This was the second of what became the Donmar all-female Shakespeare trilogy. We performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014 and at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2015.
A Power of English
Supposing Brutus had not died, had won the war and had had a son. Suppose that son grew up to be a wastrel, uninterested in the price his father had paid to achieve power, and whose lifestyle made a nonsense of everything his father believed.
This is more or less the scenario with King Henry and his son Prince Hal.
I was now preparing a second female prison Shakespeare play, and so my usual desire to look for differences between the character I last played and the one I am about to play had to be set aside in the interests of developing the thematic links that enriched the prison plays. After all, in one way I was playing the same character, Hannah. She was my stepping stone to understanding both these men who had done damage and lived with remorse.
Elizabethan England was repairing itself after years of religious and tribal war, and Queen Elizabeth was striving to be the banner under which all factions could be united.
The same is true of King Henry, and one way to unite a nation is to create a common enemy. From the very opening of the play he sets out his aim. Civil war must end:
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood;
and
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy;
Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb
To chase these pagans in those holy fields
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet
Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d
For our advantage on the bitter cross.
(In fact I spoke a slightly streamlined version, taking the liberty of changing Shakespeare’s rather confusing syntax so we were off to ‘chase those pagans from the Holy Land’, iambic pentameter intact.)
The speech is a neat piece of emotional blackmail, invoking mothers and the martyred Jesus to secure loyalty to this King who had got the crown by dubious means.
The crowd rallies to him, stirred by the concept of their common Englishness.
Of the possible other plays on director Phyllida Lloyd’s list, Henry IV lent itself best to an ensemble of players, giving decent parts to the most people. On the huge canvas of the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare seems to be asking the still relevant question: Who are we as a people? What binds us together?
In his time the country was in fact a mix of Scottish, Irish, Welsh and French, not to mention other foreigners and ‘strangers’ from continental Europe. Our twenty-first-century, all-female cast represented an even wider demographic and ethnic spread, all but two of us calling ourselves British. We demanded to be included in Shakespeare’s discussion.
Right from the start, the sight of fourteen women coming on stage was in itself extraordinary. How do you categorise fourteen women? You can’t. In a ‘normal’ play you might get three women and you might think, ‘Oh I get it; she’s the young innocent, she’s the spoilt sexpot, she’s the uptight secretary’ or whatever. I exaggerate, of course, but you get the idea. Our cast was composed of women of all ages, sizes, colours and sexualities, some of African, some of Caribbean, Chinese or Indian descent, some Irish, some Scottish, one Spanish. Many were Shakespeare virgins, but each had a unique quality and skill to bring to the group. We had some wonderful musicians, some stand-up comedians, a poet and a DJ. Most of them would be playing more than one part: a man and a woman maybe, or an earl and a cutpurse.
The prison itself was the unifying factor in our play, and this gave us a particular advantage. Most productions strive for a uniformity of style, and are cast with a view to creating a coherent family or societal picture which can occasionally lead to a rather bland neutrality. The prison was our coherent stage world and could accommodate our variety.
Preparations
With Phyllida we spent hours unknotting the text, making sure we all understood it. We paraphrased speeches, delved into dictionaries, looked up references and shared all this round a table.
Barbara Houseman, our voice coach, convinced us that speaking this language was within the grasp of all of us. One of the main issues that came up was that of accent. The Irish, the Scottish, the South Londoners all felt that to drop their accent would make them feel inauthentic. It was agreed that we should each speak with our own accent, and the audience would just have to adjust to the idea that a young black woman from South London was Lord Mortimer, and a Spanish woman was Lord Northumberland.
I knew there were some in the group who looked to me as an experienced Shakespeare speaker, and I didn’t want them trying to imitate me, so I announced rather sheepishly that RP—or whatever you want to call it—was my accent and that I didn’t want to feel inauthentic either by ‘putting on’ some fake cockney. (In the event I did roughen up my accent. Henry became more mob leader than noble king.)
Britain is the only country I know where people are prejudged by their accents before being judged for their pronouncements. One of our missions was to liberate actors and audiences alike from some preconceived idea of how Shakespeare’s language should sound. The important thing was to make our speech and our intentions clear so we could deliver up the play, and that I think we achieved.
If you passionately believe in something and love it, you can either hug it to yourself or you want as many other people in the world to love it too to endorse your own belief. That is how I am about Shakespeare. That is why I cared so much that we did not alienate the young people and school-kids who came to the play. They saw people like themselves sounding like themselves, and it linked them into the play. It made them feel included.
The two parts of Henry IV are massive. Every echelon of English society is depicted, and the play roams all over the country. The complete version can last four or five hours. We needed it to run at two hours max, with no interval to break the tension.
So Phyllida judiciously cut the play, slicing out whole characters and bits of battle plot. The resulting script was mostly comprised of Part I but with cherry-picked best bits from Part II (Lady Percy’s ‘Go not to these wars’ speech, the King’s ‘Uneasy lies the head’ speech, the King’s death and the final rejection of Falstaff).
