Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  HARRIET WALTER

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  1. Ophelia

  A Case Study

  2. Helena

  Heroine or Harpy?

  3. Portia, Viola (& Imogen)

  A Year of Playing Boys

  4. Imogen

  Peeling Back the Layers

  5. Lady Macbeth

  A Portrait of a Marriage

  6. Beatrice

  A Woman with a Past

  7. Two Loves

  Or, The Eternal Triangle

  8. Cleopatra

  The Consummate Actress

  9. Brutus

  The Honorary Man

  10. Henry IV

  ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’

  Epilogue

  A Letter to Will

  A Chronology of Shakespearean Performances

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  Introduction

  A part we have played is like a person we once met, grew to know, became intimately enmeshed with and finally moved away from. Some of these characters remain friends, others are like ex-lovers with whom we no longer have anything in common. All of them bring something out in us that will never go back in the box.

  In this book I write about the major Shakespeare characters I have played. This sometimes involved revisiting pieces I had written much earlier in my life and my career, and doing this was a bit like looking back through old diaries with a mixture of affection and embarrassment. In reworking these pieces, I have deliberately preserved references that place our productions in a particular time (e.g. in Chapter Four on Imogen, I mention Glasnost; in Chapter Three on Portia, I refer to President Ronald Reagan), and I have stuck to the original thoughts I was wanting to convey, even if that meant exposing the naivety or idealism of my younger self.

  Apart from the chapters on Ophelia, Imogen and Lady Macbeth, which are abridged or edited versions of pieces that had been published elsewhere, all the material has been freshly written this year. Younger characters have been recollected in tranquillity or written up from early essays or rehearsal notes. I had never written anything about Beatrice or Cleopatra before, and enjoyed reawakening those parts played fourteen and ten years ago respectively.

  The last chapters of the book deal with still-current roles: the male protagonists in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy for the Donmar Warehouse. At the time of writing, we are reviving the two plays we have already performed (Julius Caesar and Henry IV) and are rehearsing the third (The Tempest). Here, the writing task is different. Obviously there is no difficulty in recalling details, but instead I have to step back, freeze the still flowing ideas about a part, and attempt to crystallise something that will have changed by the time you read this.

  Many people suppose that we actors just have very vivid imaginations that carry us away until we believe we are someone else, and that all we then have to do is to remember the lines and not bump into the furniture. What is less understood is how we build a character through interpreting the text, and how we bring that character to life in collaboration with the director and the rest of the cast.

  Much of acting work is about choices: the choices of interpretation and emphasis in rehearsing a role, and the minute-to-minute choices we make in response to an audience in performance. My choices will never be the same as someone else’s, and if there were a right way and a wrong way to play a part we would all try to copy some ‘definitive’ performance, and life would be very dull. So this book is not intended as a blueprint to be followed to the letter, but I hope that it shows the sort of questions an actor needs to ask him- or herself in preparing a role, and how Shakespeare’s text can be excavated for clues to support several interpretations. The important thing is that the character should be coherent with the play and production that surrounds it.

  Two things happened to encourage me to write about playing Shakespeare. One was that, during my first seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1980s, there existed a strong connection between the company and the Shakespeare Institute, a department of Birmingham University, based in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Institute produced the collections called Players of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press), in which RSC actors were invited to contribute a chapter on the particular character they were playing that season (see Chapter Four on Imogen). Here was an academic institution taking actors’ insights seriously. They introduced the now totally accepted idea that, since Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed and watched rather than studied, the players could make a valid contribution to the analysis of his works.

  Secondly, around that same time, myself and four other leading actresses were interviewed by Professor Carol Rutter of Warwick University for her book Clamorous Voices (The Women’s Press, 1988). She was interested in gathering the reactions and opinions of a generation of actresses who were bringing a new feminist experience to the famous female roles. I had taken my feminism for granted, not really knowing how these roles had been interpreted before, and Carol’s book encouraged me to believe there was something fresh I could bring to the discussion.

  This is not an academic book, nor is it a practical handbook. It is more personal than both of those. Perhaps it is a kind of autobiography in that it journeys from my thoughts as a thirty-year-old who understood the vulnerability of Ophelia, gaining confidence and complexity through my thirties and forties with Helena, Viola, Portia and Lady Macbeth, to a more relaxed, womanly Beatrice and Cleopatra in my fifties, and onward to finding new territory in the male roles in my sixties. As with any autobiography, I can impose a retrospective shape on a life that was experienced in a more blinkered present tense. Perhaps this is my attempt to lay down a record of an art form that is only true in the moment of performance.

  August 2016

  Acknowledgements

  I want to thank the many directors who have given me such heady opportunities, passed on their insights and helped build and develop my courage as a performer of Shakespeare over so many years; in particular John Barton, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Greg Doran and Phyllida Lloyd.

