Drama

...Shakespeare encoded much in the way of instruction for actors and production in his dialogue, and it is revealing to look at the status of women in his plays and compare the suggestions of the text, as it has come down to us, with the ways in which his women characters are being interpreted on stage now, in an age where we suppose ourselves to be less gender-biased than generations before our time. We might reasonably expect that women would be portrayed as able and self-controlled in the 1990s, and so in the Sydney 1995 season we saw Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew stomping off at the end of the play rather than accepting her husband's bowing to her, but we saw Portia tremble uncertainly in the middle of her triumphant court case. By 1998, the Globe's Portia came to full professional excellence. More has been happening on stage than Shakespeare necessarily indicated, and more has changed in the theatrical profession than women's status in society, giving rise to many interpretations focusing on men's attraction to men, particularly with Coriolanus. Actresses have wrestled with the women's parts, finding difficulties in directors' interpretations of a role, the voices or the silences. The actresses' voices can speak now, exploring what has been done with conceptions of relationships and conflicts, by male and female producers and directors....