Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  We have come full circle to that all too familiar political tactic of using war abroad to distract people from their grievances at home. It is advice that Henry V takes to heart.

  Old Henry dies at peace with himself and God. If there had been doubts about his own right to rule, at least his son is a legitimate heir and the Plantagenet dynasty is secure.

  As I lay in a nightshirt on a narrow prison hospital bed I was stripped of my manly accoutrements, and the scene sometimes felt like a mother/daughter scene as much as a father/son one. It also felt like Hannah saying goodbye to Donna, secure in the knowledge that she was going out into the world and would make a life for herself.

  Andrea/Falstaff will not let go so happily. Donna/Hal next appears in the final scene at the top of a ladder repeating the first few lines of Henry’s opening speech (a little liberty Phyllida took for emphasis). The crowd cheers and church bells ring. The Cheapside gang, with football rattles in celebratory mood, are ranged behind a police cordon. Fully confident that his own sweet King Hal will endow him with special favours for evermore, Falstaff calls out to him. Hal orders an officer to have him silenced and then delivers his devastating rejection:

  I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers.

  By this time I had re-entered the stage as Hannah and joined the ranks of policemen. I felt a bit like Henry’s ghost witnessing the triumph of my son as well as Hannah proudly watching her protégée playing her star role.

  During Hal’s speech, Andrea’s Falstaff began to unravel. The untrained prison actor was unable to separate pretence from reality. The rejection was too real. She started to behave unpredictably. We all watched closely, ready to pounce if necessary, and then Andrea ran at the base of the ladder shouting desperately to Donna not to leave her. The prison guards rushed on and barked at us to lie on the floor. Andrea was grabbed and manacled and dragged screaming offstage. The rest of us silently obeyed the order to get up and stand in line. I tried to calm Donna down and make sure she didn’t blow her parole by breaking out in some way, and we shuffled off. An ignominious end to our hard-fought-for play…

  …But Not the End for Us

  The two all-female Shakespeare plays that Phyllida and the Donmar had produced and which we had taken into schools, prisons and toured to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, had started a buzz, and people were asking about a third. It was becoming known as a trilogy even before we had decided what play to do next.

  After much thought and discussion we decided on The Tempest. This seemed a great throughline for Hannah/me. If Brutus was about getting power, and Henry was about holding on to power, Prospero would be about letting go of power.

  The Tempest is Shakespeare’s most experimental play. It is his and Prospero’s swansong. It is a play about creativity itself. It is about imagination and control, about projection, about parenthood, possessiveness and forgiveness—so many things.

  For over thirty years I have grown up through and alongside Shakespeare’s characters. I have learnt things from them and put back what I have learnt into the playing of them. Prospero lets go of his anger, releases his prisoners Caliban and Ariel, sends his daughter out into the future and forgives his former enemies. He hands power over to the next generation. I am not quite ready to drown my book or break my staff, but I have a lot to learn about this next phase of life. I must prepare.

  Epilogue

  Dear Will (if I may),

  You told us that (my emphasis)

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players:

  but then you went on…

  And one man in his time plays many parts,

  His acts being seven ages.

  Apart from the puking infant’s nurse and the mistress’s eyebrow, we women don’t get a look-in. In most of your plays you seem to run out of women’s ages once we have got our man. Up to that point you give us such wise and witty things to say and, particularly if we are wearing breeches, you even let us drive the plot, but in the final scene you have us knuckle down to marriage. Then what? Is that where the fun stops?

  I am now what you would consider a very old woman, and I have felt somewhat starved of your material for the last ten to fifteen years. We seem only to be allowed into your stories as the daughters, mothers, wives or widows of the Main Man. Are you just not interested in our lives? I so want to be included in your wise humanistic embrace.

  You said that the purpose of a play was ‘to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’, but your own mirror doesn’t reflect many women. That’s half the population to a large extent obscured. I do appreciate that you were a jobbing playwright with a living to earn and that, in your day, women weren’t allowed on the stage, and I also understand that women (pace your Queen) were not allowed at the centre of public life, so why would female characters feature at the centre of the drama that holds the mirror up to that public life? So you do have an excuse, but because you were such a genius, we are still doing your plays four hundred years after your death, and, because your words are still the highest form of expression of our human condition, we still swallow your plots and your social attitudes even though they don’t fit us any more.

