much crueller fates for politicians than to be reincarnated as Helen Mirren. Such is Golda Meir’s lot in “Golda”, which dramatises the trials of Israel’s only female prime minister during the Yom Kippur war of 1973 . Ms Mirren movingly portrays a lone woman in a coterie of military men, a chain-smoking lymphoma sufferer whose country is threatened with extinction.
Similar forms of racial mimicry are no-nos, too. Today’s strife tends to involve other strictures, which are proliferating. Some in showbiz and beyond think depictions of many marginalised groups should be reserved for members of them. Straight performers should not take gay parts; only trans actors should play trans roles, and only deaf actors deaf ones. Artists
on the rare work that mirrors their experience. But the objections involve justice as well as jobs. As with blackface, runs the argument, casting non-disabled actors as disabled characters or gentiles as Jews can lead to caricature and distortion. And those can cause misconceptions and prejudice, which seep from stage and screen into the real world.
Always and only viewing roles in terms of groups and categories is impractical. In the case of a gay Irish part, for instance, which is more essential, a gay actor or an Irish one? It is simplistic, as “Golda” shows: the crux of Ms Mirren’s character is that she must make decisions over soldiers’ lives and deaths, a burden few people of any race or nation have carried, none of them actors.