The Honorary Man
As Brutus
Julius Caesar, Donmar Warehouse, 2012
In 2012 I started on what has become a four-year, three-play, all-female Shakespeare project with the director Phyllida Lloyd and the Donmar Warehouse. This, and the following chapter, are written in the midst of it. After playing the first part of this trilogy, Julius Caesar, at the Donmar in 2012, we took it to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2013.
It sometimes takes a woman to show us what men are truly made of. Just as a skilled drag queen reminds us of the artifice that shapes our images of femininity, women portraying macho men highlight what’s grotesque and confining in traditionally masculine postures.
Ben Brantley, New York Times
Who is Entitled?
Where do you go after Cleopatra’s magnificent death? Alright, there is Volumnia, or the Countess of Rousillon; Paulina is a possible, and there’s mad Margaret; but that is pretty well it, and none of them has the infinite variety of the Egyptian Queen.
Playing Cleopatra, I had learnt new lessons and reached new heights—or plateaux—from which I could see a further range above me that I hadn’t known was there, but those lessons looked like they would never be put into practice and those further peaks would remain on the horizon never to be scaled.
Then along came Phyllida Lloyd and her idea of an all-female Shakespeare season at the Donmar Warehouse. It was not a new idea. A handful of women have played male roles in every century since Shakespeare died. Nor was it the first time anyone had talked to me about playing a male role in Shakespeare, but things had remained at the talking stage.
Phyllida caught me at a time when I had accepted that my Shakespeare days were over. I was lucky to keep busy with other work on stage and screen, but there was always that low background hum of longing for Shakespeare. To be barred from speaking those words, from that lung-filling, mind-altering, self-testing practice, was like being a concert pianist forbidden to open the lid of the piano.
As Phyllida’s idea took deeper root, we overcame our initial doubts and became sure that there was something a group of women could say by performing these male plays.
The classics are revisited for what they can tell us about our world today, and the world today is much more feminised than in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Women, in the West at least, have access to perform in any and every field of public endeavour, in theory at least. Could we not play the male leaders in our national playwright’s canon? And if it looked or felt wrong, wouldn’t we have to ask ourselves useful questions as to why? We are continually broadening the definition of what a man or a woman is, so couldn’t we be holding Shakespeare’s mirror up to the nature of a more current world?
The problem to me had always been permission: permission from the public and permission from myself. I may have wanted to keep in the Shakespeare game, but if that meant playing men, the public didn’t need to watch me do it. This was why I had never taken the idea further than speculation. I needed Phyllida’s nerve and thereby her permission. What could I as a performer bring to any male role that a male could not do better? Would it not just be a vanity exercise?
Then I thought, hey! What male actor do I know who would not jump at playing Hamlet for the sake of playing Hamlet, never mind that the world arguably does not need another one for a decade? The public will go to these productions in search of the latest bearer of the ‘Great Actor’ baton from Richard Burbage, through Garrick, Kean, Irving, Gielgud, David Warner, Jonathan Pryce, Mark Rylance, Ben Whishaw, and on and on, all in their way personifying the hero or anti-hero of our age. There is no questioning any male actor’s right to take up the torch. But what right have I…?
In my very coyness lurked a revelation. I had a typically female attitude. I didn’t feel entitled. We women can be as ambitious as men and as hungry, but then that old chestnut of needing to be liked rears its head. It sounds daft but it is a not-to-be-ignored factor that contributes to women’s ongoing underachievement in the top echelons of public life. A woman CEO or police commander or politician not only has to do a demanding job but in addition she must be armed against a mass of prejudice and personal dislike that will inevitably come her way. You only have to look at the vile, personal, sexist attacks in the media during Hillary Clinton’s election campaigns in 2008 and 2016, to see that irrational antagonism against a woman is somehow deemed an acceptable form of public discussion. The equivalent racism against Barack Obama had to be more carefully disguised. A large number of women have decided that this kind of institutional misogyny is too high a price to pay for doing a tough job and prefer to balance career achievements with social acceptability and family life.
But I am only an actor. Could I not risk a bit of criticism from my male colleagues and male critics? Of course I bloody could. So I put off worrying about such things till opening night and committed myself to the journey with Phyllida.
We wondered which play to pick. On Phyllida’s shortlist were Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Julius Caesar won almost because it was the least obvious for women to play. Love is the customary territory for Shakespeare’s women, and Hamlet is a bit of a solo act. Julius Caesar is about power, the struggle for it, the gaining of it and how to use it when you have it. The prospect of women playing out that story from inside male characters quickly excited me.
We talked much of how to ‘justify’ an all-female Julius Caesar, and one day Phyllida came in with the idea of setting the play in a female prison. The advantages of this were that we would be de-sexed by our uniform, it would explain why there were no male actors, the violence and aggression in the play would be more convincing in a prison context, and it is no stretch to imagine prisoners playing Shakespeare as it is now a fairly common practice for actors to do workshops in prisons.
