If black actors can play white people, why not the other way round?

Congratulations to Ncuti Gatwa, the star of Doctor Who, on landing an exciting new role. He’s been cast in Born with Teeth, a Royal Shakespeare Company play about the relationship between the Bard and his fellow Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Mr Gatwa says the play is “like no version of Shakespeare and Marlowe that I’ve ever seen before”.

I can well believe it. Not least because Mr Gatwa is to play Marlowe. Who, like most people in England in the early 1590s, was white.

To be clear: I mean no disrespect to Mr Gatwa. He’s a talented actor. In any case, there’s nothing unusual, these days, about hiring a non-white actor to play a white historical figure. We saw it last year in the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall, set in the 1530s, and indeed in a 2023 episode of Doctor Who, with a mixed-race actor playing Isaac Newton.

The only reason I mention it is that, in this day and age, I somehow find it hard to imagine a white actor being hired to play a black historical figure. While Mr Gatwa gets to play Marlowe, the writer of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, I somehow doubt that, say, Keira Knightley would be cast to play the Nobel Prize-winning African-American novelist Toni Morrison, or that Hugh Grant would get the nod to portray the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. I tend to suspect that such casting would be considered not just inauthentic, but disrespectful. If not downright racist.

Nowadays, in fact, casting white actors to play black characters is unacceptable even in cartoons. This may seem curious, given that a cartoon’s audience is unable to see what race the actors are. None the less, we know it’s true, because in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the Fox TV network announced: “The Simpsons will no longer have white actors voice non-white characters.” As a result, Harry Shearer, who is white, no longer voices the character of Dr Hibbert, who is black.

The same happened on another popular US cartoon, Family Guy. For 20 years, the character of Cleveland Brown, who is black, had been voiced by Mike Henry, who is white. But after the Black Lives Matter protests, Mr Henry announced that he was quitting the role, saying: “Persons of colour should play characters of colour.”

In summary, then, here are the new rules. A black actor may play a real-life historical figure who was white. But a white actor may not even provide the voice for a completely fictional character who is black. Please update your records accordingly.

What’s got into modern women?

Police in Detroit, Michigan have arrested a suspect in a harrowing case of animal cruelty. Having forced entry into the suspect’s home, officers say they found a dog suffering from “multiple stab wounds”. The suspect is also alleged to have posted videos of the dog’s suffering online.

I found this story deeply shocking. Not least because, according to both the police and leading Left-wing news outlets, the suspect is a woman. This took me by surprise. Because, when I was growing up, I would swear that women never used to be charged with such brutal, aggressive, violent crimes.

But, if they ever had been, I feel sure that they would at least have taken the trouble to look smart and respectable for their police mug shot. Not so in this case, I’m afraid. On Friday evening the Independent, the Left-wing news site, ran a report headlined, “Woman Accused of Stabbing Dog and Posting Video of Wounded Animal on Social Media”. Beneath this headline was the woman’s mug shot. And it showed her with several days’ worth of stubble.

Of course, I don’t mean to mock the woman for her looks. That would be sexist. So I will refrain from drawing attention to her uncommonly large ears or her remarkably square jaw.

None the less, I do think that, before having her mug shot taken, she might at least have had a shave. In the old days, no self-respecting woman would ever have let herself be photographed with five o’clock shadow, let alone thick stubble.

These days, however, it seems to be increasingly common. In February, the website of the Southern Daily Echo ran a story headlined, “Hampshire Woman Appears in Court Charged with Raping Girl”. Beneath this headline was a photo of the woman in question. And she appeared to have several days’ worth of stubble, too.

Two months before that, the Manchester Evening News reported that “a ‘dangerous’ woman” named Angel Hill had been jailed “for violent physical and sexual abuse”. And the accompanying mug shot showed that, like the women above, Miss Hill hadn’t shaved for some time.

It seems to me that, in recent years, something very strange has come over women. Judging from headlines like these, they appear to be committing more and more violent crimes. The sort of crimes that, in the past, were overwhelmingly committed by men.

Can anyone explain this mystery?

Way of the World is a twice-weekly satirical look at the headlines aiming to mock the absurdities of the modern world. It is published at 6am every Tuesday and Saturday