New Globe director
The future of Shakespeare is female
Michelle Terry’s most fondly cherished moment to date treading the boards at Shakespeare’s Globe came during Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2009 as the Princess of France. “I felt a tug on my corsetstrings. I turned around and a man said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, your majesty, your corset has come undone.’ Amazing – he was being completely pragmatic, yet he was so imaginatively engaged he called me ‘your majesty’. That’s the Globe in a nutshell.”
When she steps out on to that beautiful, open-air replica Elizabethan stage next week, greeting the gaze of some 1,500 people as Hamlet – the first female Hamlet in the theatre’s 21-year history – Terry, 39, won’t just be assuming the mantle of one of the greatest and most demanding roles in the canon: all eyes will also be on her as the Globe’s new artistic director. The play’s first line, as she observes wryly, is “Who’s there?” She describes the looming moment as “terrifying”.
The spotlight on Terry is all the fiercer given who she is replacing: Emma Rice, who formally bows out this weekend after two turbulent years at the helm. Yet anyone who considers Terry a safe choice needs to think again. Terry has warm praise for Rice’s tenure, even the contentious use of modern lighting and sound systems.
“I was as excited as anyone by what she was trying to do,” she says. “The building was conceived as a radical experiment and it was the most radical appointment. Could a balance have been found? We will never know because it was cut off so soon. She is the best thing that has ever happened to the Globe. She caused a profound period of reflection.”
As a result of that reflection, much clearer, tighter parameters have been set for the playing conditions: the technical add-ons have vanished and the emphasis shifted back to a natural acoustic and “shared lighting”. Still, on the surface, Terry appears an unlikely candidate to take over. She has had no experience directing in the theatre or running a company. Yet after she made an informal offer of help during the crisis, she was invited to consider greater involvement. She knew the place from the inside, adored it too, and had such a proven track-record in Shakespeare (with credits at the RSC, National and Regent’s Park, where she played Henry V) that she could self-evidently serve as a powerful ambassador for the Bard and the building, helping it rediscover its shaken sense of purpose.
Identifying what’s unique to the Globe as a guide to the way forward has enabled Terry to build upon one crucial aspect of Rice’s legacy – the desire to achieve gender parity, to which she has made a solid commitment. Putting diversity at the centre of her approach, and making disability and colour-blind casting par for the course, Terry argues that all Shakespeare roles are now up for grabs for women. That doesn’t mean that every production will have an equal number of men and women players. “I’m not saying there won’t be all-male or all-female productions – who doesn’t want to watch Mark Rylance give the kind of performance he gave in Twelfth Night [as Olivia]? But what matters is the balance across the season.”
She has already had angry complaints about Hamlet. “People have written letters saying: ‘Don’t do this’. There is concern about women playing men. One person was outraged that I would be playing Hamlet, which they felt I was selfishly using as therapy for my ‘obvious transgender issues’.” They’re painful to read – she prefers not to – but there’s no way she’s backing down. The days when Hamlet meant the continuation of a long male lineage stretching back to Burbage – interrupted by the odd female upstart – are over, she says. “There’s no alternative now.”
The rationale lies with Shakespeare himself: “If our resident playwright is saying, ‘I’m dealing with the human condition’ then anybody should be able to play any of those parts. Do I think you could do that with Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams? I don’t know. But with Shakespeare, that’s possible. When he was writing, women weren’t allowed on stage. He didn’t care if men played women, so why would he care if women play men? He didn’t ask us to think authentically but imaginatively and expansively. We can explode these plays.”
She’s stirring the waters still further by experimenting with a 12-strong ensemble – cast across Hamlet and As You Like It (in which she plays the minor role of the old man Adam) – that has been granted rare creative autonomy. There are two co-directors shaping things as they emerge but they all started work together, raiding the costume store for what they need, not imposing a predetermined concept. “I think we’ve gone too far down the road of one person being solely responsible and I think there’s another way,” she says.
For her, this trial is about dismantling oppressive hierarchies and challenging “the patriarchal system we’re all born into”. It has been “liberating” she says to pool ideas, work collaboratively. “The result may be terrible but so much love has gone into it that I hope something bigger will be asked than how well did she do ‘To be or not to be’.”
Although it almost looks like destiny – she got the Shakespeare bug when she was just seven, playing Puck at her local drama club in rural Somerset – Terry says she’s “still surprised” she got the gig. “When I found out that it was between me and two others, I knew I had a chance,” she recalls. “Paul [Ready, her actor husband] and I talked about it and came to the conclusion that someone had to do the job, so why not me?” New mother to a daughter (Scout, now 17 months), she turned the lack of nominal
‘One person was outraged, they felt I was selfishly using [Hamlet] as therapy for my “obvious transgender issues”’
qualifications to run a building of this status on its head: “Something about having a baby released me into a vulnerable, raw and authentic place. I think that’s how I got this job. It was going: what if I am enough? What if being a mother makes me qualified? What if all these things that have hitherto been felt as obstacles could now be converted into qualifications – all my self-doubt, my anxiety too? We have to believe that mothers and wives can be leaders. It’s not working ‘or’ mother. I am an actor-managermother-wife!”
“I have no assumption that this is going to go swimmingly,” she cheerily concludes as she heads off to rehearsals. “For some people what I’m doing will be offensive. I don’t mean to offend anyone and audience dissent is allowed. If people don’t want to see the world represented in a diverse way, there’s nothing I can do about that.” She falls quiet. “If so, I won’t be in this job for very long.” Having seen her Henry V in 2016, though, winning over a sceptical audience, something tells me this could be an Agincourt moment for the Globe.
Hamlet previews from April 25. Tickets: 020 7401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com