Robert Harris, the historian and novelist, came to talk to us during rehearsals. He endorsed the choice of our prison setting, pointing out that Rome was felt by many to be a prison. The conspirators were desperate and in such a climate they hint at suicide as an escape:
CASSIUS:
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.
CASCA:
So can I:
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity
All of our prison cast could relate to this, especially Hannah as a lifer with no hope of release. Suicide is a complex issue, and I won’t presume to plumb its depths here. I will just pick out a few strands.
Strand 1
Young women in prison who try to kill themselves because they see themselves as worthless. The world would be better off without them, they think.
Strand 2
Statistically suicide is most common among young men. Grayson Perry again, talking of a thirty-year-old man who had killed himself:
No one had a clue he was suicidal. I think some men don’t even know when they are sad.
Strand 3
It was a Roman soldier’s duty to fall on his sword in the event of defeat or failure. This involved getting someone else to hold that sword.
All these strands plaited together over the last beats of the play. Cassius, mistakenly thinking that Octavius has defeated Brutus (in fact the opposite is true), gets his slave Pindarus to finish him off. When Messala finds his dead body he understands that ‘Mistrust of good success hath done this deed’.
When Brutus finds his dead friend, he knows who to blame:
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.
Fear and guilt are eating into their morale and dooming them to lose the war. Is this Shakespeare’s message? That regime change will ultimately fail? Hannah deeply hopes not. I hope Shakespeare is less decided than that and simply wants us to ask questions and learn about ourselves. He has engineered a trick of the plot in order to achieve tragedy, in order to teach us something. Just as Romeo and Juliet could have ended happily if Friar John had been able to get Friar Laurence’s message through to Romeo, Cassius and Brutus might have lived to fight another battle had not Pindarus, on look-out, misread the situation he sees far off in Brutus’s camp. Shakespeare doesn’t alter the historical fact of Cassius’s and Brutus’s deaths, but he imagines them in such a way to make us aware of the ‘it needn’t have been like that’ aspect. Our minds shape our destinies.
The thrash-metal sounds build throughout the last beat of the play, punctuating Brutus’s speeches as he desperately seeks someone who will hold the sword for him to fall on, while he urges his friends to escape the advancing enemy: his last effort to salvage some good from the disaster.
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
I shall have glory by this losing day
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile conquest shall attain unto.
At this point I got to be a sort of rock performer in my sixties. Slap in the spotlight, my men dropping all around me, drums thrashing, lights flashing, an electric guitar wailing as Brutus does a kind of desperate dance trying to summon up the guts to shoot himself in the head (…with a water pistol). Finally he gets his servant Lucius (in the original it is one, Strato, whom we barely know) to do the deed. Lucius the boy soldier. Will he take Brutus’s lessons to his heart or is he so brutalised by the war that he joins the winning side? The latter of course.
With Brutus safely dead, Mark Antony can afford a generous eulogy. Our Mark Antony speedily beckons to a ‘camera man’ to make sure it gets filmed for the nation. The PR will do him good. For a second he is the unifier we hoped Brutus would be, but, almost immediately, Octavius sweeps the carpet out from under him and assumes the cloak.
Frankie/Caesar, who has appeared at intermittent moments during the play, as Caesar’s ghost appearing to Brutus on the eve of battle, and then during the battle itself, now sits at the drum-kit orchestrating all of this with single, startling drumbeats. We all move to her tune. I rise up and join the ranks again and then suddenly, just before we reach the end, a deafening blast comes from the prison tannoy: ‘FIVE MINUTES TO LOCK-UP!’
A mixture of fury at being cut off in mid-flow and elation at their achievement runs through the prisoners. The flurry of reaction masks a surprising and shocking costume change. Frankie (ex-Caesar) has dropped her disguise and suddenly we see her dressed in the uniform of the prison officer she has been all along. She orders us into line ready to leave the space.
At this point we shed the Roman layer of the play within the play and were just actors playing prisoners. Each of these prisoners had given her all, had felt empowered by understanding Shakespeare’s language and by having it on her tongue-tip. Now each prisoner was reduced to a number. Phyllida wanted Hannah to be the last to leave. She invited me to take my time, to do something distinct from the others. She wouldn’t define it, and I never planned it. The challenge was to drop the acting and find Hannah’s agony somewhere inside. I thought of Judith Clark. The same age as me, she has been locked away for thirty-five years. Yes, she made mistakes, but the only life she took was her own. Prison brought her time to think and to make a profound turnaround. Why is she still there?
Prison Officer Frankie broke my reverie and hurried me along, and, as the door clanged shut behind the cast, I hoped we had done Julius Caesar justice, but I also hoped that we had left the audience with a sense of the talent we waste when we sideline swathes of society or lock them out of sight.
* At the time of writing we are about to remount the play with a different musical grouping.
HENRY IV
‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’
As King Henry IV
Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse, 2014
This was the second of what became the Donmar all-female Shakespeare trilogy. We performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014 and at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2015.
