Artist Interview: Tina Packer
The Shakespeare legend (and the Lantern’s Volumnia) shares her unique insights on the depth in the Bard’s text, channeling her expertise in the rehearsal room, and more.
Originally produced during Lantern Theater Company’s 2016/17 season and streaming on demand June 1–27, 2021, as part of our Plays from the Lantern Archives series, Coriolanus features the legendary Tina Packer as Volumnia, the fierce and fearsome mother of the title character.
“Tina Packer is quite simply one of the finest classical actors on the planet,” wrote The Huffington Post in their review of the Lantern’s production of Coriolanus. Tina is among our foremost experts, actors, and directors of Shakespeare. She is a co-founder of Shakespeare & Company and the author of Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays, Tales from Shakespeare, and Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management. During the original 2017 run of Coriolanus, Lantern dramaturg Meghan Winch was delighted to speak with Tina about Volumnia, the depth in Shakespeare’s text, and channeling her expertise in the rehearsal room.
Meghan Winch: You’re an expert on Shakespeare’s women. What makes Volumnia unique? How do you see her situated in the larger trajectory?
Tina Packer: [Laughs] I suppose you can say I’m an expert in Shakespeare’s women. It’s certainly true I’ve written about them a lot. I find Volumnia to be absolutely fascinating.
I break down Shakespeare’s women into five different parts. In the early Shakespeare, he’s projecting on women. They’re either shrews or they’re virgins on the pedestal. And then suddenly with Juliet he starts writing from the inside of women. And once women get their full agency and have their full sexuality, then something shifts between the relationship between men and women, or the masculine and the feminine if you prefer to put it that way. But when these two attributes or these, the sexes, are actually in parity within themselves — they’re never in parity in the outside world, of course, because you know our organizational structures make them always less-than — but when in Shakespeare’s imagination and in the creative life they have equality, then what happens is that there is a kind of sexual, spiritual merging which takes loves to a whole other level. And it’s importance in the world picture becomes powerful, and almost a counteracting force to the organizational structures that have been built up.
The third part shifts into women telling the truth about what they see, and if they’re in their frocks they get killed for telling the truth, or they run mad or commit suicide or all three, or they disguise themselves as men in order to tell the truth, and they go off to the forest of Arden or wherever it is that they can not only tell the truth, but they can organize everybody. Their voices are heard and it all turns out terribly well at the end and it’s a comedy.
Then the fourth part, which is where I think Volumnia really belongs, is the darkest period of Shakespeare’s writing life as far as women are concerned. Actually, it’s the darkest period as far as anyone is concerned. And in these plays, the women really want the same things as the men do, or think they do. So I’m talking about Lady Macbeth, the two eldest daughters of Lear, and Volumnia. You know, the other play in this period is Timon of Athens, but there’s only a couple of women in that, they’re both whores, they have about twelve lines, and their job is simply to give men diseases.
I think Volumnia is the ultimate portrait of the overbearing woman, the woman who is so totally thwarted by the organizational structures that she can’t actually do what she wants to do — which is lead Rome, be a great warrior. Volumnia in this day and age might have somewhere to put her energies. But at that time, no. She’s meant to play the woman’s role, which is to breed sons for Rome. Now we never know where Coriolanus’ father is, so she’s become the mother and the father, if I can say that. She has a best friend, Menenius, who is a kind of surrogate father, but he’s just a nice presence, he’s not a warrior presence. She’s the warrior presence as well as the all-nurturing mother. And so it means that she does have power, but not overt power. Her power is from her relationship with her son. And he’s the one who needs to go out and fight the battles and win the wounds and scars.
It’s after this play that Shakespeare goes back to Stratford. His mother died the year he wrote this play, and I don’t think he could have written this play if his mother had still been alive. And it aligns with historical events as well besides his mother dying — which I think was most important — but there was a famine in Stratford that year and had been the previous couple of years, so this whole thing about “Who’s got grain and who hasn’t?” was a huge issue in Stratford. And all the areas in England had representation in the Parliament, but they didn’t choose that representative themselves. The Privy Council chose who it should be, somebody they felt they could get on with, but you did have the right of ratification. So you could say, or at least the middle-class people could say, “Yes, we ratify this person.” And Stratford was refusing to ratify their MP. So there are three real strong parallels between Shakespeare’s own life at this point.
But he goes back to Stratford after this and starts writing very different plays — not realistic plays. And I would say Coriolanus is very realistic, politically realistic. You know, who’s got political power? Who says what to whom, what effect that has. Can you lie? All these have huge resonances for our politics today.
