Playing Petruchia at the RSC - an Interview with Claire Price
From IMDB: RSC - The Taming of the Shrew (2019). Claire Price center left, in green.
Claire Price played Petruchia in the 2019 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Justin Audibert. This production flipped the genders of most of the play’s characters, including the lead characters Petruchio and Katherine. In this interview, Claire Price talks about the character of Petruchio/Petruchia, the character’s relationship with Katherine, the process of creating the matriarchal world of Padua, how Shakespeare was a genius of his time, and what it means for actresses to take on traditionally male roles.
This interview was originally conducted by Andrew Smith in 2020 for Smith's podcast ‘To Be Or Not To Be: Lockdown Shakespeare.’ This podcast, featuring interviews with some of the world's leading Shakespearean actors, directors, and scholars, began recording during lockdown to raise awareness for theatres and for actors in a time of pandemic and theatre closures. To learn more about the podcast and to find ways to support theatres, visit https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/to-be-or-not-to-be-lockdown-shakespeare/id1529922392, https://tobeornottobe.podbean.com/, and http://www.fleetingyearfilms.com/podcast.html#.
This transcript was edited and slightly abridged for content and clarity by Maria McNair, to whom any corrections should be directed: maria@lyceum.fm.
Creating a gender-flipped Taming of the Shrew
How did it all start? Well, as you know, by the time an actor comes into the audition process, all these decisions have been pretty much made. And I think what happened was that, you know, the RSC is working through its canon under Greg [Doran], and they've got to sort of the last few plays, and in that mix was Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and As You Like It, and then #MeToo happened. And I think they formed a season that was intended as some kind of response or comment on #MeToo. So they put together Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, which of course is — I mean, it's a cliche to call it a #MeToo play, but it is – and As You Like It, which is sort of the alternative to #MeToo, in a way.
Anyway, and so they put those three together and Justin Audibert, director of Taming of the Shrew, got given that and thought … “I'm not interested in doing a traditional version of it. I don't know what purpose that would serve. I don't know what it says, particularly to young people” — this is a big thing for the RSC now, building that audience from the ground up, building the next generation, and he came up with the idea of flipping the world. So instead of it being a patriarchy, it would be a matriarchy. So the power-holders would be women, the disempowered would be men. And what would that do? So when I went to meet him for it, I asked him lots of questions … by the way, I love Taming of the Shrew, right? It's one of my favorite plays, in any version. I have no problem with it traditionally, I haven't — I have no issue with it. Because, as I remind people when they get very upset, it's a play. It's a throwing around of ideas. It's not marriage guidance counseling. It's not how to live in the world. It's a play."
Now, there's all sorts of other, more complicated things that, of course, it arouses, I know. But I still think it's a play about a very specific pair of people. Anyway, I'll come on to that. … So when I met him for it, I said, “So, how do you address things like Petruchio (… the names were still, you know, male-gendered, as we went on in rehearsals, we changed them …) but how do you address the fact that he can, at any point, overwhelm Kate physically? And that's always there for women, that's always there, that at any point, the argument’s over, because it can just turn to violence, and they may or may not be able to fight their way out of it, and they probably won't.” I said, “What do we do about that?” And he said, “I don't know. I haven't worked that through … I don't have an answer to that.” So when I was offered the job, and I thought, “Okay, I'm going in. Let's go in and let's see how this could possibly, possibly work.”
And I have to say, it was the most extraordinary iconoclastic rehearsal process of my life. Everyday we threw something else out. And it was brilliantly exciting and maddening, and at times I thought, “This is just not going to work at all.” And at other times, I thought, “No, this does all fit together.” Like, quite early on in rehearsals, we addressed virginity. So virginity, which of course has been a major preoccupation of Western Christian culture for thousands of years, well, hundreds of years — female virginity was ditched in a conversation in a clapping rehearsal room, it was just thrown out as a thing that women have to be concerned about. Because if women have the power-holders, if women are the decision-makers, they can have sex with whoever they want. The consequences of that are they get pregnant, obviously, in Elizabethan time, that wouldn't have been great contraception. And so I joked that Petruchia — at this point, we changed the names — Petruchia had a breed of children at home, all from all sorts of affairs, and that wouldn't have been a thing. It just wouldn't have been a thing.
