In After Shakespeare, Lexi Wolfe imagines the lives of four of the Bard’s characters after their plays have ended.
What happened to them? And why?
If this all sounds a little Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it’s not. Wolfe digs deep into each character, and what she finds there is both illuminating and entertaining.
With only the simplest of props – a stool, a screen, and a few different clothes – she leads us through the later lives of Henry V, Hamlet, Portia and Lady Macbeth, and in every role she is spellbinding. The characters are not introduced, so we need to work out who they are from what they say. Wolfe drops hints but her first candidate, Henry, is initially hardest to fathom, especially as immediately denies that he is Prince Hal, before recounting his involvement in the Battle of Shrewsbury and later Azincourt/Agincourt.
‘I lost people that day and I blame the Crown for it.’
And who was the Crown that St Crispin’s Day? He was.
Why is he distancing himself in this way? Presumably because he doesn’t want people to blame him (or he doesn’t want to blame himself) for the many deaths. Despite everyone’s misgivings the outnumbered English won the day, but later he recalls the siege of Rouen, in which a combination of French and English intransigence led to the deaths of 12,000 poor French people, mostly women and children, left to starve in the dry moat after being expelled from the city to save food for the French soldiers.
Henry refused to let his men help the starving people, yet now he recalls the pleas of a dying girl, begging him to save her baby. He still dreams of her cries.
‘I am just a common knight. King Henry wouldn’t let such people bother him.’
So Wolfe unpeels the king’s carapace; he’s made some brutal decisions, and now he must live with his conscience.
Wolfe, meanwhile, moves on to Hamlet.
This is a very entertaining monologue with lots of jokes; the wronged prince goes over his past and realises what a man of action he was not. He’s surprisingly self-aware for someone who was quite the opposite in Shakespeare’s version. He witters away about the meaning of ‘nothing’, notes how much he moaned to his mother about How Depressed He Was, and marvels at the fact that while he was ostensibly trying to kill his uncle he had time to write a play.
‘Who does that?’ (sigh)
He wonders about his relationships with Laertes and Ophelia, analyses Polonius’s motives, and wisely concludes:
‘I was given the wrong task. My father should’ve known better than to come to me. I can write a long essay; I am a philosopher not a king.’
Wolfe then turns her attentions to two female leads. In the first of these scenes the screen is put to good use as a confessional. The priest has arrived, and our heroine starts to make her confession – before promptly giving up. For this is Portia, and, having had a taste of life as a man in The Merchant of Venice, she’s apparently been going into Belmont, and even Venice itself, dressed as a man ever since.
Wolfe encourages us to think about the different ways in which men and women are treated in society, and while those differences were obviously more extreme in 16th century Venice, the point is valid still.
Portia’s realised that, for the first time ever, she’s been seen and heard, and can do exactly as she wishes. She knows that her cross-dressing will be viewed by many as a sin worse than rape, but if she gives it up she’ll lose all that freedom. In The Merchant of Venice, when dressed as Balthazar, she’s had a chance to use her razor-sharp mind; she wants to be able to do that again, and now sees both her home and her body as traps. She still loves her husband, Bassanio;
‘I miss him (when he’s away). But I miss Balthazar more.’
It’s a thought echoed in Wolfe’s final character, Lady Macbeth, when she cries
‘A woman can do exactly as a man does and they will say she has lost her mind.’
11th century Scotland; Lady Macbeth’s first husband is dead, murdered by King Duncan. She has married Macbeth, but she most of all wants vengeance for his predecessor, and it is this, Wolfe conjectures, not her desire for regal power, that drives her on.
Wolfe is magnificent in this role; she is a woman possessed, consumed with anger and grief, her red hair now cascading down as she sweeps across the stage.
‘I was a woman, a Queen, a deity all in one.’
When she discovers that she has been betrayed, she is mad with shock and repulsion. And once again she scrubs and scrubs at her skin
‘I never once got my hands dirty. Strange then that they never seem clean.’
Wolfe is an excellent actress, with beautifully clear enunciation and powerful delivery, especially as Lady Macbeth. Her comic timing is also top notch; her Hamlet is hilarious. After Shakepeare is a thought-provoking and rewarding show.
After Shakespeare is at theSpaceTriplex (Studio), The Prince Philip Building (next to theSpace @ Surgeons Hall) at 4.05pm every day except Sunday 13th (no performance), until 26th August.
