A young director's examination how gender is performed on stage especially within the works of William Shakespeare

27 June 2012

Prospera/Prospero

In Shakespeare's last full play The Tempest, the main protagonist Duke Prospero is banished from his dukedom by his ambitious brother and, with the help of his magical art, finds himself on an island with none but his infant daughter and some spirits for company. At the play's resolution Prospero vows to break his magic staff and bury it. Many read this as Shakespeare's own exit speech, the great conjurer of words downing his pen and retiring.

A few years ago Helen Mirren took part in a film version of The Tempest where she played Prospera, now Duchess, who is accused of witchcraft and banished with her child in order to flee persecution. When I first began to talk to people about my interest in gender-switching in Shakespeare a few mentioned Mirren's role to me but it is only now that I come to investigate it.

A few examples of the film are available on YouTube and Mirren cuts quite a figure with her white-blonde hair, magic staff and clothes which are neither traditionally 'masculine' nor 'feminine' but somewhere in between – a kind of shalwar kameez. The speech where she vows that 'this rough magic I here abjure' is haunting and moving.

Now, I must admit that I am not a huge fan of The Tempest. Whilst it I think it has some of the most wonderful poetry written by Shakespeare ('we are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep...') I find Miranda annoying, her love story with Ferdinand unconvincing, and Prospero cold and moody. However, a re-imagining of the play in the way we see with Mirren's production opens it up and Prospero becoming Prospera, with a slightly different backstory and rationale, suddenly makes the whole thing more relatable, to me at least. It feels as though the play is not at all damaged by this change – as many purists fear when any of gender-bending is made – but is significantly enhanced. Something that is 400 years old occasionally needs a little dusting down and shaking off and Prospera is a great conduit for this.

It would be interesting to see how Mirren would have played Prospero himself and what that would have added to the story. Women playing men as men has been seen many times, notably it seems with Kathryn Hunter as King Lear in 1997 and indeed Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero at The Globe in 2000, but sadly both of these were before my time. I am greatly looking forward to the all-male Twelfth Night this autumn but I also look forward to hearing of some new productions where great actresses take on traditionally male roles, either playing them as men or with slight tweaks in order to play them as women. More than anything it provides a chance for actresses to flex their muscles in new ways, considering the dearth of juicy classical roles available for women, a number which only dwindles as an actress gets older.

25 June 2012

Catalysts and kick starts

Feminism has always been of interest to me ever since studying the suffragettes in Year 9. At school my interest in women's emancipation and my final big history A Level project on why Elizabeth I was quite right to have never married meant that I was often cast as 'The Feminist' amongst my peers. However, it wasn't until university that I began to understand the word and to identify really and truly as a feminist. Led by a particularly inspiring lecturer my academic work in my BA Study of Religions took a very gendered approach. Wherever possible I would write essays on gender and women, and outside the classroom I became involved in various women's rights campaigns, put on events about feminism, led the university's branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and at the end of my second year became co-Women's Officer for the Student's Union. It looked like I was destined for a life in academia and that seemed just fine, mainly because I wasn't sure what else I could or would do. The theatre, whilst having played a significant role in my life as a child and young teen, was a fun, often far too expensive past time, little more.

After second year exams and before leaving London for the summer, my friends and I had a few sunny weeks of freedom and decided that an injection of culture was needed if our brains were to keep ticking over until the commencement of our final year in September. Standing tickets at The Globe are a student-friendly fiver so we booked for As You Like It (a play I sort of knew and remembered finding very funny when I was a child) and spent the entire journey to the South Bank drawing complex diagrams of all the relationships in the play.



The course of true love never did run smooth...

The atmosphere of being a groundling at The Globe makes the spine tingle. With the stage jutting out into an audience who crowds in on three sides, and people leaning against the stage, parking drinks and coats around the edge, one really gets involved in the action and the best players exploit the proximity of audience and story to great effect. We piled in to the packed auditorium and the play began.

Now, while standing is a fantastic experience, unless one leans on the stage or rests on the boards at the back, it can be hard to concentrate as one must frequently do a sly jig in order to keep circulation going. So at about half an hour in and just getting used to standing and watching, I realised that I hadn’t to my knowledge seen Jaques, the cynical character who delivers the (in)famous 'Seven Ages of Man' speech. I started to look around and was struck when someone in a skirt was referred to as ‘Madame Jaques’. Madame Jaques? Jaques is being played by a woman? My interest was immediately heightened. Gender-bending was what I studied, what I wrote about and read about at uni, but seeing Emma Pallant pull off a brilliant performance as Madame Jaques (and also Phebe) was an out and out revelation to me.