So you married because you needed a partner to help you run your business, which is your family home, and because these people lived in tough worlds and marriage is how you build allegiances and you make things work well, is through having a team. But I desperately wanted, when you go back to Petruchia’s house, like the Von Trapps, you know, seven children to come on and Petruchia just hand them to Kate as if, “Okay, you do the childcare.” I mean, this was a big issue for me at the time because I was rehearsing with a two-year-old … but, you know, that kind of idea grew in rehearsals. So female virginity is not a thing. So that goes. So female issues around sex, or expressing themselves through sex, that goes. So, you know, all these things just got chucked out.
And then we talked about this thing of the physical threat, and we went with a world where men don't leave the house — well, men have a certain class, which Katherine is, and now I'm talking in terms of the play we came up with, so Katherine here is a man. We didn't change that name. That name stayed because it's, you know, it's iconic. Yeah. Katherine in Taming of the Shrew. So we didn't go to “Kit” or any of that stuff, we stayed with Kate and Katherine. So if you think of Katherine's life, he's been hot-housed for a marriage at some point by his ambitious, wealthy mother. So he's never allowed out of the house. They've tried to teach him to play instruments. Katherine's not very interested. Bianca — Bianco, in our version, his younger brother — is very interested in those things, plays the game.
So they've never left the house. They wouldn't know how to handle themselves if they went out into the street. Whereas Petruchia has served in the army, because that's one of the first things Petruchio/Petruchia says about themselves when they come in, they talk about not being afraid of this difficult person they've heard about called Katherine, because, “I've heard lions roar, I've stood in the middle of battles” … So we had to go with that being true. So we had to accept that when Petruchia says, “I've fought in battles and I’m not afraid of that stuff,” that's true. So there were certain things that we questioned about the text and we changed, and certain things that we stuck with as truth. And the majority of the text actually stayed the same. We changed “madame” and “master” and “boy” and “woman” … but the actual — what the characters said about themselves as people, we didn't change.
So I took that as truth, that Petruchia is an old soldier, and I had all sorts of backstories in my head about war wounds that hurt when the weather's rainy and those kinds of things that men always complain about, don't they? You know, they’ve got a bit of shrapnel still from when they were in Korea, those kind of … [but] as a consequence, Petruchia can handle herself in fights. So she's not scared. Katherine hits Petruchio/Petruchia at one point, and I — we never, we sort of got this, but I wanted it to be funny for Petruchia to be hit in the face. Because I thought, “How shocking to see a woman be hit in the face by a man, and the woman finds it hilarious, because the man is so pathetic. And it's like, yeah, that hurt, but now I'm just gonna get you in a headlock, and I can break your neck, because I'm a soldier and you're not. So yeah, you can hit me, but I can knock you off balance in a way that you can't get back from.” So that's what we worked on. And we talked about that. We did a great improvisation in rehearsals, and normally I hate this kind of stuff, but my God, I loved it.
We created a world of Padua, where the women were the ones with the money and the power, who made the decisions and could go into the bars and the pubs and eat, and the men had to be careful. You know, the attractive young men walking down the street had to be careful, because a woman could look at them and they couldn't look back. That was a really interesting thing we talked about, was who can look where. You know, we talked about this, that on the Tube … as women, we have to be careful. We don't engage our eyes with men, otherwise we might get talked to, or we might get felt, or something might happen on the Tube. But in this world, in Padua, we can look where we want, and the men have to be careful how they return the gaze.
Honestly, that rehearsal process was amazing. It was one of the greatest of my life because we lived a lot of the thought experiments of feminism. We actually lived them out. We got to work them out through this, as you say, 400-year-old play, by flipping it, but not really changing it. And that's what I think was kind of interesting about it, ultimately, was that it was an incredibly — this is the wrong word … it was quite a traditional production in the end, because once you've got over the initial shock, everything still held true. There was a power-holder called Petruchia and a disempowered man called Katherine who didn't like his lot. They didn't fit into a world they didn't really like, anyway. So they came up with a deal that worked for them — which ultimately is what, I think, that play’s about, two odd-bods who don't like the world around them as it stands, and they strike a bargain. And they, both of them, give something up for that bargain, and it's a good bargain — by the end they’re okay.
