“Women of Will” owes its inspiration and even its title to Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of the acclaimed Shakespeare & Company theater company of Lenox, Massachusetts, who died earlier this year at the age of 87, having spent much of her life studying Shakespeare’s female characters.
In this new play written by Siofra Dromgoole, a bartender (Ella Loudon) is preparing for an audition to get into drama school, when one of her customers, an aging actor (Nigel Gore), offers to assist her. They meet weekly in the pub, rehearsing/reciting some of the Bard’s most familiar lines written for women – from Juliet to Viola (disguised as Cesario) in “Twelfth Night” to Lady Macbeth. They also discuss and debate these characters, and Shakespeare’s attitudes towards them. If the circumstances of their conversations and the setting in a working bar feel at best unnecessary, the performances and discussions of the Bard’s scenes and soliloquies themselves are engaged and engaging — and clearly meant to pay tribute to Packer.
A British-born actress and then director (graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company) Packer had been involved professionally with virtually every one of the Bard’s plays, when she authored “Women of Will,” a scholarly work of analysis . She gave the same title to a wildly ambitious work of theater. It was Packer’s thesis that Shakespeare evolved in his attitude towards women over the course of his 25-year playwriting career, and her ten-hour play “Women of Will” was divided into five separate parts, each focused on what she identified as one of the five distinct stages in his treatment of female characters. In his first stage, for example, Packer argued, the women were either warriors or virgins; the very first female character that Shakespeare wrote for the stage was Joan of Arc, in Henry VI, Part 1. In the last stage, Packer maintained, the characters were female phoenixes or healing daughters, like Miranda in “The Tempest.”
Some of this evolution is touched on in Dromgoole’s play. But the changes that we most notice are the improvement in the bartender’s performances (the actress portraying her, Loudon, clearly in control of this transformation.) And the insights about the Bard share the spotlight with the lives and dramas of the two modern-day characters. I would have preferred straightforward exposition rather than drama in-between the lines from Shakespeare. That was the approach that Patrick Page took to great effect in his one-man show All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain
Tina Packer herself more or less took Page’s approach in the two-and-a-half hour “overview” of her “Women of Will” that I saw at The Gym at Judson in New York in 2013, which marked Packer’s New York stage acting debut. Like Page in his play, Packer stuck to insights and observations when she wasn’t performing the Bard’s lines, although she did engage (as herself) in some banter with her acting partner (as himself.) That partner, a real pro, was the very same Nigel Gore now portraying somebody other than himself in-between some of the very same Shakespearean scenes.
***Women of Will, performed as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival through August 31 at The Library Gallery in Summerhall
Hi Jonathan, thank you for coming to see the show, and for the kind words about the performances.
I wanted to offer a brief response. I think the review misses what the framing device is actually for. You call the setting and the circumstances of their conversations “at best unnecessary,” but that drama between the bar and the Shakespeare isn’t unnecessary, it’s the mechanism. Watching Ella’s character wrestle with Juliet or Lady Macbeth through her own stakes, her own audition nerves, her own relationship with Nigel’s character, is what lets an audience who doesn’t already know these plays inside and out start to understand Shakespeare, not just be told about him. Take that scaffolding away and you have exposition for people who already have the context to appreciate it, which is closer to what Tina’s own solo show or Patrick Page’s piece offered. That’s a valid form too, but it’s a different project with a different audience.
The pub setting isn’t incidental either. A pub, then and now, is a place where everyone is welcome, the intellectuals and the non-intellectuals, the Shakespeare lovers and the people who’ve never picked up a Shakespeare play in their lives, all in the same room. We think that’s very much in the spirit of what Shakespeare himself would have done.
We’ve had audiences at this run who came in knowing Shakespeare well, and audiences who’d never really read or seen him performed, and both have told us they connected with it, just in different ways.
If you came in expecting something closer to Tina’s original, more academic work, then yes, the drama is going to read as padding around material you already know how to receive. And that’s okay, we don’t need to be that show for everyone. But for an audience discovering these characters for the first time, that human story is precisely what makes the Shakespeare land.
I’m glad Ella’s and Nigel’s work came through regardless, and I hope readers come see for themselves before we close on the 31st.
I understood your intent; I accept that it is a well-meaning device to make Shakespeare more palatable to those who are largely unfamiliar with Juliet or Lady Macbeth. Perhaps there are such people who attend the Fringe festival; I don’t believe they would have felt out to sea with a clear, straightforward explanation of the context for each character.