Phyllida Lloyd, director of Mamma Mia! and Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, is to create an all-female stage version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
She said it was important to open up opportunities for older actresses who have fewer than their male counterparts — and face much tougher demands to look good.
“Women have to work so hard to fulfil expectations,” Ms Lloyd said. “You can become fat and bald and crazy as an actor and become increasingly employable but women have a tightrope to walk and their options are limited. So in a way this is about freeing people from those strictures.”
She said the play at the Donmar Warehouse would be an important “adventure” because older actresses are effectively limited in Shakespeare to playing Volumnia in Coriolanus, Hamlet’s mother or Queen Margaret in Richard III. She said: “There are a lot of great jobs for the boys in this repertoire. But there aren’t enough roles for my friends — women who have spent a lifetime developing an expertise in this extreme sport — in big-hitter classics.
“It’s just not good enough. So I think we’re going to have a go, with all humility. With women’s voices speaking these words, we’re going to hear new things.”
The director is returning to the Donmar for her first play since premiering the award-winning Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller there seven years ago. She will be reunited with her Mary Stuart star Harriet Walter. The production previews from November 29 and follows the Royal Shakespeare Company’s all-black Caesar, set in Africa.
The third play in the Donmar’s next season will be the first London revival of Conor McPherson’s hit play The Weir since its premiere in 1997. Josie Rourke, the theatre’s artistic director who will direct it, said it would be “thrilling” to explore a ghost story in the Donmar auditorium where everyone is so close “you can feel the collective breath”.
