‘It's not about gender’: Cross-gendered casting in Deborah Warner's Richard II

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Notes

My thanks are due to Louise Ray at the Royal National Theatre Archive. I am grateful to members of Denise Albanese's seminar on ‘Performance, Performativity and Difference’ at the 2002 Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Women: A Cultural Review, Gianna Bouchard, Ewan Fernie, Margaret Healy, Tanya Horeck, Mark Houlahan, Lindsey Moore, Judith Pryor and Julie Scanlon.

1. Fiona Shaw, interview with Christian Tyler, ‘Private View: Why a Leading Lady wants to Play Principal Boy’, Financial Times, 9 December 1995, p. 22.

2. Richard II, dir. Deborah Warner, Royal National Theatre, Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre Archive, videocassette, 18 November 1995 and Richard II, dir. Warner, BBC 2, videocassette, 22 March 1997.

3. See W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, pp. 95–150.

4. Shaw, interview with Tyler, p. 22.

5. Shaw, foreword, in Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay (eds), The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, London: Routledge, 1998, p. xxiv.

6. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority, p. 99.

7. Deborah Warner, interview with Geraldine Cousin, ‘Exploring Space at Play: the Making of the Theatrical Event’, New Theatre Quarterly 47, 1996, p. 233.

8. Cousin, ‘Exploring Space at Play’, pp. 232–3.

9. Warner, interview with Cousin, p. 233.

10. For an extended discussion of Warner's production in relation to kingship and performance see Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Shakespeare Performed: Fiona Shaw's Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48.3, 1997, pp. 314–24.

11. Shaw, interview with Richard Covington, ‘Portrait of the Actress as a Non-Man’, Salon 11, http://www.salon.com/11/features/shaw2.html 6 April 1996 (Accessed: 1 November 2005).

12. Warner, interview with Cousin, p. 233.

13. Warner, interview with Cousin, p. 233.

14. Warner, interview with Cousin, p. 233.

15. John Mullan, ‘Privilege of Gender’, rev. of Richard II, dir. Deborah Warner, Cottesloe, Times Literary Supplement, 16 June 1995, p. 22; Tyler, ‘Private View’, p. 22; Andrew Temple, ‘To Play the King (and be a Woman)’, Independent on Sunday, 21 May 1995, Review, p. 23.

16. Alastair Macaulay, rev. of Richard II, Cottesloe, Financial Times, 6 June 1995, rpt. in Theatre Record, 19 June 1995, p. 704.

17. Michael Billington, rev. of Richard II, Cottesloe, The Guardian, 5 June 1995, rpt. in Theatre Record, 19 June 1995, p. 700.

18. Benedict Nightingale, rev. of Richard II, Cottesloe, The Times, 5 June 1995, rpt. in Theatre Record, 19 June 1995, p. 702.

19. Georgina Brown, ‘And She's Not Bad at Tennis, Either’, The Independent, 26 May 1995, Arts, p. 25.

20. See Grace Tiffany for a brief discussion of Warner's production in relation to Richard's ‘femininity’, in ‘How Revolutionary is Cross-cast Shakespeare? A Look at Five Contemporary Productions’, in Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney (eds), Shakespeare: Text and Theatre: Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999, pp. 121–24.

21. John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 1783; London: John Nichols, 1823, vol. 3, p. 552.

22. See Charles R. Forker (ed.), William Shakespeare Richard II, Introduction, London: Arden Shakespeare-Thomson, 2002, pp. 5–16.

23. Rhoda Koenig, ‘The Girl Who Would be King’, rev. of Richard II, Cottesloe, The Independent, 5 June 1995, Arts, p. 22.

24. Billington, rev. of Richard II, p. 700.

25. Macaulay, rev. of Richard II, p. 704.

26. John Gross, rev. of Richard II, Cottesloe, Sunday Telegraph, 11 June 1995, rpt. in Theatre Record, 19 June 1995, p. 702.

27. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater, London: Routledge, 1997, p. vii.

28. Elizabeth Klett similarly engages with Warner's production in terms of gender performativity; she develops these ideas in relation to androgyny and offers a queer reading of Richard and Bollingbroke's relationship, in ‘Many Bodies, Many Voices: Performing Androgyny in Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner's Richard II’, Theatre Journal 58.2, 2006, pp. 175–94. Unfortunately this suggestive essay was not published until after my own article was accepted for publication, so I have been unable to engage with it in detail here.

29. See, for example, Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 12–16.

30. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 17.

31. For fuller accounts of Richard II and gender see Margaret Healy, William Shakespeare Richard II, ser. Writers and Their Works, Plymouth: Northcote, 1998, pp. 49–57 and Graham Holderness, in Ivo Kamps (ed.), ‘‘‘A Woman's War’’: A Feminist Reading of Richard II ’, Shakespeare Left and Right, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 167–83. Healy's critique is more positive than Holderness's with respect to the text's possibilities for female agency.

32. Shaw, The Routledge Reader, p. xxiv.

33. Macaulay, rev. of Richard II, p. 704.

34. Photographs and programmes, Royal National Theatre Archive, London. Two programme covers were issued: one reproduced a photograph of Shaw and Threlfall and the other had no cover illustration.

35. Shaw, interview with Covington.

36. Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1933 [1932], The Standard Edition, tr. James Strachey, Vol. 22, London: Hogarth, 1964, p. 113. Freud's observation was reprinted in the programme.

37. Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. 159.

38. Shaw, quoted in Rutter, p. 315. Shaw's emphasis.

39. Shaw, interview with Alison Oddey, in Alison Oddey (ed.), Performing Women: Stand-Ups, Strumpets and Itinerants, Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's, 1999, p. 156.

40. These differences are made clear in the videos and in the costume file (Royal National Theatre Archive, London).