Why Shakespeare Set in a Women’s Prison Makes Complete Sense
By Patrick Monahan for Vanity Fair, 5 November 2015
A group of actresses playing prison inmates. An episode ofOrange Is the New Black? Chicago the musical’s “Cell Block Tango”? No, it’s Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
Phyllida Lloyd directs a new production of Henry IV—the second in a trilogy of all-female Shakespeare set in jail—at the new St. Ann’s Warehouse, running from November 6 through December 6. The first was Julius Caesar, which Lloyd (who also directed the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady) brought to St. Ann’s in 2013. “We were looking for a play that frees as many actresses as possible from the domestic and romantic sphere,” Lloyd told us. Harriet Walter stars as King Henry, who will be familiar to Downton Abbey-ites as Lady Shackleton. Walter is among a group of brilliant British stage and screen actresses, who, in Lloyd’s own words, are “scandalously underused.”
The concept is not as offbeat as it sounds. In Shakespeare’s day, the actors were all one gender—male, with the female characters in elaborate Elizabethan drag. In Henry IV, Part I, Harry Percy (better known as Hotspur) says to his wife, Kate: “I know you wise, but yet no farther wise than Harry Percy’s wife.” Between male and female actors, the line is simple chauvinism. However, Lloyd explained, “when you play it with one gender—the whole play—whether you did it all male or all female, suddenly the roles of the women are thrown into really blinding relief.”
“I Was Fed Up” — The 180-Degree Decision to Stage Shakespeare With Only Women
By Carey Purcell for Playbill, 7 November 2015
Phyllida Lloyd, director of the all-female Henry IV playing St. Ann’s Warehouse, reveals the moment she decided to disrupt the status quo by casting a Shakespeare play completely with women and how female prisoners can relate to Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton.
If New York theatregoers can’t snag a ticket to see the Donmar Warehouseproduction of Henry IV at St. Ann’s Warehouse, they needn’t despair: The cast members will most likely be easy to spot while riding the subway.
While directing the all-female cast in Shakespeare’s history play, Phyllida Lloyd spoke with the actors at great length about embodying roles typically performed by male actors — and adopting habits typically common to men, including sitting with their legs apart on the subway, occupying more than one seat.
“Our cast has become so alert to [manspreading],” she said. “We’ve been practicing it on our subways — just sitting there and having their legs apart and seeing horror on everyone’s face and testing how invasive it feels.”
Women’s Work
By Rebecca Mead for The New Yorker, 16 November 2015
Dame Harriet Walter is regarded as one of the greatest living Shakespearean actors: in the past decade, she has delivered revelatory interpretations of Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But because of her gender and her age—she is sixty-five—the roles available to her are dwindling. “Shakespeare just doesn’t do mothers,” she said the other morning, in the lobby of St. Ann’s Warehouse, on the Dumbo waterfront. “In one way, he’s very honest—he didn’t know much about women at that age. But he didn’t know much about so many things, and he could get into the Moor of Venice, so why couldn’t he understand an older woman? The longer I live with him, the more that feels like a sad little disconnect for me.”
Fortunately, Walter has discovered a partial remedy for her Shakespeare problem. This month, she takes on the title role of “Henry IV” in an all-female production of the play, directed by Phyllida Lloyd. (It originated at the Donmar Warehouse, in London.) Two years ago, the company performed an all-female “Julius Caesar,” also at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Both productions are set in a women’s prison, with the actors playing prisoners who are playing Shakespeare. “Many of the younger actors have said it has really helped, because you go, ‘Oh, God, I can’t play Prince Hal, but I can play a prisoner who is playing Prince Hal,’ so it’s a way of accessing something that’s true to you,” Walter said.
Walter and her colleagues worked in rehearsal on their body language. “It was a question of inhabiting a body that felt unapologetic about taking up space. So we will sit like this”—Walter, who was wearing dark-blue pants and a dark-purple wool coat, spread her knees, like the stick figure in the monitory poster on the subway—“because a man will go like that. It is sort of getting behind the person who owns that kind of a body.” They sought to diminish their reliance on gestures that indicated submissiveness—Walter folded her hands on her breast by way of example—and to eliminate automatic vocal patterns. “Sometimes women do what is called devoicing, which is when they deliberately soften their voices so as to be non-threatening,” she said, with a demonstrative huskiness. “All these techniques we don’t even know we are doing suddenly come up in the rehearsal room, and they become blocks to the audience’s believing who we are.”
Photo from Vanity Fair.
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