Women Playing Hamlet on the Spanish Stage
University of Alicante
Studies of female Shakespearean performance are practically non-existent in Spain, despite the fact women have been part of Spanish theatre since medieval times. Their presence on the public stage has remained a problematic and complex issue for different reasons. The controversy about the morality of comedies in Spain during the last decades of the sixteenth century had an immediate and adverse impact on women acting professionally, yet actresses nevertheless soon conquered the Spanish stage: women were first allowed to perform in plays in 1587, but they had to wait until 4 October 1772 to play Shakespeare. The first Spanish woman in a Shakespearean role was Catalina Tordesillas, who performed Gertrude in a Hamlet staged at the Corral del Príncipe Theatre in Madrid.
Since that time, a particular challenge for Spanish actresses – perhaps unexpectedly – has been the playing not of Gertrude but of Hamlet. The Hamlets of Gloria Torres, Margarita Xirgu, Nuria Espert, and Blanca Portillo have made valuable contributions to the construction and transformation of modern theatre in Spain from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present. The iconoclasm and alleged femininity of Hamlet – Hamlet himself sees his inaction and verbosity as womanish, of course (2.2.517–21) – have fascinated Spanish actresses at different times. They have played Hamlet because they sought to exploit ‘what was seen as a feminine ability to convey the interiority of the character and to do justice to Hamlet’s romantic sensitivity’.1 Delacroix had emphasized the same gender ambiguity in his studies of 1835, in which his model for Hamlet was Marguerite Pierret, and Zuloaga depicted Blanca Barrymore dressed as the Prince while posing in front of the Segovia Alcázar in 1924. In this essay I will offer accounts of four actresses who have played Hamlet on the Spanish stage – Sarah Bernhardt, Margarita Xirgu, Nuria Espert, and Blanca Portillo – for the benefit of scholars and theatre practitioners unfamiliar with the history of Shakespeare in Spain, showing how they introduced new ways for acting and producing a female Spanish Hamlet at different times and under particular conditions.
Sarah Bernhardt: ‘Masters, you are all welcome’
Sarah Bernhardt was the first female Hamlet to appear on the Spanish stage. Like that of Hamlet, the life of the French actress (born Rosine Bernard, 1844–1923) remains a mystery. It is perhaps the mystique surrounding her that ensured her success and the continuous interest in her life and work. During her lifetime Hamlet was the most frequently staged play in France. She had previously taken part in a production of King Lear as a young actress and had also been Ophelia at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in 1886, but her female Hamlet was undoubtedly her most acclaimed and famous role. Although Sarah Siddons is reputed to have been the first established actress to play Hamlet in 1776, Sarah Bernhardt took on the role of the Prince first in Paris, where she was also filmed in a silent movie as Hamlet during the scene of the duel, and then in London, New York and Madrid, playing a daring and innovative Hamlet and showing his androgynous side. It was not a successful performance, not least because the production ‘in fifteen scenes with musical interludes lasted almost five hours’.2
Before playing Hamlet in Madrid in 1899, Bernhardt had been Gilberta in Frou-Frou and Margarita in La dame aux camélias. These were outstanding performances; audiences bowed to the simplicity of her style. But her Hamlet raised greater expectation among the public. It was unusual at the time for a woman to undertake such a paradigmatic and complex male role, yet there was a unanimously positive response to her acting. Spectators applauded warmly – as they had not done in her previous performances – and congratulated her on such moving and wonderful acting. It was made clear that the diva ‘[m]oved and persuaded in her characterization of Hamlet’.3 Bernhardt thus became the inspiration for a series of subsequent Spanish actresses taking on the role.
