Much Ado About This Poisoned, Vengeful Shrew: Shifting to Live Theatre

Greetings readers, I am coming to you one final time from across the pond!

As June and my time studying in England conclude, this update too concludes a month full of theatre and introspection about my project on reclaiming feminine rage. Perhaps its biggest development has been consolidating the material it covers to focus solely on theatre. Seeing a plethora of shows on the West End prompted the realization that modern or retold, this theme is experiencing a Renaissance. It is not just being featured but celebrated. Through sharing and witnessing female rage live, the potential impact of my project has become something more urgent and tangible, giving me a push of inspiration.

Just as making Anne Boleyn’s costume last month turned from a personal project into an academic one, so did my experiences of viewing West End productions. I was witness to an explosion of passion, violence, and emotional rage given by actress Stephanie J. Block in Kiss Me, Kate. Beatrice’s growl of: “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!” (Act IV, Scene 1), in Much Ado About Nothing. An interpretation of Taming of the Shrew that used a childish set design to recognize how infantile and fragile the male characters acted, ending not with a strong “moral” but with silent admonishment. A recorded production of Medea accessed with the assistance of the National Theatre Archives where Helen McCrory plays the titular character not as insane but as an aggressive woman with nothing seeking something: “You heard the softness blow from my lips no more. Look on me and see a godly strength in this earthly body. Look on me and see vengeance!”

During these shows, there was an unexpected communal celebration of female expressions of anger. Garnering vocal audience reactions, theaters became safe spaces for women to find catharsis in characters and comradery in their experiences. Through my piece introduced last month, a recreation of Anne Boleyn’s costume from Six, I realized this principle of attachment could extend beyond spaces and attach itself to characters. I began wearing the costume to places where her real-life counterpart lived with the original intention of documenting how her legacy as a cunning and vocal woman could not erased. But when staff and visitors recognized the character, the potential impact of my project finally dawned. Giving a new voice to narratives, whether written centuries or decades ago, introduces the opportunity to insert the aggressive female into gaps of contemporary gender expression. By focusing my research on live actions and participating in this conversation, I am highlighting and attempting to fill this gap.

But, as female rage gains recognition, so too does its risk of being commodified and diluted to a sanitized depiction of “girl-power” or “girl-bossing.” Speaking through my academic and artistic voice, I am trying to contribute to this conversation in a productive way spanning theatre, literature, women’s studies, and art. My goal is to critique and celebrate impassioned, gendered anger in an approachable but authentic way. To conclude, contributing an inspired, but original synthesis of visual re-interpretation, my final body of work (a documented portfolio of mixed media pieces or “artifacts” that I have engaged with performatively), is an inciting invitation for viewers to reconsider how narratives change in the perspective of its players.

As I look onto July, a month focused on implementing my research into making physical art pieces in acts of creation and destruction, I am considering how my own voice can challenge this conversation. Questions that I seek to answer in the process of making like:

Is feminine rage seeking justification? Does it even need to be?

Is the narrative source for this rage ever untethered to a man?

How does the audiences’ reaction to female rage change depending on morality, like from Medea to Anne Boleyn?

How does the increase in feminine rage onstage parallel, encourage, or harm its freedom to exist in everyday life? Why is this correlation important?

Until next month! Signing off!