By coincidence I had just been performing a scene from King Lear with a young Serbian prisoner in a correction centre in Malta with Bruce Wall’s London Shakespeare Workout, and my loose connection with his wonderful group had familiarised me with the benefits of prisoners playing Shakespeare. I knew there were many such groups doing wonderful things, giving voices to the most forgotten people and confidence to people of rock-bottom self-esteem. The work does not wave a Pollyanna wand, but it does leave people changed in their view of themselves as individuals and it welcomes them in as participants in a shared story of humanity. So Phyllida’s idea seemed not only to be totally grounded in possibility, but also provided a perfect metaphor for the way women’s voices are largely excluded from the centre of our cultural history.
I wasn’t sure at first which part I wanted to play. It never having been a possibility, I had never thought about playing Brutus, but after a bit of discussion I agreed to play him. So how would the rest of the cast be picked? There are enough experienced, talented female actors of my age group and younger to cast the play six times over, but once the prison idea had established itself, we needed a cast that could believably represent the racial and social mix of a prison population. This prerequisite sent the casting net far wider than the typical RSC or Globe or National Theatre lists, so during the auditioning process I met female performers from all backgrounds, disciplines and degrees of experience, and I was privy to some wonderfully creative discussions between Phyllida and the Donmar’s casting genius, Anne McNulty.
To add into the mix, I had long been a patron of Clean Break, a theatre company set up by two women, while they themselves were in prison, to explore the inmates’ lives and prison issues through drama and which went on to develop into the producing/training/commissioning powerhouse it is now. I suggested that we might collaborate with them in some way, and so the Donmar hired some Clean Break actors, who brought a completely fresh tone to Shakespeare and at the same time provided us with invaluable first-hand knowledge of prison life to make the setting feel as authentic as possible.
If a white, middle-class, educated Shakespeare pro like me felt a lack of entitlement, how must a young black woman from Sout
h London who had never spoken a word of Shakespeare feel? I discovered that one or two of the very youngest members of the cast had a sort of ‘What’s the problem?’ attitude which I found very hopeful. It seemed that their generation were already blurring the edges between genders, classes and race and had not bought into the cultural segregation that the older ones had grown up with. One of the most rewarding outcomes of the whole adventure was to watch various company members grow in confidence and ability before my eyes. It was humbling to realise that the audience felt no distinction between my achievement, building on my whole Shakespearean career, and that of a first-time player. What rocked them was the total commitment, clarity and energy they got off each and every one of us. None of us took this privilege for granted as perhaps some male actors might do. We were all contributing wholeheartedly to creating a believable world, and the audience willingly suspended their disbelief. If any one of us had dropped the ball, we would have shattered the whole illusion, and I, for one, would have felt a total fraud.
Brutus and ‘Hannah’
In preparation for rehearsals, Phyllida and I visited a group of women in Holloway Prison and did some workshops with them. It was a frustratingly short interlude, and the prison agenda tended to marginalise our work, changing the attendees of the group at the last minute, whisking people out to take their ‘meds’, shunting us from one un-atmospheric room to another. On one occasion, while our group were passionately acting out the murder of Caesar, someone bashed into the room and started energetically working a floor-polisher under and around our feet with a disregard for what we were doing that was so astonishing as to inspire a brief interlude in the final production.
From the Holloway women we did get confirmation that the play was the right one to do. The themes of violence, loyalty, competition, suicide, and the marginalised quality of the domestic scenes all resonated with them. We were also encouraged by how speedily they had grasped the meaning of the text, and, in one case at least, we saw a budding natural talent for verse speaking.
When the cast met for rehearsals we watched some TV documentaries about British women’s prisons and noticed how so many women aped male behaviour and played out relationships with one another that mirrored the male/female relationships they experienced on the outside. There were many self-harmers (a link to Portia’s desperate act of wounding herself in the thigh), but there was also a lot of humour and paradoxically a lot of tenderness. All of these qualities could be used in our play.
For me the elephant in the room was: ‘What would a person like Harriet Walter be doing in a prison?’ Most women in prison in this country shouldn’t be there. A tiny percentage have committed violent acts. Nearly all of their crimes are petty and a huge percentage are drug-related. An even more interesting statistic is that nearly all women in jail are there because of a man in their life: a pimp, a drug dealer, or a violent partner. I came from a privileged, enlightened background and what I most feared was having to ‘pretend’ too much. I already needed to suspend people’s disbelief by playing a Roman general, but on top of that I needed people to believe in a prisoner who could act fluently in Shakespeare’s language.
Phyllida had encouraged each of us to invent a prison character who in some way matched our Shakespeare character. To make any other choice would be unproductive. One of our Clean Break members helped us rank our characters in a prison hierarchy, for such a thing exists, whereby some crimes are more respected than others. Thus the actress playing Cinna the Poet, who is violently beaten up by the mob, chose to be in for a hit-and-run car accident, a low status, much despised crime, which upped the ante in the fight which got out of hand and tipped over into something rather too real (but of course not real).