But Shakespeare, after this, goes back to Stratford and starts writing a different kind of play, a fairy tale or a myth, in which psychological development is more expressed through the whole play. It’s really Joseph Campbell time, if I can put it like that. What’s the story?…For Shakespeare it’s the heroine’s story. In other words, the daughter will redeem the sins of the father. She needs a couple things: she needs a very creative force to be with her; she can’t do it without creativity. She needs a young man to stand with her, and this idea of the magical powers or the creative powers. And then the terrible tragedy that always happens at the top of the play or fifteen years earlier can then be redeemed.
So Coriolanus is the play just before Shakespeare shifts his storytelling again and the women become the redeemers. And I think Volumnia is a huge example of the all-destroying mother, who gets a little profound insight as to what she’s done by the end.
MW: You’ve directed most of Shakespeare’s plays —
TP: I have.
MW: You co-founded Shakespeare & Company —
TP: I did.
MW: You’ve performed in several of the plays —
TP: Yes.
MW: How do you bring all of your vast experience into the rehearsal room for one specific role in one specific production?
TP: Well, I have to say it’s quite difficult [laughs heartily]. You know, I think starting a theater company, in order to be able to do theater the way I wanted to do it, really allowed me understand something about Shakespeare that I think most people don’t, because he also was the founder of a theater company. And he also was one of the shareholders, so he stayed there for a long time as the company itself grew older and as he wrote plays, and they performed all his plays. So our company has done the same: We have performed all his plays, and this summer I’ll finish the canon [as a director]. I’ll do Cymbeline; that’s my last one. But what that meant was that I was always looking at Shakespeare from the inside, I feel, rather than from an academic, outside point of view, and that’s why I think I started seeing these patterns in the women, in his writing of the women.
I’m fascinated by language — the text is what I start with, and we go way into the text. I don’t mean sitting around talking about the text, I mean getting the words in our body and seeing what the atavistic depths of those words are, in the sound. Because language has been around a lot longer than we have. And so, we’re living out of these words that we inherited, but language has DNA. So if I say, in the simplest way, “mother,” or you say “mother,” probably your own mother will come up first, but then other mothers will start coming out. Mothers you see on film, your grandmother, other people’s mothers, the monster mothers, then the kind of universal mothers start coming out. And all that’s in the language of “mother,” “mama,” “mere.” All the languages, they’re all “mmmm,” you know. That’s the DNA of the language. So what is it our lips know about “mmmm”? Well obviously, it’s the first sound we make; the first sound we make is related to our mother. And, so that’s still in us, do you understand? So, I go into the text. I have various exercises I’ve invented over the years, in order to really own the text. I’m always trying to do my homework so that I can make these words live inside me. I’m not reporting my speech, I’m inventing it, creating it at the moment I say it, and my connection to the language is deep.
What happens with a character like Volumnia is, I get her point of view but when I step out of it, she does make me slightly sick. [laughs heartily] So you have to learn these things. I am the priest in this case. It’s my job to do this. But I do think it’s why actors are very compassionate people. They know what it is to walk in other people’s shoes. They understand other human beings. If you’re playing Richard III, you need to know why he kills and why he keeps on killing. And so to get in the mind of a serial killer is quite something, and I think at the very basis of what it means to be an actor is that you’re willing to embrace every kind of character. That doesn’t mean to say that you have to live it offstage. In fact, I think it’s terribly important that you don’t live it offstage. But you find a way to step out of it; that’s the end of that, I’m out of the ritual space now, and I’m just Tina walking down the street.
However, I can see all parts of myself in Volumnia. But it’s really the text that takes me in there. “Thinkest thou it honorable for a noble man still to remember wrongs?” You know? I mean, at the beginning everything is:
These are the ushers of Marcius: before him he
Brings noise, and behind him he leaves tears;
Death, that dark spirit, in his nervy arm doth lie;
It advanced, and then declines, and then men die.
I love all that — I mean, Volumnia loves all that. But by the time she gets to the end, she’s saying “Please, reconcile the Volscis and make this peace,” a thing she would have never said before. And so how does she make that journey? That feels to be my task. That I own these words and out of that really find what the journey is.
MW: You’ve talked before — and this is related — about how the structure of the language is the most important thing. Is that the DNA you’re talking about? Is that the scaffolding?
TP: It is both of those things. So I’ve been talking about the depth of the word, what I call the atavistic depths of the words, but within that Shakespeare is writing basically in iambic pentameter except when he switches to prose. But if you think about iambic pentameter for a minute, it’s
pa PUM pa PUM pa PUM pa PUM pa PUM
and that is how Marlowe wrote all the time. It was called Marlowe’s Mighty Line, so it’s like a rock band that’s doing that beat:
pa PUM pa PUM pa PUM pa PUM pa PUM!
