Book Club Meets: Women speaking their minds, with Dame Harriet Walter

0:00Ophelia fooled ya. Hey, welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. Tobey or not tobey had been my question. Today, she speaks what Shakespeare's women might have said by Dame Harriet Walter. To chance cheek death and leave my body. To hibernate a while, then reappear a reinvented, unconnected person. Not sickly to her with thinking or with fear. Observing Hamlet carefully, I aped him Like him, escaped by faking antic ways If he was mad north-west, I'd be his tailwind Distract them with distraction, seeming crazed From there it was a breeze to stage my drowning I sought the help of one who digs the graves Beside poor Yorick's corpse, there is an orphan, not buried yet I'll see how much she weighs.

0:58Then later, as an unobserved observer, I watched them trail my understudy's beer. It worked a treat. So totally enshrouded, she fooled them, and they drenched her with their tears. Did Hamlet or my brother howl the loudest? I own I had to eavesdrop on their griefs. The sad truth is, whichever way you sound it, the person they were mourning wasn't me. One last obedient act I did for Hamlet. He bade me to a nunnery, so I went. And oh, what marvellous people I have found here, encloistered in these deep sequestered walls. No saintly nuns to speak of, but some sisters that narrow tongues do fast, loose women call.

1:51the learned and the simple young and ancient the harlots and the headstrong wits and bores the accidental mothers and their offspring creative crafty cracked or merely flawed their heads held high their feet upon the ground i fit right in among the lost and found Have you seen Succession or Killing Eve? Of course you have. Harriet Walter is in both of those shows and she's bloody brilliant. She's also one of Britain's most esteemed Shakespearean actors which is what makes her the perfect person to have written this incredibly clever book. Having played most of Shakespeare's female characters at one point or another Harriet is now letting them speak their minds in this book, She Speaks.

2:40I love the title too. It was our Happy Place Book Club pick for December and in it Harriet goes between the lines of famous Shakespeare plays to write what she imagines these women were really thinking. I picked this book for December because it's a really lovely read and it is a book that you can pick up, read a chapter of, pop it down, read another bit while you're having a cup of tea. I absolutely love it. It's a real look at women in the late 1500s and early 1600s. It's also a really interesting look at what Harriet wants to say and the things that Harriet might have wanted to say when she was playing these women.

3:13She's played 21 of Shakespeare's characters and also probably gives us a bit of a clearer idea as to how Harriet thinks. Although not all of the rewritten speeches are Harriet speaking her mind, some of them are. And that is truly fascinating. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert.

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4:29Right, let's do it. Here's the show.

4:52Hello, Dame Harriet. Hello, Dame Fern. Oh, well, not quite. One day. Oh, it's so nice to see you. I sort of door stopped you at Buckingham Palace the other day. Yes, like you do. Like you do. I'd had a Buckingham Palace gin and tonic, so I felt all brave. And I was like, I'm just going to go up and say hi. And it was so lovely to talk to you. And you didn't need bravery at all. It was a good gin and tonic, though, I have to say. It felt special. They know how to do it, though. Yeah, it had, like, twirly cucumber in it and everything. It was gorgeous. Hey, I really want to talk about She Speaks, this book.

5:25This bloody great book, which is our Happy Place pick for December. I love this book so much. It's so clever. Obviously, you very astutely used all of your knowledge of Shakespeare and your experience in Shakespearean plays to sort of rewrite the female voice for many of his characters. having played so many yourself too. When did that idea land? It's a very unique idea and one that has really captivated me. When did that idea land in your head? The first idea landed, it came out of a competition that was set up for school kids to reinvent a character in Shakespeare or rewrite or put themselves into a story or something to make Shakespeare sort of more fun and have more ownership of the plays in schools.

6:10and I was invited as a practitioner to kick the competition off with an example. And I started off, first of all, they said, we've got an in-house writer if you want him to do it. I said, no, I'll do it myself. What do you mean? And I came up with the very first one, which was about Gertrude in Hamlet, who I'd watched every night sort of when I was playing Ophelia. I'd watched from the wings and I'd seen my frustration on her behalf was that she never really got to answer back to Hamlet, who has enough to say, let's face it, you could have given her a bit of space. And that was the first speech that came to mind, and it came to mind very immediately.

