Maxine Peake opens as Hamlet this week at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. The star of BBC1’s The Village and Silk calls the part “more well rounded” than Shakespeare’s female characters, and says her Hamlet will be “in touch with her masculine side”. I wonder which side she favoured when she was Ophelia 12 years ago.
Peake joins a chorus of actresses and directors who argue that women should sometimes play Shakespeare’s male parts because his female characters are both fewer in number and generally less important. True, though one could argue that Shakespeare was writing about periods of history when women had smaller roles in society. And, of course, it was men who took the female parts in his plays when they were first staged.
Next month, the Donmar opens its second all-female Shakespeare, with Harriet Walter as Henry IV, following the women-only Julius Caesar at the London venue in 2012-13. Both were directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Fiona Shaw played Richard II at the National, and when Mark Rylance ran the Globe, he staged an all-female Richard III and Taming of the Shrew, although, for balance, there was also a blokes-only Richard II.
So, is this Shakespearean gender-bending valid or a stunt, partly because his plays are so often performed that there is constant pressure to reinvent the wheel? What about all-female Ibsens or Chekhovs? I wonder, too, if eventually we will become gender-blind about Shakespeare’s plays, in the way, thankfully, we are now broadly colour-blind with actors.
■ Opening soon at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in Stratford, is the Jacobean play The Witch of Edmonton, which will star Eileen Atkins. It’s a perfect part for her — not that, in real life, she looks anything like a witch. (Amazingly, she is now 80.) No, it’s appropriate, as Atkins told me, because she went to school in Edmonton, north London — the same grammar school, Latymer’s, as Bruce Forsyth, though he is a tad older. It’s a shame the RSC could not have found a cross-dressing cameo for Brucie in it, now he is free from Strictly Come Dancing.
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■ It’s not cross-dressing as such, but the usually macho Dominic West (think The Wire and The Hour) is cast against expectation as one of a group of London gays supporting the South Wales miners during the 1984 strike in Matthew Warchus’s Pride. It’s a true story, though with some fictional embellishment; West’s character is inspired by Jonathan Grimshaw, who tested positive for HIV in 1984 and is still alive today. Also cast against type is Bill Nighy, as the very Welsh and shy secretary of a pit-village welfare club. And all the better for it: I’m tired of him playing suave Englishmen with mannered tics. If Pride, which opens on Friday, achieves nothing else, putting Nighy and West in unexpected roles will be a welcome treat.