Cross-Dressed Actors and their Audiences: Kate Valk's Emperor Jones and William Shakespeare's Juliet

Abstract

Male cross-dressing in leading female roles in the Elizabethan theatre has, at different extremes of modern stage practice, been either ignored as a no longer relevant convention or appropriated to make some kind of sexual-political statement. In either case, at issue is the ‘lifelikeness’ or otherwise achieved, and how far modern deployment should or should not be taken to challenge our own assumptions. John Russell Brown takes a recent production by the Wooster Group, in which Kate Falk played the eponymous male lead in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, to suggest that cross-dressing can engage us with other perceptions of reality altogether – and demand, in relation to Shakespearean performance, a reading of the text that responds to resonances more often ignored or avoided. He illustrates his argument with close reference to the presentation and representation of sexuality in Romeo and Juliet. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and, subsequently, Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia. He is now based in London, and is Consultant in Theatre at Middlesex University. His most recent book is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999) and his most recent theatre work a production of Surrena Goldsmith's Blue for the Wandsworth Arts Festival (November 1998) and an acting and Living Newspaper workshop for the National School of Drama in Delhi (March 1999).