‘To me, Lady Macbeth looks like Tina Turner’: female music mix about to rock the RSC | stage

WHitney White is practically swooning. “I have more respect and love for William Shakespeare than I can honestly communicate,” she said in a video call from Stratford-upon-Avon. When she went to Holy Trinity Church to visit his grave, she said: “I just cried, because the language is so beautiful to me.”

White’s first encounter with Shakespeare was in Chicago in high school, where A Midsummer Night’s Dream unleashed the “theater nerd” in her, she says. “I remember thinking: ‘Shouldn’t all theater have music and dancing and scripts and battles and be as full as possible?’ Then you grow up and start doing theatre, and we divide the work into musicals and plays.

Except White didn’t. A Tony-nominated director (for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding), actress and songwriter, her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather’s church, which had a 50-strong choir. It follows that music in Shakespeare is the key to it, the meter being every bit as valid as the meaning. I realized this when I enrolled in a theater program at Brown University in Rhode Island. “I was assigned what you call an epic speech. I’ll never forget the feeling I had when I finished it. It was like the sky was clear.”

Singing was “the first thing I ever did in my life,” she says. And I thought to myself, “Wow, Shakespeare makes me feel the same way.” It sounds like a song.” Although she recognizes much of her world in his, she says, “For a long time, we’ve been told that only some people can make up these stories. I think this is not true. “I think whoever Shakespeare was, he made it for all of us to play.”

But as an actress, she found that she would only play minor roles such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet or Maria in Twelfth Night. This was how diverse the cast was 10 years ago. “Being a leading lady still creates a sense of conservatism for some people — and I think that’s what really started it all.”

She points to her massive, boundary-breaking theatre, Everything But Imagination. About to be presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company in two parts, it mixes characters from different Shakespeare plays: Lady Macbeth and Emilia Othello in one, and Juliet and Richard III in the other.

When I started the project, music was paramount. “I read Macbeth and I heard rock ‘n’ roll. To me, Lady Macbeth was like Tina Turner. She was like, ‘I want more but the world won’t give me more.'” And after a while, White realized: “Wait, I don’t just like Lady Macbeth. My favorite characters are also Juliet, Emilia and Cleopatra. But oh, why do all these women die in Chapter 5?”

For all her admiration for Shakespeare, there is a reworking of these characters and an interrogation of women’s ambition, strength and mortality in the productions. “In the midst of all this, I lost two women in my family, and I’m still not happy with the way I lost them,” she says. “The show is a look at the arcs of heterosexual female fatalities… I feel like we’re all very relieved that women are meeting an untimely end.”

The final element she added to the show were the witches from Macbeth, who are front and center. “As a black woman, I don’t want to tell this story alone. It’s not just my story. I needed allies on stage to process the trauma and the queerness.” The witches are bossy, funny, humane, and sing in a mixture of what sounds like gospel and hymn.

“A spell is a prayer, and a witch is a holy woman, right? That didn’t seem like a big leap to me. I also wanted to put the shows in a place where collective witness could take place, which is the church. If I go to the church I grew up in, the whole community is there, watching me. That’s how I grew up, and I don’t understand the world without a community of women watching me, telling me what’s good and what’s bad. My whole life has been my mother and her two sisters who guide me. The Three Witches are those people – my aunts and my mother on stage with me every Night.

Did her relationship with Shakespeare change after this examination of his women? “It’s complicated. My relationship with ‘us’ has changed because Othello is what it is, but why Othello is still relevant is our fault. I think Shakespeare might have recorded something 400 years ago, but why didn’t we?” we Changed? It’s about us. We are the problem, not Shakespeare.

At the beginning of her version of Macbeth, she states that “understatement is everything.” With that in mind, she says, “I have a great respect for the text that I think allows me to play with it, because I read and studied and sat with the language and tried to reflect on how narratives stay alive in the newsfeed. That was another big way I wrote these plays.”

So, for example, All But a Fiction traces a line between a speech given by Iago’s wife, Emilia, about abused women, and the rising rates of domestic violence during the epidemic and subsequent years. She tries to take the audience on the journey she had in mind when she read the plays. “I have an opinion about them that stems from my life experience, and I believe that I have the right to marry these two things and ask many questions.”

However, being in a resettlement support center brings stress. “I’ve never felt more frightened in my life, but I’ve also never felt more alive. I met Ian McKellen and Judi Dench and I couldn’t even speak. They have an armory here where you can pick out weapons for display: think how many hands have touched those weapons! Being in Shakespeare’s chapel, I certainly bow at the altar – but I’d like to add a new song to the Mass.”