With no preamble, Eileen Atkins strides into the wonderfully intimate space of the Globe’s new, candle-lit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, plants her hands on the lectern-like table in front of her and eyeballs the hushed audience. She really knows how to make an entrance. Dressed in a blue trouser suit, a flowing blue jacket and wearing the hint of an Elizabethan ruff, she’s a Dame with a dash of Prospero.
It’s a fair comparison – Atkins is pretty spell-binding when it comes to breathing life into Shakespeare’s verse. There are no theatrical pyrotechnics here, just a cast-iron grip on character. This doesn’t only apply to the excerpts she performs in the guise of Beatrice, Rosalind, Juliet or Ophelia; it’s also true of Dame Ellen Terry, the famed Victorian Shakespearean actress she’s channelling between speeches.
For this one-woman show – just over an hour long – Atkins has adapted Terry’s lectures on comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare, which she gave once she had retired from the stage. In these, Terry describes her approach to playing the Bard’s most iconic female roles, fleshed out with anecdotes from her own life and illustrated by speeches from the plays.
The ‘with’ in the title is very deliberate. This isn’t a simple stab at a theatrical séance. As Atkins has said elsewhere, we’re watching her interpretation of the characters, and she’s picked out the points Terry makes about acting with which she agrees: “I’ve left out one thing she says, which is that you must never sacrifice charm. My goodness – yes you should.”
What we get is Terry refracted through the lens of an equally talented and charismatic admirer. Atkins, eyebrow occasionally arched, captures beautifully Terry’s eccentricities, her dry humour and her proudly British briskness towards acting and a life lived on the stage. As she makes clear from the start, theorising about Shakespeare is for academics. She has something better: experience.
Terry insists on every generation’s right to re-interpretation when it comes to Shakespeare, while expressing a wry hope that the profession’s old-timers might still get a voice. Her women are brave, finding strength in forbearance and are usually one step ahead of the men. Beatrice and Mistress Page are favourites because age has made them wise and witty.
The importance of experience is a thread that runs throughout these lectures. At one point, Atkins as Terry ruefully observes that Juliet is a role that an actress is best equipped to play only when she is too old to do so. This is, of course, self-serving, enabling Terry to give the ‘definitive’ death scene. But true or not, Atkins is utterly electrifying as a terrified Juliet contemplating the consequences of taking the poison.
Terry’s close reading of Shakespeare is matched by Atkins, whose performance of the huge variety of roles encompassed by the lectures is a rich delight. She sheds new light on familiar characters, bringing genuine pathos to the tricky Ophelia mad scene. In such moments, she and Terry touch fingertips across the decades, positioning Shakespeare’s women at the moral and artistic heart of his plays.
