Elon Musk has recently sounded off on the casting of both Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page in Chistoper Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026), describing the performance of a black Helen of Troy or a transgender Achilles (rather, Page is depicting Elpenor) as “DEI lies”, 

“Nolan has lost his integrity [...] [He] desecrated the Odyssey so that he would be eligible for an Academy Award.”

Where (you may ask) is his outrage over the casting of Matt Damon as Odysseus or Anne Hathaway as (his wife) Penelope, two Americans playing as Ancient Greeks? The obvious explanation is that Musk is suffering from the same delusion as Christian Zionists who believe that Jesus was white.

Whether Grecians would be understood as POC depends on the socioeconomic context, but they’re certainly not American. Why—then—cast an ancestrally Kenyan actress (who was raised in Mexico) as “the most beautiful woman” in Ancient Greece? Because it’s not real, it’s mythology, she’s acting.

To most of us, this controversy is nothing new: 2021 saw a three-part adaptation of Anne Boleyn’s final days, starring Jodie Turner-Smith (as Anne Boleyn) and Paapa Essiedu (as her brother George). The fact that Anne Boleyn was not black is of little consequence and the series doesn’t engage in historical revisionism, not that it wouldn’t be interesting, rather, the creators broached the subject of court politics—and how the Boleyns fell out of favour with King Henry VIII—through the prism of race.

There is no reason to exclude non-white actors from theatrical work, especially in the realm of period dramas or classic literature, not least because we hope that our evolved societies don’t look anything like the history that we long to reproduce.

As an unfortunate caveat, casting is still a refined art that can make or break a project.

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Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is set in the midwest and based on the true story of the Wright Aeronautical corporation in Ohio, which colluded with the Army in approving batches of defective engine parts for use in WW2. In the play, this causes the deaths of twenty-one pilots; in real life, a whistleblower informed the government of the plot before they could be used—and those responsible were brought to justice.

There is no suggestion in the play whether Joe Keller colluded with the Army in the sale of these parts, and the resulting karma is less bureaucratic, instead, focusing on the communal and filial repercussions of such a crime.

Throughout the play, various neighbours from the cul de sac pop on and off stage: the Bayliss, Lubey and Deever families, as well as the eight-year-old Bert.

As this pertains to blind casting, there is no requirement for the actors to be white Ohioans as Miller makes no reference to a specific geographic location: only to the Keller’s house being on “the outskirts of an American town”. The Deevers had moved to New York which would be plausible on the borders of the Midwest and Northeast, but the play could feasibly be set anywhere with an industrial presence.

The only nuance is that the audience has to believe that the characters on stage have grown up with and around each other, not as it pertains to the way that they look but how similar they sound—and how effectively their community is rendered.

As in Jack O’Brien’s Broadway revival and Jeremy Herrin’s production at the Old Vic (both in 2019), the Kellers and their neighbours have been uniformly white/affecting rustic American accents. Regardless, there’s always an element of suspending disbelief—when assembling a mélange of actors—that they might not sound entirely related, even as they reach for a similar regional palette or sound.

Van Hove’s production is truly revolutionary in both its staging and casting: trading the classic American porch for a minimalist black box that contains only Larry’s fallen tree, an entrance into the Keller’s home and (above) a circular window. When a character enters the home, they head directly upstage; and when someone leaves the scene, they walk off either stage left or right. The window provides another dimension, allowing the characters to interact with each other on different planes.

Arguably, van Hove set himself up in casting Bryan Cranston (an American) as Joe Keller, following their Broadway collaboration on Network (2018), before rounding out the cast with English actors through the London-based Gavin Kalin, Playful Productions and Wessex Grove—with casting handled by Julia Horan from the Casting Director’s Guild.

Cranston is a fine Joe Keller—he loses some of his bluster towards the end of the play but the character is uniquely submissive within his own predicament, subsumed by guilt and his wife’s compunction—and his easygoing American accent is built-in. The rest of the cast—however talented—are constantly reaching for the same notes with varying degrees of success.

Marianne Jean Baptiste (Kate Keller) and Hayley Squires (Anne Deever) sound as if they might be found on the streets of New York. As far as we know, Kate has never left their small town and Anne has only migrated over the last few years—according to van Hove, she’s had a taste of the Big Apple and lost all of her regionalisms.

Papa Essiedu (Chris Keller) brings an honest vulnerability to the role but his distinct voice—somewhat muffled and indifferent—marks him out within the tight-knit community.

There exists a spectrum of midwestern accents, from the more typically nasal “Northern Cities Vowel Shift” found in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, to the tight-mouthed dialect found in Minnesota/Wisconsin and the prototypical flat affect of the landlocked Midwest, from Ohio to Iowa.

With the exception of Cranston, who nails the Middle American accent, the rest of the company is reaching for a ubiquitously nasal tone that is regionally sound (aside from their East Coast inclinations) but the antithesis of Miller’s direction: to create a community that has weathered a local crime. These actors don’t sound as if they were raised anywhere near each other, they sound as if they were assembled by an esteemed director to create an award-winning smash hit revival. Hove has recently been ostracised from the Amsterdam theatre community over allegations of fostering a toxic workplace; and his last Broadway engagement (West Side Story, 2020) was criticised by The New York Times for its multiracial depiction of “the Jets” (the white counterpart to “the Sharks”), as well as for the staging of Anita’s on-screen rape:

“The omnipresence of screens in this production should remind us how easy it has always been to reproduce, revive and restage scenes of spectacular violence. Yet I’m not sure how deeply Mr van Hove understands the implications of his own choices here [...]

Mr van Hove’s casting misrepresents the real solidarities that form at the margins of U.S. citizenship—and perhaps more dangerously, shifts our focus away from the enduring problem of white supremacist violence. “Inclusion” here is code for willful colorblindness.”

Call me cynical but I wonder if van Hove staged a more diverse production of All My Sons in London—rather than New York—as a result of this. The production would be improved on Broadway—however—as van Hove would have the privilege of actually casting midwestern actors.

This is of a different matter to unnecessarily diversifying the Jets—which belies the white supremacy that underscores their treatment of Puerto Ricans—as the Kellers don’t have to be white, nor does anyone in the play. It would have been more revolutionary to actually stage All My Sons in the UK, where there is just as much of an industrial legacy as in the Rust Belt—and allow the actors to use a semblance of their own voices.

The likely story is that Cranston was already attached to the production and van Hove was paranoid about American critics, so now the audience has to put up with a cadre of English actors pretending as if they all grew up on the same midwestern street—whilst their leading actor prances around in his own dialect.

Essiedu deserves his Olivier for the sheer energy he exerts—if the emotional beats are a little flat—but the award for Best Revival is misguided. Fellow nominee, Carrie Cracknell’s Arcadia had the same approach to blindcasting and employed a similarly radical set design—in the form of a double revolve.

The resounding moral framework of All My Sons has never been more prescient, so I can only hope that this production jumps the pond. A postmortem of the Americana deserves to be performed by the Americans who are suffering under its latest incarnation, the victims of ICE and Trump’s fascism, not the English.