So who would my character be? My little acting mantra that I use in the wings or when first approaching a character is ‘This could be me’. If I were not born into my circumstances at my time into this body, I could be any other human being. It is the actor’s version of time travel. So, given that social advantages and education reduce the likelihood of committing crimes, why might someone like me land up in prison? Driving offences? Sure. Some kind of tax fraud? Quite possible. Manslaughter? Not impossible. But none of these matched Brutus.
My Clean Break friend told us how someone with education would command immediate respect, not necessarily affection but a recognition of potential authority. That respect could be built on or lost depending on how that prisoner continued to behave. I needed to find a prison character who wanted to put her education to helpful use, someone who had earned respect over a period of time, so probably serving a long sentence. Someone who, like Brutus, passionately and genuinely cared about the principle of democracy, who needed to expiate a past guilt and believed in redemption. She was beginning to shape up into a political prisoner, a revolutionary who in her youth had rebelled against the system of privilege that had formed her. I was the right generation for this kind of profile, but Britain did not have any political prisoners, now that the IRA have been released. How about Baader-Meinhof? Patty Hearst? All too specific geographically. Nevertheless, I followed this idea through, and, given that our stage prison was not supposed to mirror any particular factual prison, I created Hannah.
Hannah was a combination of people I had read about, in particular one: Judith Clark, an American prisoner jailed for life for her involvement in a bank robbery conducted by an anti-capitalist revolutionary group in the early 1980s. Three people died as a result of the raid, and although Clark was only the getaway driver, through a combination of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and extreme non-cooperation (she refused to attend her own trial in protest against the entire legal system), she received a longer sentence (life without parole) than the rest of the gang, even than the trigger-pullers. She is a mother and a grandmother and has had to face her own terrible feelings of guilt for the life she has led her family into. When I read about this woman it was in a fairly recent article describing her complete turnaround over her years in jail. A story so profound that I cannot even begin it here. Suffice to say, I could latch on to her as a real person to feed into my speculative creation, Hannah.
Hannah/Judith could be me. Hannah would become a mentor figure to the other women, a teacher with a missionary zeal to equip them with an education and skills with which to improve their lives. Hannah might well have learnt her Shakespeare by joining one of Bruce Wall’s visiting groups, and she might have earned enough trust from the prison staff to be charged with helping to put on a play and passing on her skills. She would definitely have seen Julius Caesar as a perfect vehicle in which to play out her own inner debates, and she would care desperately about getting it right. The production would be the be-all-and-end-all of her otherwise barren prison days.
Hannah/Judith was a far more extreme politico than I had ever been and is now a far more profound and brave woman than I expect ever to be. I would have to reach for her just as I have to reach beyond myself to the noble Brutus.
So Who is Brutus?
He is a patrician from an ancient Roman family. He is part of the establishment and has the ear of Caesar. He has recently fought against Caesar in the war with Pompey, a fact that Caesar seems to have forgiven. His wife Portia is the daughter of Cato, himself no lover of Caesar’s; but I won’t embark on the inter-familial entanglements of the Roman world. It is enough to know that Brutus is conflicted. He is also the most universally respected man of the moment. Cinna, one of the conspirators against Caesar, shows us a hint of Brutus’s particular importance to their cause:
O Cassius, if you could
But win the noble Brutus to our party—
tailing off because it seems an impossible dream as Brutus is so close to Caesar.
Cassius is the most purely revolutionary character in the play. He is not hampered by love of Caesar as Brutus is. He is clear-eyed about the situation, saying:
Caesar doth bear me hard; but he loves Brutus.
He knows that Brutus has
more to lose, but precisely because he is seen by the people to be respected by Caesar, Brutus will have a vital role to play as unifier after Caesar’s assassination. He is the key man. The conspirators cannot act without him.
In his opening scene with Brutus we see Cassius avidly searching Brutus’s face for clues to his thoughts and ready to pounce on Brutus’s verbal hesitations as signs of a chink in his armour. He knows he can play on Brutus’s genuine passion for republicanism and his hatred of Caesar’s increasingly despotic regime. By the end of the scene he can say:
Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet, I see,
Thy honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is disposed.
A little further tipping (by way of some anonymous notes), and Brutus is won over to the cause. Cassius has worked on Brutus rather as Lady Macbeth works on her husband. Cassius knows Brutus’s heart and prods his deeper ambition into action. As Hamlet says: ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all’, but once Brutus has wrestled with his conscience, he rushes to the forefront of the fight and puts his doubts behind him. For a while…
I had never realised what a complex and interesting character Brutus is. In the Shakespeare panoply he is related to both Hamlet and Macbeth, almost as mentally tortured as the former, almost as guilt-ridden as the latter, but not as self-explicit as either. It made his soliloquies quite tantalising. He is a private man who can’t even open up to his best friend, Cassius:
Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself.
Even when he does privately talk to the audience he is oblique, and this seems to indicate that he is not even sure what he himself thinks, or is it that he is not 100 per cent honest with himself, unable to look his own ambition and darker tendencies straight in the eye?
Brutus and Other Heroines Page 15