So that's why I think it's a very complicated play, and it's a play that we can't put on the shelf and leave. There are so many plays from this era, not by Shakespeare, but plays from this era that we've gone, “It doesn't say anything to us now. We could put it on. But — and it's interesting because it's interesting to know that's what people were writing about then, but really, I don't, I can't relate to any of it.” Taming of the Shrew, as offensive and difficult as we find it, we can't leave it alone. We keep getting it down on the shelf.
Now, what was interesting was a lot of people said to me afterwards, “Yeah, I enjoyed it in spite of myself,” or “I didn't mean to, but I did. But you didn't solve it.” And I kept saying, “What would it mean to solve it? What's the solution to it?” I come back to my original point, it's a play. And — how could you solve it? What would you do to, in inverted commas, ‘solve it’? The world isn't solved, the world is the problem. The world in which we all find ourselves currently is the problem, not a play. You can't solve the play and then leave the world. The world is the issue. And the fact that, you know, there are still, we still live in power structures, that's the problem. Not that the play reflects the fact that we still live in power structures.
Women’s parts in Shakespeare
I love that play, as I said, and I enjoy watching it. And I loved being in it. And that's also, as an actress coming to certain point in my life, you know, I was forty-eight last week, I'm coming to a point where I'm sailing away from that — well, I've long sailed away from being the sort of 27-year-old who all the older male characters are falling in love with. Those are the parts I played for a long time. And now I'm playing anguished mums. I played a lot of anguished mums, or anguished women who can't be mums … so Petruchia was a fantastic moment for me … I've watched it, and I thought, “What a great part for a man that is, what a great part, how complicated he is.” And yet Shakespeare never bores us with the detail. He just hints at these little things that Petruchio’s carrying in himself that he can't deal with, you know, the loss of — in the original play, the loss of the father, which, you know, in ours was the loss of a mother … and I imagined Petrucia, and we turned the mother into Antonia in our version, just being so invested in each other, just loving each other so much, because in the first through two scenes, Petruchia mentions her mother five times, and says, “She was one of the greatest women in Italy. You know, everyone knows my mother.” Is that true? Who knows, but it's true to Petruchia, and in Petruchia’s head, her mother was this awesome woman, and now it's Petruchia’s turn to be that woman.
So, you know, all this stuff that you think of as a male heritage, about status and power and, “Now I'm the head of household,” goes to being me. I got to wear those shoes and live that sort of, that itch that I imagine men carry a lot of — “Where do I fit in here, status-wise? Well, that person has more money than me, but I’m an aristocrat and they’re not an aristocrat … so I'll get their money and they get a bit of my aristocracy,” you know, all that stuff — that again, you know, Western Christian culture has been dominated by this patriarchal system. And now it flips to women, and I got to do that. And I got to do it every night. And it was an extraordinary experience …
… I was in King Lear the year before, 2018, in the West End with Ian McKellen. And — it was so interesting playing Goneril, because the men — well, Lear, not all the men, obviously — Lear is onstage telling the audience what he thinks — or not quite telling them what he thinks, because that's one of Lear’s problems, he can't quite articulate what he thinks but he tries — the whole time. And meanwhile, the women are offstage, coming up with plans and strategies to handle Lear. And every now and again, the audience checks in with where they're up to, with their strategies. But the women don’t get to explain why they change strategy, or what happened to them when they met someone else and they began a love affair. Goneril, you know, suddenly starts a love affair with Edmund, but you don't see that start. It just has happened. But Petruchia, I was onstage most of the time telling people what I thought and what I was going to do, and — because I have a theory that Shakespeare characters don't lie, unless they tell you they're lying, which is partly why I do enjoy doing Shakespeare — I've quite a mixed love-hate relationship with Shakespeare, but one of the things I like about that is that if they lie, they say, “Okay, the next time so-and-so comes on, I'm going to tell them a lie.” They draw the audience into the lie. And I think — but you know, I had that opportunity. I got to be on stage doing that as a woman, at nearly 50. You know, my mother was an actress, and my mother was always saying, “It runs out, the work runs out, it will run out. So brace yourself for that.”
