Enter His Majesty the Queen

Traditionalists dismiss single-sex casts in Shakespeare as a gimmick. Defenders say they can liberate the plays. Claire Allfree reports on the Globe's gender warfare

In 1899, Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in the West End. The critic Max Beerbohm said at the time that he refrained from laughing out loud only out of concern for the "national reputation of good manners". What the rest of the audience thought went unrecorded. Bernhardt's performance made her the most famous example of a woman playing a Shakespearean male role: a provocation of reverse gender with which actors and directors have wrestled ever since.

So potent has the preoccupation become that, this summer, in its Season of Regime Change, Shakespeare's Globe, in London, is producing two plays with all-female casts, Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew, and two with all-male casts, Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II. Yet with experimentation comes anxiety about what it all means. With gender bound up in notions of representation, authenticity and identity, further complicated by Shakespeare's playfulness in having women, played by boys, dress up as men, there is the potential for argument about tradition vs modernity and merit vs gimmick.

Barry Kyle, the director of Richard III at the Globe, has a simple answer to why one might want to stage an all-female Richard III: why not? "How did the press tell stories about the war in Iraq when it described events that were not necessarily supported by its journalists?" he says. "Or, to put it another way, if we buried each of the 12 or so daily newspapers published on the day the war broke out, and someone dug them up 100 years later, how would that person know, amid the different stories and motivations on offer, which was telling the truth? In Richard III, Shakespeare was writing about an area of history that was already massively contested by historians. What I want to do is rehabilitate the notion that the female voice is also a voice of history, just one that's rarely heard."

By changing the dominant voice of a text, particularly a historical one, you affect the dominant meaning. Coming at the end of a cycle of plays that chronicled the devastation of a country by decades of civil war, Richard III portrays, in many ways, the psychological fallout of that devastation. Kyle thinks an all-female cast can make that point more powerfully than a male one. "In Richard III, the subconscious is a major determinate for the political action; nearly everyone is plagued by dreams and memories. Not only are these things commonly associated with the female, but it's the women who feel this psychological damage the most. The biggest injury that occurs in the play is the murder of the children. And who feels and describes this the most passionately? The women."

Kathryn Hunter, who plays Richard III, agrees that a female king forces an audience to think about the way patriarchal discourses shape our culture, both present and past. "For example, when you see men preparing for the Battle of Bosworth Field, you automatically think, 'Oh, here we go.' But if it's women picking up the spears, the audience will do a double take. All that recent argument about the war in Iraq being a necessary war. Here, seeing a bunch of women going to war, with all the implications that brings, won't it be hard not to think differently, to question whether it really was a necessary war?"

Thanks in part to their Elizabethan antecedents, all-male productions aren't subject to similar shifts in meaning. Rather, an all-male cast can acquire a different kind of narrative liberation, conversely by being able actually to transcend gender. Adrian Lester, who played Rosalind in Declan Donnellan's all-male production of As You Like It in 1997, admits that he initially found the prospect of playing a woman "hugely embarrassing. And potentially a huge insult to every woman who came to see the play. But once we got past the political and cultural implications of the gender swap, both within and outside the play, and got down to the nuts and bolts of loving, the production took off. As soon as I forgot about what I looked like in a dress, I could concentrate on what it meant to love. It took the play to another level; it was a wholly liberating thing to do. And if you as an actor believe it, then the audience will too."

Hunter and Kyle resent the suggestion that reversing gender has to imply a specific statement. "It's inevitable that many people, when they look at this project, will want the woman thing to be the first thing that's addressed," says Kyle. "But, as practitioners, we see it in broader terms. It's no longer 1973, for example. These days, women work, fight and make decisions as much as men do. We're not locked in some blunt loggerhead over sexual politics the way we were 30 years ago."

Deborah Warner, who directed Fiona Shaw in Richard II at the National in 1995, deliberately waited until gender politics had become sufficiently neutered not to get in the way when it came to her production. "Casting Shaw as Richard II was about getting the right actor for the part, rather than about making any putative feminist statement," she says. "Although it also had a positive bearing on the text, for me it gloriously released the love story between Richard and Bolingbroke from the exclusively homoerotic. Shaw receives an almost weekly mailbag from students saying that we opened up the possibilities of cross-gender casting for a whole generation."

Similarly, for Hunter, playing Richard III is a proposition that, at the end of the day, simply requires all her imaginative resources. "I've treated the part of Richard III in the same way I would any other," she says. "For me, it's a play about a person slowly learning that it's impossible to operate without a conscience. I think anyone can relate to that, be they male or female."

Audiences are perhaps better placed to relate to what they see on stage at Shakespeare's Globe than they are in most theatres. Since its construction seven years ago, the Globe has been instrumental in a subtle change in the way theatre is produced. In the Eighties and much of the Nineties, the relationship between a director and critic became at least as important as the relationship between an actor and their audience. The Globe, with its unique emphasis on the dynamic of live performance, has re-established the importance of the audience. And, paradoxically, that has enabled the Globe to try out new ideas about staging that other theatres might baulk at. Its artistic director, Mark Rylance, made an amusingly girlish Cleopatra in an all-male production there in 1999. After all, theatre stands or falls on the ability of the audience to suspend their disbelief. "Gender is just one in a queue of imaginative leaps an audience has to make when it comes to the theatre," says Kyle. "At the end of the day, we are just playing. I personally would like to see a production where actors are cast irrespective of gender. Actually, I think that may be next."

'Richard II' opens tonight, 'Richard III' on 25 May, 'Edward II' on 20 July and 'The Taming of the Shrew' on 10 August, at Shakespeare's Globe, London SE1 (020-7401 9919)