The
theatrical version of Pedro Almodovar’s film “All About My Mother” performed
by the Finnish National Theater has raised a hot debate on its casting.
The basic
problem is that the tradition of female characters played by male actors has a heavy
burden of contempt and ridicule because they present, on the one hand, the
ridiculousness of a woman and, on the other, the repeated idea that a man playing
a woman is a ridiculous matter in itself. So if a man plays a transgender woman
role, this background hurts real transgender women who feel that this would
perpetuate their image as men disguised as women and at the same time also
ridiculed according to the old tradition. The fact that the character Agrado is
quite fast-paced in her twists and turns does not make it any easier. There was
also criticism that a transgender woman role should have been played by a trans woman because they otherwise have a limited number of job opportunities.
On the
other hand, performance choices have been defended in the debate in the name of
artistic freedom and the fact that theater has a long tradition of men playing
female roles and women playing male roles. Another view has also been raised among actor
circles that an actor must be able to present any character regardless of who
he or she is.
Another key problem that is the starting point for the mess is the definitions of a trans feminine persons in Spain, which do not always go hand in hand with Finnish thinking. In addition to how people define their own identity, the way they are perceived there does not necessarily go hand in hand. The director and the actor still make their own interpretations of this. The Finnish viewer's interpretation of what is seen is another separate level, which varies according to what he or she knows about the matter in general and the performance in particular..
In Spain of nineteen nineties trans
women, like Finland, were not in a care process supported by society, so they had to
pay for it themselves. Funding was quite often done through prostitution. In it,
on the other hand, because of the clientele, the market power is an irreparable
genitals, and if that financing process does not proceed as expected, it may
remain at this stage for a long time. Nor do the needs required in the market
attract the use of hormones that would be easy to use per se. Almodovar’s film
Agrado is probably a transgender woman who is in just that situation. On the
other hand, transvestites and drag queens also offered their services in the same
market, to whom the permanent body modification is not necessarily even the
goal.
The
original film was made in the 1990s, when the world was very different than it
is today. In its production, the National Theater uses the English version of Samuel
Adamson, presented in 2007, in which Agrado is written as a transvestite. The
National Theater also depicts the character as a transvestite accordingly.
However, some pre-published National Theater brochures have spoken of Agrado as
a transgender woman. The statement of the director of the theater, which also
talked about a transgender woman, did not clarify the matter at all. In an
article in Helsingin Sanomat, Janne Reinikainen, who was momentarily excluded
from the role of Agrado, tried to correct the misunderstanding. The matter went
in an even more awkward direction here, when Reinikainen did not master the
concepts he used in his well-meaning text and caused more resentment. This
contradiction between communication and the image of those who saw the film has
been the root of the uproar this time.
At the heart of all this is a chain of misunderstandings resembling a broken phone. Samuel Adamson seems to have translated the Spanish word travesti directly into the word transvestite. To some extent, however, the word travesti, which is also used as a barking word, has a much broader meaning than the transvestite/crossdresser used in Finland, and in practice it can mean a wide range from transvestites to trans women as the words are understood in Finland. In the text, Agrado’s character is about the same as in Almodovar’s film. In 2007, such confusion of concepts could go unnoticed, but today the value and message problems it produces have become heavily at the center of the debate.
At the end of the blog is a
table where I try to compare Agrado to traditional transvestites and trans
women.
This
situation, on the other hand, was further complicated by the fact that the text
rights owner emphasized that the role was written as a transvestite and is
therefore also a male role. In the 2007 production, this was also the case. So for
the National Theater the room for modifications was small and full of built-in
contradiction.
