Spanish actress Beatriz Romilly is “evil Edmund” in a new production of King Lear directed by Michael Hurst, who also plays the lead role. They talk to Joanna Wane about the gender switch and why Shakespeare’s grand tragedy remains so relevant today.
When Hollywood producer Adam McKay pitched a new show called Succession to actor Jeremy Strong — who plays Kendall, the most tortured of the warring Roy children — he described it as a King Lear for the media-industrial complex.
That reference to the powerful fusion of interests between politics, business and what used to be quaintly called “the press” isn’t such a stretch. In his 2017 novel Dunbar, British novelist Edward St Aubyn recasts Lear as an international media tycoon.
Parallels between the grandiose, self-delusional king are easy to draw with contemporary figures from Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump. And sure, both HBO and Shakespeare have created masterpieces that reek of ego and privilege. Strip away the trappings, though, and they’re tangled family dramas that remind us the most badly behaved people are often found much closer to home.
“There are definitely lots of male and female Lears in the world, these people who have complete power, who aren’t said no to and make big choices that affect all of us,” says Beatriz Romilly, who makes her own ruthless power play as the Earl of Gloucester’s bastard daughter Edmund, one of three roles given a gender switch in Auckland Theatre Company’s new production of King Lear.
“And the message with that is, does someone have to be completely destroyed to realise what a jerk they’re being? It’s the techies, like Elon Musk, who I find the most scary because they’re the future and they’re treated like gods. So, there’s huge relevance in that sense with Lear. But for me, [the play] is more of a family dynamic. It’s the human heart that interests me most. The moral is that we’re all the products of our environment. And I think Gloucester and Lear are horrid.”
Romilly is a relative newcomer to the Auckland scene, after relocating to New Zealand in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic (her Kiwi husband was head chef at London’s Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen; she was the head waitress).
Born in Spain, she moved to the UK with her family at the age of 5 and remembers hiding under the desk on her first day at school because she couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Now she speaks with a British accent. “I’m very emotional as Beatriz, so in Spanish I’m very, very articulate,” she says. “In English, sometimes I get kind of stuck in my head.”
The elfin actress could still pass for someone in her 20s, but she’ll have turned 40 by King Lear’s opening night. It’s ATC’s first Shakespeare production in more than a decade, following the Pop-up Globe’s demise. Expectations are high, with the legendary Michael Hurst co-directing alongside Ben Henson and playing the notoriously challenging title role, a double-act he’s pulled off before with Hamlet (twice) and Macbeth.
In a twist that may disconcert traditionalists, Hurst has cast women in three of the male parts. Hester Ullyart will play The Fool, who speaks unpalatable truths to power — a role Hurst has done twice in the past — and his wife Jennifer Ward-Lealand is Lear’s loyal servant Kent, one of the few truly decent people in the whole story. As a female Edmund, Romilly ends up in a same-sex love triangle with Lear’s two eldest daughters.
Such feminisation is not an unprecedented subversion of the text. In the UK, the king has been performed to much acclaim by both Glenda Jackson and Kathryn Hunter. A less successful 2002 adaptation in Auckland called Leah, with Geraldine Brophy as the royal despot, was a famous flop, although she still considers it one of the best things she’s ever done, claiming some scholars believe Shakespeare based his play on the ageing, menopausal Queen Elizabeth I and the vagaries of her later years on the throne.
If we think of Shakespeare as holding a mirror to society, says Hurst (who does exactly that with the production’s clever set design), not only do we see women today in powerful positions but we see women being relegated too. “Also, women don’t have a monopoly on goodness. And men don’t have a monopoly on evil, either.”
An outsider whose mother died in childbirth, the illegitimate Edmund is manipulative, ambitious and pitiless almost to the bitter end. You think Hamlet has a high body count? Lear, one of the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, beats it by one.
In preparing for the role, Romilly found two quotes that have helped her get inside Edmund’s head. One is an African proverb: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” The other comes from a recent TV interview with Irish actress Denise Gough: “Be careful how you speak to children because that becomes their inner voice.”
“Yeah, that for me is Edmund,” Romilly says, sitting cross-legged on the floor in plain black overalls and bare feet, her eyes flashing with enthusiasm as she leafs through a book filled with research notes. In a play where nurturing female figures are entirely absent, she’s interested to see what the audience makes of him played as a woman.
“Edmund is evil. It’s not good what she does, but we all know what it means to be second best, or not to have love or feel like you belong. We’re all made up of everything and we’re all capable of everything. And when you realise why [a character] chooses to do something, even if you don’t agree with it, you understand where it comes from — and it’s always from love or fear.” No prizes, then, for guessing that the desperately insecure, vulnerable Roman is her favourite character in Succession. “You go, ‘Oh, mate, you just need someone to give you a massive cuddle.’”
