Michelle Terry interview

By Dominic Cavendish

Daily Telegraph 20 April 2019

Michelle Terry’s most fondly cherished moment to date treading the boards
at Shakespeare’s Globe came during Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2009 as the Princess of
France. “I felt a tug on my corset-strings. I turned around and a man said,
‘I’m terribly sorry, your majesty, your corset has come undone.’ Amazing
– he was being completely pragmatic, yet he was so imaginatively
engaged he called me ‘your majesty’. That’s the Globe in a nutshell.”
When she steps out on to that beautiful, open-air replica Elizabethan stage next
week, greeting the gaze of some 1,500 people as Hamlet – the first female Hamlet in
the theatre’s 21-year history – Terry, 39, won’t just be assuming the mantle of one of
the greatest and most demanding roles in the canon: all eyes will also be on her as
the Globe’s new artistic director. The play’s first line, as she observes wryly, is “Who’s
there?” She describes the looming moment as “terrifying”.

The spotlight on Terry is all the fiercer given who she is replacing: Emma Rice, who
formally bows out this weekend after two turbulent years at the helm. Yet anyone
who considers Terry a safe choice needs to think again. Terry has warm praise for
Rice’s tenure, even the contentious use of modern lighting and sound systems.
“I was as excited as anyone by what she was trying to do,” she says. “The building was
conceived as a radical experiment and it was the most radical appointment. Could a
balance have been found? We will never know because it was cut off so soon. She is
the best thing that has ever happened to the Globe. She caused a profound period of
reflection.”

As a result of that reflection, much clearer, tighter parameters have been set for the
playing conditions: the technical add-ons have vanished and the emphasis shifted
back to a natural acoustic and “shared lighting”. Still, on the surface, Terry appears
an unlikely candidate to take over. She has had no experience directing in the theatre
or running a company. Yet after she made an informal offer of help during the crisis,
she was invited to consider greater involvement. She knew the place from the inside,
adored it too, and had such a proven track-record in Shakespeare (with credits at the
RSC, National and Regent’s Park, where she played Henry V) that she could self-
evidently serve as a powerful ambassador for the Bard and the building, helping it
rediscover its shaken sense of purpose.
Michelle Terry as Henry V at the Open Air Theatre, Regents Park CREDIT: Alastair Muir
Identifying what’s unique to the Globe as a guide to the way forward has
enabled Terry to build upon one crucial aspect of Rice’s legacy – the
desire to achieve a 50-50 split in terms of gender parity, to which she has
made a solid commitment. Putting diversity at the centre of her
approach, and making disability and colour-blind casting par for the
course, Terry argues that all Shakespeare roles are now up for grabs for women.
That doesn’t mean that every production will have an equal number of men and
women players. “I’m not saying there won’t be all-male or all-female productions –
who doesn’t want to watch Mark Rylance give the kind of performance he gave in
Twelfth Night [as Olivia]? But what matters is the balance across the season.”
She has already had angry complaints about Hamlet. “People have written letters
saying: ‘Don’t do this’. There is concern about women playing men. One person was
outraged that I would be playing Hamlet, which they felt I was selfishly using as
therapy for my ‘obvious transgender issues’.” They’re painful to read – she prefers
not to – but there’s no way she’s backing down. The days when Hamlet meant the
continuation of a long male lineage stretching back to Burbage – interrupted by the
odd female upstart – are over, she says. “There’s no alternative now.”

The rationale lies with Shakespeare himself: “If our resident playwright is
saying, ‘I’m dealing with the human condition’ then anybody should be
able to play any of those parts. Do I think you could do that with Arthur
Miller or Tennessee Williams? I don’t know. But with Shakespeare, that’s
possible. When he was writing, women weren’t allowed on stage. He
didn’t care if men played women, so why would he care if women play
men? He didn’t ask us to think authentically but imaginatively and
expansively. We can explode these plays.”
She’s stirring the waters still further by experimenting with a 12-strong ensemble –
cast across Hamlet and As You Like It (in which she plays the minor role of the old
man Adam) – that has been granted rare creative autonomy. There are two co-
directors shaping things as they emerge but they all started work together, raiding
the costume store for what they need, not imposing a predetermined concept. “I
think we’ve gone too far down the road of one person being solely responsible and I
think there’s another way,” she says.

