Let me start by saying that I don’t think there are a lack of female roles in Cambridge theatre, on-stage or off. In any average ADC or Corpus show, there’s a fairly even split, and very often, a bias towards women. In fact it’s an inspiring and exciting place to be for any woman who arrives here, ready to exercise that acting muscle and put on a bloody good show.

Yes, there are plenty of roles for female actors. The issue is that these roles often aren’t very interesting.

There’s nothing worse than leaving a play feeling that an actor was wasted, but, all too often, Cambridge women are cutting their teeth on four basic roles: the nice girl love interest, the morally-ambiguous Bond-girl inexplicably tamed by a pretty average bloke, the sensible mother and the madwoman. Roles written specifically for women which stretch the boundaries of the Bechdel test – such as last term’s production of Anna Jordan’s Freak, for example, which gave all its stage time to two stellar female leads – are few and far between. In comedy, it’s a particular issue. Token females who come in to spoil the men’s hijinks remain a staple. 

This is not just a Cambridge phenomenon. RSC-veteran Janet Suzman, reflecting on a life spent playing Shakespeare’s great women, including the infamously tricky Cleopatra, told The Radio Times she’d spent most of her professional career playing "not very interesting women".  Further afield in Hollywood, females comprised just 12% of protagonists in the top-grossing films of 2014. Depressing, but this makes the things that we do to alleviate the problem all the more important and all the more worthy of recognition.

One obvious solution is gender-blind casting, which has been a godsend to actors and directors alike. As well as giving female actors the fight scenes and complex inner-wanderings afforded to the literary canon’s male protagonists, it means that there’s a greater pool of talent to choose from. Already a staple of Cambridge theatre, maintaining gender-blind casting as a pre-requisite of any production is one way to ensure we give female actors a chance to shine. Nevertheless, considerations of changing pronouns, adjusting consecrated scripts and perhaps our own conditioning often prevents us from considering any person for any role. There’s a pressure to make a point with your casting decision, as with last term’s production of Cymbeline. The same-sex romance between Posthumus and Imogen gives a modern audience a greater sense of its clandestine nature, a brilliant move on the part of the director. It’s a difficult balance to strike when modernising a classic, but experimenting is what student theatre is about. 

Unfortunately, there lingers a sense of old habits dying hard, and false prejudices dying even harder. Like the whiny voice that still occasionally insists that "women aren’t funny", there occasionally pipes up a director or theatre critic who isn’t sold on characters being a blank space that any person, regardless of gender identity, can fill. But, living in a post-modern age, as Kate Bornstein points out, means recognising that "the floor of one room can also be the ceiling of another." Identities are perhaps not as clear-cut as our narrative of dramatic history might like to believe, not least because female actors have been playing male roles since the Restoration; with the dawn of mixed companies, casting was a fluid process.  

Thus, anyone who thinks a woman ‘shouldn’t’ play Lear or Faustus is misreading the history of theatre, as well as severely underestimating the collective talents of female actors in Cambridge and the wider world. As Maxine Peake’s recent turn as Hamlet clarifies, an astonishingly good performance can be drawn from permitting characters the genderless freedom that the text affords them – in an interview with the BBC, she promotes more women playing male roles, convinced that the character itself is written to exist on a gender spectrum. With our own gender-swapped Othello hitting the ADC stage this term, we should be celebrating and building on our commitments to representing every talented individual we have at our disposal. It’s not about being novel – indeed, a great female actor is not a novelty – it’s about putting on high-quality productions that respectfully revive our favourite plays. 

Of course, allowing female actors the chance to play established male roles is by no means a solution in itself. Another way of getting round the lack of interesting female roles? Write them ourselves. As Michaelmas term’s Female Personality of the Year and The Wives of Others indicate, funny, powerful and intricate characters need not always be guys, and we have the actors, directors and writers who can bring them to life. You don’t have to be a woman to write a decent female role. Women are, after all, people, but encouraging more female playwrights in Cambridge is always in our best interests, as is diversifying the plays we put on generally. A night geared specifically towards self-identifying females sharing their writing, like the Pembroke Players’ Lady Smoker, but for plays and excerpts from plays, would not go amiss. 

Cambridge theatre is a big place, brimming with talented women and we should be writing the characters, directing the plays and asking for the roles that best demonstrate that. Who knows? We could get some pretty decent productions out of it too.