6:52And because it was only for fun and there was no pressure on me, I found all these sort of other stray lines from Shakespeare plays coming into the speech. And I thought, oh, isn't it funny? That was fun. I didn't know I had that in me. And then I started to do others. And it became, in some cases, it was, you know, me writing what I'd like them to have said. But it was also me using the structure of Shakespeare's arguments to say something I wanted to say through another character. So it's not always about me telling Shakespeare that he didn't do enough for us. It's more about sort of addressing some of what we feel now through his beautiful structures.

7:34Yeah, it's so amazing. And of course, not only did Shakespeare wrote these plays, so it's a male lens that we're seeing these characters through. But also females, of course, weren't permitted to act in the plays back in the day. So you also had men playing these female roles. So women did really totally get left to one side in terms of this storytelling. And you've talked there about your frustration of seeing another character, another actor play a role and sort of thinking, God, why doesn't she have the opportunity to speak back? You've played 21 Shakespearean roles now. Have you felt frustration on stage thinking, I want to bloody say something?

8:13But obviously, you know, you can't. You definitely do feel that. And female actors find strategies to get through the evening's play, sort of trying to balance staying engaged in your character with not, so in other words, not sort of sitting on the back foot and falling asleep, but staying in the play while you haven't got any action or speech to contribute at that point. so you become very good listeners you develop strategies of kind of thinking what am I thinking even though I'm not saying it so that you know I used to think if somebody jumped up on stage from the audience and said what are you thinking now I'd be able to answer and it would come from the character within the play and we get very used to that and I just want to make a bit clear that it's not so much that because women weren't allowed on stage that Shakespeare he didn't underwrite for his women you know the women have fantastic parts and they're varied and they're brilliant and they're beautiful and they have just as complicated things to say but there's fewer of them they're shorter in length and they don't because the boys would grow up quite soon they don't have the sort of lifespan of the male actors range and also you know in the times he was writing and up until embarrassingly recently, men ran the story.

9:37It was about a king or a magician or a lord or, you know, somebody was running the show and it was a male. And so all the women characters had to fit round or feed into that male. I mean, you actually make a point in the book of saying that because Shakespeare knew that it would be young men playing these female roles, perhaps he actually accentuated some parts of their character. There might be sexual innuendo in there, or perhaps a bit of humour that he might not have added if he had had women playing those roles on stage. Yes, that's just a theory of mine, but I think it does sort of hold up.

10:15I think so. Some of the feistier female characters he's got, particularly the ones who dress as boys, they were taking part in a sort of Shakespearean, Jacobean in-joke for the sort of borderline sort of homosexuality and all of that that was openly, not openly, but in this kind of subtle way was exposed. And, you know, there was a sort of titillation in seeing a boy dressed as a girl who was then going to disguise themselves back as a boy. We have the opposite titillation because we have girls dressed as boys pretending to be girls, you know. And so we know those sort of innuendo gender jokes are around in his court and in the audience of his day.

11:00And they are, and the boys are allowed to make quite lewd little references. They're subtle and they're allowed to be feisty and take part in sword fights and make jokes about themselves. that perhaps if they'd been sort of decorous little females in Shakespeare's eye, they wouldn't have been allowed to go that far. Yeah, I think it's a really solid theory. I mean, was there one particular female character that you felt had the most to say, who had perhaps been the most suppressed or hadn't had the opportunity to speak back? Well, there are a lot of them, but one of the ones that I think of is Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra, who's really, she's used really as a pawn in a sort of historical moment when Octavius Caesar, who's then Caesar or about to take over and be the one Caesar and not be ruling with two other people, is trying to win Mark Antony back into the fold and he buys him off by marrying him off to his sister, which is a way of saying, you know, it's like a diplomatic marriage.

12:06It's like a marriage of convenience, you know. And it has absolutely nothing to do with Octavia's desires or who she wants to marry. And she spends most of the play, she's got about very few lines. And what line she has is, oh, what am I going to do? Torn between my husband and my brother. I don't know where my loyalties lie. And basically that marriage breaks down in a couple of scenes. And historically, she was great. She was feisty. She was right in there. She and Mark Antony had two children together. they lived together they must have lived together for at least six years yes of course he went back to Cleopatra in the end when Antony and Cleopatra died she became guardian of their children she brought up his earlier children her own earlier children their children together and Antony and Cleopatra's children plus she did a lot of work for the state and for her brother and for Rome and she traveled to Athens and she did this and that but for the purposes of Shakespeare's plot she has to be boring, dull, uninteresting, someone who we can all understand Mark Antony leaving for Cleopatra.

