When Phyllida Lloyd took on Shakespeare, it was never going to be a conventional production. This is the woman who had leapt from the rarefied world of opera to the West End and then to movies when she steered the Abba musical Mamma Mia! to global domination, and whose stage dramas were bold and innovative.
In 2012, some critics were sniffy about her all-female production of Julius Caesar, dismissing it as gimmicky. Lloyd stuck to her idea and this week, four years on, her third all-woman Shakespeare production completed the trilogy – this time to several five-star reviews. Last week the trilogy became joint-winner of the Longford prize, awarded by the prison reform charity the Longford Trust – Lloyd worked with the the arts charity Clean Break in developing the plays, which are set in a women’s prison.
The idea for a trilogy of all-female Shakespeare performances came out of a conversation with Lloyd, says the actor Harriet Walter, who stars in all three productions at King’s Cross theatre.
It was a conversation “that is being had amongst women in the theatre, about the dearth of great roles for women over a certain age, and also [how] job opportunities are much narrower for women who are of unconventional size, shape, accent, ethnic origin, whatever”. Lloyd wanted to stage Shakespeare with a solely female cast. “It isn’t that women haven’t played Shakespeare men before – they have. But to actually make this bigger gesture, nobody had really done so in such a public way,” says Walter.
Walter played Brutus in Julius Caesar and the title role in 2014’s Henry IV. Performances of the final play in Lloyd’s series, The Tempest (Walter is Prospero), opened in September at the Donmar Warehouse’s specially commissioned pop-up theatre in London. This week it opened as part of the trilogy. The Guardian critic Lyn Gardner described seeing the three plays back to back, which audiences can do on certain trilogy days, as “utterly extraordinary”.
Walter, who had worked with Lloyd in 2005 (she played Elizabeth I in Mary Stuart), had doubts she could do it. “I’m not unusual among women, feeling slightly do I have the right to take over this territory? At first I was thinking, who needs me to play this part other than me?” Lloyd convinced her. “What she has above all is courage. I would say that’s her top quality. I think courage is commensurate with your fear – if you lack imagination and you’re fearless, that’s not courage to me. She has all the imagination and knows what she’s up against and still does it, and that’s real courage.”
Lloyd’s work is broad – she has done everything from little-known plays to Brecht, became a successful opera director and then went into musicals, directing Mamma Mia! as well as its film version, which has become one of the most successful British films of all time. She has been praised for her ability to re-imagine traditional works for modern audiences, but what her works in recent years seem to have most in common is a desire to put women centre stage. She explores their lives, as in The Iron Lady, her biopic of Margaret Thatcher, or tells stories that resonate – Mamma Mia! was a hit because so many women, particularly otherwise-ignored female middle-aged audiences, loved it with a passion.
Her creative collaborators also tend to be women – Mamma Mia! had a female producer, director, writer and star. Nicholas Payne, who recruited Lloyd to direct operas in the early 1990s, remembers suggesting an opera to her. “She’d say: ‘I’d do it if you gave me an entirely female technical crew.’ Of course, it was a deliberate challenge. You have to be bold about it, and that’s what she is.”
Lloyd grew up in a tiny Somerset hamlet, Nempnett Thrubwell, and went to an arts-based boarding school “where we lived and breathed theatre. We had to write, direct and produce plays from the age of 12, and perform them at pagan festivals on the Malvern Hills”. After university – Birmingham, where she read English and drama – she got a job at the BBC as an assistant in the drama department. Eager to have directing opportunities, she moved into fringe theatre, and was then given an Arts Council grant to train as a director.
Within a few years she had become associate director of the Bristol Old Vic, staged plays for Manchester’s Royal Exchange, the RSC, Royal Court, Donmar Warehouse and the National Theatre. In the early 1990s, Payne, then general director of Opera North, had been watching Lloyd’s career. “I saw two or three of Phyllida’s productions [that] made me think there is something about the way in which she gets people to react on stage, which you could see transferring to opera. This kind of very detailed work with actors could be very liberating for singers.”
He remembers them having coffee and proposing she become an opera director. “She’s very thoughtful. She asked very intelligent questions – about the attitude of singers, the length of rehearsal periods – sensible, practical questions.” She has always been “very picky”, he says. “Even when she was young and poor, she would only take on a project if she thought it was the right thing for her.”
Her first production was L’Etoile by the French composer Emmanuel Chabrier. “It’s a wonderful, lighthearted music and a completely zany story, and I had seen enough by then of Phyllida’s work to see she had a gift for comedy.” The reviews, he says, were the best of any show he’s ever put on. A number of successful – or at least talked-about – operas followed, including La Bohème and a controversial Wagner’s Ring cycle for English National Opera.
