“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 discussion are 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 engaged professionally with virtually every one of the Bard’s plays, when she authored“Women of Will” a scholarly work of analysis and 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 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 is touched on in Dromgoole’s play. But the change swe tracked the most were in the improvement in the bartender’s performances (The actress portraying her, Loudon, was clearly in control..) And the insights about the Bard had to share the spotlight with attention to the lives and dramas of the two modern-day characters. I would have preferred exposition in-between the lines from Shakespeare. This is the approach that Patrick Page took in his one-man show All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain
This was also more or less the approach that Tina Packer herself took 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, who was the very same Nigel Gore who now is 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
