Making sense of history.
Adjoa Andoh is directing and starring in the first major production of Richard II with a company entirely made up of women of colour. Here she tells Greg Morrison about why now is the right time for this production.
How did this production come about?
I went to see Michelle [Terry] about a different project entirely. Richard II came up and she asked me if I’d be interested. So we talked about the idea. I was very interested in it being a play that would be running while we Brexited. There seemed to me to be a lovely congruence between this national conversation that we are having, about who we are as a nation, and the challenges that Richard wrangles with: who he is as a divinely appointed monarch and as a human being, who he is in relation to his closest detractors and his closest supporters, how they respond to his ability or inability to govern as God’s chosen on Earth. What does everyone really want? How do you be something that you’ve been born into, is that who you are? All those sorts of questions were terribly interesting to me.
Lets not forget Richard II is set at a time of great political national upheaval. Spoiler alert, he is the first King deposed — not killed in battle or captured by a warring nation or executed at home, but deposed and locked up. It’s a constitutional crisis. As time has passed since those early conversations, so the resonances grow. It has a flavour of Brexit, of plotting, when May was scrabbling around trying to convince a sceptical Commons of her wisdom and worthiness to lead the country. Also we look to the United States and Trump’s Mr Fixit ex-lawyer Michael Cohen’s revelations and the Mueller investigation and we wonder, will we see another leader of state deposed in the coming months? Or even at the civil unrest in France and across Europe with the gilets jaunes in opposition to austerity and threatened fuel hikes — reminiscent of the Wat Tyler peasants revolt in 1381, during the early part of Richard’s reign. Shakespeare is always pertinent at a micro and macro level.
So Michelle asked if I would be interested in directing this and I thought, yes I would — Shakespeare’s got the greatest wisdoms and there’s always something telling to discover in his work. Next Michelle asked who I’d want to play Richard and I said me — because I am not doing all that work and not play one of the most fabulous parts you can possibly play, why would you? Then I had to think about the madness of directing it and playing Richard.
How do you manage directing and playing the lead?
Well, I’m not completely bonkers, so I said I will co-direct it with my good friend and collaborator Lynette Linton, who I think stages things beautifully and has a great sense of storytelling. All of which is now justified as she’s just been appointed the new Artistic Director at the Bush Theatre — hurrah!
How are you approaching the production?
My big idea was I wanted to stage the play with women of colour as the actors who would realise it. Lynette was completely up for it and I suppose we wanted to create a space where women of colour could for once just come and be artists. A space where you could leave all the “Oh my god, I’m the only woman in the room”, “Oh my god I’m the only person of colour in the room” or a combination of the two at the door and, for once, just come and practise your art. So that’s on the sort of professional development/relief level.
We were also interested in seeing how it would be to examine Britain in the context of Brexit, in the context of the debacle of the Windrush generation of immigrants to this country who were citizens of the British Empire and what’s happened to them subsequently. We wanted to talk about the play in the context of Grenfell Tower, because the people in that building, the majority of people in that building, who suffered and died or survived in trauma, were people we would recognise — with a similar shared story to, say, my father — who came as immigrants from elsewhere and built a new life for themselves in this country. We wanted to talk about this country out of the mouths of people who could have been their children, or could have been them.
But I suppose the greatest provocation for why I wanted to do Richard II as an all-women-of-colour production was the World Cup. I love my football and when the World Cup is on we hang flags out of the kitchen window. If England and Ghana are playing there will be a great big flag of St George and a great big Ghanaian Black Star hanging from my kitchen window. Sadly Ghana was not playing last year so it was just the flag of St George. My daughter, who lives in Tanzania, rang me up and I said, “I’ve got the flag of St George up.” She went “Oh my God, mum.” And I said, “What?” and she said, “honestly” and I said, “That’s my flag, I’m having that flag.” I’m reclaiming the flag of St George.
Why?
My great uncle lost his arm in the Second World War, fighting for this country. Ghana was a country of Empire, my grandfather was a surveyor who surveyed the land for the Commonwealth back in the 1930s. My family had been educated in Ghana on the lines of a British public school system — that’s the history that they were taught. The Empire has made this country what it is in terms of everything: slavery, post-slavery, colonisation, raw materials, people’s land, their history, their language, their everything has been taken by Empire and used to fuel the industrial revolution in this country. That’s just on the Ghanaian side. On the English side of my family I’ve got farm labourers and merchant seamen and a great grandfather who fought in the Boer war. My connections to this country are deep. I was born in this country, I was raised in this country, I have a right to claim that flag.
And now we have historical evidence of Cheddar man, a dark-skinned, ancient human being on this island. So, when we talk about who belongs where, as we discover more with science and history it becomes a nonsense that only racists and fascists have a claim to this flag. In a way staging Richard II with all women of colour is about saying let’s double down on this ownership and have the people who are at the bottom of the heap of Empire, whose ancestors lives fuelled the growth of empire and who continue to contribute to this country, let’s have them tell the story of this nation. And in the context of Brexit, it’s not insignificant that without Gina Miller, a woman of colour, who took the government to court and received a lot of abuse as a result, there would be no parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process.