  Dear William, because you are so famous and wonderful, you have cast a long shadow over the theatrical tradition, and despite the fact that the world has changed enormously since your day, the stories we tell about ourselves still tend to follow your template, with male protagonists whose thoughts and actions matter—and females who only matter in as much as they relate to those men.

  I feel churlish for saying this, but many of us feel excluded, and I would love you to come back and do some rewrites.

  Nowadays we are challenging all preconceptions about gender, both in terms of personal identification and public roles, so I hope you don’t mind but I have been playing men recently. I am only following your own example. It seems as legitimate for women to play men as it was for boys to play women.

  My function in the story is no longer constrained by my gender, and I am freed up to play out the general political and moral dilemmas that concern us all.

  You have to understand that as Brutus I get to say things like:

  There is a tide in the affairs of men,

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries,

  while my wife Portia has speeches like:

  Am I yourself

  But, as it were, in sort or limitation,

  To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,

  And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs

  Of your good pleasure? If it be no more

  Portia is Brutus’s harlot, not his wife,

  which is perfectly brilliant, of course, but can you see that the speech itself is about limitation and that Portia defines her ‘self’ (as opposed to herself) wholly in relation to her husband or her father?

  The women in your plays often have a moral clarity that comes from their very exclusion. Being outside the violence, they can comment on it. They can foresee the consequences but are helpless to prevent them from happening. You put their case so beautifully and eloquently, but once they have had their say (usually in one scene) you remove us from the play, and we have to spend the rest of the evening in our dressing room.

  As Brutus I felt so privileged to play a character whose main concerns were freedom, power, morality and mortality. You may be shocked to see women playing men in battle and murdering their leader—and it was somehow saddening for us that we could ape their behaviour so convincingly—but it served to sharpen the question: Is there another way? I wonder if your amazing imagination and understanding of humanity could come up with a new and better path for us.

  In many parts of the world the attitude to women has not changed since your day, but we are all trying. We women talk amongst ourselves about politics and philosophy, and many now take an active
part on the world stage. We have several women leaders running important countries. Where I live, people from all continents, races, cultures and religions move amongst one another, intermarry and exchange ideas—admittedly not always peaceably but more successfully than the newsmongers or cynical politicians would have us believe.

  There is now a thing called the Bechdel test devised by a woman in America which requires that a script fulfils three criteria:

  1.There should be at least two women in it (you tick that box)

  2.Who talk to one another… (you tick that one too, but pretty seldom)

  3.(and here’s the catch)… about something besides a man.

  Off the top of my head I cannot think of one example of that in your work. With Olivia and Viola the subject is Orsino. Emilia tells Desdemona all about men. With the Countess of Rousillon and Helena, it’s Bertram. With Rosalind and Celia, it’s Orlando. When Hero and her women get together in an all-female enclave you can only imagine them talking about wedding dresses. Ah! I can think of one: Princess Katherine and Alice in Henry V have an English lesson, although you could say the reason for learning is to get a man.

  I am being hard on you, particularly as so many writers now do no better. I just wonder what you would write for us now.

  You see, imitating men can’t be the only answer either on the stage or the world stage.

  Dear Will, when I speak your words I feel I am having a private conversation with a friend today who is whispering eternal truths in my ear. Four hundred years after your death we are still acting out your stories all over the world in every conceivable situation and in every conceivable language. As you foretold in Sonnet 18, your words will resonate ‘so long as men can breathe or eyes can see’. Being the most famous Englishman that ever lived you prove the pen to be mightier than the sword, and you give dignity to my profession. All the world is indeed a stage, and I cannot imagine a world without you. I just wish you had put more women at the centre of your world/stage. Our stories matter not because of our relation to men but because we are members of the human race. To be or not to be, that is a question for us all.

