In an age of the female cold-case killer, from Lady Killers to a steady stream of revisionist histories, the women once dismissed as monsters are finally being re-examined with cultural panache.
Enter centre stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon: All Is But Fantasy, a gig-theatre musical performance in two parts. Written and directed by Broadway multi-award-winning Whitney White, it’s Shakespeare as you’ve never heard it before.
With a live band on stage behind her, White summons her coven of “weird sisters” to re-imagine Shakespeare’s catalogue of femme fatales, not as fantasists or fanatics, but through a proudly feminist lens. And what a world she creates. You don’t need your GCSE notebook to hand to enjoy this.
Instead, the women explain their motives and misgivings themselves through a series of new songs, simmered in a theatrical cauldron. Blues, gospel and funk are brewed into something vibrant, funny and fiercely empowered, a kind of musical alchemy. It’s reinvention. It’s Shakespeare turned up to eleven.
The close female harmonies are glorious, a sound I’m helplessly biased toward, having grown up on Broadway’s brilliant but under-appreciated Songs for a New World and The Witches of Eastwick.
At times, the show edges into female barbershop territory: exposed, precise, nowhere to hide. When it locks in, it’s spine-tingling. I had actual goosebumps.
Modern jokes land cleanly. “We’re going for the BIG A!” says one of the Weird Sisters.
“Allyship?”
“No. Ambition!”
After Lady Macbeth’s blood-soaked hands drip all over the stage, the fourth wall shatters. Stage crew rush on with a mop and bucket to scrub out that damn spot. It’s gloriously camp, and devastatingly knowing.
Shakespeare’s own insults aren’t sanitised either. Curses fly. “He called her whore! That villainous knave!”
The poor soul we perhaps ought to pity is actor Daniel Krikler, billed simply as “Man”. Whether he’s a hapless Macbeth bullied by his Lady, or a second-rate Iago barking “Wench, filch it” at Desdemona, he’s a strong singer and an excellent sport.
For the entire show he’s condemned to stalk the stage in leather trousers, less tragic hero and more silhouette of Eddie Cochran on early-1960s BBC television, the sort of look once scandalous enough to make aunties clutch their pearls. I didn’t hear any complaints at the interval.
What I did hear, though, was far more reassuring.
The couple next to me, front row where stage meets stalls, were visiting Stratford for the weekend. They’d simply decided to do “something Shakespearean”.
By the interval they’d discovered the production was actually two separate performances. One headed for the bar; the other sprinted to the Box Office for matinee tickets the next day.
They came back grinning.