Margarita Xirgu: ‘Our state to be disjoint and out of frame’
Margarita Xirgu (1888–1969) has been most often compared with Sarah Bernhardt, as she was to repeat much of Bernhardt’s success in the theatre. She was not the first Spanish-born actress to play Hamlet on the Spanish stage, as there is evidence, though scant, that Gloria Torres, the leading actress in Salvador Martínez’s company, also played the role of Hamlet before the Spanish Civil War which effectively marked the end of an era in Spanish theatre.4 But performances never stopped completely despite adverse conditions. Probably the only production of Hamlet between 1936 and 1939 was that of Salvador Soler and Milagros Leal staged at the Eslava Theatre while soldiers were fighting some miles away.5 Xirgu was on tour in Latin America with her company at the outbreak of the Civil War. The political situation and her Republican commitment made her stay in America until her death. While she thus dominated the Spanish theatre only until 1936, her haunting presence was felt throughout the whole century. She became a symbol of Catalan culture and of the Republic in exile, promoting the staging of plays that could not be seen in Spain because of Francoist censorship.
Xirgu was not only an accomplished actress, but also a reputed director and theatre manager. She typically played the role of bold, aggressive heroines. José Alsina considered her ‘a great modern actress, different from the rest, highly individualistic, sensitive, cerebral’.6 She showed a particular ability to play with silence and to use her hands in her performances, drawing inspiration from El Greco’s and Velázquez’s paintings for her acting and productions. From the beginning, there was a subversive tone in the roles and performances she chose to stage, ranging from Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1910), which sparked a public response so violent that the theatre closed to avoid further trouble, to Galdós’s Santa Juana de Castilla (1918), written especially for her, and Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan (1924) as well as Lorca’s Yerma (1934), Bodas de sangre (1935) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1945). She enjoyed a close friendship with Lorca until his tragic shooting in August 1936; he wrote the poem ‘If I leave, I love you more/ If I stay, I love you the same’ for her. She has been considered his ‘muse’, and her inspiration and influence appear to have shaped Lorca’s theatrical art, as shown in the opera Ainadamar that was presented at the Teatro Real in Madrid on 8 July 2012 and that opened when Margarita Xirgu was stepping onto the stage for what would be her last performance of Lorca’s Mariana Pineda.
For Xirgu the actor was as important as the author, and had become a primary instance of the importance to the audience of the lead actor as she confesses to Domènec Guansé, ‘[y]ou go to the theatre not just to be familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet but to see the play performed by Zacconi, Talhma or Sarah Bernhardt’.7 Xirgu’s Shakespearean roles were few, but significant: ‘Macbeth, staged while in exile, as a study of the execution of dictatorial power, the fear of the erotic feminine and the frayed ties of the family unit; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lorca’s favourite Shakespearean work, whose intertextual traces linger in Comedia sin título; and Hamlet, a mercurial feminization of the agonized prince’.8 In 1950 she also directed and produced Romeo and Juliet, working with a translation by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo. Her interest in Hamlet started when she performed Electra, fearing that her voice would not be good enough to convey Hamlet’s philosophical tone. But considering that the productions she had seen were too conventional and not true to the spirit of the Prince, she projected a transvestite Hamlet that would be, she believed, natural and spontaneous. Jacinto Benavente, the Spanish Nobel prize winner in 1922, encouraged her to take on the role, since playing Hamlet was always an honour reserved for the best actors.
From that moment, performing Hamlet became an obsession for Xirgu. She decided to go to England to learn more about how to stage Hamlet, and in the summer of 1933 went to Stratford, accompanied by Benavente, to see performances of the play and discovered first hand that it was possible to stage Hamlet with a level of simplicity that she had not previously experienced. Her own Hamlet production took place at the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires in 1938, with Amelia de la Torre as Ophelia and a translation by Gregorio Martínez Sierra and María Lejárraga. Even her own company had issues with Xirgu’s taking on the role of Hamlet herself: the actor Pedro López Lagar suddenly left the company due to his disappointment at not being allowed to perform the role of the Prince. Xirgu’s Hamlet dramatized an angry rivalry with his dead father, which was played as overtly Oedipal; sexual ambiguity was also a salient feature of the Hamlet/Ophelia encounters and of the Gertrude/Hamlet relationship. The production thus became in a way a radical reworking of Bernhardt’s Hamlet, triggering an unexpectedly positive response in young spectators.
