“ they’re What we’ve got is four plays which are completely different from one another. They’re all really fun; really sunny and sparky. And very badly behaved, too... ” Erica Whyman talks about Midsummer Mischief at the RSC... 6 www.whatsonlive.co.uk
interview... A woman of numerous firsts, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Deputy Artistic Director, Erica Whyman, has many years’ experience in theatres across the UK, and has a particular interest in championing new work. In 2013, Erica’s services to theatre were acknowledged with an OBE in the New Year’s Honours List. In her role at the RSC, Erica has been hugely instrumental in the planned re-opening of The Other Place, the Stratford venue in which the Company will this month present four new plays as part of its Midsummer Mischief festival. What’s On recently caught up with Erica to talk about her role at the RSC, gender politics in theatre, and why ‘wellbehaved women seldom make history’. First and foremost, Erica, what’s your remit at the RSC? I’m Deputy Artistic Director, so basically I do what it says on the tin. I deputise for Greg Doran, the Artistic Director, which I suppose means not just being in the places that he can’t be, but working with him on the programming. I have a special responsibility for our new work, so Greg and I will talk in a lot of detail about, for instance, what we’re going to do in the Swan, which is a combination of Jacobean and Elizabethan work and plays that we might be unearthing, or plays that people love that they can only see with us, and new plays that we’ve commissioned. I have to look at how it all fits in with everything else in the programme. I also have a particular interest in making connections, inviting different kinds of theatre-makers to Stratford and to the West Midlands, either to spend some time working at the RSC or with other West Midlands artists. You’ve been with the company now for just over twelve months. Coming from Northern Stage to such a major institution, was the transition a bit of a culture shock? It was a bit strange at first because the theatre I was running in Newcastle had a staff of about forty-five. But there are big similarities between my previous and current roles, which I guess is why Greg asked me to come. At Northern Stage, we were interested in new work and were engaging with writers and other kinds of theatremakers - people who were devising new theatre. The year before I left, we’d joined a programme in Edinburgh which had quite a lot in common with my plans for The Other Place. So in terms of content it’s quite similar, but the scale and size of the RSC is quite different. There are some things about it that are completely wonderful and other things which are utterly bewildering, but I’m getting my head around them slowly. So what was your brief when programming for the Midsummer Mischief Festival? I sort of gave myself the brief. I’m charged with working out how we might open The Other Place, and I’m very excited about that. We want to take hold of the steel box that houses The Courtyard auditorium and turn it into, amongst other things, a Studio Theatre. That’s going to take us a couple of years, because although it’s not a huge project, we need to raise some funding for it, half of which we’ve already got in place. I was very aware that I’d talked quite a lot about radical mischief, the idea that Shakespeare’s spirit would encourage us to be quite daring in our theatre, both in our content and the way that we make theatre. Also, 2014 is the fortieth anniversary of when Buzz Goodbody set up the The Other Place in a tin hut on Waterside, essentially the same place where The Courtyard is now. And so we didn’t want to miss this year. We wanted to celebrate her legacy, the legacy of The Other Place and, I suppose, herald what we’re going to do in the future. And also give people a little bit of faith that we mean what we say and that we’re going to do a different kind of smaller theatre in Stratford, in dialogue which complements the main programme. That’s where it came from. Then I started thinking about the Roaring Girls season. Obviously, Greg and I had programmed the Roaring Girls together, and I’ve been very close to the directors and the way that they’ve thought about those plays. The plays really are magnificent, and are about quite remarkable women - but usually in a man’s world. So it seemed important to me that one of the roles of a national company, and a national theatre company with Shakespeare in our title, should be to make sure we’re listening to contemporary voices. We’re sort of asking ourselves, ‘what would Shakespeare be writing about now?’. He was very interested in gender, as we know, and was quite bold about it. Four hundred-odd years ago, there was a lot of planned thinking about gender but also the asking of serious questions about equality. So to me, it seemed completely appropriate to devise a very simple brief for our writers and say to them, ‘Actually, what if you wrote about well-behaved women’. Why ‘Well-behaved women seldom make history’? I came across a book titled the same about a year ago in New York. It was by the woman who’d originally said it, quite inadvertently, in a history article. She was a fascinating academic researcher and she’d been writing about a religious community in North America. At the bottom of a paragraph, almost as a throwaway line, she wrote: ‘Wellbehaved women seldom make history’. Years later, the slogan had been sent to her on a mug and she’d gone: ‘Oh crikey, it’s become this thing that everybody quotes!’. I came across her book and it started me thinking about good behaviour and bad behaviour, and how that feels like something which is applied to women in a different way to how it is men. So we started a process with the writers of thinking about that and, I suppose, gave them permission to be quite radical and quite daring about the issues. And what about the plays you’ve chosen? What we’ve got is four plays which are completely different from one another. They’re all really fun; really sunny and sparky. And they’re very badly behaved, too, in the sense that there’s one which I’m directing that doesn’t really behave like a play at all. It’s a series of little vignettes that kind of amount to a revolution and ask the question, ‘what would a revolution look like in 2014 if we were to have one?’. A sexual revolution, I suppose, or a revolution more broadly. These are not plays about women, but they take women seriously. I have a play in my double-bill that Timberlake Wertenbaker has written. It’s a new play about economics, about Europe and about how our language is limiting us. With the other two plays, which Jo McInnes is directing, one is more domestic in feel and is by EV Crow. It asks deep questions about how we treat mothers and what it is to be a mother. The fourth play, by Abi Zakarian, really thinks about how the debate around feminism has got so stuck, again using quite theatrical techniques to suggest we’ve got ourselves in a place we can’t get out of in terms of men, women and gender politics. The result of it all is quite thrilling, as they’re quite bold and unusual. They’re all short and sharp - each play is only an hour long - and it feels very nice to be doing something like this in Stratford, by contrast to the work that we make on The Swan stage or the RST stage. Are there any plans to tour the plays post- Stratford? I suspect they won’t have a long life, but never say never. The really lovely thing is that we have a collaboration with the Royal Court in London. The productions play Stratford for a whole month and then go to the Royal Court for a week to take part in their summer programme. One of the other plays, by Alice Birch, then goes on to be performed at Latitude Festival. It’s great they’ve got that London connection, but I was keen for it to be this way round and for more people to see the plays in Stratford. Gender imbalance in theatre remains an issue. How do you personally think this can be addressed? It is an issue, of course, but part of my answer is that we should celebrate our successes. I’ve been either running theatres - or, more recently, deputy of a major theatre - for seventeen years. I was the first woman to do any of the jobs that I’ve done, but I’m really not alone now. So I suppose I think it’s important that we notice when people do break through, when they’re in positions of influence, because I think we’re a bit hooked on the story that it’s all a disaster. I think there are other fields - I’m thinking about parts of the world where women and girls aren’t even allowed to go to school - which feel higher up the agenda. On the other hand, what I think is really shocking is how few terrific roles for women we have, both in terms of the images and stories we tell about women and the balance of our actresses, who don’t get as much of a look-in as our actors. We’ve obviously been talking about this a lot recently, and we were saying that www.whatsonlive.co.uk 7
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