable  - honestly, we were in “Hey, Oncle – shaddap you face” territory. There was no explanation given for this bizarre casting decision, and, as the actor in question wasn’t black or Asian or disabled, we couldn’t figure out what possible rationale there could have been for preferring him to a British actor - after all, there's hardly a shortage of them. But, then, we’re talking about a cultural milieu which allowed Danny Boyle to  suggest in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony that a large proportion of top-hatted Victorian industrialists were black, so, apparently, any lie is acceptable, as long as it's a left-wing one.

Oddly, given what I’ve written above, you might imagine I’m against any black, Asian or Oriental actor being cast in historical plays - far from it. I just think that, if the director suspects it would confuse the audience, or that it would amount to a misrepresentation of history undertaken for purely social engineering purposes or to allow our cultural establishment to tick one of its numerous "feel good" leftie boxes, he or she should be allowed to reject the sort of pernicious tokenism that bores and annoys the people who ultimately pay for it all – i.e. us.