Nuria Espert: ‘Come, give us a taste of your quality, come, a passionate speech’
Nuria Espert has done everything in the theatre. She has been actress, theatre and opera manager and director, and translator. Espert’s career first took off at the age of nineteen when she received a standing ovation at the Grec Theater in Barcelona for her role in Medea in 1954. Since then, her acting has been controversial. During Franco’s regime she performed polemical dramatists like Genet, O’Neill, Sartre, Bretch, Arrabal and Lorca. Her production of La casa de Bernarda Alba in 1985 at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in London, with Glenda Jackson as Bernarda and Joan Plowright as Poncia, was an unprecedented success, bringing her international acclaim and recognition. Her choices of role located her within a developing tradition: like Bernhardt and Xirgu, for instance, she played Salome.
For Espert, staging Shakespeare was much more than just performing a text: it was, she said, ‘as if one were doing something that existed from the beginning of the universe’.9 Her love affair with Shakespeare began when she performed Juliet in 1953; two years later she produced The Comedy of Errors and played a minor role in Julius Caesar. Eight years later – after performing Medea – she decided to play Hamlet. Despite the pressure of the circumstances – this was a very busy time in her career – it was a very rewarding experience as she could show the ‘pleasure [she] had had to bother and provoke’.10 Playing Hamlet came naturally to her and made her more mature as an actress.
Hamlet was produced by Armando Moreno, her husband, with translation by Nicolás González Ruiz. It had its premiere at the open air Teatre Grec in Barcelona in 1960. Sigfrido Burmann’s scenery used the old moat and walls of Montjuich to give the impression of a huge castle: the set included battlements, platforms, and a throne room. Espert’s choice to play Hamlet when she was just twenty-four was controversial, even scandalous.11 Spectators seem to have been shocked by her performance, for which she kept her hair long so as ‘to highlight the homosexual dimension of Hamlet’s relationships, and more precisely, an inability to come to terms with his own sexuality’,12 and they reacted vocally, as Espert started to say ‘Less than kin’, the audience began booing, and at the end of the first half there was both bawling and applause. The provocative nature of her performance, her costume choices, and the deliberately anachronistic nature of the production, merging different historical periods, seem to have split the audience between acclamation and opposition. Perhaps the failure of her Hamlet was due to imitation as she tried to reproduce Hamlet roles of past productions, like those of Bernhardt and Olivier.
Later she was expected to produce Macbeth, with Luis Buñuel as director, but he finally declined the offer due to bad health. She also played the roles of Prospero and Ariel in her own production of The Tempest on 23 May 1983 at the Romea Theatre in Barcelona with the Catalan translation by Josep Maria de Sagarra and directed by Jorge Lavelli. Playing Prospero and Ariel was a challenge for her, as she had to look for new ways of being both at the same time. The problem was finally solved by making Ariel a reflected image in a mirror. In 2010, she starred in a one-actress show as she played all the parts in Miguel del Arco’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. She was able to show the villainy, doubt, ferocity, and desperation of Tarquin as well as the innocence, unbearable pain and ultimate strength of Lucrece. The production was certainly the culmination of her career as one of the best Spanish actresses of all time.
Blanca Portillo: To be a man or/and a woman – that is the question
Like Xirgu and Espert, Blanca Portillo has been an actress, director and theatre manager. She has also taken part in two Pedro Almodóvar films, Volver (2006), as Agustina, and Los abrazos rotos (2009), as Judit García. Hamlet was neither her first Shakespeare play as she had been Hermione in The Winter’s Tale in 1992, nor her first male role, as she had been the inquisitor Brother Emilio Bocanegra in the film Alatriste (2006) and had played Segismund in Helena Pimenta’s adaptation of Calderón’s La vida es sueño (2012). But Tomaz Pandur’s Hamlet was a paradigmatic production, where Blanca Portillo became the centre of the dramatic action.