13:12So that's a perfect example. Sometimes I did play her when I was very, very young. I thought this is just the most awful part. I've got to give her some words. Yeah, I love it. Is it the, just trying to find, I've dogged so many pages in the book. Is it the rewrite of the weird sisters dialogue that you really get stuck into looking at ageing? yes that's it the witch I loved that one I recently saw Macbeth actually at the Harold Pinter theatre and it was one of the best things I've ever seen in my life great um I just loved it and I and I loved this impassioned rant that you were on and I say rant purely in a positive way because I'm with you on it I I very much love getting older and everything that comes with it and that just seemed to pour out of you onto the page for that particular one it's so funny because I've rehearsed those arguments in other forms or, you know, but I've never.

14:07And then also, actually, it wasn't one of mine. It wasn't one of the first ones I wanted to write. But my publisher said, how about the witches? And I thought, well, how can you write about the witches? Who are they? And, you know, we never know quite where to place them because we don't really believe in witches anymore. Most of us. And I thought, I don't know. They're not going to play the function they play in the play. They're going to play another function. they're going to remind the world that if they don't die too young they're going to get old and you better enjoy it and face it and you better look at old people in a different way and all of that sort of all my own personal kind of arguments came through them so that's what I mean by it wasn't always about giving the character as they are in the play something else to say because you can't improve on a lot of Shakespeare stuff and I wouldn't want to but what I've given is sort of more margin room for different arguments to come into the story.

15:00So brilliant. Talking of Macbeth, you know, you say in the book, playing Lady Macbeth was a challenge because at first it was particularly hard to get in touch with who she was and what her motivation was. And it wasn't necessarily chiming with you. How did you remedy that? How did you get to the point where you thought, right, I totally understand where she's coming from and why she's acting in such a way? Yes, it's quite a process that I had to go through. and I'm sure anyone else who's played Lady Macbeth would have had to as well. First of all, you're confronted by her reputation, which is way bigger than the size of the part in the play.

15:34It's a small part. But, you know, people talk about modern Lady Macbeth and the power behind the throne and, you know, Madame Mao. And, you know, everybody talks about the evil woman breathing into the ear of the quite nice man who then becomes horrible. and so I was facing that reputation my first thought was I've got to look behind that investigate it and if it's not the case I want to try and make people look at it a different way well whatever you do you do a play for a year and you do it your way but after it's finished everybody goes back to thinking the way they always thought but yeah I mean so it was partly it was actually a funny funny thing that came to me and I don't want to sound woo-woo-ish but I was in Yorkshire on a walk and I thought I'm going to go on this walk not as me but as Lady Macbeth I'm going to look at the trees and the hills and the rotting ground underneath me and the birds and the you know and I'm and the wind rattling in the leaves and I'm going to see it as her I'm going to experience it through her eyes and her senses and it was a brilliant sort of stepping stone into her character because I realized that I walk around the world and largely see nature is benign and kind of on my side and you know for my delight and I started to get through to a person who thought nature had been her enemy and had spoiled her life because she couldn't have children or she'd had children and they'd died and because that there are very heavy hints of that in the play and my Macbeth who was Antonin Schur came along on that ride very much so and felt that was a core to the bitterness she has to the urgency of making him king while they were you know while they were still able to take that power because we were in our middle age when we did it and it became the heart of her this sort of this woman who'd been turned to poison by the accident of nature and her milk had turned to gall yeah oh my gosh I love that and I guess you know if you can't find that instant connection with a character, with a role, you know, you have to seek it out.

17:55You have to try and see through their eyes. It's remarkable. I mean, I loved watching Macbeth recently. It was a really interesting production where you wore headphones. So they were almost whispering. Yeah, it was so cool. I was mesmerized by the whole thing and the music was really gorgeous. And I felt like I understood the play really well after watching it. I just, I absolutely, I loved it. I loved it so much. Who would you say has been your favourite Shakespearean female role to play? Gosh, I like the big ones. It's quite as simple as that. The juicy ones. The ones where you get to spend a lot of stage time and exercise your muscles because it's a physical thing as well.

