I never studied Shakespeare at school. My mother – an English teacher – told me I'd probably never need it. I can see why she thought so. I grew up in a town where mining, farming and crayfishing were the main industries. Not a hell of a lot of Elizabethan theatre was on tap in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia.
But thankfully, my mother still had a great respect for the written word, and advised me to study the "Australian greats" instead. So instead of The Tempest, I threw myself into David Williamson's The Removalists. Instead of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I revelled in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler. On the coast of country Western Australia, I fell in love with Australian stories, and I guess my career as a playwright started with those incredible Australian texts.
I didn't get my first taste of Shakespeare – the man and his work – until I had to study his texts at Curtin University as part of my theatre degree. And it was a good, albeit belated, introduction. It was all about performance rather than merely reading. Just as a play should be – played.
When the tiny Hayman Theatre on campus decided to do an all-female production of Hamlet, I auditioned – as much a virgin to Shakespeare as I was to … well, anything, really. I ended up getting cast as Claudius – the evil King who killed his brother and married his sister-in-law in order to wear the crown.
I was a 5 foot 2, freckle-faced 18-year-old with a bad perm who went from a crayfishing town in WA to, within months, performing in my first Shakespeare as a tyrant King. I know – I'm as horrified as you. Yet despite this blatant miscasting, I went from knowing nothing about Shakespeare to absolutely falling in love with his texts through performance. It was a strange way to rebel against my mother, but there you go.
Horses for courses.
Through feeling Shakespeare's words in my mouth, connecting them to my gut, wrapping the ideas around my heart, I fell in love with verse. Yes … even the verse of a villain. That one university production of Hamlet set me on my pathway. I was smitten.
And I took with me a magnificent codpiece.
Performing Shakespeare also solidified the love I already had for Australian stories. I saw everything with fresh eyes. I saw Juliet reborn in Sally Banner, the young, sexually charged poet in Dorothy Hewett's breathtaking The Chapel Perilous. I saw elements of Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" in Louis Nowra's beautiful band of theatrical misfits in Cosi. I saw the same humanity, tragedy, cheekiness and insight that I found in Australian texts in Shakespeare. To me – working backwards in my theatrical education – they were embracing the same themes. Love. Loneliness. Power. Powerlessness. Youth. Ageing. Grief. Hope. Racism. Sexism. Mortality. Humanity. Love again. I embraced Shakespeare's incredible knack at finding the domestic in the epic and the epic in the domestic, and tried to apply it to all my self-written work. And still do.
For some reason, some 20 years on from that first Shakespearean role, but still 5 foot 2 and freckled, I still get cast as the villain. I haven't revisited Claudius, you'll be pleased to know. But I have played Regan in King Lear at the Sydney Theatre Company, pulling "vile jelly" eyeballs from Tony Llewellyn-Jones' gorgeous head. I played the "lean and hungry" Cassius for Bell Shakespeare a few years later, as a woman. A grieving Lady Macbeth for Bell recently ...
And now ... Richard III.
Yep. Richard III.
I can hand on my heart say that this is one villain I never expected to play, and one that fills me with more fear and excitement than all of the others put together.
AKA Richard of Gloucester.
AKA Dick the Shit.
I can hand on my heart say that this is one villain I never expected to play, and one that fills me with more fear and excitement than all of the others put together. After all, this is a man who makes Claudius' murderous ear-poisoning method seem angelic. Richard doesn't kill just one brother – he kills them all, as well as his own wife and young nephews.
And he's proud of it! Whereas Claudius prays that God may forgive him somehow, to wash the blood from his hand – "Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?" – Richard actually tells the audience his gruesome intentions from the get-go. "Since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair, well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain..." He regales us with the murderous rampage he is about to embark on and encourages us to come along for the ride. And we do!
He is malevolent, charming, brittle and slippery. The original Frank Underwood in his own house of cards. He is the Pied Piper and the audience become his child-like followers. He is psychologically addictive. A car accident that we rubberneck at. We cannot look away from this delightfully crooked creature. And that's just the way he wants it, because for too long, people have looked at him for all the wrong reasons.
And this is where, for me, the allure of Richard is far more personal.
You see, the other big thing that happened to me while I grew up in WA was childhood cancer. Radiotherapy left me with severe spinal malformation. Only half of my back muscle remained after treatment, and only the right side of my vertebrae grew beyond the illness. So, weirdly, half of my body is trapped in a time machine of treatment. The left-hand side of my back is still only three years old. It has not grown since then. The right hand side has formed a tight, curved, muscular hunch to compensate for my empty left.
