Noble Romans return to Colchester

By Andrew Clarke

Friends, East Anglians, countrymen lend them your ears… for Colchester's Mercury Theatre is engaged in an audacious project to bring two of Shakespeare's greatest historical epics to the stage - Coriolanus and Julius Caesar.

The Roman history plays are being produced back to back, on a shared set, as mirror images of one another. Coriolanus features an all-male cast and Julius Caesar an all-female cast.

The two productions will reunite two old friends Colchester's artistic director Dee Evans and her mentor Shakespeare scholar Tina Packer who has returned home to Britain having spent the last 30 years living and working in America.

The pair became friends when Dee went to the US as a young actress looking to gain experience in the world of Shakespearean theatre.

She went to seek out Tina who already had a glowing reputation as a producer of ground-breaking Shakespeare. Now Dee is thrilled to repay the complement and bring Tina back to the UK to stage her first theatre production here for more than 30 years.

She said that the genesis of the whole season had its roots in her desire to tempt Tina back to these shores. Speaking during a break in rehearsals Dee said: “I have been wanting Tina to come and direct for quite some time. She has her own company in America and is quite busy. I sent her yet another email which said: 'official invitation - come and direct here' and she chose Coriolanus.”

She said that the Mercury Theatre acting company had been together for eight years and this Shakespeare mini-season was the perfect opportunity for them to test their mettle.

“One of the things we do here is to try and push things. Our company has been going for eight years now and what I wanted to do was explore how we were doing and how we were developing. We can all talk the talk but every now and then we have to go and see if it means anything.

“So a year ago I went to the company and said that this autumn we would do two plays back to back and one of them would be Coriolanus and how many of them would be interested in coming on board. What I wanted to know who would be interested in the project before we knew what the casting was… and we got 20 actors.”

She said that she was thrilled with the response from the theatre's acting company but their enthusiasm threw up problems when it came to casting. “We had ten women who threw their hats into the ring and so I was looking for a play for women. We read a lot of plays, women's plays, and they were weeping and wailing plays and it didn't feel right.

“If you are doing Coriolanus in a Roman town, the obvious play to do is Julius Caesar. But it wasn't obvious to start with. So I rang Tina and said I am thinking of doing Julius Caesar and doing it with all women: 'Am I Mad?' And she said: 'No I think it is quite a good idea really.”

For Tina adventurous re-interpretation of Shakespeare is nothing new. She had established a glowing career on her love for the Bard's work and has spent many years exploring ways it can be re-imagined, freshened up and brought before an audience. Like Dee Tina Packer started her professional life as an actress appearing with numerous theatre repertory companies and doing classic TV adaptations like David Copperfield and staple telly gigs like Play For Today and Doctor Who - appearing alongside Patrick Troughton in The Web of Fear.

She said: “I went to RADA and had a fairly traditional theatrical training, upbringing, if you like, but I found myself thinking there has to be more than this and that's what made me switch from acting to directing.

“Then as soon as I made the change to directing I did 12 productions in two years at LAMDA and so I started getting involved with what I thought theatre was really about. I was absolutely besotted with Shakespeare and that was all that I really wanted to do.

“So I started asking the question: 'What is Elizabethan theatre all about?' and as a result of that I met American actors and when I was looking for money, they said come to America and go to the Ford Foundation and get some money from them. And because I was so innocent and naïve, I swanned across to America and did just that.”

She maintains that she didn't deliberately set out to flee these shores and much of her first year with American funding was still spent in the UK but it quickly became clear that America was a much more appreciative place to explore the world of classic English theatre.

“I didn't really care whether I did it in England or America, in some ways it would have been better to do it in England because the master-teachers were all here but the money of course was in America.” She said that times have changed as far as funding goes but at the time a smile, an English accent and proof that you were serious about what you were doing was enough to unlock the chque books of some major American corporations.

“Thirty years later I can't get the Ford Foundation to give me a penny but back then they gave me what was a huge some of money… an extension of studies grant. They gave me money to spend half a year in England and half a year in America and they paid for the whole lot.

“We spent the first half of the year at Stratford and the RSC were very sweet and gave us The Other Place as out rehearsal room. We were in Stratford until June and then we went to the O'Neill Centre in New York and ended up doing A Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew in New York. That's how I got to America. And I ended up getting some more money to travel and I started a permanent company and that's really how I started in America.”