What Shakespeare did was he shifted that. It’s always there, it can’t not be there, because it’s the pulse, it’s the heartbeat. So it’s always there, but what he started doing was the rhythm of the meaning and the shifts:
pa PUM PUM PUM pa PUM pum
So he’s not following the iambic, but you’ve still got the iambic, because it’s there inherently within the text. So you’ve got two lines now. Then, if you’re actually breathing on the end of lines, that brings up the last word all time. The last line of the thing gives the psychological structure of your character. And because you’re breathing it brings it slightly up. You’re not dropping your line endings, you’re bringing them up.
So you’re working within a music, if I can put it like that. Now it’s not, “Oh, I’m doing Voice Beautiful.” Don’t think that. Because you know, 50, 60 years ago there used to be the “Voice Beautiful” actors. It’s not that. When you listen to Chopin, you’re filled with this kind of sadness, as opposed to Bach, where you’re being overwhelmed by the patterns and the resonances and things. They put you in different emotional states. Well, Shakespeare’s always putting you in different emotional states, and he does it through the structure. So if you don’t work on the structure, then you’re missing half of the play. That gives you the depth to what it is you’re doing. Besides the thought, and besides the DNA in the language.
MW: Can you talk about the development of Women of Will, both the performance piece and the book?
TP: Well, it was a long-term project. I wanted it to be a performance piece because I knew it had to be in the body. I only saw three movements in his writing at first, so it was three plays first. And then I started realizing while I was doing it that it was five plays. Which is interesting, because it’s the five-act structure. In other words, in Shakespeare, in the first act, you get all the players on the stage and you understand what the dilemma is. In the second act, you start having who the protagonists are and how they’re lining up. Third act…the forces are opposing each other. Fourth act, all hell breaks loose. Fifth act, it gets resolved, and either everybody survives and gets married — it’s a comedy! — or they all die and it’s a tragedy. So they follow the same structure. Well actually, his writing of the women to some extent follows that same structure. So that was pleasing to me.
I kept on thinking, “how can anybody possibly do five plays about the same subject?” but I was fascinated by it and I had my own company so what the hell? [Laughs] One reason to have your own company.
I was doing that, and I did it for several years. Then, you know, I’m the artistic director, and I couldn’t get enough time to concentrate on it. So I actually let it go for about five years, and then I thought “I’ve got to get back to it. I have to finish this off.” I’d performed the three parts, and then I was doing Hamlet with my son playing Hamlet and me playing Gertrude, and Nigel Gore just came into the company at that time. He was playing Claudius, and we got on really well. And I started thinking “Maybe he’s my partner for Women of Will.”
By this time, I’ve got so much information in my head, that I thought I’ve got to download all this information, I can’t just keep it. So I started writing it and then I had all these other things: honor vs. love, things that seemed to me that really needed some deeper explanation that the two lines I could give it onstage in order to get it down into two or two and a half hours. So that’s when I started writing that out and then I started putting it together as a book.
I find I like writing a lot. And when I was much younger, when I was 18 I thought I’d be a writer instead, and I was a journalist for a short time…And I like being able to define more deeply what I think the world’s about through theater.
In order to do Women of Will, I realized I had to step aside as the artistic director. I couldn’t do both jobs; there was just no way. I had to get on the road, I had to think about things, and when you’re running a company, you’re just at it all the time. And Shakespeare & Company’s quite a complicated company. It’s education, training, and performance, three legs to the stool. Our performance program is not just some kind of little adjunct — we’re really into what education is about through Shakespeare, and we do it in the justice system as well; the training is really the center of everything we do. So we translate that pedagogy into the education programs and into the performance programs. So I couldn’t keep on doing this and run the organization and write the book. I could do the other two books, one because it was a children’s book [Tales from Shakespeare] and that was not too strenuous. And Power Plays I had a co-author, John Whitney, who was the Deming Professor at Columbia Business School…so that hadn’t been heavy lifting. But this was going to be heavy lifting, so that’s why I had to step aside. And I don’t regret that… my artistic life is still with them.
This 2017 interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Related reading: Coriolanus: Legend and Literature — The historical origins of the central figure of Shakespeare’s political and psychological thriller
Coriolanus is the fourth and final installment in our Plays from the Lantern Archives series, which celebrates some of the finest productions from recent Lantern seasons, brought vividly back to life on screen. This performance was professionally filmed with a live theater audience in April 2017, and is streaming June 1–27, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