And so I hope I'm catching the cusp of something for women and for everybody who's been sort of left out … and I hope now, the actors of color, the women, that those things are going to … the riches are going to be shared out, I hope, and I feel like I got my spoon in the bowl with Petruchia, I got to really kind of taste something there. And it was an absolute honor. It was a privilege. I was happy every night. It was ridiculous. I loved it so much.
Katherine’s final speech
Whenever we did Q and A's, when we did the Stratford summer school last year, the final speech came up again and again and again. And I was often asked about the final speech. So Joseph Arkley, who played Katherine, wasn't often asked about it. They came, they asked me, which I thought was really interesting. I wasn't sure if that was because they thought the woman on the stage should be able to explain the final speech, or because they thought the power-holder, as the person who’s kind of abused Katherine throughout the play, I should then explain why Katherine can give that speech.
So I suppose what's difficult about the speech is that it's an acceptance. And now, there's lots of different ways of playing that speech. And we went with it being completely on the level. So, Katherine — I mean, I'm now putting words in Joseph Arkley’s mouth, but as I understood it — Katherine had a miserable tough life with his mum, who he didn't get on with, and his brother, who he thought was manipulative and deceitful. It's a world where everybody lies, and no one's honest and upfront. And into this world comes this very eccentric, crazy woman, called Petruchia, who says to Katherine, “You and I can be honest, but there are certain rules. I ultimately make the decisions, and you abide by my rules, but within those rules, you're totally free to be yourself.”
Now there's a great speech, and we used to talk about this a lot, about how this is one of our favorite moments, when Petruchia — really, it's a horrible scene in lots of ways, Petruchia won’t let Katherine eat, she's depriving him of food, she's depriving him of sleep, and then she says, ‘We're going to go back to your parents, to your mother, and we're going to get you a nice outfit.” And everything that Katherine says he likes, Petruchia says, “I don't like it.” So by the end, Petruchia says, “Okay, we're going to go back in these dirty old clothes we're wearing, who cares what people think of us and the way we look.” And Petruchia has this really interesting speech, which I think is at the heart of the play, which is all about honor being something that's inside yourself. And it doesn't matter what the world is like outside. And it doesn't matter what other people think of you, because you have honor inside yourself. That's how you — you know, that's where you find your kind of real self-worth, is in yourself.
And Petruchia says to Katherine, “You know, and if you’re ashamed when you go home, and people think you look dirty and messy, you tell them to come and talk to me, you say, ‘My wife told me to wear this,’ and therefore frolic, meaning, so you're free at this party to do whatever you want. Because if anyone picks on you, you send them to me, because I now look out for you.” So we took that as a kind of moment of a bond. And then they go on to have lots of other arguments about the sun and the moon and all that kind of stuff that then is the eventual moment where Katherine finally agrees to see the world through Petruchia’s eyes.
So that when ultimately Katherine is asked to give that speech — and also this is a big public event, and Petruchia depends on Katherine by this point and how Katherine backs her up — so it's all complicated, isn't it? ( … I'm talking about us in our gender that we chose, the gender that we flipped to.) So, the women, the power-holders, have made a bet about whose husband is most loyal. And Petruchia wins the bet. Because the other new husbands are not loyal. They don't come when they're asked. But Katherine comes when he's asked, which I always thought was the most profound moment in the play — for someone like Petruchia to know that there's someone now she can absolutely trust totally, is massive.
Anyway, and then Petruchia asks Katherine to say, “Tell these other young husbands how they should regard their wives.” Now, this was a brilliant moment, because, of course, a man stands up in front of an audience of people and says, “Your wife is the head of your household. Your wife is the authority. You are nothing compared to your wife.” So, on one level, all the men in the audience, in this modern audience, they're going, “Oh, I don't like the sound of that.” And the women are cheering. Sometimes we had audiences like hen-dos, you know, where the women whooped at this. And I remember someone at the RSC saying, “It was like hearing the first feminist man speak.” So on one level, it was incredibly moving, because it worked on so many levels, this final speech, in our version, because he said it completely sincerely.
