Cross-gender Casting Inhibiting Suspension of Disbelief in Queen’s School of Drama and Music’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth

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Theatre theorists have started to understand physical materials not only as passive vehicles for human action, but also as able to act alongside and affect human performers (Schweitzer and Zerdy, Sofer). No theatrical prop makes this more visible than the human skull which can be seen at once as an object and the remains of a subject, confusing the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief and accept it as a part of the fiction. As the audience questions the history of the subject behind the object, the skull’s reality distracts from the human actor playing alongside it and makes obvious the precarious nature of acting (Monks, Sofer, Werry). This research project will explore the skull as a stage prop that oscillates between subject and object; first, to expose the subject/object status of human actors, and second, to offer insight into how casting choices can affect an audience’s suspension of disbelief during a performance. To demonstrate how the human actor body can be understood as an object able to act independently of the subject who carries it, this project examines cross-gender casting in Queen’s School of Drama and Music’s production of Macbeth. The characteristically female actor bodies playing famously male roles in this performance of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy inhibit its audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief during the play, ultimately exposing the precarious relationships in theatre between fiction and reality, subject and object.