For her, this trial is about dismantling oppressive hierarchies and challenging “the
patriarchal system we’re all born into”. It has been “liberating” she says to pool ideas,
work collaboratively. “The result may be terrible but so much love has gone into it
that I hope something bigger will be asked than how well did she do ‘To be or not to
be’.”

Although it almost looks like destiny – she got the Shakespeare bug when she was
just seven, playing Puck at her local drama club in rural Somerset – Terry says she’s
“still surprised” she got the gig. “When I found out that it was between me and two
others, I knew I had a chance,” she recalls. “Paul [Ready, her actor husband] and I
talked about it and came to the conclusion that someone had to do the job, so why
not me?” New mother to a daughter (Scout, now 17 months), she turned the lack of
nominal qualifications to run a building of this status on its head: “Something about
having a baby released me into a vulnerable, raw and authentic place. I think that’s
how I got this job. It was going: what if I am enough? What if being a mother makes
me qualified? What if all these things that have hitherto been felt as obstacles could
now be converted into qualifications – all my self-doubt, my anxiety too? We have to
believe that mothers and wives can be leaders. It’s not working ‘or’ mother. I am an
actor-manager-mother-wife!”

“I have no assumption that this is going to go swimmingly,” she cheerily concludes as

she heads off to rehearsals. “For some people what I’m doing will be offensive. I don’t
mean to offend anyone and audience dissent is allowed. If people don’t want to see
the world represented in a diverse way, there’s nothing I can do about that.” She falls
quiet. “If so, I won’t be in this job for very long.” Having seen her Henry V in 2016,
though, winning over a sceptical audience, something tells me this could be an
Agincourt moment for the Globe.

Guardian

11 May 2021

By Chris Wiegand

When Shakespeare’s Globe announced its reopening plans for spring, the
headline news was that it had killed off the interval. Shows in its new
season will run without a break as part of Covid safety protocols that
include, for the first time, seats spread out in the theatre’s yard where
groundlings have traditionally jostled shoulder to shoulder.
The Globe’s artistic director, Michelle Terry, pointed out that the plays were
not written with intervals in the first place. When we catch up for a chat a
week or so before the theatre reopens, she adds that audiences will be given
a “beautiful autonomy”, liberated from the strictures “must sit in seat, must
face forward, lights must go down”. To pee or not to pee is a question no
longer reserved for the halfway point. “You can come in and out, that’s your
right,” she says. “Go to the loo, go to the gift shop, go to the bar which will
stay open.” It’s about trusting Shakespeare as a writer, rather than worrying
about what you may miss. “If it’s really that important, he’ll probably repeat
it at least five times,” she says with a laugh.
The actor-director, who will play Viola in this summer’s Twelfth Night,
can’t wait for the Wooden O on the South Bank to once more hold
theatregoers in its distinctive embrace. “There are … lots of feelings,” she
says. Chiefly: pride, excitement and a sense of profundity. After such an
extended period of division and isolation, the season is billed as celebrating
all that unites us. Sean Holmes’s hard-partying 2019 staging of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream is back to kick things off, followed by rising
director Ola Ince’s Romeo and Juliet, which was already in rehearsals when
theatres were forced to close in March last year.

Victoria Elliott as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Sean

Holmes in 2019. It will now play to socially distanced spectators. Photograph:
Tristram Kenton/the Guardian
Looking back on those first fraught weeks of closure, Terry recalls being
stunned by the severity of the crisis but also sensing a “galvanising force”
brought about by crisis management which felt invigorating. Questions
came thick and fast, she says: “How do we survive, how do we support our
neighbours, how do we pivot to digital?” As the months went by and the
country moved in and out of lockdowns, England’s venues allowed to open
and then forced to close their doors with little advance warning, the
unsettling sense of uncertainty set in. Theatres’ curtailed Christmas season
was a particularly bitter blow. It was very hard to have hope, she admits.
Is Shakespeare as cosmopolitan, multicultural and intercultural as we hope it is? I
think the truth is that it isn’t
But as Sadiq Khan said on Monday, when he signed in to begin his second
term as mayor of London in a ceremony at the Globe, this playhouse’s story
is “a tale of resilience and renewal”. Between 1603 and 1613, the Globe and
other theatres in the capital were shut for a total of 78 months to prevent
the spread of the plague.
Terry has not put on a live show since last March. While many other
outdoor venues reopened in summer 2020, the Globe maintained that as an
independent charity with very limited reserves it was not economically
viable to open for a reduced audience. Awarded a grant of just under £3m
from the government’s culture recovery fund, the Globe was hailed by
culture secretary Oliver Dowden as one of the “irreplaceable parts of our
heritage” that help make Britain a “cultural superpower”.