A Power of English
Supposing Brutus had not died, had won the war and had had a son. Suppose that son grew up to be a wastrel, uninterested in the price his father had paid to achieve power, and whose lifestyle made a nonsense of everything his father believed.
This is more or less the scenario with King Henry and his son Prince Hal.
I was now preparing a second female prison Shakespeare play, and so my usual desire to look for differences between the character I last played and the one I am about to play had to be set aside in the interests of developing the thematic links that enriched the prison plays. After all, in one way I was playing the same character, Hannah. She was my stepping stone to understanding both these men who had done damage and lived with remorse.
Elizabethan England was repairing itself after years of religious and tribal war, and Queen Elizabeth was striving to be the banner under which all factions could be united.
The same is true of King Henry, and one way to unite a nation is to create a common enemy. From the very opening of the play he sets out his aim. Civil war must end:
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood;
and
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy;
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d
For our advantage on the bitter cross.
(In fact I spoke a slightly streamlined version, taking the liberty of changing Shakespeare’s rather confusing syntax so we were off to ‘chase those pagans from the Holy Land’, iambic pentameter intact.)
The speech is a neat
piece of emotional blackmail, invoking mothers and the martyred Jesus to secure loyalty to this King who had got the crown by dubious means.
The crowd rallies to him, stirred by the concept of their common Englishness.
Of the possible other plays on director Phyllida Lloyd’s list, Henry IV lent itself best to an ensemble of players, giving decent parts to the most people. On the huge canvas of the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare seems to be asking the still relevant question: Who are we as a people? What binds us together?
In his time the country was in fact a mix of Scottish, Irish, Welsh and French, not to mention other foreigners and ‘strangers’ from continental Europe. Our twenty-first-century, all-female cast represented an even wider demographic and ethnic spread, all but two of us calling ourselves British. We demanded to be included in Shakespeare’s discussion.
Right from the start, the sight of fourteen women coming on stage was in itself extraordinary. How do you categorise fourteen women? You can’t. In a ‘normal’ play you might get three women and you might think, ‘Oh I get it; she’s the young innocent, she’s the spoilt sexpot, she’s the uptight secretary’ or whatever. I exaggerate, of course, but you get the idea. Our cast was composed of women of all ages, sizes, colours and sexualities, some of African, some of Caribbean, Chinese or Indian descent, some Irish, some Scottish, one Spanish. Many were Shakespeare virgins, but each had a unique quality and skill to bring to the group. We had some wonderful musicians, some stand-up comedians, a poet and a DJ. Most of them would be playing more than one part: a man and a woman maybe, or an earl and a cutpurse.
The prison itself was the unifying factor in our play, and this gave us a particular advantage. Most productions strive for a uniformity of style, and are cast with a view to creating a coherent family or societal picture which can occasionally lead to a rather bland neutrality. The prison was our coherent stage world and could accommodate our variety.
Preparations
With Phyllida we spent hours unknotting the text, making sure we all understood it. We paraphrased speeches, delved into dictionaries, looked up references and shared all this round a table.
Barbara Houseman, our voice coach, convinced us that speaking this language was within the grasp of all of us. One of the main issues that came up was that of accent. The Irish, the Scottish, the South Londoners all felt that to drop their accent would make them feel inauthentic. It was agreed that we should each speak with our own accent, and the audience would just have to adjust to the idea that a young black woman from South London was Lord Mortimer, and a Spanish woman was Lord Northumberland.
I knew there were some in the group who looked to me as an experienced Shakespeare speaker, and I didn’t want them trying to imitate me, so I announced rather sheepishly that RP—or whatever you want to call it—was my accent and that I didn’t want to feel inauthentic either by ‘putting on’ some fake cockney. (In the event I did roughen up my accent. Henry became more mob leader than noble king.)
Britain is the only country I know where people are prejudged by their accents before being judged for their pronouncements. One of our missions was to liberate actors and audiences alike from some preconceived idea of how Shakespeare’s language should sound. The important thing was to make our speech and our intentions clear so we could deliver up the play, and that I think we achieved.
If you passionately believe in something and love it, you can either hug it to yourself or you want as many other people in the world to love it too to endorse your own belief. That is how I am about Shakespeare. That is why I cared so much that we did not alienate the young people and school-kids who came to the play. They saw people like themselves sounding like themselves, and it linked them into the play. It made them feel included.
The two parts of Henry IV are massive. Every echelon of English society is depicted, and the play roams all over the country. The complete version can last four or five hours. We needed it to run at two hours max, with no interval to break the tension.
So Phyllida judiciously cut the play, slicing out whole characters and bits of battle plot. The resulting script was mostly comprised of Part I but with cherry-picked best bits from Part II (Lady Percy’s ‘Go not to these wars’ speech, the King’s ‘Uneasy lies the head’ speech, the King’s death and the final rejection of Falstaff).
