‘The Dog, the Guard, the Horses and the Maid’: Diverse Casting at the Royal Shakespeare Company
This article takes as its starting point a quotation from the British East Asian actor Paul Courtenay Hyu concerning casting practice at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC): ‘They have an all-black Julius Caesar and an all-Indian Much Ado, but when they decide to do the Chinese Hamlet, they cast fourteen out of seventeen actors and all of the major parts as non-Chinese. In the 21st century, that’s unbelievable.’ Hyu raises many issues including diversity policies, politics of ethnic minority casting, and cultural representation, all of which were contested following the casting choices made by the RSC in 2012. I use the American scholar Ayanna Thompson’s theories concerning ‘non-traditional’ casting policies as a lens through which to analyse contemporary British theatrical practices. The concepts of ‘colour-blind’ and ‘cross-cultural’ casting are examined in the context of the World Shakespeare Festival where the ethos of celebrating Britain’s ‘unique internationalism’ and diversity was championed. As the Olympic year drew to a close, there were clear tensions between celebration and condemnation, expectation and disappointment, visibility and invisibility, regarding the representation of performers from ethnic minority backgrounds appearing on stage at the RSC. Through an examination of Much Ado About Nothing directed by Iqbal Khan, and Julius Caesar and The Orphan of Zhao, both directed by Gregory Doran, this article seeks to address the complexities involved in different approaches to casting, and the impact these evolving practices have on the cultural representation of diverse communities in contemporary Britain.
A Bicultural Dream in Aotearoa New Zealand: (De)Colonising Shakespeare?
This essay came into being as a way of ‘thinking out loud’ about the stirring of traditions – Shakespearean and Māori – into an idealised spectacle of reconciliation that belies its own theatrical, historical and social foundations.[1] When I was coming up as a theatre director in the USA, the production of Shakespearean theatre was aspirational, requiring rigorous training in textual analysis as well as physical and vocal grace, as was evident in the shows I still remember from school and other trips to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether on professional stages, in schools and universities, or in community theatres, Shakespeare’s plays were produced, often explicitly, to uplift us – whoever ‘we’ were – from our otherwise more mundane theatrical and social circumstances and preoccupations. The Pop-up Globe Theatre in Auckland, New Zealand, is a product of such aspirations. It promises an encounter with erudition made accessible through low jokes and entertaining shenanigans.[2] And it certainly delivers. 
Shakespeare’s plays are great because of their universalism, so we continue to be told. But in fact they were first and foremost products of their place and time, playing on and revealing the strata of class, race and gender in ways that were affirmational to their audiences, acts of reification rather than radicalisation. So too the Pop-up Globe’s bicultural production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2017/2018).[3] In finding common ground with the groundlings, it also necessarily plays into rather than against stereotypes, and toward rather than against affirmation of the status quo. The Pop-up Globe’s success is that it mixes entertainment with education. Its appeal is to teachers, students and their parents – a spoonful of sugar approach to an otherwise starchy run-in with high culture. But what is it they’re teaching?
Numerical Simulation of Thermal Sensitivity for Explosives
In order to compare the thermal sensitivity of several typical explosives, this article solved numerically one-dimensional transient heat conduction equation including thermal decomposition for explosives with finite difference method. The explicit difference equations under different boundary conditions were established, and the corresponding stability criterion was derived. The ignition times for typical explosives were calculated, which was used to evaluate thermal sensitivity of explosives.