Then, of course, you go back to the sadness that there has to be a power structure. But given that the world of the play is power structures, and there is a power structure, Katherine has found a place within this power structure, and it's one that he is proud and prepared to hold. So that's how we understood it, given that that's how we understood the play. There are a million different ways of doing it.
And I remember when I was growing up, my father reading a review of the legendary Brian Cox-Fiona Shaw production where Fiona Shaw delivered that speech in a state of nervous breakdown. And Brian Cox was kind of like, “Yeah, this is what I've done to her. And it's great because now she behaves.” And it was hugely controversial … I remember my dad reading, because my dad was an actor too, so we talked about Shakespeare at the breakfast table, that's what we did — and I remember him reading this review and going, “Gosh, what do we think about that? You know, how does — what does that do?”
And so there are a million ways, you know, Taming of the Shrew will be done — like I say, we can't leave it on the shelf, it will be done millions of times, and there'll be people who will come along and do something else with that speech again. In our version, in the play that we made and the world that we chose, Katherine meant it. And, also given that Petruchia is … a really ferociously observant creature. You know, watches everybody all the time, and the minute she senses betrayal, she's on to it. She's like a kind of bloodhound. You know, she knows when people are not honest. And if Katherine had tried to get away with anything, or tried to be ironic, Petruchia would have said, “Okay, hold on, stop a minute,” that wouldn't have washed, Petruchia doesn't let up. And so it also has never sat right quite right with me, the versions of it where Katherine is being ironic, where Katherine is winking at the audience, going, “Well, I'm saying that for his benefit, but I'm not actually going to do any of it.” I don't buy that. Because Petruchia is too fierce for that. So this was the version that we came up with, and in that sense, the speech made total sense.
And, you know, I also always go back to Germaine Greer, at the end of The Female Eunuch, writes a really beautiful defense of that speech, and says, “You know, this is a Christian monogamous play, set in a Christian monogamous culture, and it's absolutely right and proper that there should be a head of a household who makes the decisions, and everyone below him who abides by those decisions.” And that's what Katherine is accepting and doing. So it's not ironic, it's honest, it's true. “I get it, I get my place in the world. I didn't like it. And now I get it.”
And so — and given that we were not trying to blow the play apart — we were and we weren't, we had our cake and we ate it too, with that production, in a sense, because we scrutinized it and we tore apart all the sorts of issues in it. And then we put the play back together and went, “Here is a very dodgy comedy. What do you think about that?” And that's kind of what we did. And audiences cheered and gasped, and whooped, and caught us at the stage door and said, “I love that. And I don't know why I loved it. And I hate myself but I loved it.” And, you know, it caused a lot of questions.
And also, you know, people walked out, at the start when we opened in Stratford, people walked out. On the whole, it was predominantly older men. And they went to the box office, and they said, “I want my money back. I don't want to see women behaving like that.” Great, excellent. So when you say, you know, 400 year old play, and I was — I looked at your [Smith’s] website, saw some of the stuff you've done with the Globe about working with younger people, and how do you make these plays relevant for them — well, you show them women behaving in a way you don't see women behave, and you've asked the questions that come from that. And that to me was really, really exciting, I think.
… they're both referred to as mad. They're both referred to as being sort of too much. Katherine is referred to as this monstrous loudmouth who's always abusive. No one knows what to do with him. But Petruchia is always referred to as “madcap.” They have been — Greg Doran said once, “You know, they've been put in boxes.” And that, I think, is right. They don't really fit in. And also, if you analyze them, they never lie. Petruchia and Katherine are really interesting characters. They may employ things that aren't true. They may say things that aren't true, but they do that on purpose. They're not dishonest. They are never dishonest.
Ultimately, it's really interesting, you know, Baptista, who is the father or mother, depending on which version, of Katherine and Bianco … in our version, the mother, Baptista, who thought Bianco was the son she could trust, [realizes that Bianco] is not a son she could trust, because Bianco was lying to her all the time and has married secretly, has been having a relationship secretly. Katherine was upfront all the time: “I don't want to marry any of these people. They're not good enough for me. I don't like them. I don't want to do what you say. I don't like your rules. Why do I have to follow your rules?”