This stripping down had the effect of highlighting the triangular central relationship between Falstaff, Hal and the King. Hal is torn between the fun of Falstaff, with his petty criminal gang at The Boar’s Head, and his own ambition to be King. His first soliloquy shows that he has a game-plan to play along with the lowlife and fool the establishment into thinking he’s a lost cause; then, like the prodigal son, he will be doubly treasured when he does return to the fold. Shakespeare had a game-plan too: to show a future King Henry V who knew his people first-hand, unlike his father.
Connections
A core of the cast had also been in Julius Caesar. Clare Dunne, who had played my wife Portia, was now playing my son Prince Hal. In the New York version of Henry IV, Henry’s chief enemy Lord Worcester was played by Jenny Jules, who had played Cassius. This gave us an opportunity to enrich the subtext between our characters. Worcester, like Cassius, had been a co-conspirator against the previous ruler and was now feeling slighted and excluded by an increasingly remote King. Might not the brotherly love between Cassius and Brutus have turned sour if they had survived to run Rome?
In prison, strong emotional attachments are made and suddenly destroyed by some random relocation or because one prisoner is set free and the other remains. Again I thought of Judith Clark (see Chapter Nine on Brutus), whose whole world is confined in one building and who has formed close bonds with women who come and then go. Like Judith, Hannah would have developed defences against the pain of this.
I went to an all-girls’ boarding school, which meant being away from my family for many months on end. It is a frivolous comparison, but I do understand how, away from home, you become more emotionally dependent on the people in your immediate environment than on your family, and how you develop strategies to survive among your peers.
This was the only personal connection I had to draw on to imagine life in prison. Other members of the cast had closer links to the sort of women they were playing. One had been in prison herself. Some had had problems with addiction and mental illness, some were mothers of small children and could imagine that most awful separation forced on so many women prisoners with all the worry for those children’s future it entails—another reason why we should think several times before giving mothers custodial sentences for low-grade, drug-related crimes or prostitution.
The actors playing Falstaff and Hal had done workshops in two prisons in Yorkshire before rehearsals began and had learnt which of the play’s themes resonated most with the inmates. In the tussle over Hal’s future they saw a familiar story of a drug pusher (Falstaff) exploiting a younger person’s (Hal’s) dependency on drugs in order to keep them in the prison and under their control, while another senior role model (Henry) is fighting for that same person to get clean and take up a life outside.
Thanks to the prisoners’ input, we adopted this story as our subtext. Hannah, the mentor who had perhaps kicked a drug habit herself, wanted for Donna/Hal the future she had lost for herself. Andrea/Falstaff offered a far more attractive route at first but an ultimately destructive one. Within this context, Hal’s first speech seemed to be that of an overconfident addict fooling themselves and promising us (the audience, or a parole board?) that they have the habit under control.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
We invented a set-up before the play proper began, whereby Donna had just been given parole. Now the stakes were extremely high for Andrea and Hannah. This subtext would not and should not be made explicit to the audience, but it gave extra fuel and commitment to our performances.
Scene Changes
/> Another theme that the prison visits threw up was that of territory, the need for space in a crowded, noisy place where no one respects privacy. One room can be used by a religious group for an hour, then be turned over to a yoga group or a therapy session. The staff might grudgingly sanction these group activities outside the cell, but sessions could be broken up at any moment. This fed into the territorial wars between the factions in Henry IV.
With our choreographer Ann Yee (who is much more than a choreographer) we followed through the work we had done on Julius Caesar exploring crowd dynamics and now worked on gang dynamics. Playing men was not so much about putting on deep voices or blokeish walks; it was more about stripping away feminine gestures. We found so many of our female cultural habits (softening our voices, folding ourselves into neat shapes, ‘explaining’ things with hand movements) were about accommodating other people and making ourselves less threatening. We tried to get into a mindset of entitlement: entitlement to be seen and heard, to take up space and dominate a room. This confidence led us to a simpler, more direct body language.
Hotspur, Worcester, Northumberland and his gang were dubbed by us the ‘gym bunnies’. It suited their dedication and preparedness for war compared with Hal’s dissipation. They brought on gym equipment for their scenes and discussed their rebel plans while working out. The actresses themselves were extremely fit, and it was wonderful to watch schoolboys in the audience agape with wonder that women could do ten consecutive pull-ups on a bar.
A blast of music from our DJ/actor and a quick scene change: gym mats rolled up, benches moved to the side and The Boar’s Head was put together. On the principle that we could only use what was easily available in the prison, the pub furniture came from the nursery area. Little coloured plastic chairs and tables, a plastic toy ‘shop’ for the bar, plastic cups for tankards, etc. These scenes were mostly joyously funny, with Falstaff entertaining his onstage audience, grabbing a mic and serenading Hal with a blast of ‘Gimme money… that’s what I want’, dressed in the faux-fur coat and blonde wig they had stolen from me (yes me, alias ‘a pilgrim’ or American tourist in what had become a carjack scene in place of the ambush at Gadshill). I was also allowed to put on a beanie and join in the pub fun, witnessing at close hand (and in slight pain) Falstaff’s imitation of the King.
Brutus and Other Heroines Page 17