A busy bee

So, it has been a while since my last post as life has become very busy!

The Gender MA is brilliant. I have found myself with a group of enthusiastic, intelligent and lovely people, who are as happy to talk about Foucault and Judith Butler as they are to go to dinner and find great theatre. The atmosphere at Goldmiths is fantastic and the commitment to academic excellence, coupled with a desire to see the theory put into practice, has meant that I feel very at home. I'm sorry I only have a year there!

Now essay season has begun I am furiously researching and writing. One essay will be on Walter Benjamin and his concept of the decay of 'aura'; the other will be about the pregnant body in art. Both very challenging but I'm excited to get back into writing.

I've also begun writing for a few online blogs, 'Being Feminist' and 'Geeked Magazine', the latter of which is soon to be in print which is very exciting!

But where is Shakespeare in all of this?! Well, it has been tricky to do much reading, or even thinking, about the old Bard recently, but that doesn't worry me too much as I know these things come and go.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm sure ideas about the plays are swirling and marinading. 

The thesis will feature Shakespeare in some way, I have no doubt of it. Currently, my thinking is towards looking at bodies on stage, with particular regard to women playing men. I would like to do a historical analysis, looking at cross-dressing on stage, or focus specifically on the plays and examine Shakespeare's approach to gender. However, time and word limit (20,000) will not permit such broad scope, and so I am going to have to pick a topic, and stick to it. Women on stage seems to allow for the covering of quite a lot of ground, and I also hope it will give me a chance to celebrate the triumphs and achievements of women on stage in the UK.

The all-female Julius Caesar, opening at the Donmar in a few days interests me greatly. I think I may start there and see what reflections arise...

'We will draw you the curtain and show you the picture'

Some friends and I were lucky enough to see Tim Carroll’s all-male Twelfth Night at the Globe last weekend. I’ve been trying to get some thoughts down for a few days now and wanted to share some impressions.

We were fortunate enough to have gone on a blazing sunny day. I have attended a couple of performances at the Globe where I got absolutely drenched, as there is no roof over where the groundlings stand. It ain’t a pleasant experience I can tell you! Thankfully we were spared nature’s wash and had a decent view from the back of the pit. The acting in the play was superb. Stephen Fry seemed to have been made for playing Malvolio and Mark Rylance was brilliant as Olivia, somehow gliding across the stage as if he had wheels under his skirts. My favourite player though was Paul Chahidi, who played Maria with a kind of gleeful malevolence.

The all-male aspect was intriguing and it certainly shed a different light on things. For a start, I never realised there quite were so many cock jokes in the play. Whenever there was potential for an innuendo, the guiding principle appears to have been ‘stick it in’…I also felt that Viola/Cesario’s lines ‘I am all the brothers of my father’s house and all the daughters’; ‘I am the man’ and her whole smouldering exchange with Orsino where she basically tells him she fancies the pants off him and he’s too obtuse to realise, were all delivered with a bit of a wry smile, a kind of ‘nudge nudge wink wink, look what we’re doing, audience. They’re talking about being women when they’re actually men!’ If I had one criticism of the whole thing it would be that, for me at least, it was lacking a little in subtlety.

It also struck me that the fact of an all-male cast actually serves quite well to remind us how conventional the comedies are, and how they usually end with everyone subscribing to a heteronormative framework, all marrying the person they ‘should’ marry (though see my previous post on Love’s Labour’s Lost). That all the characters were being played by men made – at least for me – the relationships seem more risqué, and the actors certainly played up to that feeling, but in the end we remember that Viola marries Orsino (a great match for her, but he’s just spent the whole play pining after Olivia); and Olivia marries Sebastian (having known him for about 5 minutes and having actually been madly in love with his sister). Sharon Holland, in her essay Is There An Audience For My Play? argues that this is the brilliance of Twelfth Night (and indeed most of the Shakespearean comedies), that we think the world has been turned upside down and subverted, but in actual fact it subscribes strongly to a traditional, patriarchal societal structure, and ‘order is restored’ within quite a narrow and predictable framework.

Chin-strokey, academically minded chat aside, the play was a great afternoon out, at times moving, at other times hilarious. Good fun, and a really interesting production.

We'll see what we can do about that...

This sentence, from an article about Caryl Churchill, just made my heart sink a little:

I think it is true that to have had major theatrical success, male directors still seem pivotal.

I am saddened by this opinion, which comes from successful writer and musician Michelene Wandor, and I am sure that it is a reaction to the rigidly hierarchical situation in theatre which she herself has experienced. However, in my (perhaps naively) optimistic way, I seriously hope that this will not always be the case. It is my hope that in the coming years things will change – even more than they undoubtedly have over the past few decades – and that within my working life time I will be able to be part of an industry that is meritocratic, and accepting of great works of art, regardless of whether the creator is female, male, transsexual, bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, black, white, pink, green, with 8 arms or no legs – and everything in between.