And by the end, Katherine's the real one, the honest one, the one I always knew where I was with, for Baptista. That's not true of the one I thought I loved. Again, because they live in a power structure, you know, the two boys have to work out how they're going to define themselves given the power structure. Bianco lies, Katherine doesn't lie. Katherine gets hit a lot and kicked around a lot. And Bianco is adored. So, you know, as women, we were able to talk a lot about that in the rehearsal room to the men in the room and say, “As women, you have to work out how you're going to play the game when men hold the power. Are you going to be the sexy, hot one who gets everything but then may have to oblige, or are you going to be the not-sexy hot one, and then the men don't like you so much, but you may not have to — put out.” I mean, all these questions were asked and talked about.
Possible abuse in the play and possible options for women
The issues around abuse, and we were asked a lot about this in Q and As, about the sort of gaslighting element and the kind of coercive, control element of it, which I always found very hard to talk about, partly because as Petruchia, it doesn't feel that way. So it's very, very difficult when you're the actor inside it, to analyze it in that way, because … I understood totally why Petruchia needed — you know, if you live in a difficult world, which they do, they live in 1591, so we didn't change that, it’s 1591 — so you have to get the harvest in, otherwise, your household starves, right. So you can't have a member of your household who won't do what's asked of them. So if you marry somebody and bring them into your household to be part of the small business that is your household so you and your servants and your children survive the winter, you can't have someone who says, “No, no, I'm not pulling my weight. I'm just going to sit here being angry and smash stuff because I don't like any of you.” You can't have that. You have to get them to be their end of the bargain.
Katherine agrees to marry Petruchio, which is really interesting, and turns up for the wedding. And again, you see, this is an interesting thing, because when you really look at the text, what Katherine really says … on their wedding day, Petruchia doesn't show up. She's late. And Katherine’s speech is partly, “I don't even want to marry this person anyway,” but it's also, “They’re late, so I don't think they really meant it. I don't think Petruchia meant it.” So Katherine has become attached to Petruchia in some strange way already, before they've even got married: “I think Petruchia just goes around promising herself to all sorts of people. And now I'm just humiliated and heartbroken.”
Now, that's something that when you do the play traditionally, given the context of the world in which we live, is very difficult for Katherines to acknowledge, the actresses playing Katherine to acknowledge, that there's some sort of attachment has happened. I think Katherine spots a way of being free, of being herself at least, by marrying Petruchio (I'm now talking as if I was playing Katherine), that “This guy is mad, and I don't know what I feel about him particularly, but at least he's interesting, and he's a way out of this horrible house and this horrible world that I don't fit into. And given that my options are so limited, as a woman, I marry or I go into the convent, I think I'll throw my lot in with this lunatic and see where I end up.”
Interestingly, Measure for Measure, which of course was one of the other plays in our trio of plays in the season, the heroine has chosen the convent. So this is a play, I don't know, 15 years after Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's a totally different person. You can tell in the text, the language he uses, is, you know — he's really struggled a lot. He's lost a child, all sorts of things have happened. He’s spent a lot of time in London, he's got cut off from his family back in Stratford. I mean, there's all sorts of things you could try and analyze about him psychologically, we don't really know, but the heroine, the heroine in Taming of the Shrew, Katherine doesn't, you know, fight, and chooses marriage.
The heroine in Measure for Measure is a very different type of heroine. She's extremely articulate, she can win any argument, and she wants to go to the convent: “I don't want to marry anyone. I want to go to the convent. I want to be my own woman.” And I think Isabella's very spiritually ambitious. She wants to be an abbess. She wants to get to the top.
But it's interesting that, you know, Shakespeare gets it. I think that the notion of not doing these plays or not looking at these plays anymore because they're troublesome is, I think it's mistaken, because Shakespeare gets that the world is not right. That's why the plays are troublesome. And Shakespeare — I mean, ultimately, Shakespeare's a patriarch, you know, he's a kind, compassionate patriarch. And that's why he didn't write a gender-flipped version of Taming of the Shrew, because it would never have occurred to him to gender-flip. But he gets the problem.
