Trans What You Will, a theatre company dedicated to staging Shakespeare plays with trans and nonbinary performers, will produce a staged reading of Twelfth Night at The Space in London on July 25. In a post to Instagram, the theater company wrote that the “inherent queerness [of the play] is glaringly apparent to so many.”
The play will receive an introduction from none other than Sir Ian McKellen, who has called Twelfth Night “perhaps the funniest and most moving of Shakespeare’s plays.” As Trans What You Will describes it, “you’ve got a lady disguised as a man, seducing another lady on behalf of a lord, but nothing goes to plan when the lady falls for the disguised lady, and the disguised lady falls for the lord!”
Even more chaos ensues. Have your read Shakespeare through Queer or Trans* lenses? Have you ever imagined an entirely trans or gender expansive cast? How many doors might this sort of production open for LGBTQ+ in London and maybe even beyond?
