Globe makes history with first all‑women, ALL‑BAME Shakespeare
Theatre Richard II Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1 ★★★★★
The mission at Shakespeare’s Globe under Michelle Terry is at once eye-catching, the height of political correctness and sensible: her aim is to ensure that those staging Shakespeare are drawn from the diverse society in which we’re now living. That means accepting women playing men, and the casting of many ethnicities as well as those who might be termed “differently abled”.
Other major companies are moving in a similar direction, in line with a wider push to create an inclusive model of representation, in performance and production. But the Globe has made history: this revival of Richard II, which stars Adjoa Andoh (also co-directing with Lynette Linton, the Bush Theatre’s artistic director) is “directed, designed and performed by the first-ever company of women of colour in a Shakespeare play on a major UK stage”.
On the opening night, I was greeted in passing by Jatinder Verma who, in 1977, set up the UK’S first Asian theatre company, Tara Arts, in the midst of race riots and prejudice. There can be no denying it has taken a long time for theatre to open its doors to all-comers. Andoh explains in the programme that: “People of colour, and women, are always at the bottom of the heap, so women of colour get to tell that story
[Richard II]”; it would be churlish to quarrel with that. The roll-call of Richards includes Gielgud, Scofield, Mckellen, Spacey, Redmayne, Tennant, Rylance and Russell Beale, with Fiona Shaw the odd-woman-out at the National in 1995. It’s Andoh’s turn now.
If I have some misgivings, they’re less to do with the production – which, much textually pruned and galloping grippingly apace, proves remarkably straightforward and insightful – than with the kind of combative language that surrounds its bold statement of ownership. Also in the programme we find the author Bernardine Evaristo talking about “the theatrical ‘establishment’” as “the patriarchal hegemony in all but name”. This comes shortly after Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director of the Kiln, denounced the dominance of white men, “generally over 50”, in the critical community – and leaves me concerned that the benign mission to enlarge the theatre-going and -making realm is becoming allied to the hostile rhetoric of identity-political exclusion.
Aside from some notable innovations – the stage-wall clad in a woody frontage, the auditorium festooned with photographs of the cast’s female forebears, the company’s arrival to a drum-accompanied chorus of chants – it’s the fidelity and clarity of the evening that stands out, in welcome contrast to the hectic muddle of the recent Almeida production.
We’re promised “a post-empire reflection on what it means to be British in the light of the Windrush anniversary and as we leave the European Union”, but much of that implied topicality comes from the audience, who did (on press night) duly greet John of Gaunt’s line – “England, that was wont to conquer others, hath made a shameful conquest of itself ” – with a Brexit-based laugh.
A gorgeously attired Andoh makes for a fleet, formidable Richard; it’s a physically commanding performance that would be more brilliant still if applied to Henry V. But she also has a clownishness that well suits Richard’s taunting confrontations with Sarah Niles’s usurping Bolingbroke and she fully registers the sadness, dismay and release of defeat and deposition. All the speeches hit home, the final soliloquy filled with indignant passion at wasted time. As for that line: “Thus play I in one person many people” – who can deny it carries a revitalised emphasis?
Until April 21. Tickets: 020 7401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com