The Jamie Lloyd Company has hit back after its production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” has been the subject of what they call a “barrage of deplorable racial abuse” aimed at an unnamed cast member.
The play, directed by Jamie Lloyd (“Sunset Boulevard”), stars “Spider-Man: No Way Home” star Tom Holland as Romeo and Francesca Amewaduh-Rivers (“Sex Education”) as Juliet.
On Friday, the Jamie Lloyd Company issued a statement, saying: “Following the announcement of our ‘Romeo & Juliet’ cast, there has been a barrage of deplorable racial abuse online directed towards a member of our company. This must stop.”
They already DID highlight her! That’s my point–they put a massive spotlight on her, by both going out of their way to specify the particular type of abuse, and also going out of their way to say that one and only one cast member was receiving the abuse. They’ve directly contradicted their own ridiculous pretense of ‘not naming names’ by doing literally everything they can to clearly identify her as the victim, and then bizarrely refusing to plainly say she’s the victim.
All of the people in this chain saying “why does she have to be named”: why aren’t any of you asking “why does the fact that it’s exactly one victim need to be specified” or “why does the fact that the online abuse was racially motivated”? None of these three DON’T act to identify the victim. You clearly don’t mind if the victim is identified since you don’t have a problem with those other two. So why are people biting my head off simply for pointing out it’s weird that they did the latter two and not the former?
It’s like if someone asked how many of something you have, and your answer is “the amount is an odd integer between 4 and 6” instead of “5”. It’d be perfectly reasonable to ask in response “why the hell didn’t you just say 5?”
lol
You are focused on entirely the wrong point. Why are you attempting to distract from the issue?
If you read an article about a guy who murdered his wife that had a timeline, and it read ‘he woke up, took a shower, ate 23 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and then he shot his wife’–would it be “distracting from the issue” to comment about the obvious bizarre element there? To comment on that is not equivalent to trivializing the murder. Weird thing sticks out, someone who noticed points it out. That’s all, it ain’t that deep.
I’m not trying to distract from anything, holy shit. All I did was point out a strange element I identified in the article. The top level comment in this chain is mine, so you can’t even accuse me of derailing someone else’s, lol. If you don’t want to talk about this particular bit, post your own top-level comment and move on. Don’t whine at me here about it.