Michelle Terry as Hamlet and Catrin Aaron as Horatio at the Globe in

2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian
Terry says she is “disturbed” by the proposed 50% funding cut to arts
subjects at universities, which could come into effect from this autumn. The
theatre sector, she says, has put the case effectively for its contribution to
the economy. The harder task is finding a way to articulate the social
impact of the arts. Financial arguments can be made with metrics but “I
don’t think maths is going to be able to answer the question ‘to be or not to
be?’!” The scale of our climate crisis is overwhelming, she continues, but the
notion of a carbon footprint is readily understandable. The myriad
contributions of the arts to the health of the nation, rather than the wealth,
needs to be made similarly tangible.

Motherland's Paul Ready: 'Michelle Terry and I are very much like the Macbeths!'
Read more

A big thinker, Terry shares a sense of warmth and wonder with her
predecessor at the Globe, Emma Rice, who stepped down in 2018 and said
her freedom to experiment had been blocked at the theatre and that the
board did not respect her. Terry has been radical in her own ways,
dismantling traditional hierarchies by promoting a democratic ensemble
approach. Her first season opened with Hamlet and As You Like It, with
roles assigned by the actors themselves during the rehearsal period. (Terry
played the tragic prince, and has since been Lady Macbeth opposite her
husband, Paul Ready.) Audiences have also been given more power,
including the decision to choose from a selection of plays offered by the
touring ensemble.
The working practices of Shakespeare’s first players are still at the heart of
Terry’s Globe. “A lot of the time,” she says, “we’re going: what did they do
400 years ago?” A new play inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is
planned to reopen the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in September, is
being created by three writers in residence (Sami Ibrahim, Laura Lomas
and Sabrina Mahfouz). It mirrors Shakespeare’s original “writers’ room”,
Terry says, who “would have been working and writing bespoke to the
architecture, the artists, the seasons”. Ovid, who was a rich source material
for Shakespeare, asks questions about the “infinite capacity of human
transformation” and “where we sit in the cosmos”, she says – pertinent
issues for a global crisis. Ovid, she adds, also knew about experiencing
exile.

Sadiq Khan’s signing-in ceremony at Shakespeare’s Globe this week. Photograph:

Stefan Rousseau/PA
Metamorphoses will be livestreamed from the Globe, as will Romeo and
Juliet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has an
accompanying “anti-racist Shakespeare” webinar. “We talk a lot about
Shakespeare’s multiplicity and universality,” she says, “but whose prism are
we looking at that through? Is it as cosmopolitan, multicultural and
intercultural as we hope that it is? I think the truth is that it isn’t.”
It is essential to ask “who feels welcome in this space?” says Terry.
Like Matthew Warchus at the Old Vic, she wants her theatre to be as
welcoming and unintimidating as possible for audiences old and new. The
touring ensemble will start what she calls a grassroots conversation with
local communities. “A huge number of Londoners know about the Globe,
like the idea of the Globe, but haven’t visited,” Terry recognises. That’s a big
piece of work – to get the people who are local to us to want to come and
engage.”
Theatres that made us: from Shakespeare's Globe to Leicester's Curve
Read more

If the theatre was opening at full capacity, Terry would be more nervous. “I
would ask how are we going to fill 13 shows a week with 1,600 people?” As
society gradually reopens and London gets busier, so the Globe’s number of
shows and the capacity will increase. For now, though, “fingers crossed,
touch all the wood that the building is made of, we’ll be inviting 400 people
back into the space,” she says and pauses. “That’s so profound. What it is
for human beings to be together again.”

