Maureen Lipman’s criticism of Helen Mirren poses a threat to the arts

It is tempting to attribute Jewish actress Maureen Lipman’s outrage over the casting of a non-Jew, Helen Mirren, as Israeli premier Golda Meir to sour grapes. The two dames are about the same age, both are household names in Britain, there could be rivalry.

But that’s not fair. For a start, Lipman is not in competition with Mirren; the plum part would never have been hers. And, besides, her complaint is not made in a vacuum but is the latest salvo in an ongoing debate over “Jewface” casting.

Lipman’s contention is that the Jewishness of the Golda Meir role is so integral that only a Jew should have played her. She said: “I’m sure she will be marvellous, but it would never be allowed for Ben Kingsley to play Nelson Mandela. You just couldn’t even go there.”

In fact, Kingsley did, sort of. While he may never be a Mandela, he has famously been an Indian (Mahatma Gandhi) and a Jew (Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List).

An actor’s job surely is to pretend to be someone else, something Kingsley excels at, and even being half-Indian (his father was from Gujarat) wouldn’t have helped him reprise Gandhi so convincingly if he wasn’t such a fine actor.

Other thespians have faced arguably bigger challenges, going back to Shakespeare’s day when boys with breaking voices had to play Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and all the other female roles the bard invented.

Grown actors have had to act like kids – June Allyson was a 32-year-old Jo in the 1949 production of Little Women and, more recently, most of the original History Boys were pushing 30 as they swotted for their Oxbridge exams while the cast of Grease were even more mature High School leavers.

At least they all had “lived experience” of being young, however, which is at the heart of Lipman’s grievance. Mirren does not know what it is to be Jewish, though she may know as much as Lipman (or the other actresses she’d have preferred, including Scarlett Johansson, who is Jewish) what it is to be Golda Meir.

Publicity shots for the film depict the actress with a prosthetic nose but is this “Jewface” or film craft? Think of the make-up that would have been necessary if casting directors had gone for Johansson. Think of the false nose Nicole Kidman had fitted to make her look more like Virginia Woolf (it didn’t) in The Hours.

At what point does acting become cultural appropriation? Performances that perpetuate patronising stereotypes are usually more a case of bad acting or directing, than gross insensitivity. Ron Moody, who described himself as totally kosher, may present Fagin differently if he were around now, though many still think he stole the show back in 1968.

Less offensive but annoying nonetheless are dodgy Irish and Scottish accents, Americans doing a Dick Van Dyke, or the myriad Inspector Clouseau interpretations of the French (Peter Sellers excluded).

Whether they get it right or not, inhabiting another character is what drives actors; if they could only impersonate people like themselves think how boring that would be, especially for audiences.

The playwright Patrick Marber told the Jewish Chronicle that the idea of “lived experience” in casting decisions was “a denial of what creativity is” and robs the actor of the right to become someone “from another culture, from another religion, another sexuality and other gender.”

If only gays could play gays, we wouldn’t have had John Hurt’s Quentin Crisp, and if, by the same token, only straight men could play romantic leads the world would be without Andrew Scott’s Hot Priest in Fleabag.

Extend the premise to the arts generally, which the advocates of “lived experience” do, and novelists would be out of business.

Jewface or gayface are not blackface, which came from an era of white supremacism that demeaned people of African descent and is rightly considered racist. It would be unthinkable today to have a Laurence Olivier blacked up as Othello, not only due to the historical associations but because black actors have traditionally been underrepresented on stage and screen.

Clearly, Jewish actors do not need to redress the balance in the same way. Jewish talent largely built Hollywood and Broadway and continues to influence our entertainment industries and artistic life. The composers (Bernstein, Rodgers, Sondheim, Gershwin), lyricists (Hammerstein, Sondheim, Gershwin), movie moguls (Mayer, Goldwyn, Warner), and too many directors to mention are hardwired into our cultural memory.

Black and ethnically diverse musicians are so invisible on western concert platforms that an orchestra, the excellent Chineke! Foundation, was formed to increase their representation. For Jewish musicians, all orchestras, including the world’s best, have long been their realm.

The backlash against Lipman’s comments has perhaps been most ferocious among her fellow Jews who resist being compartmentalised by their religion.

She more or less destroyed her own argument with her alternative, Jewish suggestions for Golda Meir, not just Johansson, but Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand and Tracy Ullman.

When Chaim Topol was chosen to play Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, he ticked the Jewish box but was much younger than the dairyman father figure. “A good actor can play an old man, a sad face, a happy man,” he reportedly told director Hal Prince.

Prince’s other options had apparently been Richard Burton and Danny Kaye, which goes to show that while casting should be culturally blind it must never take complete leave of its artistic senses.