LADY M is a one-woman journey into the mind of Shakespeare’s “fiend-like queen”. We sat down for an exclusive interview with creator and performer, Jessica Kinsey and writer and director Benjamin Askew to discuss the upcoming performances.
LADY M runs 14th – 18th October at The Playhouse – Tickets here
Lady Macbeth has long been condemned as a byword for ambition, so what did you find beneath that reputation that made her worth an entire evening?
We knew we weren’t satisfied with the reductive definitions and simplistic explanations that can surround Lady Macbeth. We wanted to unpick our own assumptions about her “ambition”, and to explore it as an attempt to solve a problem rather than as an essential quality of her being. In doing that, we discovered the space for a more varied, more surprising, more human idea of the character. Our Lady M is capable of being strong, vulnerable, complex, contradictory, funny, sexy, crude, sophisticated… We haven’t tried to make her “nice”, but what we have found is a human being, who (like many of us) is desperately trying to make sense of herself, get control of her life, and manage her own suffering, albeit in ways that are extreme… and that don’t work out too well for her.
How did you decide which of Shakespeare’s lines to preserve and which moments demanded new writing?
Barring a couple of very minor edits, the lines Shakespeare wrote for Lady Macbeth are all preserved in our play. Where we have added and invented, we’re exploring between and beneath those lines: interrogating her responses to characters and situations, following the kinds of thought processes and internal conflicts that other Shakespearean characters (including her husband) get to voice through extended soliloquies. Rather than “re-writing Shakespeare”, what we’re doing is taking what is often the actor’s unseen process of imagining the story from their own character’s perspective (trying to step into their psychology and their experience) and sharing that with the audience as a performance in its own right. We don’t change the events of the play, we just go on its journey with her.
Jessica, what does carrying a full psychological portrait alone demand of you that an ensemble piece never could?
From an actor’s perspective, the piece we’ve created is hugely exciting and hugely demanding. There are so many plates to spin! You’re telling the story, constructing the space, inhabiting the inner world, responding to other characters, playing the actions… but it’s only ever you onstage. It’s exposing and exhilarating. The character has so many facets and changes, and the text itself is like being on a rollercoaster. It’s this heady cocktail of Shakespeare’s text, combined with the material Ben has scripted based on our workshopping of the character, and it’s constantly shifting, from the profound and the poetic to the crude and confrontational, and it’s always moving, always changing, always driving forward. Technically, emotionally, physically, it’s a massive workout! It requires so much focus and commitment, but, as an actor, it’s also an opportunity to bring everything you’ve got to the table.
Benjamin, how does a director shape the rhythm of a one-woman show when there is no second performer to play against?
It’s a fascinating challenge. What is quite specific to this piece is that we’re trying to follow the rhythm of her experience: how she perceives events more than the events themselves. We might condense or expand time, for example – brutally cutting text or adding to it with detours and repetitions – depending on how the moment is being processed. That psychology has its own rhythm, and we’ve developed different ways of capturing that. Some are familiar, such as shifts in relating to the space, the audience, different people (even if we can’t see them!), but many have emerged from our approach to exploring the character. We’ve done a lot of work examining the internal and external personalities that exist within Lady M. She feels to us like an ensemble cast in her own right! And so the dynamics between these “parts” of her shape the rhythms of the piece as much as the exits and entrances we see in more conventional drama.
Why did you choose playful physical storytelling as the language for one of the darkest figures in Shakespeare?
It’s a choice that developed rather than one we went in with. However, both the physicality and the playfulness emerged as responses to the questions we were asking. How do we tell this story with only one body in the space? How do we loosen our grip on our assumptions about the character? How do we stage her experience of this scene rather than the scene itself? How do we turn psychological discussions into something we can feel in the space? We play. We physicalise. We bend and break the rules. So, this playfulness is an authentic reflection of our process. Sometimes it lightens the mood. Sometimes it darkens it further, adding biting absurdity to an already intense situation. But it’s always a part of our language.