I have seen three productions of William Shakespeare’s Othello in recent weeks in each of which, of course, the title role has been played by a black actor. I say of ‘of course’ because these days the idea of any white actor ‘blacking up’ for the part is unthinkable.

For singers, however, it is a different matter. I can think of no black tenor who has sung Verdi’s Otello. The great American singer George Shirley, who might have seemed the most obvious candidate during his days at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, knew that his lyric tenor voice was unsuited to the role. He told an interviewer: “Gian Carlo Menotti and Luchino Visconti approached me to do [the part]. I said no thanks. I knew it was wrong regardless of how it would have looked.”

The black-actors-only rule for Shakespeare’s Othello, though it seems to have been with us for ever, is in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon. True, Paul Robeson played the role at Stratford in 1959, but this was a rare exception. Thirty years ago at Stratford, Donald Sinden played the part; six years later, another theatrical knight-to-be Ben Kingsley was the RSC’s Moor. Willard White, exactly 20 years ago (there seems to be a ten-year cycle at work here), was the RSC’s first black Othello of recent times.

Trevor Nunn, who directed White, said: “I could not possibly have gone ahead with the production if I had failed to find the casting of an artist of colour to play the central role. The days of white actors wearing black make-up had gone by the end of the 1970s.”

This was certainly true. But it was equally true that in those days we had yet to be introduced – at any rate on a wide scale – to the notion of colour-blind casting. White-skinnned characters – the kings and courtiers of Shakespeare’s histories, say – were considered to require white-skinned actors to play them. But once this requirement was jettisoned – very sensibly – was it not inconsistent to continue to insist on black Othellos?

In the current National Theatre production of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, which A.S.H. Smyth reviewed last week for The Oxford Times, we find the curious business of black actors ‘whiting-up’ to play stereotypical British colonials. This has irritated some members of the profession.

One actor told the Daily Telegraph (perhaps wisely anonymously): “Colour-blind casting seems to work only one way. Not only can we not play black characters, now we’re not even allowed to play whites.”

Playwright Ronald Harwood said he thought the whole idea of ethnic casting “ridiculous and patronising”. He added: “Take it to its logical conclusion and only a Jew could play Shylock and only a Scotsman Macbeth”

Whiting up, actually, was ever the way for black singers on the operatic stage. The aforementioned George Shirley once said: “One of the reasons my path has been fairly smooth is the fact that I'm light-skinned, and I’ve always used make-up – like my colleagues have used it – to make myself look more like the characters have been traditionally portrayed. Some people have not known I was black.”

How true that is! Our opera writer Hugh Vickers recalls seeing Shirley in a 1969 production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Covent Garden with him so made up in the role of David that his companion simply would not believe that he was black.

“He was made up to look like a member of the Hitler Youth,” Hugh recalls, “a real blond beast.”

Sometimes, it seems to me, colour blind casting can have its problems. I mentioned an instance last November with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet was played by a black actor, Anneika Rose I wrote in my review: “Colour-blind casting is all very well – indeed entirely proper – but is difficult for an audience to be ‘colour-deaf’ too. Since her skin is dark, talk of the ‘white wonder’ of her hand, and other references to comely pallor, seem out of place.”

As I mentioned last week in my review of the new production of The Winter’s Tale, the RSC is now expecting us to be ‘accent-deaf’ as well. The abandoned princess Perdita is played by Samantha Young in what I assume (to judge from the Caledonian focus of her programme biography) to be her natural Scottish accent. This seems odd – indeed, a positive handicap to the suspension of disbelief – since the young shepherd who has brought her up for 16 years speaks in strong Welsh, again presumably the actor’s native voice (his name is Gruffudd Glyn).

Is this to continue at Stratford, I wonder?