I had an opportunity to tell the production
team for gender diversity spectrum with other representatives of Seta
organization. At the time, we said that in Spain, the concepts are not the same
as ours and how there are people there for whom we have no concept in Finnish
language. We also told you that the transgender role played by the man will
surely arouse a great halo. We were told that the character in this version is
a transvestite, which sounded somewhat strange, but certainly met the criteria
of political correctness. We did not see the text itself at that time. We were
further told that they had tried to get the transgender person into the role
without success. There are a small number of actors with trans backgrounds in
Finland, but it is not easy to find +/- 40 years old transgender actors who
would master such a demanding and cohesive role.
The heated
debate we predicted, described above, had already begun well before the
premiere. This media circus created terrible pressure to the production group
of the National Theater: How to preserve a long-prepared production and, on the
other hand, do it politically correctly. The solution was to modify Agrado’s character
towards a clear transvestite/crossdresser, for example, by replacing his surgical implants
with external breastsforms.
In his
distress, the working group asked me and a few other trans people to evaluate
the whole for a preliminary presentation. When I saw and heard it, I was
somewhat shocked: The character had, of course, been externally modified into a
transvestite, but many key passages in the text still referred to a
manifestation of travesti identity that did not correspond to our crossdressers.
Thus, a broken telephone had further distorted the situation.
Janne
Reinikainen does create an interesting character that opens up new perspectives
on the dimensions of masculinity. Reinikainen's Agrado also does not reinforce
stereotypes that a man when imitating a woman has somehow an element begging
for ridicule. The central adult roles in the work are all somehow amusing and
also have some dark sides. Agrado character is amusing, but does it primarily
on her own. Instead of being ridiculous, he is portrayed as powerful and
transformative - Almodovar’s trans characters have this function more generally.
The big problem, however, is that twisting Agrado into a familiar crossdresser essentially eats up the artistic-dramaturgical impact of the work.
From the
performance as a whole, it can be said that its core message, the praise of
communion and friendship, remained a bit sloppy. It could be due to the
horrible pressure from the public that affected the actors ’performance. On the
other hand, the English implementation of 2007 has also received similar
criticism.
If we
summed up the debate so far, there are a few points:
- Most of
the criticism comes from the image that its performers have of the film or the
first brochures of the National Theater, not of the performance itself.
- The
demand that a cis man could not act as a transfeminine role is partly
well-founded, but somewhat straightforward as a categorical and may neglect the
context of implementation.
- The
confusion of the National Theater was understandable: the director apparently
interpreted Agrado’s text in a multidimensional way as a transfeminine
character, and the actor understood the transvestite as we usually understand
it. However, such confusion should have been understood to be clarified with a
help from the experts and ethical and artistic decisions made logically on that
basis. If the character had been created to be a transgender, a cis-woman would
have been a natural option in the absence of a trans actress. If, on the other
hand, the character had been constructed as a transvestite/crossdresser understood in
Finland, the text would still have had to be significantly modified, in which
case certain key dramatic culminations of it would have had to be removed or
replaced by others.
- Despite
the interludes, the final outcome of the production was ethically sustainable,
but dramaturgically very problematic.
The text
was written a week after the preview I saw, and I don’t know if the
presentation has been heavily modified yet from what I saw.
Chart:
Typical features of transvestite and transwoman in relation to the Agrado
character in the film and Adamson's theatre version
|
|
A typical transvestite/ crossdresser |
Agrado |
A typical trans woman |
|
Internal body modification with hormones |
Very rare |
Apparently not |
Common |
|
Internal body modification with silicon |
Very rare |
Apparently yes |
When necessary |
|
Internal body modification surgically |
Very rare |
Apparently yes |
Common |
|
Genital modification surgically |
Very rare |
Nope |
Common |
|
External body modification |
Typical |
Apparently not |
Only if nothing else is available |
|
Masculine virility |
Typical |
Maybe |
Usually not |
|
Regards herself being a woman |
Possible but rare |
Apparently not |
Typical |
|
Wants to be a woman |
Typical |
Yes |
Nope, because she is a woman |
|
Lives as a woman 24/7 |
Possible but rare |
Yes |
Typical whenever possible |