18:34So the biggest parts I've played in Shakespeare and loved the most because they have so much complexity. I would say, first of all, Imogen in Cymbeline, which is not very often done, but she's really mercurial and she changes from tragedy to comedy. She dresses as a boy. She, you know, she she's feisty. She's gentle. She's absolutely everything. And there's a bit of so many of his other characters in her. There's a bit of Juliet in her. There's a bit of Cleopatra in her. There's a bit of Isabella in her. You know, she's she's a really complex, full character. The trouble is the play's a bit silly and people don't do it very often.

19:09But so fun. Very good fun. And then I suppose, and then Cleopatra, of course, gets to do some wonderful stuff. And Helena in Allswell, Ennswell, you see, she's another one. The play is complicated. People find it a problem play. They literally call it a problem play because we don't know whose side we're supposed to be on. I think that's one of the problems. But I find her wonderful. She goes out and gets what she wants and she doesn't lose her humanity. She's not horrible. She's not evil. but she tries to get the love of her life who doesn't love her back as it happens. So she's a fun character.

19:46And then Beatrice in Much Ado is just pure pleasure. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert, right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Riley Herbst from 2311 Racing Checking In. Got a break in between team meetings? Sounds like the perfect time for some fast-paced fun at Chumba Casino.

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20:51I'm always so fascinated by actors that gravitate towards Shakespeare. You know, we recently had David Tennant on who, well, he's currently in Macbeth at the moment. And he's obviously got a longstanding history in his career of doing TV, then going back to Shakespeare plays much like you have over the years. And you've had an unbelievably diverse career. You know, I can't do this interview without saying how much I absolutely bloody loved you in succession. But I'm always so fascinated with that wonderful to-ing and fro-ing from TV to Shakespeare. It's a real dedication. You have to be insanely good at Shakespeare.

21:27It's a real specific skill set. The flow of it, the cadence, the understanding of the plays. what first captured you when it comes to Shakespeare what what sort of drew you in it's funny isn't it because I I never knew how to answer that question that because you know people's it was framed slightly differently you know why Shakespeare when did you first get interested and I always said oh well you know I never I never got I didn't really get excited at school I didn't get excited by going to a lot of Shakespeare plays I think the The first one I went to, I was 21 or something. And I realised that it was at drama school.

22:03And I'd forgotten this literally until a few years ago. I hadn't sort of registered. I was at drama school and I was being put through my paces in a scene. You know, most drama schools only do Shakespeare for a term, maybe two. Out of all the other things they do, he's only part of it. Some of them don't do him at all, I hate to say. but at my drama school Lander there was a wonderful woman teacher called Shati Salomon and she put me through Hermione's speech in the trial scene of Winter's Tale and it's very extreme she's been locked up in prison her boy has died she's been publicly shamed she's been treated by her husband as an adulteress.

22:46She's been starved. Da, da, da. And then you walk on stage, right? And so all of that has to be in your imagination. You can't demonstrate it to the audience very easily. You've just got to bring it on with you. And Shakespeare gives her these powerful long speeches that are fighting for her life. And this teacher was relentless. She kept saying, okay, forget, remember, you haven't eaten for three weeks. Remember, you've just lost your boy. Remember, you're the Empress of Russia, and you've been humiliated publicly. Remember, you used to love your husband. She piled all this information. And then she said, I didn't hear that line.

23:27Well, what are you saying? And she went on and on and on at me. And I was loving it. Because there was something about how difficult it was and how challenging it was that I was absolutely loving. And there were other people in my class who sort of walked out and said to hell with this. I'm not going to be harangued by this. He wasn't gentle. But I learned so much in that afternoon. I'll never forget it. And if nothing else, I learned that you have to juggle about 10 balls when you're doing Shakespeare. You know, you've got to remember where you are. You've got to be emotional. You've got to not be too emotional so that we can't hear what you're saying.

24:06You've got to drive the argument through. You've got to particularize all the images. you've got to make them land in the audience and not affect you too much because if you're too affected by them they won't get it you know it's very very very it's very hugely challenging and I think a lot of actors love that challenge yeah I mean you've got to love it otherwise there's you wouldn't stand a chance I mean even just learning the text it's not something where you know you could go off piste and make a bit up if you've forgotten where you are there's a certain rhythm and a cadence and exact language that you've got to use.

