Harriet Walter: On the Donmar stage, all Shakespeare's players are women
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Version 0 of 1. Shakespeare is tantalising to the female actor. He gives us the most wonderful words to say, the most dramatic situations to re-create. We have to stretch wider and higher and dig deeper than our standard selves in order to reach those words and those situations. In that sense, the challenge to the female and the male actor is the same. However, and this is the big however, there is on average only one female role to every four male roles in the canon of his plays. This is not just a pity in that it gives women less of a voice and consequence in his plays; it also gives female actors less employment and less chance to practise their craft, while women in the audience get fewer chances to identify with the characters on stage. As for any meaty roles for older women, I can name six: Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Volumnia, Paulina, the Nurse and Queen Margaret. So what does an ageing Shakespearean actress do? My Shakespearean acting life has been mercifully extended by the Donmar theatre’s staging of two Shakespeare plays with all-female casts: Julius Caesar, in which I played Brutus, and now Henry IV, in which I am playing the king. These productions are not intended as a token gesture or a gimmick or as an act of charity to female actors. The plays themselves are in many ways seen afresh through the filter of a female cast and a female director, Phyllida Lloyd. They are a gift to the cast for obvious reasons, but they have been largely received as a gift by audiences as well. Now that I have played male and female roles in Shakespeare’s plays, I can begin to define the differences between them. The purpose of a woman’s presence in the plot is almost always in relation to a man – ie they are someone’s daughter, girlfriend, wife or widow. Their speeches are almost always about their men in some way. Men are their world, while for men the whole wide world is their sphere, and their speeches can range across the great political and philosophical questions that concern us all. Playing Brutus I got to say things like: “There is a tide in the affairs of men,Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;Omitted, all the voyage of their lifeIs bound in shallows and in miseries.” While my wife, Portia, got to say: “Am I yourselfBut, as it were, in sort or limitation,To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbsOf your good pleasure? If it be no more,Portia is Brutus’s harlot not his wife.” You see? Tantalising. No one says it better than Shakespeare, but Portia’s is a speech about limitation, and she defines herself wholly in relation to Brutus. Shakespeare’s words empower the speaker, and it is a wonderful novelty for us to feel that power (and responsibility) and to hear our own and other female voices speaking mighty verses about freedom, leadership, destiny etc. By setting both productions in a female prison, Phyllida Lloyd makes a wider connection with female voicelessness in the world. It is easy for the relatively liberated few to forget how many women in the world are still gagged and trapped in roles imposed on them by men. In our own country, the majority of women in prison are there because of a man – a drug dealer, a pimp or an abusive partner who runs their life on the outside. The prison setting also helps with the suspension of disbelief when we act out male aggression and violence. Women in prison live closer to these things than the average female actor does. Our neuter prison garb also helps the audience put aside any questions of “Are they men playing women or women playing men?” and we hope they just leap into the play with us as soon as we speak the words. Once you have accepted that we are women playing all the men, you don’t have to worry about it again. We are a society of people acting out another society of people. Fourteen completely distinct women come on stage and no one can categorise us or reduce us to stereotypes as in “oh I see, she’s the bitch” or “she’s the virginal heroine” or “she’s the comic maid”. Fourteen women on stage without men is a novelty, and in itself a rather wondrous sight to behold. People ask us whether we have to do a lot of research or do different things to get into a male character. The answer is: not really. The actor’s job is to get behind the needs of their character that give rise to what they say and do. My character, King Henry, needs to secure the succession to his rather dodgy claim to the throne before he dies. Shakespeare has done most of the work and my task is to lift his words and thoughts off the page. It is part of an actor’s equipment to be able to imagine life in a mind and body other than their own. We each created a backstory for our prison character (which the audience doesn’t need to know about), and as I can relate more easily to a female prisoner than to a Plantagenet king, I use my prison character as a stepping-stone towards reaching Henry. Both have difficulty sleeping because of their conscience; both have children who they wish they could see more often and who they wish would “go straight”. A female cast can also throw into relief certain aspects of male behaviour that would be taken for granted in a male performer. When a woman playing a man refers to “womanish tears” or dismisses a female character with “Go to, you are a woman, go”, it has an extra resonance. Then there is the question of physicality. A man will more easily grab the space on stage and use the full force of his voice. In rehearsal, we had to work on these things – on how to show status in our physicality, and how to be unapologetic about taking up room. The job was never to ape male behaviour (if there is such a thing), but to try to get behind the needs and attitudes that give rise to that behaviour. There are all-female casts, cross-gender casts and gender-blind casts, and all these can shake up our preconceived roles and our notions of sexual identity, but I would argue that when the cast are all women, we can look beyond gender to our common humanity. Shakespeare expressed this humanity better than anyone. He just didn’t always include women in the frame. One of the main purposes behind these Donmar productions is for all classes of women to feel they own, belong to and have a stake in our history and our culture – and what better place to take that on than in a Shakespeare history play? • Henry IV is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 29 November. Box office: 0844 871 7624. |