This stripping down had the effect of highlighting the triangular central relationship between Falstaff, Hal and the King. Hal is torn between the fun of Falstaff, with his petty criminal gang at The Boar’s Head, and his own ambition to be King. His first soliloquy shows that he has a game-plan to play along with the lowlife and fool the establishment into thinking he’s a lost cause; then, like the prodigal son, he will be doubly treasured when he does return to the fold. Shakespeare had a game-plan too: to show a future King Henry V who knew his people first-hand, unlike his father.
Connections
A core of the cast had also been in Julius Caesar. Clare Dunne, who had played my wife Portia, was now playing my son Prince Hal. In the New York version of Henry IV, Henry’s chief enemy Lord Worcester was played by Jenny Jules, who had played Cassius. This gave us an opportunity to enrich the subtext between our characters. Worcester, like Cassius, had been a co-conspirator against the previous ruler and was now feeling slighted and excluded by an increasingly remote King. Might not the brotherly love between Cassius and Brutus have turned sour if they had survived to run Rome?
In prison, strong emotional attachments are made and suddenly destroyed by some random relocation or because one prisoner is set free and the other remains. Again I thought of Judith Clark (see Chapter Nine on Brutus), whose whole world is confined in one building and who has formed close bonds with women who come and then go. Like Judith, Hannah would have developed defences against the pain of this.
I went to an all-girls’ boarding school, which meant being away from my family for many months on end. It is a frivolous comparison, but I do understand how, away from home, you become more emotionally dependent on the people in your immediate environment than on your family, and how you develop strategies to survive among your peers.
This was the only personal connection I had to draw on to imagine life in prison. Other members of the cast had closer links to the sort of women they were playing. One had been in prison herself. Some had had problems with addiction and mental illness, some were mothers of small children and could imagine that most awful separation forced on so many women prisoners with all the worry for those children’s future it entails—another reason why we should think several times before giving mothers custodial sentences for low-grade, drug-related crimes or prostitution.
The actors playing Falstaff and Hal had done workshops in two prisons in Yorkshire before rehearsals began and had learnt which of the play’s themes resonated most with the inmates. In the tussle over Hal’s future they saw a familiar story of a drug pusher (Falstaff) exploiting a younger person’s (Hal’s) dependency on drugs in order to keep them in the prison and under their control, while another senior role model (Henry) is fighting for that same person to get clean and take up a life outside.
Thanks to the prisoners’ input, we adopted this story as our subtext. Hannah, the mentor who had perhaps kicked a drug habit herself, wanted for Donna/Hal the future she had lost for herself. Andrea/Falstaff offered a far more attractive route at first but an ultimately destructive one. Within this context, Hal’s first speech seemed to be that of an overconfident addict fooling themselves and promising us (the audience, or a parole board?) that they have the habit under control.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
We invented a set-up before the play proper began, whereby Donna had just been given parole. Now the stakes were extremely high for Andrea and Hannah. This subtext would not and should not be made explicit to the audience, but it gave extra fuel and commitment to our performances.
Scene Changes
Another theme that the prison visits threw up was that of territory, the need for space in a crowded, noisy place where no one respects privacy. One room can be used by a religious group for an hour, then be turned over to a yoga group or a therapy session. The staff might grudgingly sanction these group activities outside the cell, but sessions could be broken up at any moment. This fed into the territorial wars between the factions in Henry IV.
With our choreographer Ann Yee (who is much more than a choreographer) we followed through the work we had done on Julius Caesar exploring crowd dynamics and now worked on gang dynamics. Playing men was not so much about putting on deep voices or blokeish walks; it was more about stripping away feminine gestures. We found so many of our female cultural habits (softening our voices, folding ourselves into neat shapes, ‘explaining’ things with hand movements) were about accommodating other people and making ourselves less threatening. We tried to get into a mindset of entitlement: entitlement to be seen and heard, to take up space and dominate a room. This confidence led us to a simpler, more direct body language.
Hotspur, Worcester, Northumberland and his gang were dubbed by us the ‘gym bunnies’. It suited their dedication and preparedness for war compared with Hal’s dissipation. They brought on gym equipment for their scenes and discussed their rebel plans while working out. The actresses themselves were extremely fit, and it was wonderful to watch schoolboys in the audience agape with wonder that women could do ten consecutive pull-ups on a bar.
A blast of music from our DJ/actor and a quick scene change: gym mats rolled up, benches moved to the side and The Boar’s Head was put together. On the principle that we could only use what was easily available in the prison, the pub furniture came from the nursery area. Little coloured plastic chairs and tables, a plastic toy ‘shop’ for the bar, plastic cups for tankards, etc. These scenes were mostly joyously funny, with Falstaff entertaining his onstage audience, grabbing a mic and serenading Hal with a blast of ‘Gimme money… that’s what I want’, dressed in the faux-fur coat and blonde wig they had stolen from me (yes me, alias ‘a pilgrim’ or American tourist in what had become a carjack scene in place of the ambush at Gadshill). I was also allowed to put on a beanie and join in the pub fun, witnessing at close hand (and in slight pain) Falstaff’s imitation of the King.
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
dig my grave thyself,
And bid the merry 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.
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.