A few years ago I had a chat with the actor Jimmy Vee while he was playing one of the seven dwarves in panto.
He told me that as a small actor (he's 3ft 8in) he is only ever offered two types of roles - dwarves in Snow White or monsters in Doctor Who - but insisted there was no reason why he always had to be in parts defined by his height. Was there anything, he asked, to stop him being in Coronation Street or EastEnders?
The answer is no, except that even Jimmy himself could see there were some obstacles to overcome. He grew up in Lanarkshire and told me it wasn't until he was 21 that he saw another dwarf and that his first reaction was: ain't he funny? This is often the way we react to small people: to see them as cute or amusing, and it helps explain why producers do not consider them for regular, straight roles. The fear is that the audience will giggle or go aww. And every year we get more productions of Snow White which encourages us to keep on doing it.
The solution is to just go ahead and use small actors in regular roles and eventually audiences will accept it, which is partly what Warwick Davis, the small actor who has appeared in Star Wars and Life's Too Short among other things, intends to do with his new project The Reduced Height Theatre Company. His aim, he told Modern Times: Warwick Davis' Big Night (BBC2, Thursday, 9pm), was that within five minutes of watching a play, the audience would forget they were watching little people, and just follow the plot. There would be a kind of invisibility cloak; difference would disappear.
In an attempt to achieve this in his first production, Davis shrank the set itself so it was the same scale as the cast, the idea being there would be nothing to make us laugh except the jokes in the script. It was a good idea, although the documentary didn't really put it to the test. The obvious next step would have been to speak to the audience and ask them for their reaction but that didn't happen, leaving the production looking like an experiment without a conclusion.
Davis's first choice of production, the farce See How They Run, was also tricky considering his aim was to prove small actors can do more than be funny. Sure enough, on the first night, there was lots of laughing from the audience, but what were they laughing at? The whoops-vicar script? The little people? A bit of both? Again, the documentary could have put this to the test, but didn't.
This lack of rigour left the documentary feeling like an idea with no proper historical, cultural or political context, although the story of Jon Key, one of the small actors who appeared in See How They Run, was fascinating. Jon revealed he had spent a lot of his life divided into two people, the physical and the emotional. And then he tried to unite the two, reducing the boundaries before finally scrubbing them out. It was moving to hear him describe the process because it was similar to the disappearing act Warwick Davis wanted to achieve on stage: the disappearance of prejudice, but also the disappearance of self-doubt.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article