Emma Pallant, 2011

Over the next few weeks I started to read Shakespeare’s plays as though my life depended on it. Suddenly there was so much there that I knew about but had never really noticed: Lady Macbeth’s great ‘unsex me here’ soliloquy and all the sexual politics between her and her husband; the possibility of doubling up Cordelia and The Fool in King Lear; and the gender-bending that runs rife throughout the comedies. It was like a light had been switched on.

Very soon I was back at The Globe, this time for Much Ado About Nothing. The only version of this I knew was a BBC adaptation with Sarah Parish and Damien Lewis that my sister and I used to watch constantly as teenagers. It didn’t occur to me to read the play beforehand as I was confident that I was pretty au fait with the story. Boy oh boy was I in for a shock! Whilst I knew the plot, nothing could have prepared me for how I would be swept away by Shakespeare's language in all its glory, being presented in as close to the original setting as we have. The character of Beatrice is now one of my favourite characters in English literature, so shaken and stirred was I by her story. When she cried ‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place’ I couldn’t help but cheer and raise a fist. I'm with ya Bea!! I later read an interview with the actress who had played Beatrice so brilliantly, Eve Best, where she talked about how she would love to play Macbeth. I was ecstatic. Other people are thinking about this gender-bending stuff too? Hooray!

Ever since last June I have thrown myself head first into the world of the theatre, Shakespeare, and into exploring how – with the lenses of gender – our greatest stories might be reimagined and replayed, if for not other reason than to give women a crack at the incredible wealth of parts which, until recently, were only available to men. Over the next year I hope to explore this more, both in an academic setting and through contemporary theatre praxis. I feel that there is increasingly a move towards looking at how women and men can take on and interpret one another’s roles and stories on stage, and I am excited to be part of that growing exploration.


22 June 2012

Green eyed, 5 foot 4 and right handed

I am a woman. That is a way I identify myself and a way I am identified by others. However, I am also green eyed, 5 foot 4 and right handed. I love cricket, prefer red wine to white, and don't like raw tomatoes. These are also categories of identity, some used more often than others.

Gender is one of the most ubiquitous categories for identity, with almost everyone strongly identifying with one camp or another, and judging or being judged according to the supposed characteristics of XX or XY. But when it comes to gender as a marker for identity I have a certain ambivalence, even a reticence towards the subject, perhaps a strange admission for someone for whom gender has been the driving topic behind my academic study for the past three years and is about to embark on a Masters in Gender. The issue is, as it always is these days, with identity. How far does one's identity as a woman or a man factor in one's ability to do anything or be anything?

My gut answer is 'it has, or should have, absolutely nothing at all to do with whether one is any good at something or not!' As a fledgling director I am already very aware of being described as a 'woman director'. I feel that the word 'woman' here is used as a qualification, and not always a good one. I have never read about a 'man director' – only 'directors' and 'women directors'. When I direct I want my ability as a theatre practitioner to be the yardstick by which I am appraised, not the fact that I don't have a penis, something which seems (if you'll forgive the turn of phrase) immaterial to me.

Yet at the same time I would add feminist to the list of identities to which I fit, and strident feminist if I've just read Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman which at one point last year I was rereading every few weeks. As a feminist I recognise and wish to honour the hard-won gains made by the women before me, both in the world of theatre and elsewhere. I want women to have their equal share in the world in which we're all living, and part of that is done by women telling stories – either their own stories or giving their take on those stories previously told only by men. For example, I think that parts such as King Lear or Macbeth are greatly invigorated when put in the mouths of women, and new and exciting discoveries can be made therein.

However, each player, whoever they are, will (hopefully) bring new and exciting insight to these great parts, and therein lies the reticence I spoke of. On the one hand I want to play down the question of gender as I feel it only heightens division and is an unnecessary and unhelpful way of judging people. But on the other hand I think that having women play roles traditionally played by men and staging single-gender productions of plays offers really interesting possibilities for how we can understand characters and stories.

I think that I will be pulled – or will pull myself – in many directions when it comes to discussions on gender. Should gender be an issue when it comes to creating theatre? And by making it an issue does it make it more of 'An Issue' and therefore only help to reinforce division, as Michael Billingdon was accused of doing here? It is not a question I think I will ever fully reconcile, but it is certainly one I wish to engage with over and over, here and in practise. 

Welcome

Welcome to the first post from Directions of Gender, a blog following my journey into theatre directing – lenses of gender firmly on – and drawing together those who are interested in interpretations and discussions on gender in the theatre, be that representation of women as theatre practitioners, how women are represented on stage, or how classical works are reinterpreted today with feminist and gender-aware stances.

Welcome and I hope you enjoy what is here!