My natural standing position is often charmingly described as "wonky". (So is my sitting position, come to think of it, as I catch my reflection in the mirror just now.) The left-hand side of my pelvis has dropped, because there is no back muscle to hold it in place. So I have one leg shorter than the other. Because of the overworked right-hand side, my shoulder slouches down and backwards.
To remove my tumour, the doctors had to take out several ribs from one side, which has left me concave, and with a tiny waist. (My pet hate is when people comment on how lucky I am to have a small waist. Through my polite smile I'm secretly envying their two kidneys and complete skeleton.)
My "deformities", as they have so often been called on medical paperwork, in doctors' forums, and at (dreaded) school swimming carnivals, are a part of myself that I have, in my career, learned to hide. I have spent years trying to right my posture. But it's an illusionist's act. It's really, really hard to stay straight! My body always wants to shift back to its wonk. And it often takes a team of magician's assistants to help me in my trick. Costume-makers at theatre companies insert panels in dresses to "fill the gaps", lighting designers have had to work around my shadows in scenes requiring minimal clothing, directors of photography often have to favour one side over another while framing me onscreen.
I have also had to learn to disguise the physical pain of working with "half a back". It is chronic and debilitating and often leaves me almost unable to walk at the end of the day. (I get a LOT of Ubers home from rehearsal ... I swear they wait around the corner at the Bell Shakespeare rehearsal rooms, ...)
But strangely, when I hit the stage, I feel no pain at all. "Doctor Theatre" takes over. The performance heals me. The audience, the text, the discipline, my fellow cast and crew – all of them provide some kind of magic medicine. When I'm performing – particularly in a Shakespeare, where so much depends on clarity, character and core – I am deliciously pain-free. Walking tall. Fleshed out and full. Supported.
And so, there's a fair amount of irony to taking on Richard III. While pretending to be the "bunch-back'd toad", I finally won't have to pretend to be straight-backed. I won't have to hide anything. I'll get to embrace every curve, creak and quirk of my body. With pride. And, unfortunately, that's not something many women are encouraged to do....
Which brings me to the idea of gender.
History's Richard is a man. Shakespeare's is too. But he's not suffering anything a woman can't and doesn't suffer. If anything, his existence is more like a woman's. He is judged for his body, his clothes. People call him appalling names. He is made to feel unworthy of his role in society. Incapable of certain jobs. He is held under a different moral compass to the people around him. He is assumed to be stupid. He is accused of being overly emotional. From birth, he has been disempowered simply because of his physicality. (If you're scoffing at this, I ask you to look at the recent US election results and tell me this isn't still happening.)
But despite all that, I'm not interested in playing Richard as a woman. I want him to remain a man. That's the beauty of theatre, of course. You can smash boundaries. You can turn to the audience, just like Richard does, and say, "Hey. This stage is a palace. This chair is a throne. This woman is a man." Theatre is brave and alive and immediate. The audience is encouraged to be as bold as the art itself. Theatre audiences delight in risk.
And so I want to embrace the misogyny of Richard while not disguising my femaleness. I want the audience to feel challenged by the sexism of Richard, played by a female performer. I want the audience to hear lines in new ways because they're coming out of a different body – a body that fits the description of Richard III physically, and yet paradoxically does not.
Because by encompassing every intricate aspect of gender onstage, you know what we get? A human.
And Richard, more than anything, is that. A living being, born with inconsistencies that saw him disqualified from society. He is the butt of jokes. He is so looked down upon that even dogs bark at him as he passes. Richard represents what happens to an individual who is deliberately unloved. He represents how a fractured individual can bite back at the barking dogs. And it ain't always pretty.
Back in WA, when my own physical issues presented themselves, I was thankfully surrounded with love and support from my family and friends. Despite the occasional bully calling me names, I didn't grow into a villainous tyrant. At least, I don't think I did. There are days when the pain is so bad that you wouldn't want to be around me, but I'm not going to slay anyone for it. Thankfully, I also had those Australian stories to get me through. And later, I found William Shakespeare.
I know I'll be performing as Richard in front of hundreds of humans, from all walks of life, with all kinds of stories. And although I know it's going to rack up a lot of Uber trips, I look forward to jumping into the body and bones of Richard – sans codpiece – and encouraging everyone in the audience to join the mayhem of humanity for a couple of hours. In the words of Richard Gloucester himself, "I am myself alone". But he doesn't have to be. Not if you see this very human villain for who he truly is, and join him in his story.
Kate Mulvany appears in Bell Shakespeare's Richard III, Sydney Opera House, February 25 – April 1; Canberra Theatre Centre, April 6–15; and Arts Centre Melbourne, April 20 – May 7. bellshakespeare.com.au