So then 400 years later, Justin Audibert says, “Well, why don't we just totally turn the play on its head and see what happens? Because now those are the questions we're asking.” But the plays hold up, because the plays don't lack anything. The plays are asking all the right questions. It's just that they can — and also they're tough. You know, those plays are tough, and they're tougher than anything we could throw at them. Peter Brook says the word genius is misused. And he's right. But about Shakespeare, it's not. Shakespeare is a genius, and he's ahead of us all the time, in terms of what he's posing for us as questions and thoughts.
Shakespeare as a writer of female characters and a genius of his time
I used to say Rosalind was Hamlet for girls, because — now, of course, this was back in the days when I had no notion of gender-flipping. And now, of course Hamlet is for girls, if they want to do it. But — the comedies are interesting … the comedies are where people can explode out of their boundaries and have different things, you know. And he really throws everything at that play, doesn't he, he lets her dress up as a man, he lets her go into the forest, I mean, he gives her every way in which she can explore herself, Rosalind, and then, by the end, she has to sort of go back into being a woman, and it is a loss … Towards the end of As You Like It, I think Orlando says something like, “I'm tired of playing,” and Rosalind, pretending to be a boy, says, “Okay, all right, no more playing,” and knows that she's now got to reveal herself as who she really is, which is a woman. So there's a sense of kind of loss, which I think Shakespeare marks, which is that, “This has been fun, this has been fun not having breasts and running around in trousers and being in charge, has been fun. And now I have to tell my father who I really am, and now I have to tell the man I love it's really me. And I can't — I have to go back to being me.”
And I mean, the comedies are very different, because Rosalind, as you say, she gets to dominate and she gets to speak her mind, but within certain parameters. And then Shakespeare takes the parameters away, and Rosalind marries. And then, of course, he gives her the last speech, which is lovely. And yeah, she has the epilogue, and she's very charming to the audience honestly, but I think, ultimately, you know, Shakespeare is — he's of his time. He’s a genius. And he's of his time.
And I suppose, in that way, he can't help himself, you know. Because he's such a sympathetic person. I think whoever wrote those plays — and I do think it was someone called William Shakespeare who grew up in Stratford, and I don't hold with any of these conspiracy theories — but he can't help sympathizing with everybody who comes on stage. Even little messengers come on, and they have something … he writes a play where the worst character is this moneylender who's a Jew called Shylock, and he can't help himself but think what it must be like to be made to live in a gated community, to be spat at in the street. What must that be like? And then he starts writing the wonderful things for this character to say. And then of course, he goes into being the Venetians who hate Shylock because he's a Jew. And he thinks, “This is what it's like to hate Jews because they have a hold over you because they lent you money.” And, you know, he can't help himself.
And then ultimately, I suppose, with Rosalind, he puts things sort of back together again, and I don't quite know what Rosalind’s life is going to be like with Orlando because she's so fiery, isn’t she, she's so neurotic. I don't know that marriage will suit Rosalind terribly well, but … he can't help himself. He comes up with these people and walks in their shoes and gives them a voice …
… I've never played Ophelia, I auditioned for it once. And I didn't get it. Rats. Because I had lots of really interesting ideas about Ophelia … Hamlet plays with madness. But Ophelia goes mad. So in Shakespeare's plays on the whole, the men can play at madness, but the women can't play at it. The women go mad. And I remember thinking, “How interesting if there's something more self-conscious in Ophelia than actual madness, that she is having a nervous breakdown, but she also knows she's having a nervous breakdown, and she's partly playing the part of having a nervous breakdown. So she's mimicking Hamlet in some way.” And then I have seen actresses do that. But more often than not, it's played as a genuine complete collapse into sort of, you know, the picking of flowers and all that kind of stuff. Whereas it's such a cliché, madness, I thought, “How interesting if she's doing it to provoke people. And it's conscious as well as being something that she can't hold. And then she goes and kills herself because she just can't tolerate it anymore, she can't bear her life anymore.”
