Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  Next up we whisked the audience to Wales for the Glendower scene. I helped clear the plastic furniture, put on a hoodie and joined one of the three gangs that stood behind Hotspur, Mortimer and Glendower. Our job was to back our leader in all things.

  The scene had barely begun when, in a wonderfully naturalistic moment, Shakespeare has Hotspur say,

  A plague upon it! I have forgot the map,

  whereupon various of us rushed out with spray cans of different colours and painted a huge outline of England and Wales on the floor. We then placed three signs, ‘England’, ‘Wales’ and ‘to Scotland’, in their appropriate spots.

  With Glendower’s grandstanding and Hotspur’s undercutting, it is one of the funniest scenes in the play. With women in the roles we could highlight the preposterousness of certain aspects of male behaviour, as we grunted approval behind our respective gang leader, arms folded over huge imagined chests, legs spread wide.

  I am sure Shakespeare was on our side. Surely he meant to send up the whole idea of carving up and dishing out bits of a country in this boys’ playground squabble…

  HOTSPUR:

  Methinks my portion, north from Burton here,

  In quantity equals not one of yours:

  See how this river comes me cranking in,

  And cuts me from the best of all my land…

  I’ll have the current in this place damm’d up…

  It shall not wind with such a deep indent.

  GLENDOWER:

  Not wind? it shall, it must; you see it doth.

  MORTIMER:

  Yea, but mark how he bears his course, and runs me up

  With like advantage on the other side;

  Gelding the opposed continent as much

  As on the other side it takes from you

  …so we considered ourselves licensed to do silly things. The scene ends in reconciliation and manly claps on backs. Then Glendower enjoins the men to say goodbye to their women:

  There will be a world of water shed

  Upon the parting of your wives and you.

  Spoken with a twinkle in his/Jackie Clune’s eye. (Women, eh?)

  The silly mood is broken by Lady Percy singing a beautiful contemporary pop song, ‘Daddy’s Gone’, in place of the Welsh Lady’s song of the original. It was a poignant contrast to the hilarity we had just been part of, a reminder of centuries of women left behind when their husbands go to war. The sudden switch of mood was Shakespeare’s idea not ours. We were hopefully aiding his intentions by having all the prison women enter the space, stripped of pretence (well, one layer of it), and curl up on the floor to sleep, or try to. Each woman seemed mentally isolated as when locked in her cell alone to face her demons.

  Insomnia

  When the song ended, I appeared on an upper level as King Henry, kept awake by anxiety for his kingship. Sleeplessness in Shakespeare’s characters is often about guilt, but he gives his ‘guilty creatures’ some of his most beautiful words as they long for sleep.

  From Macbeth:

  the innocent sleep,

  Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,

  The death of each day’s life [etc.]

  and from Henry in our play:

  O gentle sleep,

  Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

  That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down

  And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

  Phyllida airlifted this speech from Part II and placed it here, with Henry looking down with envy on his subjects, whom he supposes can have nothing to worry about. Incidentally, in a later prison workshop this scene was picked out by some of the real inmates as one they could particularly relate to. I found it remarkable that they saw past the elitist figure of a King to a fellow human being plagued by insomnia and anxiety.

  There is a loneliness at the heart of Henry. In our stripped-down cast, he appeared with only two or three loyal supporters rather than a full court, and he missed out on all the fun.

  He is getting old and worries about his legacy, which his heir seems hell-bent on wrecking. He had a brief moment of popularity with the crowd at the top of the play, but almost immediately after that he learns that rebellion has reared its head again, and the idea of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem must be postponed. All his best intentions are dragged back into war.

  Shakespeare is not concerned with the real Henry. He is a playwright not a historian, and unapologetically bends historical characters to fit the story he wants to tell. In Richard II he shows the same character, then plain Henry Bolingbroke, as the popular saviour of the country, a counterweight to the increasingly despotic Richard. Now for the purposes of his argument Richard is ‘that sweet lovely rose’ and was supplanted by ‘this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke’.

  What Shakespeare does seem interested in is the internal moral dilemma of a ruler who has been compelled to do bad things in order to survive. I have already mentioned the echo of Elizabeth I, and I wonder, if she saw the play, whether she would have taken any comfort from the speech’s seemingly empathetic last line: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

  At the end of the sleep speech, Hal tiptoes in as if creeping back from a late night at the tavern. Wakeful Henry pounces on him and harangues him. Henry is not a likeable man. To him likeability is a luxury. He may even be a little jealous of the decadent but convivial life his son leads.

  Hal’s reactions under fire range from defiant to abject. Henry tries several tactics to engage his son. The scene is very alive if you play it moment by moment, each of you reacting slightly differently to the other’s slightly different reactions every night. Of course, a lot of Hal’s reactions are unspoken, but as Henry you learn to read the signs. You can pick up hints in both men’s speeches that they desperately want one another’s love, but at this point there is not enough trust between them to do more than hint.

