"And of course there are people who spend their time actively looking for excuses to be offended."
"Criticizing actors for playing a different ethnic group is preposterous. There's a reason it's called ACTING."Truer words have never been spoken. There are people who see Denzel Washington playing Macbeth
as
perverted wokeness because Macbeth can't have possibly been black. To which I say: He never even existed, he's a figure of fiction, you could have a Martian play him. (For the avoidance of doubt: The visuals of that film are spectacular, I will certainly see it when I get the chance - and Denzel is always worth watching.)
Then there's people who say
you can't have Othello played by anyone but a black man and all past performances of great white actors are
despicable blackface:
To which I reply: Last I heard, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins were not ridiculing black people in minstrel shows and robbing them of their dignity, but portraying a dramatic character who happened to be black already in the original play.
Not to forget of course those people - we now really want everyone to be offended! - who hold the view that
black people should not be playing Othello at all because it reinforces the cliche of the gullible black man manipulated by evil, yet intellectually superior whites. According to that school of thought, James Earl Jones, Lawrence Fishburne and Chiwetel Ejiofor were all really only Uncle Tom traitors to their
race ethnicity.
Going forward, the solutions can only be that (i) we stop playing Othello altogether, or (ii) we do find that Martian to take on the role, or (iii) how about finding a black actor we first whiteface and then add another layer of blackface?