She said that when she arrived the Americans liked the idea of Shakespeare better than they understood the actual plays. At the beginning it was important that it was done by white, English actors in Elizabethan dress. “Happily that has now all changed. They now talk in their own accents, they are multi-ethnic in their approach and now there are more Shakespeare companies in America than there are in England.”

She said that Dee came out in the early '80s for a year and the pair became firm friends. “I think because Dee came out at a fairly early stage in the process and we all lived together in a hippy-style commune, we got on very well.” She said that she can see Dee implementing lessons she picked up while she was working with her company in the States. “We were well placed three hours north of New York and two hours south of Boston and we quickly developed a good reputation because we did take our work out to the people and took it into schools - we became part of the community which is what Dee is doing here.

“William Shakespeare wasn't a precious artist creating rarefied art which needed a translator to get all the hidden meanings - he was a populist playwright who said: 'How am I going to get the buggers in here?' So he set about creating mainstream, public entertainment but within that he also addressed the issue of how can I write about what I am interested in? He didn't see them as mutually exclusive - he wanted to get the people in and talk with them.

“That's why in his tragedies there is always some light relief, some comedy moments, just to relieve the tension. There's plenty of that in Corionlanus - I think it was Bernard Shaw who said that Corionlanus was his favourite Shakespeare comedy.”

Promoting a sense of community and making Shakespeare accessible to everyone is key to what Tina and Dee are all about. It's about tearing down artificial barriers and casting aside pre-conceived ideas.

“What's amazing is that the kids around New York are totally Shakespeare literate because of our programmes there. They all do Shakespeare plays, they come to us and stage a Shakespeare Festival …. It's all good stuff,” says Tina warming to her subject.

“The secret is to get the kids to act it themselves. The plays come alive then. They understand the plays and they will remember them until the end of their days. The children own the play - it's their role, their play and it takes on a life of its own.”

Dee admits that after taking the decision she had “several fits of collywobbles along the way and now it seems like a thoroughly good idea and I am glad we are doing it.”

Tina said that she thought Dee's idea was a courageous one but once she got over the shock of an all-female Julius Ceasar she thought it was a great idea because gender is a huge issue in both plays.

Dee says that it was only after she made the decision that it became apparent how appropriate the idea was: “Of course now I say it was always a grand plan but the more I looked at it the more apparent it became that the whole idea of these two plays is that they deal with the whole issue of gender. I knew when someone from the RSC phoned up and asked me to explain myself I knew we had got it right.”

For Tina she is rejoicing being back in this country and is delighted with the performances of the actors in the Mercury's company. “I always wanted to come back because I wanted to see how my work sat in the English theatre. I never thought of myself as an American even after all this time.

“I believe that I belong to this hybrid race of people who don't actually belong to any particular country. You are looking at the culture and thinking 'what are the universals here?' The way we are going to get out of the mess in the world is to find out what unites us rather than what separates us.”

Dee said that it was a real thrill to work with Tina. She said that although they were working separately on their respective plays, they were both singing from the same hymn book. “I would love to sit in on Tina's rehearsals but the theatre unfortunately doesn't run itself and I will need to be out of circulation when we're rehearsing Julius Caesar.”

Tina added that they both share a love of language. “You can't do Shakespeare unless you really get to grips with the language of Shakespeare. The audience can't understand what's happening unless the actors understand what they are saying. We also believe that the visuals should support the verbal.”

The visuals in this case are a very dramatic set that actually extends out over the auditorium and brings the audience into the very heart of the action. Dee has been liaising with regular designer Sara Perks to come with a set which will take people's breath away.

“It's long been a dream of mine to have one set that goes across more than one production. The theory was that it would save money but I don't suppose it has. Having said that, the one that's been designed is twice the size of our usual set, so it's very impressive.

“Our designer Sara knows the space intimately and has come up with this amazing diagonal wall which stretches 60 feet across the stage and the set actually extends out into the auditorium, so it brings the action much closer to the audience.”

She said that her production of Julius Caesar also has music composed by performance artist Ansuman Biswas, who provided the soundtrack to Ion three years ago. Apparently he was so taken with Dee's ideas for the show he volunteered for a sex change in order to take part. Dee laughs as she relates her conversation with him: “I said: 'No sorry mate, you're a man.' Anyway we went to a show and saw a female Japanese Taiko drummer and now she is in the show as well. It all adds extra interest for an audience. The more they are engaged the more they bring to a show.”

Coriolanus runs until November 3. Julius Caesar is on stage November 7-14. Further information online at www.mercurytheatre.co.uk