There’s nothing confusing about a black actress playing Hermione Granger

A news producer rang up this morning, asking me to talk about ‘colour-blind casting’. Noma Dumezweni has just been cast as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage sequel to JK Rowling’s novels. So there I was, listening to a hack ask ‘isn’t it confusing when black actresses play white roles?’ When I was too stunned to answer, he added, encouragingly, ‘we thought you’d be happy to come on and criticise Sonia Friedman’.

True, if you follow theatre, you’ll know that Sonia Friedman, the super-producer who brings Hollywood’s most commercial franchises to the West End stage, won’t be sending me a Christmas card this year. But for very different reasons. Friedman knows how to pack her houses, and when she brought Benedict Cumberbatch to the Barbican in this year’s Hamlet, I described the cinematic result as ‘a production cut to frame its star’. Scott Jordan Harris identified ‘the carefully choreographed theatrical re-creation of the trademark moments in Sherlock,’ Cumberbatch’s iconic TV series.