A few years ago, I fell hopelessly in love with Harriet Walter. It only lasted an hour or two: she was playing Brutus in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of Julius Caesar, and there she was, aloof, damaged, burning with pride and suppressed sorrow.
The Donmar theatre’s production was set in a women’s prison, as if performed by inmates. In Walter’s mind, we learn in her latest book, she was not playing white, older, educated Brutus, but ‘Hannah’, a long-term prisoner whose presence in the jail she based on the story of Judith Clark, an anti-capitalist revolutionary imprisoned for driving the getaway car at a fatal bank robbery. It is a rare moment of political predictability in an acting memoir otherwise notable for its focused scrutiny of Shakespeare’s language.
Walter’s 2012 turn as Brutus has become cult theatre — it turns out that my crush was far from unique. This winter, the Donmar has revived the production as part of a trilogy with Lloyd’s 2014 Henry IV, in which Walter plays the title role, and a new production of The Tempest, giving her a chance to tackle Prospero. The results are electric; an extraordinary success for British theatre’s new addiction to mixing up gender in performance. It’s a disappointment, then, that Brutus and Other Heroines focuses less on this achievement and more on Walter’s history of, well, more traditional Shakespearian heroines. There’s plenty on gender, less on gender-bending.
Walter certainly has an impressive back-catalogue of performances, but for an actor at the heart of the British theatre world she’s short on gossip, long on plot summary. She is grateful, for example, that Patrick Stewart was keen to play Antony to her RSC Cleopatra — most major male actors, we are told, scorn it as a supporting role — but that’s all we hear about him for the rest of the chapter.
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