But yes, he gets women, [Shakespeare] really gets women. I used to think that as Petruchia, listening to Katherine speak — there's a great speech Katherine has at one point where she says to Petruchia — he says to Petruchia, but of course, this is a woman really speaking, in the original — something about, “You can take everything away from me, but I am going to speak. You can't take away my words, because if you don't let me speak, my heart will break.” And I stood there, and the first time he did it to me, I burst into tears — listening to it, I burst — because I thought, “It's so how women feel, you know, just let me speak. In arguments with men, just, no, just let me speak.” And I thought, “God, Shakespeare has had a girlfriend who, he’s in the middle of breaking up with, and she said, ‘No, no, stop coming in with all these clever arguments about why it's fine for us to break up. Let me just tell you what's in my heart.’ And because he's a writer, he's thought, ‘Oh, that’s good. I’ll put that in a play.’”And, you know, he's caught it. He listens, and he's caught it. Brilliant. He's genius.
… I was getting frustrated with the options for me. And this is what my mother was talking about, you know, when I was a child, she was talking about being an actress. And it seems to me like predominantly, Shakespeare writes for, as do most men, forgive me, when they write plays, they tend to focus on the younger women, and then much, much, much older women. So the women they don't write about are their wives at home with children. So Shakespeare's women tend to drop away at sort of in their mid to late 20s. And then they come back again in sort of really meaty roles. You come back with your Queen Margarets much later on in their lives. So there's all the wives in The Merry Wives of Windsor. They're kind of there, but that's one play. You know, the actual sort of middle period of a woman's life is not well documented in Shakespeare. There’s Goneril, there’s Regan, but again, like I say, they don't get to tell you much about what's going on for them.
So I suppose, like I said before, I hope I'm coming into this phase now where these plays can be shared out, these great parts can be shared out a little more, because the middle era for men, in the middle of their lives, is what gets really interesting for Shakespeare. That's where he really starts to express himself and explore these big ideas. And if that gets shared out more, and there's more opportunities, then I'll have less of a love-hate, I suppose — I was starting to notice more and more in Shakespeare's plays, I was standing in the background in a tight corset, playing a character who hopes she either won't get her head cut off or she won't get raped. I mean, that's predominantly what the women in these plays, this era, are worrying about most of the time is, “Will I die or get raped or some combination of the two?”
Certainly in the tragedies. In the comedies, it's different. But I started to notice that there was less and less for me to feel and do. You know, I played Hermione a few years ago in The Winter's Tale. And I loved that part. But I mean, she literally becomes a statue at one point. She literally becomes the object that the men think she is. And then of course, she thaws and she comes back, but only for a moment … from Rosalind, who, as you say, dominates and talks and thinks, and, “This is what I think and no, I don't know, I changed my mind, I think that,” to Hermione — that's quite a tough — as an actress, that's a real kind of, “Get back into your box. Go back into your box, you had your moment of speaking and now you can come out when you're 60, 65, and you can play mad Queen Margaret. But until then, I'm not really interested in you.”
So I suppose that's ultimately my love-hate problem with it. And also, I suppose, as a punter, the same plays get done again and again. But then I shouldn't really complain about that. Taming of the Shrew, apparently, with Romeo and Juliet, they are the two most performed Shakespeare plays anywhere in the world at any given time — the two that are most about love, or a version of love, however you choose to look at it, but that's really interesting, isn't it? So I have just been in one of the most the most regularly performed — but yeah … as an actress, that's where my love-hate relationship with it comes from, that he's a genius. Even Lear, you know, I would sit in the wings and listen to those scenes and think, “This is flawless. It's just flawless. He's not missing a beat of what's going on for these people, this writing,” and, you know, he is a genius, no doubt.
One last thing I'll say — we talked about this a lot in Q and A's, you know, that as actresses, particularly working in classical work, we have got very good at creating inner lives, because Shakespeare gives you tiny clues. So, you know, one great moment is Gertrude drinking the poison at the end [of Hamlet], and Claudius tries to stop her, and she says, “No, no, I'm going to do it.” Now, that's really interesting to me, because I've seen it played as completely naïve, and that's very touching, and I've seen it played as knowing, and that's very touching. But you know, the actress has to construct the inner life that leads to that decision, whatever that decision is. So when you then get given the parts where they talk about themselves all the time, which the men do, it's like, “Oh my God, all this stuff that I've been doing privately, I now get to share” — it’s really an interesting revelation, that, how much work as actresses you do, upstage of the leading man while he's telling the audience what he thinks, and that when you then get to be the person downstage telling the audience what they think, how that looks like, you know, having the lid taken off the box — it was an amazing feeling.