FINANCIAL TIMES
By Sarah Hemming
January 11 2019

Michelle Terry arrives for our interview fresh from murdering a king, going mad and killing herself.
She has just stepped off the stage after performing Lady Macbeth, one of the most harrowing female
characters in Shakespeare’s canon. Not only that, but she will return shortly to do it all again, in the
intimate candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse adjacent to Shakespeare’s Globe in London — it’s a
two-show day and we are meeting in the brief interlude between matinee and evening
performances. She’s remarkably focused, under the circumstances, if ever so slightly wired.

“It’s not the mountain you have to climb when you’ve got Hamlet to do,” she says, with a grin. “But
it’s really grim . . . You have to work as hard to get out of character as to get into it.”
Get out of it she must, however, as she is here in her capacity as artistic director of Shakespeare’s
Globe, to talk about what comes next. Terry is the second person to lead the Globe as an actor (Mark
Rylance was the first) rather than as a director. It’s a combination that has a rich heritage (Laurence
Olivier, for instance, led and forged the National Theatre company), but is less common nowadays.

She’s a friendly, open and down-to-earth person — which is probably just as well. She took charge
last April at a turbulent time in the theatre’s history: her predecessor Emma Rice had left following a
bitter row about the use of contemporary lighting and amplified sound (now discontinued). Terry
herself had no previous experience of running a building. And she found herself at the helm of an
organisation in flux. It’s been quite the learning curve, she admits.

“[That period] was toxic and difficult, but out of it came a very clear agenda for what the Globe
could offer,” she says. “The organisation was at the beginning of figuring itself out again. And to bring
an actor-manager in, that’s quite a big pebble to throw in a pond already full of ripples. So I think it
has taken all of us a year to figure out what that means. There is genuine great will to think and
behave differently, to offer a different, more collaborative way of working.”

Now she launches her second season at a time of divisive national upheaval. The first play in the
main open-air Globe space in 2019 — it is closed all winter — will open just a couple of weeks after
the UK is scheduled to leave the EU. It’s perhaps no surprise that she has chosen Shakespeare’s great
examination of leadership, responsibility and national identity — his history play cycle — to be the
centrepiece of this summer’s action. After Richard II in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the 2019
season rolls through Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V on the big outdoor stage, and then returns
to the SWP for an intimate staging of all three parts of Henry VI. Alongside will be more boisterous
fare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew
Fair. “We’re at a critical point in our international and national history,” Terry explains. “So there is no
better time to look at a playwright who was looking back to understand his own present: we are sort
of doing the same thing.”

Terry knows from personal experience how live those plays can feel: she was performing Henry V in
2016 (playing the title role) when the referendum on EU membership took place. “The play suddenly
took on a different life because of national events.”

It’s not unusual to find contemporary resonance in Shakespeare. For Terry, however, the significance
lies not just in the works themselves, but in the casts that stage them. The entire cycle will be staged
by one ensemble and will continue the practice, begun with her opening shows Hamlet and As You
Like It, of applying gender-, race- and disability-blind casting.

“As crucial as the content of the plays is, I think there is also something crucial about who is
making the work,” she says. “If our job is to hold a mirror up to nature, [we should ask] who is
holding the mirror and who is being reflected.” This is a policy that chimes with the current drive to
achieve more equal representation throughout the theatre industry. It follows Phyllida Lloyd’s
excellent all-female Shakespeare productions and recent illuminating gender-switch performances:
Maxine Peake as Hamlet, Glenda Jackson as Lear among them. It’s a practice that can also attract
heated criticism. Terry has had vitriolic letters about it, some of which attack her personally. So why
continue?
 “I persist because this is why [the work] will survive another 400 years,” she says. “We’re only at the
beginning of unlocking the potential of these plays. Having a deaf actress playing Celia [in As You Like
It], for instance, revealed the play in a way we could never have imagined. These plays were never
about being literal: they were about transformative, imaginative transactions. To get back to that we
have to smash up all of that literal expectation.”