That unpeeling of human frailties fascinates Romilly, who falls a little in love each time she steps inside a new part. If someone were to paint her portrait, she imagines herself standing at the head of her ancestral line, surrounded by all the different people she’s portrayed. “When you’re on stage, you create these energies. And even though I know where Beatriz lies and I know where the character lies, you still go through it and there’s still a chemical change in your body. And that, for me, is magic.”
When Romilly thinks of Spain, it’s the sound of cicadas and crickets she remembers, the heat of summer and the rolling hills in her parents’ home village, Gargantilla, where it looks as if a voluptuous woman has lain down in the valley. At night, she’d head up the slopes with her grandfather to lie on the sun-warmed rocks and look at the stars.
One of the country’s poorest regions, near the border with Portugal, it’s where people came to farm the land during the Spanish Civil War. Her mother’s family were cherry and olive pickers. Her father, who didn’t go to school until he was 9, left and became a heart surgeon. Romilly, who was born in Madrid, is one of eight children. Spain wasn’t a place to bring up girls, their parents told them, when they moved to Guildford in the UK (they now live just outside Barcelona).
“All these little villages are slowly dying off because everyone moves away for work, but I still have three great-aunts in their 90s living there. The thing with the Spanish is they’re warm, and they are open and they are loud, but there’s a secretiveness that, for me, comes from the Civil War. Spain transitioned really fast from a dictatorship into a democracy with nothing resolved and no one held accountable for anything. Politicians are still really corrupt. And with Catalonia wanting to separate and the Basques ... you understand it because you understand where the hurt comes from.”
Romilly was 11 when she was given the lead role of Aladdin in a school play. A naturally inclined introvert, she found herself loving the attention. You could become someone else and tell a different story, she says, and not suffer the consequences. Later, at high school, she saw Anne-Marie Duff (Bad Sisters) play Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, decided to audition for Drama Centre London and got in.
The theatre has remained Romilly’s true passion; her first professional Shakespeare gig was playing a duchess, a lady and Joan of Arc in the Henry VI trilogy. Her TV credits include The Bill and several BBC productions, and she’s developed a tidy sideline doing voiceovers for video games, including Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy. She’s also worked on several projects as a motion-capture artist. In the latest Harry Potter game, she was fitted with sensors to create the body movements for Bellatrix, Professor McGonagall, the Gringotts Bank goblins and several Death Eaters.
Decamping to New Zealand meant leaving behind a stable career in the UK, where she was able to make a living as an actor — something even seasoned veterans struggle to do here. Last year, she played a pregnant therapist in Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Grand Horizons, then flew back to London to make her West End debut as an alcoholic therapist in 2.22 A Ghost Story alongside Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. This year she’s done a 10-episode run on Shortland Street as — you guessed it — a therapist. So King Lear will be a welcome change of pace. Rehearsals started on Monday.
Romilly first caught Hurst’s eye in Grand Horizons, which Ward-Lealand directed, and he thinks she’ll be terrific as Edmund. He’s directed King Lear twice before. In 1989, at the University of Auckland’s Summer Shakespeare season, he set the play in ancient Babylon “for some reason” and ended up playing Gloucester after one of the cast had a breakdown just before opening night. When we meet for this interview, he already has Lear’s lines down pat.
Image 1 of 8: Michael Neill as King Lear and Michael Hurst as The Fool in an Outdoor Summer Shakespeare production in Auckland, 2013. Photo / Supplied
Hurst is 65 now, still bursting with passion but no longer the buff young buck who performed topless as Macbeth. What time has gifted him is the gravitas to portray a king confronting mortality and his own descent into madness. He’s been reading Jungian theory as part of his research for the role and sees some redemption in Lear’s journey to self-awareness, but I’m not so sure. Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, raises the spectre of sexual abuse in her reimagining of the king as a prosperous Iowa farmer. Shakespeare never explains the rift between Lear and his two eldest daughters.
And what of Cordelia, the favoured youngest daughter? She’s exiled by her father for refusing to play the game when he asks for a profession of love to determine how his kingdom should be divided between the three sisters. Her answer, that she can say “nothing” about her love, becomes a central theme of the play. Typically, she’s depicted as the honest, virtuous one. Romilly, who has six sisters, finds her insufferably smug.
Michael Neill, a Shakespearean scholar and Emeritus Professor of English at Auckland University, describes Cordelia’s response to her father as a perfect example of sullen adolescence. In 2013, he played King Lear opposite Hurst as The Fool in an Outdoor Summer Shakespeare production in Auckland, his first return to acting in several decades after graciously leaving the field to his younger brother, Sam. The Listener called his performance a tour de force, and he enjoyed working with director Lisa Harrow. “Oh for goodness sake,” she told him. “Stop flapping your arms like an angry penguin!”
Shakespeare’s tragedies are inevitably full of death, says Neill, “but this is the only tragedy I can think of that is really about death, the confrontation with death. That’s brought home at the moment when Lear sees Cordelia dead, because your own death is trivial by comparison to the death of the people you love.”
• King Lear is on at Auckland’s ASB Waterfront Theatre from June 13 to July 1. See atc.co.nz