A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, edited by Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe. The storm surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao brought to the fore issues of racial-ethnic theatrical representation in casting. This Special Issue brings together material from all sides of the debate, from the RSC and British East Asian (BEA) actors, from practitioners and academics, to offer a series of documents on what could become a decisive, and positive, moment in the history of BEA performance in Britain.

Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe, co-editors of the special issue debating the casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, introduce the online features that accompany the print issue.

In ‘Orphan à la Crouching Tiger‘, Daphne Lei reports on a production of The Orphan of Zhao in La Jolla, California, featuring an all-Asian American cast.

To accompany his analysis of why the casting of The Orphan of Zhao became so contested, Ashley Thorpe provides a critique of the marketing of the RSC production.

Watch a video of Anna Chen performing her poem Yellowface, which satirises and reappropriates this practice of racial stereotyping.

This specially commissioned video, The Orphan of Zhao Redux, features an all-British East Asian cast, performing a hybrid text edited and compiled by Daniel York.