I wish to enter this argument now. The ‘jewface’ row. I have one. So I’m allowed. And I haven’t said anything previously because its just so much bollocks, but as that’s all that’s currently happening, what with covid and especially last night’s football, we have to sift through the bollocks to find a single, golden testicle of merit! (I think we’ve stretched that metaphor 14 kms beyond any value, so we’ll leave it there).

‘Jewface’ entered our vocabulary when a play came onto the West End stage about a Jewish family. All of whom were cast to… non-Jews!!!! There were shouts of ‘cultural appropriation!’ and ‘insensitivity’ and all sorts of nonsense. Mainly by Maureen Lipman. The self-elected Queen of the Jews. Who is, in common with many Jewish mothers and grandmothers, a fight looking for a place to happen. So she’s sparked back with her arguments afresh (as nobody cared last time) because Helen Mirren (best actress in the world, a Dame, no less, wonderful person, national treasure but… not Jewish!!!) to play Golda Meir, the late Israeli Prime Minister.

No-one complained when Roddy McDowell played a fucking gorilla in Planet of the Apes. Not one primate moaned about it. Homo Sapiens can eat bananas too, ya know!! When Charles Bronson was in The Mechanic, no-one complained that he wasn’t a real killer, just a fake, culturally appropriating hit-man values!! What about Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie? Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire?? Kevin Costner played Robin Hood but wasn’t born until 500 years after Robin Hood died!!!! That’s wrong.

The whole point of ‘acting’ is to represent someone who your aren’t. There’s nothing in the acting handbook which precludes you playing someone, some culture, some religion, race, culture or animal which you were not born as.

And while we’re at it, the very term ‘Jewface’ is a cultural appropriation of ‘blackface’, which actors used to use in the days before that was banned.

I feel Ms Lipman is suffering from overreaction rather than consideration.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx