Actress Playing ‘Malvolia’ Hits Back At Telegraph Column Arguing Actresses Should ‘Get Their Mitts Off Male Actors’ Parts!’

Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish used the current National Theatre production of Twelfth Night, which features Tamsin Greig as a female Malvolio, as a jumping-off point for a column suggesting that gender-reversed casting is becoming entrenched and that actresses – and theatres – should spend energy finding and developing female equivalents to the roles of, say, Hamlet or Willy Loman. Now Greig has responded, saying not only that Cavendish used “slightly unenlightened vocabulary,” but also that “he would not have dared to say anything if it had been a black man playing Malvolio.”