  Your ever loving,

  Harriet

  A Chronology of Shakespearean Performances

  1974

  Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra, Duke’s Playhouse, Lancaster

  1980

  Ophelia in Hamlet, Royal Court Theatre, London

  1981–3

  Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon and Barbican, London (and All’s Well at the Martin Beck Theater, Broadway, New York)

  1982–3

  Lady Percy in Henry IV, Parts I and II, Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican, London

  1982

  Olivia in Twelfth Night, and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, BBC Radio 4

  1987

  Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

  1987–9

  Viola in Twelfth Night, and Imogen in Cymbeline, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon and Barbican, London

  1997

  Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, BBC Radio 4

  1998

  Tamora in Titus Andronicus, Arkangel Shakespeare (audiobook)

  1999–2000

  Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Young Vic, London; USA and Japan tour; and Illuminations Films

  2002

  Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Theatre Royal Haymarket, London; Goneril in King Lear with Paul Scofield, Naxos AudioBooks

  2006–7

  Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Novello Theatre, London; USA tour

  2007

  Maria in Twelfth Night, Houghton Hall for Norwich Theatre Royal

  2012–13

  Brutus in Julius Caesar, Donmar Warehouse, London; St Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York City (revived at Donmar King’s Cross, London, in 2016)

  2014–15

  Henry IV in Henry IV, Donmar Warehouse, London; St Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York City (revived at Donmar King’s Cross, London, in 2016)

  2016–17

  Prospero in The Tempest, Donmar King’s Cross, London; St Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York City

  HARRIET WALTER

  Besides the Shakespearean characters listed in this book, Harriet Walter has played many other great classical stage roles, including the Duchess of Malfi (RSC), Hedda Gabler (Chichester and tour), Nina in Thomas Kilroy’s Irish version of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Anna Massey and Alan Rickman (Royal Court), Masha in Three Sisters (RSC; Olivier Award), Anna Petrovna in Ivanov with Ralph Fiennes (Almeida), Hester in The Deep Blue Sea (Theatre Royal Bath and tour), and Elizabeth I in Schiller’s Mary Stuart (Donmar Warehouse, West End, and Broadway; Evening Standard Award and Tony Award nomination). She has also performed in several contemporary classics including Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (Royal Court), Harold Pinter’s Old Times (West End), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (National), and as Linda in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman with Antony Sher (RSC, Stratford and West End).

  Harriet has created roles in new plays including Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and Yasmina Reza’s Life x 3 (National), Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (Royal Court), Stephen Lowe’s adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Joint Stock), Moira Buffini’s Dinner (National and West End), Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes, Stephen Poliakoff’s Sweet Panic, Tamsin Oglesby’s US and Them (Hampstead), and Clara Brennan’s Boa opposite her husband, Guy Paul (Trafalgar Studios).

  Her films include The Sense of an Ending, Mindhorn, Denial, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Suite Française, Man Up, The Wedding Video,Young Victoria, Babel, Villa des Roses (British Independent Film Award nomination), Sense and Sensibility and Louis Malle’s Milou en Mai. Her television work ranges from The Imitation Game by Ian McEwan and The Cherry Orchard (both directed by Richard Eyre), The Price (Channel 4 and RTÉ), Harriet Vane in the BBC’s Lord Peter Wimsey series and The Men’s Room, via guest appearances in Inspector Morse, Waking the Dead, Spooks, Poirot, Midsomer Murders and New Tricks, to more recent appearances as D.I. Natalie Chandler in Law and Order: UK, Little Dorrit, Downton Abbey, Black Sails, Call the Midwife and as Clementine Churchill in the Netflix series The Crown.

  Her other books are Other People’s Shoes (Nick Hern Books), Macbeth (Faber and Faber’s ‘Actors on Shakespeare’ series) and Facing It: Reflections on Images of Older Women (Facing It Publications).

  Harriet is an Honorary Associate Artist of the RSC, an Honorary D.Litt at Birmingham University, and was awarded a CBE in 2000 and a Damehood in 2011.

  A Nick Hern Book

  Brutus and Other Heroines first published in Great Britain in 2016 by Nick Hern Books Limited, The Glasshouse, 49a Goldhawk Road, London W12 8QP

  This ebook first published in 2016

  Copyright © 2016 Harriet Walter

  Harriet Walter has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  Designed and typeset by Nick Hern Books, London

  Front cover image: © John Spinks

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84842 293 3 (print edition)

  ISBN 978 1 78001 816 4 (ebook edition)

  CAUTION This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  rriet Walter, Brutus and Other Heroines