Women can play any male role on stage, says Tamsin

TAMSIN GREIG says there are no roles that a woman cannot play following her appearance in the latest genderblind production to hit the London stage.

The National Theatre’s Twelfth Night, in which she plays Malvolia, a female version of male character Malvolio, follows Glenda Jackson’s triumph as King Lear at the Old Vic and the Donmar Warehouse’s allfemale Shakespearean trilogy.

Greig, 50, said at first she believed that changing the gender of several characters in the play, including her own and Doon Mackichan’s Feste, might be “a gimmick” but was persuaded by director Simon Godwin.

“There is no part that a woman can’t do,” she said. “The Globe is about to do a whole series of really interesting takes on Shakespearean casting and their Twelfth Night is going to be very interesting. They’re doing similar investigations into how things change when you change the gender.

“Glenda Jackson did it so successfully in Lear. I think it’s not shoving a square peg into a round hole, I think it’s about just testing the boundaries of things, given we are testing the boundaries of society wherever we go now.”

Greig admitted she had had “lots of conversations” with the theatre after she was approached with the idea. She said: “My immediate response was to smile gleefully at the boldness of it and then spend a long time saying, ‘I don’t think it is going to work, I don’t know how I can make it work’.”

Greig said the comedy, about mistaken identity and a woman disguised as a man, was an obvious choice for the approach because it was

“already dealing with the topic of confusion and topsyturvy nature”. “Shakespeare is already saying how can we make boys bishops and servants kings and men women? So it is ripe for that kind of possibility,” she said.

But some examples of gender-blind casting have been met with hostility. Leslie Jones, a star in the all-female film remake of Ghostbusters, was forced off social media after suffering racist and sexist abuse.

Greig, whose career includes TV roles in Episodes and Green Wing, said: “I think the way Simon has directed it, he has really opened the conversation about the fluidity of identity. We don’t define ourselves nowadays — possibly always, but the conversation is hot now — within recognised boundaries anymore.

“Because it is a hot conversation you have to be careful about how you participate in it, and not just participate in it for its own sake.”