No doubt it is very weak of me, but I seem not to be able to resist looking at the feed on my phone when I wake up, rather as heavy smokers used to reach for a fag. 

Yesterday, I found what was advertised as a masterclass in the recitation of a soliloquy, posted by the National Theatre in London. It seems to me increasingly that English stage actors have two modes of recitation: mumbling or gross overemphasis—hamming it up in fact—with resultant harshness of diction. 

So it was in this case, in one of Ophelia’s laments on Hamlet’s condition. But there was something more than mere harsh diction: Ophelia was played by an actress with achondroplasia—that is to say she was a dwarf. 

The casting decision was little short of evil, the product of a bullying and totalitarian cast of mind. 

As it happens, I do not think the recitation was very good, and I would have thought so by whomever uttered. But that is not really the point. The audience was being coerced into an uncritical acceptance or even admiration of the performance because of a natural, and no doubt laudable, sympathy for those with the actress’s condition. 

Let me say at once—I have said it elsewhere, so it must be true—that I was very early appalled by the treatment of circus dwarfs in the 1950s, although I was too young and timid to say so. Only a bad person, I thought, malign of heart, would mock someone with a physical disability or laugh at his difficulties. I make an exception of the late Victorian dwarf, Little Tich, the film of whose hilarious Dance of the Seven Veils manages somehow to reassure that you are laughing with him and not at him, and that he is laughing himself without any arrière pensée or bitterness. This was not the case with the circus dwarfs of the 1950s.

I also very early realized that those with achondroplasia were not in any way mentally impaired, and that there were many professions open to them, or that should have been open to them if they were not. One should not, therefore, douse them in a cloying (and incapacitating) pity; but who cannot sympathise with human beings who suffer from a deformity that no one would choose to have and that is one more obstacle to fulfilment? 

But if there are many things that people with achondroplasia can do, there are many things that they cannot, among them playing soccer for Manchester United or Ophelia in an otherwise normal production of Hamlet. As a 76-year-old man, I cannot play Ophelia either, but I am resigned to this curtailment of my possibilities. 

I do not, of course, blame the actress for the situation, and the fact that what I have written will upset her, if she ever gets to read it, upsets me. But the alternative is to let a lie, and a gross one at that, go by default. 

The blame lies squarely with the direction of the National Theatre, which is obviously more concerned with social or psychological engineering, and with exhibiting its own supposed generosity of spirit, than with staging the best possible production. If only it would stick to its last! But no one these days, at least no one with a college education, wants to stick to his last; he wants to be a philosopher-king instead. But those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make grandiose. 

The direction of the National Theatre is practising a kind of moral blackmail of the public. It demands of the public something that is psychologically impossible, and therefore that creates a peculiar kind of anxiety. The public is supposed simultaneously to rejoice in the theatre’s wonderful open-heartedness, liberality, and virtuous devotion to diversity in choosing an achondroplastic to play Ophelia, and not to notice at the same time—that is to say to make no allowances for her because she is such, and to regard her performance just as any other. This I defy anyone to do (and if he claimed to be able to do it, I should think that he was lying). But the fact that we cannot do it is a cause, at least among a certain kind of person, probably very frequently to be found in a serious theatre audience, of a sensation of guilt. One feels guilty because, when Ophelia runs across the stage, she resembles nothing so much as a circus dwarf of old, and one cannot fail to notice the resemblance.

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The critics, of course, said that she stole the show. I have not seen the entirety of it, only a minute’s clip: but I am sure that they are right. Stealing the show is not necessarily a term of praise, however. When William McGonegall, the man generally agreed to be the worst poet in the English language (though I have much sympathy for him), played Macbeth in his subsidiary career as actor, and refused to die at the end as he was supposed to, I have little doubt that he stole the show. If Hulk Hogan had played the Infant Jesus in a nativity play, I am sure that he would have stolen the show; but that would not have been to the show’s credit. 

Coleridge said that, when we attend a play, we indulge in a willing suspension of disbelief. We are all willing to believe that a great Hamlet is Hamlet and not the man beneath the grease paint. But that is not the same as saying that the suspension of disbelief should be a kind of psychological obstacle race, in which he who overcomes most obstacles is the best, most generous and compassionate person.

There is something deeply sick—spiritually sick—about casting in this way. One must ask, what is next? A 90-year-old Romeo (after all, the population is aging)? A quadriplegic Othello? Take that, you audience! Did not the great Stalin say that writers were the engineers of the soul? Why should theatre directors be any different? The missionary spirit lives on, but not only, or even principally, among the religious.