The performance, which lasted for four hours, had its premiere on 12 February 2009 at El Matadero Theatre in Madrid. The theatrical space, designed by Numen, was full of puddles. The location was Denmark, and the court of Elsinore was an island about to submerge in a sea of mirrors, with catwalks and huge curtains hanging from above that moved like waves among the islands. There was an astonishing atmosphere of suspicion, such as when Hamlet encountered the Ghost (Asier Etxeandia) in a bar. He was there by Hamlet’s side to listen and guide him while the other characters hid behind curtains to spy. Curtains replaced walls in Elsinore. Lively action and violence were omnipresent from the beginning, such as when Portillo appeared hitting a boxing bag with all her fury. Hamlet was no longer a melancholic character but an athlete trying to take his revenge on those who had brought mourning and disaster to Elsinore. Hamlet was living in constant turmoil, as he was forced to choose between passion and reason, between violence and melancholy, between the feminine and the masculine. Here, Hamlet was a woman who had been educated as a man. But what the production made clear was that Hamlet was beyond gender determinacy, as shown in the famous monologue ‘To be or not to be’, delivered by Portillo in complete nakedness, ending in a beautiful image of Narcissus contemplating his reflection in the water. Hamlet’s sexual ambiguity mirrors the times, when we see how gender roles are so unstable.
In this way the presence of a modern Hamlet on the Spanish stage has been largely due to the contribution of Spanish actresses daring to challenge such a paradigmatic male role by looking for alternative ways of making a different Hamlet alive for Spanish spectators. They sought to exploit his ambiguity so as to present a radical reading of his complex and troubled interiority that became a source of creativity and inspiration in their own performances. Spanish female Hamlets have opened up new forms of acting and producing Hamlet, showing possibilities for theatrical experimentation ahead of their times. Women performing Hamlet on the Spanish stage have also reflected the temper of the times and offered lively voices of dissent. Xirgu and Espert functioned as emblematic political opposition during Franco’s regime. They emphasized Hamlet’s aggressive and provocative part beyond the standard traditional stereotype of the philosophical Prince, and they suggested that women are as well equipped as men to convey the emotional depth of the tragic hero and to bring out – in ways that male actors have not done – Hamlet’s enormous capacity for love beyond gender determinacy, which is constantly baffled and frustrated in the play. Spanish actresses performing Hamlet have proved that solitude, despair, melancholy, ethical doubts about revenge, and a sense of betrayed love are qualities that transcend gender barriers. Instead of impersonating maleness, they have shown how Hamlet’s thwarted love is nothing but a desperate desire to communicate, as seen in Portillo’s production. Their performances have facilitated the discovery of meaningful aspects of Hamlet’s ‘mysterious’ character that were unknown to Spanish audiences. As Xirgu’s, Espert’s, and Portillo’s female Hamlets become history, we look forward to seeing more such performances in years to come.
Notes
1Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Hamlet (Plymouth, 1996), p. 44.
2Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet. Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction (Cambridge, 2007), p. 101.
3El Imparcial, 6 November 1899.
4Rafael Portillo and Mercedes Salvador, ‘Spanish Productions of Hamlet in the Twentieth Century’, in A. Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars (eds), Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Newark, DE, 2003), p. 188.
5César Oliva, El teatro desde 1936 (Madrid: Alhambra, 1989), p. 24.
6José Alsina in Mundo Gráfico 1914. Cited in Antonina Rodrigo, Margarita Xirgu y su teatro (Barcelona 1974), p. 95.
7Domènec Guansé, ‘Toda una vida’, in Cuadernos El Público 36:46.
8María Delgado, ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres. Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (Manchester, 2003), p. 61.
9José Manuel González, ‘Entrevista a Nuria Espert’, Shakespeare en España: Crítica, traducciones y representaciones (Zaragoza, 1993), p. 416.
10González, p. 414.
11Nuria Espert and Marcos Ordoñez, De aire y fuego. Memorias (Madrid, 2002), p. 66.
12Keith Gregor, Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre. 1772 to the Present (London, 2010), p. 96.