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.

The straight jacket of gender

"A thoroughgoing feminist revolution would liberate more than women. It would liberate forms of sexual expression, and would liberate the human personality from the straight jacket of gender."

Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women, 1975

The category 'women'

I am currently archiving a rather neglected library for some friends. The main bulk of the books are on Shakespeare, his life, his London, then on acting the Bard, how to speak the lines, and on to the biographies of various great Shakespearian actors. There is also a section entitled ‘women’ with books on Shakespeare’s women, women in Shakespeare and an intriguing title that I’m going to explore later ‘Shakespeare’s Queer Children’. I also notice that a biography on Simon Callow has found it’s way into this category. As I said, the library has been somewhat neglected of late…

I have been given carte blanch to reorganise the whole collection in whatever way I choose so am currently staring at the wall of books before me, trying to bite down the rising panic associated with this rather vast task, and forcing myself not to regret offering to help out. But my current internal dialogue is debating about whether to retain the category of ‘women’ in this library. As always, there is the category ‘women’ but not ‘men’. Man, in this library and in so many others, is the norm, neutral, base 0; and woman is the addition, the auxiliary, the extra, added 1. Men find themselves in ‘education’ in ‘biography’ in ‘history’ in ‘music and food’ and in ‘tragedy/comedy’. Books about Lear or Macbeth or Hamlet are peppered around, but studies on Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Anne Hathaway, or indeed, children, are bunched together in a corner of these shelves as their own ‘special category’.

Several books all with ‘women’ and its associated words in the title seem to lend themselves well to being categorised together. However, if the same rule were to apply the other way around, if I put all the books with ‘men’ and it’s associated words together under the rubric of ‘men’ it would look weird. And probably all those books wouldn’t naturally fit together anyway as a man’s experience of Shakespearian England or male biographies or the male hero’s of the plays have been written on more extensively and cover a broader range of topics.

The category ‘women’ seems at once incongruous, as I want to place women’s contributions everywhere; and at once necessary, as there are some very specific and crucial writings on women in Shakespeare and it would make sense to keep them altogether. But then where to put ‘Shakespeare’s Queer Children’? Whilst queer theory and analysis owes much to its forerunners in feminist theory, it is not the sole enterprise of feminist thinkers and would be a welcome addition within many fields of thought, resistant though some fields remain to queer analysis.

Maybe it’s time to sod the thematic approach and go alphabetical. 

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.

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.