When you start a production, do you have an idea of where you want to get to or do you discover it along the way?
It’s got to be both. I set up the nature of things in terms of saying that I want the whole creative company to be women of colour, so the actors are, the other director Lynette Linton is, the designer is, the composer is, the musicians are, the fight director is, the voice coach is, stage management in the room are because, as Spike Lee says, “If you can’t see, you can’t be”. So, the production is letting you know you can be an actor of colour and do Shakespeare, no problem. You can be any member of the creative and stage management team as a woman of colour and do Shakespeare, no problem. Which cog in this particular creative machine do you want to be? You can be any of them, if you have the skill, the application and the interest.
We have young women of colour asking if they can come and watch rehearsals, if they can come and work backstage. We’ve got the first woman of colour to be made a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, Ingrid Pollard, documenting everything. Really, I’m trying to bring together a whole cohort of artists around this piece of work, sort of as an investment.
When you are cross-gender casting in this way, does it change the way you play?
Ok, so here’s the thing, I would say, we’re not cross-gender casting because we’re casting a whole company with women of colour. All the bodies in this production are women of colour. I am not interested in you coming and doing your best blokey acting or your best girly acting, I am interested in who your character is as a human being. This may sound ridiculous because we’re doing it with all women of colour, but in a way doing it obviates the conversation about women and colour at a stroke, because we are all the same — so what? I am interested in you as a human being beyond your melanin and your genitalia. In a way, doing a production like this is also a thought experiment into the universality of humanity. By saying we’ve all got the same signifiers so there are no signifiers, let’s tell the story.
Do you think that the world that you create on stage also has a responsibility to the world outside it?
I think it’s a contract, isn’t it? You and the audience make a contract. They make a contract not to chat, answer their phone, throw things at you, but to just sit and engage and open their hearts to it and take that leap to believe in the world you are creating on the stage. And you make a contract to be truthful, skilful, engaged and open-hearted with them and somewhere between those two contracts miracles happen, magic happens, whatever the alchemical term you want to use for it, chemistry happens. I think our responsibility is to honour the work we are presenting, to honour the characters we are playing, and do it in a respectful, focused and open-hearted way to honour the audience.
Here’s the thing, when I was 16 I was doing O-level drama. I was fairly miserable as lots of teenagers are:
I was an Oxbridge candidate who’d gone up a year early, so I was very young for my year, and I was pretty depressed. My parents were getting divorced and I was pretty unhappy. One of the tasks we had was to go to the theatre and watch a show of our choosing and write a commentary piece on it. I went to see David Hare’s Plenty starring Kate Nelligan, 1979, and I was blown away by the show. It was a matinee, it was about a young woman who gets sent overseas, works in special ops having had a life as a secretary and finds out she’s brilliant at special ops. She is most herself in that moment when she’s in France. She falls in love, then the war ends and she comes back to being a secretary in London and it is devastating because you see a human being suddenly doing the thing that they are built to do and they glory in it and when it is taken from them they are inconsolable.
There’s that absolutely blinding speech, isn’t there, where she’s by the window.
By the window, exactly.
It’s an extraordinary thing because David Hare’s words are so clear, there’s nothing showy, there’s nothing fancy about it, and she just enumerates with such understanding and such a felt life the deprivation and the limitedness that’s about to be placed on her and, if that’s what life is, then what is life?
And as a 16-year-old mixed-race black girl living in the Cotswolds, I heard that. It was like a bell going off in my head. This is 40 years ago and just you saying “she’s standing by the window”, I have goosebumps. I remember it so clearly and that moment in the theatre, on that matinee afternoon, changed the course of my life. How powerful is theatre that it can do that, because in that moment I understood that there was something extraordinary that could happen in this space. That’s when I knew this was a world I wanted to get lost in for the rest of my life.
I will always say to companies of actors, and I will always say it to myself when I am having an “oh my god I can’t believe I’ve got to do this again” feeling: there may be a 16-year-old or a 60-year-old in the audience today, who has got on a bus, who has travelled some distance, who may have had to rearrange a million things to get here, who needs you to be at your best, because they need to hear what you have to say to them in this moment, this afternoon, to save their life or change their life, or shift something in their perspective in some way. And that’s your sacred duty as a theatre worker, to provide that space for them.
Shakespeare, being the great humanitarian playwright that he is, is speaking to all of us in all our ages and stages and circumstances and backgrounds. He’s speaking to all of us because he speaks into the soul of a human being. By doing something that seems, from the outside, so exclusive, by saying it’s going to be all women of colour, I’m doing this, this hard, so that everybody understands that the invitation is to all of us, because this story is for all of us.
Richard II plays in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 21 April 2019.
This article first appeared in GLOBE Magazine, free to Members of the Globe.
