QUEEN LEAR
There’s been an upsurge in women playing major male Shakespearean roles,
“To she or not to she.”
One of my clever Star editors attached that headline to a piece I wrote four months ago about female actors playing roles written for men in Shakespeare plays.
And wow, did that ever take off on social media! I’ve never received so many likes, shares and comments on a Star story.
Part of this may have been the great headline, but I think it goes deeper. In the Anglophone world at least, it seems we’ve reached a tipping point around Shakespeare and gender.
While there’s a tradition of women playing Hamlet that goes back centuries, over the past few years, there’s been an upsurge in woman performing many of Shakespeare’s major male roles and of turning the original condition of Shakespeare productions — all-male casts — on its head.
In London over the past two years, Glenda Jackson played King Lear at the Old Vic, Michelle Terry was Henry V in Regent’s Park and Phyllida Lloyd (the director of the musical and film versions of Mamma Mia!) won raves for her all-female productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest. Last summer, Lloyd directed a female cast in The Taming of the Shrew in New York’s Central Park.
Closer to home, Dawn Jani Birley recently won a Toronto Theatre Critics Award for her performance as Horatio in Why Not Theatre’s Prince Hamlet, and Christine Horne received excellent reviews in the title role of that production. In April, Clare Coulter and Philip McKee performed in LEAR: A Retrospective at Harbourfront’s World Stage, reflecting on three iterations of that production in which Coulter played King Lear.
So what’s going on; why is this happening now?
“It’s the 21st century,” Diane D’Aquila says, with considerable emphasis.
“Theatre evolves, doesn’t it? It has to represent the society it’s playing in.”
This week, Alistair Newton’s pro- duction of King Lear opens in High Park with D’Aquila in the title role, playing Lear as a woman (rather than impersonating a man or aiming for androgyny).
“A certain feminist discourse has made inroads, finally,” Newton says.
“When you look at a classical repertory company like Stratford, how many great parts are there for all those fantastic women? . . . For men, at every step along the way of your career, you’ve got an incredible part to play.”
(Credit where it’s due, the Breath of Kings cycle at Stratford last year featured a number of female actors playing secondary male roles, though the lead parts still went to men.)
“A woman playing Lear should not be an oddity,” D’Aquila agrees. “There are a lot of roles in Shakespeare I think women can start taking on.”
When he first started talking about his concept, Newton says, some people commented that King Lear is “about the relationship between a father and his daughters. My short answer is that, yes, of course, Shakespeare did write a play about a father, but does that mean there is some sort of essentialist idea about the way to interpret it?”
D’Aquila points to the tradition, which began as early as the Restoration, of cutting Shakespeare’s plays and changing their endings because they clashed with then-current sensibilities.
“That was their response to their society. Why don’t we now reflect our society? We have these extraordinary stories that Shakespeare wrote and which adapt beautifully. Why not? The old boys’ club is still controlling what should have been relinquished a long time ago.”
Such an exercise is not for its own sake, Newton says. Making Lear a queen allows an examination of an “incredibly rigid, gendered, patriarchal world . . . that a woman has achieved rule over but, at the same time, is still totally subjected to that patriarchy . . . What aspects of herself would she have had to deny and give up in order to gain and maintain that power?”
The conflict between Lear’s public identity and her private life comes to the fore in this interpretation, according to D’Aquila: “An audience will so understand the whole difficulty of your day job versus children, family, the domestic life.”
The point, for D’Aquila, is to get past the perception that some things are admissible and others aren’t.
“When you hear ‘can’t’ — in the theatre, really? Let’s just get rid of can’t. Let’s look at the possibilities.” King Lear runs in repertory with Twelfth Night until Sept. 3 as part of Shakespeare in High Park. See canadianstage.com for information. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with critic Carly Maga.
“For men, at every step along the way of your career, you’ve got an incredible part to play.” ALISTAIR NEWTON DIRECTOR OF KING LEAR