'You that way: we this way...'

I have just returned from a summer in mid-Wales working with a group for whom Shakespeare is the beating heart of all they do. Putting on shows, education, inspiration – the source and well-spring of it all is the Bard's plays and sonnets. In so many ways it has been a life-changing experience, one that I am still processing and mulling over.

Of the many things I got involved with during my time was reorganising the library, as previously mentioned. Eventually the category 'women' was ditched and the books placed (more appropriately in the eyes of myself and my glamourous assistant!) under the headings 'Shakespeare critique', 'the life of Shakespeare', 'Jacobean theatre' amongst other. The women who are writing and being written about are now no longer niche, but integral.

One of the most serendipitous happenings over the summer was being visited by 11 incredible students from LAMDA who put on a dynamic, utterly side-splitting production of Love's Labour's Lost and had all the girls playing the boys and the boys playing the girls. This was done partly for practical reasons and partly to give each other a crack at lines they wouldn't usually speak. A couple of reflections:

– when they were trying to sort out costumes for the scene where the King and his cronies dress up as Russians they pulled out some 'svitas'. These are long overcoat-type garments with a fitted body and then a kind of skirt coming down to the knees. On a man it would have looked like traditional Russian dress. However, on the women (playing the men) it just looked as though they were wearing dresses. The players opted for black bomber jackets instead.

– when the women were playing the men there was a certain amount of shoulder-squaring, swaggering and jaw-setting. However, by and large voices were not made deeper and (apart from comedy moustaches used during the Muscovites scene) there was no facial hair added or particular physical embellishments used. But when the men were playing women it was out and out camp. Comedy breasts (two large ones quickly becoming one enormous one from scene to scene) high-pitched voices, lots of giggling, fluttering of eye lids. It was all completely brilliant and hilarious but it struck me that women --> man = attempts to neutralise one's physicality; but man --> women = a pastiche reminiscent of drag acts. In both cases what we saw was one sex playing to an idea (or ideal?) of what they felt it meant to embody the opposite sex. All very intriguing and warranting of much pencil chewing...

– finally, Love's Labour's Lost is without doubt one of Shakespeare's most captivating plays. There is a huge amount of wordplay involved and the story takes some bizarre twists and turns but the ending left me covered in goose bumps. After much madness, four men pledge their love to four women and all seems well until, in the closing lines of the play, a messenger comes to tell the Princess of her father's death. She prepares to go home and the King pleads with her:

Now, at the latest minute of the hour,
Grant us your loves.

Her response is not what we expect at the finale of a Shakespearean comedy:

A time, methinks, too short
To make a world-without-end bargain in...

In a Midsummer Night's Dream it has taken them all of one night to decide that they're all hopelessly in love with each other; Sebastian in Twelfth Night has known Olivia for about five minutes before agreeing to marry her. Yet in LLL the Princess is unwilling to commit to marriage and tells the men that they must spend a year in a monastery and, if they can manage it, only then they will marry them.

It is usually thought that the tragedies are Shakespeare's more transgressive plays, as all is not well that ends well, 'natural order' is disturbed, Jack does not have Jill and chaos often reigns. It is within the comedies that people emerge as they 'should' – bowing to authority and all married to the 'right' people. LLL seems to shy away from this predictable ending and as such it is a play I intend to plunder the depths of in the coming time.

All in all it has been an amazing, emotional, challenging and inspiring summer. It has reminded me once more that any academic study I undertake cannot be done in isolation from real living people – again going back to the thing of being very definitely a woman and not a man, but not being prescriptive about that identity. Women and men live out their identities here and now, and that real-life, lived, living experience needs to be engaged with and given equal worth alongside any theoretical exploration.

Did someone tell you I was here?!

I am very excited because the theatre company I am working with for the summer (in the middle of actual nowhere) are hosting a group from LAMDA this week, as they knock together a production of Love's Labour's Lost in 6 days. Not only is this a really cool project and they're all really lovely people, but one choice they have made for this production is to have the girls play the boys and the boys play the girls! HELLO!! Did someone tell them I was here?! I had a chat with a few of them and asked why they had made that choice. It was partly practical as there are 6 girls and 4 boys in the group and - of course - the play has more parts for the boys; but one of the girls said 'well, we wanted a go at all the good juicy speeches!' And I reckon that in itself is a good enough reason for mixing up who plays what in any play.

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.

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!