Colour-Blind Casting in ‘Saint George and the Dragon’
How Making Race Irrelevant Makes It More Relevant
Back in October 2017, the National Theatre put on a production entitled Saint George and the Dragon, which was a three-act play retelling the story of Saint George slaying a dragon. In its first act, the plot was as expected: a Medieval English knight killed a dragon and saved Elsa, the love interest, from its fiery wrath. In the second act, George found himself in Victorian England, and this time the dragon was personified in the capitalist factory owners and George tore up their contracts, slaying the capitalist dragon and again saving Elsa. In the third act, George found that he could not kill the dragon because the dragon was in fact in the hearts and minds of everyone. It was… an experience (one in which the audience was noticeably smaller after the interval).
So why, you may wonder, am I returning to this play that was performed for the last three months of 2017? Well, I am still puzzling over aspects of their colour-blind casting — or, rather, it makes me think about the practical limitations of supposed race neutrality in theatre and other visual arts.
So, what is colour-blind casting?
Also known as ‘non-traditional casting’, colour-blind casting is the practice of casting, supposedly…
