Boys will be Girls

Although we have seen, cross-casting was only rarely a ughfeature of traditional theatre in seventeenth-century France, it persisted out of necessity in the school drama of the period. 1 Drawing on the great theatrical tradition of the Jesuits at the Collège de Clermont in Paris (which became the Collège Louisle-Grand in 1683) and on the performance history of Racine’s two plays written for Saint-Cyr, I shall examine how the question of cross-casting was received in these two very different performance contexts. It will be seen that the all-male productions at the Collège de Clermont provoked quite different responses from the all-female productions at Saint-Cyr. In Jesuit drama, cross-casting was inextricably bound up with debates regarding the inclusion of female roles and love plots in their drama, while the performances at Saint-Cyr highlighted wider questions regarding the role of women in society. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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• An Introduction to the Jesuit Theatre

  Ron Engle, William H Mccabe et al.•Theatre Journal•1984

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