Two twentysomethings sitting near me admired the fact that the production suggested all gender is a fiction. I can see why that was their takeaway but it isn’t what the play is saying.

WEBSITES selling acting scripts use m and f to specify characters written for actors or actresses. Revivals of seventeenth- and twentieth-century classics, though, reverse the initials. The protagonist of Molière’s 1666 farce Le Misanthrope is Alceste, who believes in telling the truth whatever the consequences. Martin Crimp, who wrote a 1996 English version as The Misanthrope, has, 30 years later, gender-flipped it, the texts differentiated in a new Faber double edition as m and f.

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