  Henry can’t confide his doubts about how he got the crown, and Hal can’t explain why he needs the love of Falstaff to fill the gap left by his father’s coldness. Honesty will come later, when it is almost too late.

  There are always key lines that an actor grabs hold of as pointing to the deepest core of a character. One such for me was Henry’s line to Hal:

  The hope and expectation of thy time

  Is ruin’d.

  It contained something of Brutus’s energy when he cries out to Cassius:

  Remember March, the ides of March remember:

  Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?

  Both lines carry the question, ‘What was it all for? Was it worth it if you are going to let the whole thing slide?’

  Hal has heard it all before and behaves like a hangdog adolescent. Where Henry can get him is on the subject of Hotspur. By holding Hotspur up as the perfect, brave young man committed to war and victory, and by means of a sarcastic twist (‘Thou art like enough, to fight against me under Percy’s pay’), he goads Hal into action.

  Hal vows that:

  I shall make this northern youth exchange

  His glorious deeds for my indignities.

  And I will call him to so strict account,

  That he shall render every glory up…

  Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

  At last Hal is on side, even if not quite for the reasons Henry had hoped. It will do for now.

  A Lame Attempt at Peace

  From Henry’s point of view, he has been forced into this war just when he hoped to heal the nation and move on. His old sins and Worcester’s old wounds won’t lie down quietly. Perhaps he senses he is not long for this world and needs to control the narrative of his times. Why can’t bygones be bygones?

  He comes together with his enemies to parley. Like many guilty people, Henry blames others. In his book Worcester has a choice to pull back from a war that will bring a ‘broachéd mischief to the unborn times’.

  This was a tricky line. Firstly, what is ‘broachéd’? Secondly, ‘mischief’
doesn’t quite cover the idea that the fallout from war blights several generations to come. It was frustrating to have such an important point wrapped in an opaque package. I changed ‘broachéd’ to ‘curséd’, which helped a bit, but I was stuck with ‘mischief’.

  The scene does not go Henry’s way. His rather sanctimonious overture is quickly subverted as Worcester nabs the moral high ground, listing his family’s grievances. Henry quietly fumes, and in our production I lost control and threw the furniture at my enemy in a display of macho indignation.

  Hal steps in to calm things down, offering a way out of the impasse. He offers to fight Hotspur in single combat and save thousands of lives. Henry can’t accept that. He thinks Hal doesn’t stand a chance against the super-fit Hotspur, and besides, for all Henry’s arguments against war, he knows he has to fight and needs to win.

  Moving Like a Man

  I have to confess to having rather enjoyed strutting and striding and puffing out my chest. I suspect that many men enjoy it too. I have watched those sorts of men all my life, never thinking I would need those observations for an acting job. Since I was very young I have been able to watch someone and imagine myself inside them, moving their limbs, striking their poses and by some strange mechanism, getting an inkling as to their feelings and thoughts. I’m sure everyone has something of this ability, but it is particularly developed in actors. It is hard to explain how it’s done because it is not a systematised process; it is just part of our equipment. It means that we can ‘channel’ someone from real life who matches the character we are playing.

  As Henry, I channelled two or three different men (not the men themselves but their acting personae). For obvious reasons I had never had cause to channel Ray Winstone before, but I did now. Another model was Tom Bell; another was the guy from the film A Prophet, Niels Arestrup. If you know any of these actors, you will understand I was not striving to be a lookalike, but somehow, by keeping them in my mind’s eye, I could borrow some useful quality of theirs: the stillness that accompanies physical power, the prowling pace of a man keeping his violence in check, the spread-limbed arrogance of those men on the tube who occupy two seats and leave you squished up in the corner.

  It is a bit of a cliché to say it, but in many ways we are all acting. We have all been trained up in our physicality and raised within gender conventions that restrict us. The experiment of being a woman playing a man produced in me a hybrid that surprised me and released me from myself. That is what a lot of actors love best about the whole game—the escape from the limits of the package we are wrapped in. I suspect many non-actors are looking for the same.

  The Woman Underneath

  While the audience very quickly accepted that we women were the men we were pretending to be, there were times when it was effective to remind the audience of the female layer underneath.

  The premise behind our prison convention was that the inmates had an input as to how to present certain scenes in a way that meant something to them. ‘They’ made choices such as giving Hotspur and Lady Percy a baby (a doll) which started bawling as soon as Hotspur picked it up. The woman playing Hotspur handed over this stinking alien thing to another woman playing Lady Percy. Then there was the moment when Hotspur, while ordering his little wifey to stay out of important things like battles, gets his jacket zip stuck and needs her help to fix it. These moments caused much laughter of recognition from the women in the audience.