24:40What's your method for really getting that script in your head and getting it to stay in there? There are lots of tricks and I've, you know, and I think that Shakespeare wrote them in. I think he did them on purpose because his actors had to learn very quickly. So he uses, for instance, alliteration, he uses internal rhymes, He uses strong imagery that you can't forget. And he uses music, rhythm, all these things. I mean, we can learn songs because we can put words to music. And once they're in there, they don't go away. So all those kind of tricks, there's nothing generalised about it. There's nothing more difficult than learning generalised language because it's harder to get a hook in and remember it.

25:25so I found you know I suddenly realized he was full of tricks helping me learn that's handy yeah absolutely and I think he put them there because either they came to him because you know and I found writing the book that sort of rhymes would chime in my head I said there was one where I said something about a kitten's mouth and then something about a litter and I suddenly realized oh litter and kitten and I've put them both you know you suddenly realize that they come to you not that you didn't consciously write the rhyme, but it comes into your head because you've just had the former thought.

26:00So the latter one kind of catches up with you or echoes you. And I think possibly that was how he wrote sometimes as he was thinking a thought, he wrote it down and then something else chimed with that and he wrote that down. And then when you're backtracking and learning it, those little stepping stones are still there. That's so interesting. Do you think Shakespeare's women speak more to how women were thought of in the late 1500s, early 1600s, or more specifically about what Shakespeare thought about women? I don't think it's about Shakespeare, because Shakespeare seems to have such a huge range of opinions about women, if they are opinions.

26:42I mean, we know that he's famously elusive. We don't really know what Shakespeare, whose side he was on. Sometimes he's talking about revolution in a wonderful way. Then he's talking about the establishment in a wonderful way. He's talking about women being traitresses and lying. And then he talks about being absolutely the parody of beauty and human. Everything is about being human. He writes about the human condition and he doesn't leave women out of that. We're absolutely included in his embrace. I think that a lot of it is as I said before about who's running the show out there in the world he's living in and what the general public and the world and culturally women are thought of as you know they're the weaker sex they they don't have the vote they don't have hold of the purse strings at this point I mean they did in medieval England they had a lot more power but um you know uh as things evolved that women have gone up and down in society really and this is a time when you had a woman on the throne, for heaven's sakes, but she was having to really play the game amongst men.

27:50And, you know, there were a lot of very educated women who were very scholarly and brilliant, and he would have known about them. So he wouldn't have not respected women's potential. But I think within his stories, it made a good plot if the woman was a victim, or if the woman was going to commit suicide, or if the woman was a laughingstock, or if the woman was a traitorous or made a good story. Yeah, they're bloody good stories. And quite frankly, all stories are a Shakespeare story. They're just a regurgitated Shakespeare story, we've realised. Literally every film, every story is a Shakespeare story.

28:22It's remarkable. Well, I love this book and I know that our Happy Place followers will love reading it throughout December. She Speaks, Dame Harriet Walter. What a joy to read this book and a privilege to talk to you today. I'm so very grateful. Thank you, Femme. Wonderful. oh thanks Harriet love interviewing people like that it's all quite nerve wracking you have to say Dame hello Dame Harriet she'll call me Dame Fern which is let's hope a premonition for the future guys She Speaks was our Happy Place recommended read for December you'll already have known that if you follow at Happy Place Book Club on Instagram we always post loads of extra content and discussions about the book we're reading together on there so join us come join the party if you love books.

29:07I would bloody love it if you started reading along with us each month, if you don't already. January's book is by David Larby and it's called Frequently Happy. Yes, please. Listen, we all know that life can be bloody stressful. Each day can feel like a bit of a struggle to get through. But David's aim with this book is to help you see and build pockets of joy in every day. He combines poetry with weekly reflections that will help you explore your emotions and seize opportunities to grow. It is a gorgeous concept. I'll be chatting to David on the podcast in just a few weeks so you can keep an eye out for that episode.

29:42For now though, a huge thank you to Dame Harriet, to the producer Anushka Tate at Happy Play Studios and to you, you lovely Shakespearean lot. Make sure your voice is being heard.

30:14We'll see you next time.

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