  A huge thank-you to Faith Evans, whom I first met as editor of Clamorous Voices, and who then became my literary agent, encouraging me to write my first book, Other People’s Shoes. Thanks also to Matt Applewhite and everyone at Nick Hern Books, who have benignly nagged me while I procrastinated in writing this book, and especially to Nick Hern himself, who reissued Other People’s Shoes, and saved me from many writing pitfalls while editing this book.

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  Photo credits: Ophelia in Hamlet © John Haynes/Lebrecht Music & Arts; Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well by Reg Wilson, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth by Jonathan Dockar-Drysdale, and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra by Pascal Molliere, all © RSC; Portia in The Merchant of Venice by John Peters; Imogen in Cymbeline and Viola in Twelfth Night, both © Ivan Kyncl/ArenaPAL; Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing © Donald Cooper/Photostage; Brutus in Julius Caesar and King Henry IV in Henry IV, both © Helen Maybanks. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

  OPHELIA

  A Case Study

  As Ophelia with Jonathan Pryce (Hamlet)

  Hamlet, Royal Court Theatre, London, 1980

  This piece is taken from my book Other People’s Shoes, which I wrote in 1998. It came in a chapter in which I was specifically demonstrating the psychological approach to a character. I wrote it up from jotted notes I ha
d made while rehearsing several years earlier in 1980. It was my first professional Shakespeare role but not the first I wrote about. This was a thrilling, groundbreaking production to be a part of, and Ophelia proved to be a stepping stone towards my understanding of how to approach character through language.

  Sometimes, when one role is offered hot on the heels of another, your imagination remains so steeped in the world of the last role that it spills over into the next. When Richard Eyre asked me to play Ophelia to Jonathan Pryce’s Hamlet at the Royal Court, he had just finished directing me in a film for television called The Imitation Game by Ian McEwan. This was the story of a young woman, Cathy Raine, who joined the army in the Second World War and was posted to the code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley. She was bright and well educated but soon realised that her talents were to be buried in menial tasks cleaning up after the Cambridge boffins. Her frustration and need to get near the centre of things resulted in her being imprisoned for the duration of the war as a suspected spy.

  The piece was a brilliant exposé of patriarchal double standards, and before starting work on it Richard Eyre suggested I read Virginia Woolf ’s essay Three Guineas. This was one of her last works before she committed suicide in 1941. It is an agonisingly relentless analysis of the patriarchal imperative to war and the way in which women collude with it. Woolf looked straight into the light alone and was burned up by it. At the end of The Imitation Game Cathy Raine has seen a similar light but lacks Woolf ’s tools to articulate it. Locked up, suicidal or tipped into madness, that was the fate of women who, had they lived now, would have been buoyed up by a tumultuous sisterly chorus.

  With these things still churning in my mind, I started to tackle Ophelia. Fresh from The Imitation Game himself, Richard was also working on some kind of continuum of themes: patriarchal power, secrecy, corrupted love, the destruction of a woman. His version of Elsinore carried echoes of the corridors of Whitehall. Geoffrey Chater’s patrician Polonius would have been perfectly at home in MI5, and to reinforce the connection, he had played the witheringly steely colonel who had locked me up in The Imitation Game. Ophelia was to be no flibberty damsel, but an intelligent girl locked in her mind by the oppressive rules of the establishment.

  The Royal Court’s brief was to put on new plays or, if it did do any classics, to rework or reinterpret them as if they were new plays. Richard had wanted to emphasise the modern political play in Hamlet, and to this end he chose to eschew the supernatural element. His most controversial decision was to cut the part of Hamlet’s father’s ghost. The reason for this was that unlike Shakespeare’s audience, we no longer believed in Heaven and Hell as actual places, nor in tormented spirits trapped between the two. Instead of Hamlet’s father’s ghost being an outward manifestation visible and audible to whoever was on watch that night, he was to be understood as a projection of Hamlet’s fevered mind. Hamlet was possessed by his father’s spirit. When his father ‘visited’ him, Jonathan Pryce’s body writhed and contorted as if some alien creature had invaded him and was kicking at his sides. He belched the ghost’s words from the pit of his stomach and gasped for air as his own voice recovered enough to answer.

  Richard’s ‘modern play’ approach helped ease me into what was my first classical role. Before I came across John Barton and Cicely Berry at the RSC, who both taught me so much about creating character through language, I could think of no other way to approach Ophelia than through her psychology. We had a mere three-and-a-half weeks to rehearse, which meant that if I were lucky I would get about two shots at each scene before the run-throughs and technical rehearsals began. I was timid and apologetic about taking up rehearsal time, so inevitably I did a lot of my work at home.

  The most famous thing about Ophelia is that she goes mad. Richard had given me one major tip as to what he wanted, by telling me what he didn’t want. He did not want ‘mad acting’. I knew what he meant. For Ophelia, her mad scene is an ungoverned artless release; for the actress playing her it can be a chance to show off her repertoire of lolling tongues and rolling eyes, in a fey and affecting aria which is anything but artless. That is the paradox of acting mad. The actor is self-conscious in every sense, while the mad person has lost their hold on self.