  In Act III, Scene 3, the inmates chose to bring out the misogyny in Falstaff and his gang as they round on the Hostess with what have usually been played as jokey Shakespearean insults. In an improvisation during rehearsals, the group came up with some really degrading contemporary sexist taunts and slung them at the Hostess. The inmate playing the part was in for prostitution. The boundary became unclear to this prison character with the result that she became upset and stopped the scene. We kept it in the play. The audience was never sure whether the Donmar actor had ‘broken out’, or whether she was acting the part of an inmate/prostitute who was breaking out.

  After the parley between Henry and Worcester, the testosterone builds towards war, and here Falstaff delivers his famous anti-heroic ‘catechism’ on the subject of honour:

  What is honour?… Who hath it? He that died o’

  Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No… ’Tis insensible then?

  Yea to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No…

  [etc.]

  It is a deliberately subversive speech and sits well in a woman’s voice. How many women have suffered and are still suffering because of a male notion of honour?

  These were just some of the added layers of meaning that the women managed to excavate to make this giant play something to do with them.

  We Go into Battle

  We wanted no girly fighting or embarrassing sword-play. Our fight director Kate Waters was a keen boxer and, together with our movement wizard Ann Yee, created a brilliant choreographed battle of boxers. During the fighting when the Douglas threatens to kill the King, Hal steps in to save his father’s life. We cut Shakespeare’s dialogue and instead marked the moment with looks that seemed to say, ‘I didn’t know you cared’ and ‘See, I am not as useless as you thought’. Then the battle rushed to its climax: the showdown between Hal and Hotspur.

  Both Jade Anouka (Hotspur) and Clare Dunne (Hal) trained enough to be convincing boxers. An abstract soundtrack punctuated their punches, and we lined the ring cheering and baying for blood. Again the sight of women doing this set the violence in greater relief than in most ‘normal’ male productions where the fighting is taken for granted.

  Hotspur dies, the war is won, and Henry dishes out his punishments. Worcester and Vernon must die. Hal interrupts and pleads for the right to take care of the Douglas, and Henry agrees. His son has earned it. When Hal chooses to release the Douglas, because

  His valour shown upon our crests to-day

  Hath taught us how to cherish such high deeds

  Even in the bosom of our adversaries,

  Henry again sees Hal in a new light. Perhaps this young man has lessons for us all? Perhaps he can be King and a greater King than I have been? It is the beginning of a process of letting go.

  Legacy

  Henry is dying, and Hal comes to visit him in inappropriately boisterous mood. The rebels have been vanquished! The King is asleep, so his attendants shush Prince Hal and invite him to leave the room. Hal refuses and stays alone watching over the King.

  The audience eavesdrops on Hal’s musings:

  Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,

  Being so troublesome a bedfellow?

  O polish’d perturbation! golden care!

  That keep’st the ports of slumber open wide

  To many a watchful night!

  So he does understand. He has thought about kingship. Then he stops. He sees a feather near his father’s nostrils which does not move.

  My gracious lord! my father!

  This sleep is sound indeed.

  The insomniac King seems to have reached his final rest.

  The audience sees Hal’s genuine grief at what he supposes is his father’s death. They see the solemnity with which he now puts on the crown. But Henry has missed all this. He wakes and misinterprets what he sees:

  Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair

  That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours

  Before thy hour be ripe?

  Hal leaps out of his skin, as do some of the audience. Without giving Hal any chance to explain, Henry launches a devastating attack, unleashing all the fury and pain that has built up over years with as much force as his weak frame can muster. It is a whirlwind of a speech and technically tricky because you need maximum lung power while still convincing as a dying man. Henry is all the more desperate because he had begun to believe in his son and now feels he was fooled.

  He bitterly charges Hal to

  dig my grave thyself,

  And bid the merr
y bells ring to thine ear

  That thou art crowned, not that I am dead…

  Give him that gave thee life unto the worms.

  Pluck down my officers, break my decrees.

  That last line again made me think of Obama as he comes to the end of his second term. In his shoes I would be desperate to hand on the baton to someone who would complete the work I had set out to do, and fulfil any promises I had made but not delivered. What agony to imagine all of that falling away and handing the future to your enemy.

  When Henry collapses for long enough, Hal defends himself wonderfully and honestly, and, though he doesn’t say so in as many words, Henry gets the message that finally his son loves him.

  In the nick of time the two men are reconciled. Henry gasps out his last, albeit oblique, confession,

  God knows, my son,

  By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways

  I met this crown,

  his blessing,

  And now my death

  Changes the mood; for what in me was purchased,

  Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort,

  and some advice:

  Yet, though thou stand’st more sure than I could do,

  Thou art not firm enough… Therefore, my Harry,

  Be it thy course to busy giddy minds

  With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,

  May waste the memory of the former days.