Judy Craymer, the producer who had the idea of a musical based on Abba hits, had seen some of Lloyd’s opera work. “She had never done a musical,” she says. “What I love is that she is slightly anti [the] traditional musical. So it was a different way of approaching the storytelling and the challenges. We didn’t want a typical Broadway/West End musical.”
Lloyd brought a strong sense of Shakespearean structure to the show, Craymer says, “a sense of an enchanted island, second chances and mistaken identity. I think she has a sense of emergency – not panic, but a vitality.
“Mamma Mia! was a story that had to happen within 24 hours, people had to have a reason for getting on and off the stage. She kind of whips people, in a very subtle way, into action.”
The stage musical was a smash hit, transferring to Broadway and around the world, but when it came to the film version, Craymer says there were suggestions that “it should be done by a major Hollywood director”. She was clear that Lloyd should do it even though she had never directed a film before. “But she loves challenges.”
The composer Gary Yershon has known Lloyd since 1986, when they met in the stairwell of the Cheltenham Everyman theatre, where Lloyd was associate director. He says she hasn’t changed. “She was pretty much the same as she is now – she’s a quiet, intelligent, humourful, warm-hearted person with a twinkle in her eye and an immense capacity for concentration and invention.” Lloyd has always been a “political artist” he adds (in an interview in September, she said she was making work “intended as a plea for tolerance”).
Yershon is one of a number of collaborators whom Lloyd has worked with regularly. “The rootlessness of the freelance world is not a thing I particularly thrive on, actually,” she said in 1997. “She was building some kind of team she could feel secure with,” says Yershon. “The thing is, she does push you, in the best possible way. You’re pushed as far as you can go, and beyond. I think to do that, she needed people she could trust and rely on. I think that’s the reason.”
Is she hard to work with then? He laughs. “On a personal level, she’s not hard at all. She’s completely delightful and everybody loves her. But it’s her curiosity – she will shine a light on every corner, so nothing is unexamined. If she stumbles across something and it reveals to her that we’re going in the wrong direction, then the whole thing will turn around and you have to be going there with her. It’s not that she herself is hard to work with, but the journeys you go on are sometimes very arduous.”
Walter says rehearsals are long and rigorous, but Lloyd encourages everyone to have an opinion. “She’s very open to everybody’s ideas, very genuinely. You need your director to have a game plan of some kind, but she has the confidence to know that by allowing in other people’s voices and thoughts, it’s not necessarily going to threaten her plan.
“She’s able to absorb everybody else’s thoughts and take what’s useful, and reject what isn’t, in the nicest possible way. She doesn’t come in with a fixed thing, which she wants us all to fulfil. It makes for a good creative rehearsal room, and a very cooperative piece of work.”
In the trilogy, she says, Lloyd was seeking to redress how Shakespeare represents our cultural identity and yet excludes so many voices, simply because of the time in which he was writing. “She is driven by anger at the exclusion of women from history and from the narrative of our culture,” says Walter. “And that’s a widespread anger that is now galvanising a lot of artists and a lot of politicians, and women in general – and men. I think that motivates her, but terribly importantly, she’s also extremely witty and fun-loving. I think she has a lot of joy that she wants to express, and fun and love.”
Potted profile
Born: 1957, Bristol
Career: After starting in the BBC drama department, Lloyd turned to theatre, first putting on her own fringe shows before working in regional theatre, directing A Comedy of Errors for the Bristol Old Vic and a number of plays for the Manchester Royal Exchange. Her London stage productions include Mary Stuart (Donmar Warehouse, which transferred to the West End and Broadway), Pericles and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (National Theatre). She directed the Mamma Mia! musical, and its film adaptation; her other film, The Iron Lady, is based on the life of Margaret Thatcher. Her operas include La Bohème and Carmen for Opera North, The Handmaid’s Tale for ENO, and Verdi’s Macbeth for the Royal Opera House.
High point: Her groundbreaking all-female Shakespeare trilogy and the global success of Mamma Mia!
Low point: Her production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, which featured pole dancing and a female suicide bomber, proved controversial.
What she says: “You can’t wait for someone to discover you, you have to just get on and do it. Have confidence that directing is a very suitable job for a woman – with our gift for collaboration, listening and reading the nuance of things.”
What they say: “Phyllida has this unparalleled gift at playfulness mixed with serious profound thinking.” – Fiona Shaw, actor and director
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