David, Shakespeare and Gender
...in which we learn David once taught a class on gender-bending!
Before I get started on today’s post, I wanted to take this opportunity to remind my readers about my series of posts on David’s un-aired 2002 pilot, Only Human - Parts One, Two, Three, Four, and Five - and that I’m currently taking your submissions for questions about the series to the author, Jim McClellan. This is your opportunity to get your questions answered, straight from the author himself. Don’t miss it!
Anyway, on with the show!
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With all the brouhaha of late about David and his unwavering support of the LGBT+ community, I thought it apropos to highlight the fact his support isn’t and hasn’t ever been predicated on having his own “skin in the game”. No, I thought today I’d feature something which combines the community with one of many little known facts about the depth and breadth of David’s involvement in various avenues of Shakespearean theatre and drama.
One of these little known facts?
Well…back around 1999-2000, David was the host (or most likely a co-host with Dr. Luke Dixon - and why I’m not sure about this is something I’ll explain in just a moment) of a London Shakespeare Workout (LSW) workshop on gender-bending in Shakespeare!
That David was host/co-host of a workshop fairly early on in his professional career about such an interesting topic as gender-bending is something I thought my readers would be very interested to learn more about. I know I was!
I first learned about his involvement with the LSW over a decade ago. At the time I tried my best to reach out to some involved parties and nail down some details about it, but much was understandably already lost to time and hesitancy and fuzzy memories. So while I’d love to feature more about the content and scope of the workshop, I’m afraid I must acquiesce to those limitations and accept I can provide only the bones of what is surely a most interesting topic.
In other words, there’s so much more about all this I don’t know than what I do. If you’ll bear that in mind, we can begin!
The London Shakespeare Workshop (LSW) was founded in 1997 and was created as a public service for the professional theatrical community. Workout workshops were first held at the Convent of St. Vincent de Paul, just off Baker Street in London, but they’d outgrown the space by April 1998 and relocated to The Art Room at 152 Arlington Rd. in Camden Town. By then these Workout workshops were open to professional and student actors alike and were held on Sundays between 1:30pm and 5pm. They were inexpensive, as well; technically they were free, but the group actively encouraged donations of a mere £2 for professional actors and £1 for student actors.
LSW Workout workshops usually had a standard format: they began with a 15-minute physical and vocal warm-up of some sort to help break the ice - this could be anything from playful exercises to communal clapping. After that, they got to business.
First up was a 12-20 minute segment called WitSlings, which was meant to give the workshop participants a chance to sit and creatively engage with the Shakespearean text they were handed at the beginning of the session. Each person chose a line from that text which spoke to them or moved them in some way. Each participant then had two minutes to write at least four to six lines of original iambic pentameter (which goes: di DUM di DUM di DUM di DUM di DUM) inspired by the line they’d chosen. Afterwards, everyone would share their lines in various manners: sometimes they were read aloud one by one, sometimes they were acted out as they were read, and sometimes one person’s writing would inadvertently touch upon another’s and it would become a round table of like subject matter.
After WitSlings, the next segment was called Clumps. Lasting around 25 minutes, this segment offered interactive Shakespearean performances in a circle where anything can happen. Participants would freely engage in speeches, or group performances - where one actor might start a speech and end up sharing it in a trio, quartet or sextet - and improvisations, exploring the language physically and vocally. Occasionally this segment also had musical accompaniment.
I do know that many times after the Workout workshops, actors would hit the Rat & Parrot pub around the corner from the venue. The Rat & Parrot sadly closed in 2007, and the building was converted into an Indian restaurant, Masala Zone.
Oh, and the LSW workshops often had weekly themes - sonnets, Shakespeare in song, etc. One of these weekly themes was called Gender Bender Sundays.
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So now that you know a little more bout how LSW Workout workshops were run, we can start to get into what precious little I know about David’s involvement with them.
I mentioned above the LSW had a weekly theme called Gender Bender Sundays. They held “three thrilling sessions” focusing on this theme, and these sessions were held by “(Dr.) Luke Dixon and the enticing David Tennant”.
If you don’t know who Dr. Luke Dixon is, he's had a long career as a writer and a theatrical director and workshop teacher. As the Artistic Director of theatre nomad he produced an exploration of the queer in Shakespeare with Shakesqueer, put on all-female versions of Macbeth and Hamlet, and did cross-dressed versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Among the many books he’s written is 2005’s Play-Acting: A Guide To Theatre Workshops. And to top it off, he holds a doctorate in 'The Performance of Gender'. So I’d say he’s more than qualified to run a workshop on Gender Bending!
Questions, of course, then start to arise: did Dr. Dixon host these sessions and David was his co-host in one, two or all three of them? Did Dr. Dixon do two of them and David one? What were they about?
I don’t know. I wish I could tell you! I’ve tried to find out. And I’ll keep trying.
And even though I also don’t know precisely when David co-hosted this workshop, I have been able to pretty confidently narrow it down to somewhere after 1998 and before the end of 2000. So there’s that anyway.
I also don’t know for sure how David was chosen over a number of other actors to do this particular workshop…but in this regard, I can hazard a guess.
A few years prior, he’d given a widely praised and well-received performance in Steven Pimlott's production of As You Like It at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from April to October 1996, and at the Barbican Theatre in London from October 1996 to March 1997.
David’s portrayal of the jester was light and inventive, manic and melancholic, and wildly over-the-top. Decked out in his foppish harlequin finery, his Touchstone was noted for his androgynous manner…despite his character’s lust for Audrey, the simple country goat-keeper.
And of course, As You Like It itself touched upon roles of gender and identity. The play has a cross-dressing female protagonist, Rosalind, who at one point in the play disguises herself as a young boy and calls herself Ganymede (who was a young lover of Jupiter’s). Even Touchstone’s identity as a fool is something he carefully constructs himself.
Perhaps it was his magnificence in the role of Touchstone that inspired the LSW to ask him to co-host Gender Bending Sunday? Again - and yes, I know I’m in danger of sounding like a broken record - I just don’t know.
But even though there’s so much I don’t know about what took place in these three workshops, I found it really fascinating that of all the topics talented thespian David could’ve hosted/co-hosted a workshop on, gender bending is the one he did.
Don’t you?
From things that I have heard him speak of in interviews or even on his own podcast where he hardly ever talks about himself, saying to the interviewee of the day “ we can talk about that after the microphone is turned off.”, he always seems to have his sights set on the present & future.
Fascinating, indeed! I wonder what David himself recalls about these workshops? Not jus this particular one that he hosted, but also ones that he may have attended as a participant.