  Generalised mad acting, being unhinged from any centre, leaves the actor floundering in their own embarrassment. The remedy for me was to find a method in Ophelia’s madness, so that I could root her actions in her motivations (however insane and disordered), just as I would with any other character I was playing. Before playing her I had shared with many others the impression that Ophelia was a bit of a colourless part—that is, until she goes mad. I needed to find a unifying scheme that would contain both the ‘interesting’ mad Ophelia and the ‘boring’ sane Ophelia.

  Suppose Ophelia is happily ‘normal’ until her lover rejects her and murders her father. Is that necessarily a cue to go mad? After all, Juliet suffered something of the kind when Romeo killed Tybalt, and although the idea tormented her she did not flip. I started to see that the seeds of Ophelia’s madness had been sown long before the play started, by the workings of a cold, repressive environment on an already susceptible mind. I preferred this theory to the sudden-madness-through-grief idea which, together with broken hearts and walking spirits, seemed to belong in the theatre of Henry Irving or a Victorian poem.

  In the little time available to me, I scoured the libraries for modern clinical accounts of madness and found much to latch on to in R.D. Laing’s Sanity, Madness and the Family and The Divided Self. I am not concerned here with the pros and cons of Laing’s approach; what interested me were his case histories of young schizophrenic women, and the mechanisms by which their families inadvertently contributed to their disorder. A latent schizophrenic tendency need not necessarily develop into madness, but certain triggers might set it off.

  Here I found some uncanny Elsinore echoes. They always say Shakespeare can be made to fit any argument, but in this case I suppose it was just further proof that he knew all there was to know about human nature. If he had been directing me, he would no doubt have been impatient with my approach. ‘Just say the lines, love,’ he might have said. ‘I promise it will work.’ It was my own imagination that needed to do more. So with Shakespeare, Laing and Virginia Woolf to help me, I built my little theory.

  From some of my jottings at the time

  Family: father Polonius, brother Laertes. Mother is dead and no one mentions her. No known female companion. Only female role model known to be present in her life is Gertrude, who has too many of her own problems to be much help.

  Speculation

  Little experience of love. Duty rather than deep love binds her to her father, and although her brother had been an affectionate companion in childhood, they have been brought up increasingly apart from one another. Her education, such as it is, has been mostly at her father’s hands and of a deliberately unworldly nature, while her brother’s education was a serious preparation for a public role in life.

  Clues in the text

  All in the name of loving protection, Laertes undermines Ophelia’s trust in Hamlet and ‘the trifling of his favour’. ‘You must fear,’ he tells her. ‘Fear it, Ophelia, fear it my dear sister.’ And in case she still hasn’t got it, ‘Be wary.’ Layer upon layer he adds, talking of ‘the danger of desire’ and her ‘too credent ear’. On departing, Laertes charges her to ‘Remember well what I have said to you,’ and Ophelia replies, ‘’Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key of it.’ Yet the very next minute, when Polonius pounces in with, ‘What is’t Ophelia he hath said to you?’, she replies, ‘So please you, something touching the lord Hamlet,’ and within seconds she is spilling it all out. So much for locked-up secrets.

  To keep a secret is a means of preserving the self. It is proof to the keeper that they own a private self that cannot be reached. One of Laing’s cases ‘found it difficult to keep anything to herself because she talked too much and besides she though
t people could read her thoughts’.

  Further quotes from R.D. Laing’s patients

  One woman spoke of her father, who kept worrying ‘that I should be kidnapped or some dreadful thing happen to me. It’s my own fault. He’s got no confidence in me at all. I am always going to be led away by some crafty cunning bad man. He has put that into my mind, he has got that impregnated into my brain in some way.’

  ‘I am not supposed to have an opinion because my opinion is bound to be incorrect you know… Perhaps my opinion isn’t what you call reliable, perhaps in every way I am not reliable. I feel that I have to accept that I am not reliable.’

  I know there is a danger in too schematic an approach to acting, particularly Shakespeare, and that I could easily have been carried off course by the sheer fun of theory-building, so I made sure that I took from Laing only what I needed, and relied on Shakespeare and events in the rehearsal room for the rest. The exercise was not about diagnosing Ophelia as a schizophrenic, but about gaining insight into the text. I started to hear the other characters’ words from Ophelia’s point of view, as traps and ambushes, and as means of controlling her mind.

  ‘To thine own self be true,’ Polonius advises Laertes as he sees him off on his travels, while in the same scene he tells Ophelia, ‘You do not understand yourself.’ Young men should learn to fend for themselves in life’s battles, gaining confidence through experience, whereas women must be kept in fear and ignorance of their very natures.

  Ophelia submits to another battering from Polonius: ‘Do not believe his vows… Affection? Pooh! You speak like a green girl.’ He asks her, ‘Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?’, and to Ophelia’s simple reply, ‘I do not know, my lord, what I should think,’ he answers, ‘Marry, I shall teach you: think yourself a baby.’ He does such a good job on her that by the end of the scene Ophelia has promised to reject Hamlet, send back all his letters and never speak to him again.