In the depth of winter, the Globe’s great wooden O is dark and silent. But in the summer it’s a
palpably democratic space, open to the elements, with a large standing audience and shared light
(everyone can see everyone else), which fosters a particularly vivid engagement between audience
and actors. It also demands openness, flexibility and spontaneity in both cast and crowd.

Direct experience of those conditions, Terry reflects, is something she, as an actor-manager, can
bring to running the theatre. “I would be no use sitting at a desk,” she says. “I am much more useful
on the stage thinking, ‘The audience aren’t with us on this one, why not?’ What is difficult is trying to
do both.”

So what has she learnt? Terry pauses. “That change is slow,” she replies, finally. “And how important
it is to articulate the common purpose. I think what the Globe can offer is Shakespeare for all, by all.
And that has to be the people who criticise me for my gender-blind casting as much as the people
who love it. That’s quite a hard place to sit.”

FEARS FOR SAFETY OF ACTORS

The Times

David Sanderson

January 18 2023

An outpouring of online abuse after a non-binary Joan of Arc and the staging of
“Wokeo and Juliet” has raised fears from the artistic director of Shakespeare’s
Globe that she may be putting performers “in harm’s way”.

The theatre’s recent productions have been cast into the heart of the so-called
culture wars, with Michelle Terry lamenting a “bilious” response on social media.
“I have to sit with them before they go on stage and put themselves on the front
line and go, ‘Is this the safest thing for you to do,’ and that is really worrying,”
Terry said of her performers. “That is my concern. Is this a really safe place for
nuanced debate.”

The London theatre was criticised online and in the tabloid press over its 2021
production of Romeo and Juliet, which was accused of being “woke” because it
included content warnings and a suicide helpline number. Last year it staged a
production of I, Joan, in which the 15th-century saint was portrayed as non-binary.
Terry said that neither director had set out to be provocative and merely “knew the
story they wanted to tell”. She added: “What I couldn’t have predicted is that
horrible pocket of the playground on Twitter and social media that is only there to
perpetuate anonymised hate.
“Can I advise a 23-year-old artist to stay away from social media? Of course I can.
Will they? Of course they won’t. So they then read horrific tweets like, ‘Thank
God you are fat because fat burns quicker.’ ”

Terry said the organisation — which was also subjected to “woke” headlines over
last year’s production of Henry V — “still seems to be at the heart of some culture
wars” despite “more often than not just doing the play”.
She said: “If there is a really strong opinion about a piece, fantastic, that is what we
are for and then let’s have a dialogue. Find a way for theatre to be part of the
conversation, that is our job, Do I want that to be the bilious twitter corner of the
playground that only perpetuates hate? No, I do not.

“It is just when it feels so one-sided and people feel totally disempowered and yet
still have to go out there and represent a piece of work. It is becoming harmful”

Terry was speaking at the launch of this year’s season, which centres on four plays
from Shakespeare’s First Folio, the landmark 400-year-old publication without
which there would be no record of 18 of the plays. The Tempest, The Comedy of
Errors, As You Like It and Macbeth from the folio will be staged, along with A
Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Terry as Puck.
Terry, who is the fourth artistic director of the Globe following Mark Rylance,
Dominic Dromgoole and Emma Rice, said that very few drama students emerging
from training centres now had “the craft of speaking” Shakespeare’s language. She
said there was an economic necessity for drama schools to ensure students could
“come out and get work and there is not a lot of Shakespeare work out there.
“I have spent my whole life studying these plays but most people are coming in not
having been exposed to them, not having had a chance to say them out loud. There
is a concern around that.

“But it is a big ecosystem conversation. Why would you spend three years doing
Shakespeare when most of your students are not going to be spending their lives
doing that.”

She said the Globe could not afford to be a training school at present as it
continued its recovery from the pandemic. Financial uncertainties afflicting the
sector — such as the continuing absence of international tourists, and changing
habits with fewer advance bookings now made — mean the Globe is halving the
number of its famous £5 groundling tickets.
Terry said there would now only be 300 £5 tickets for each performance, adding
that there had been “endless discussions” about abolishing it entirely. She said,
however, that retaining them had been her “red line”.

“We still have people who think that Shakespeare is not for them. We have to
make it economically accessible.”