WOMEN’S ROLE:

June 1&2nd 

     The female role in the theatre nowadays is huge. Women everywhere want to be actors and are auditioning against each other for those iconic roles but thinking back in Shakespeare’s time women didn’t touch the stage at all, so the shows we see now written in that time period would have been all men. So how does having real women in the female roles affect the product of the show and the audience’s reception?

     In The Jew of Malta there really was only one major female role, Abigail. The original cast member playing this role was out sick so we saw her understudy for both shows. In my personal opinion I didn’t really care for The Jew of Malta. It was harder for me to follow and I didn’t really care for the plot line so I wasn’t invested in the show that much. I liked the actor who played Ithamore and his interpretation of it. But other than that I didn’t really care for the jokes or action. I just don’t think it was my kind of show; but to get back to the role of the Abigail in the show. There wasn’t much for her to really do. It was just her father telling her to fool the guys in love with her and to fool the priests, and then she leaves him to become and nun and gets killed by her father. So I don’t really think there is much of a difference the role being played by a real woman rather than a boy playing a girl. The story isn’t really about her and she doesn’t have much time on stage. The understudy who we saw was okay. Like I said not much for her to work with so we didn’t see a lot of her acting ability from this show.

     On the other hand we did see more of her in Love’s Sacrifice. She played Bianca as the understudy again because the original actor was sick. There was more variety for her in this role and I liked her better in this part. However, the role that I really was intrigued by was Fiormonda. She is the sister to the duke. The show opens with her still in mourning of her dead husband but in love with Fernando who doesn’t love her back. So she plots to get revenge on him when she learns that he is in love with Bianca, the Duke’s new wife. There’s lots of chaos that ensues and in the end pretty much everyone dies but her role is very different than Abigail’s in The Jew of Malta. Fiormonda is strong and forceful. She gives orders to her henchman guy as well as influences the Duke in his decisions. I think that a boy playing this role back in the day would have been good but I think the level of power and independence that she has would have been lost on the audience because women who have the strong roles in the older plays stand out more and are more rare.

     After Fiormonda falls to her knees to beg Fernando to love her she vows to make his life hell because she does not bow to anyone. Just those few lines alone have so much strength that a boy playing that wouldn’t have given off the necessary strength to the fact that it was rare for a woman in that time period to have that kind of power and independence. Overall the shows were okay but not my favorites. They just weren’t the strongest plays and I think that is why I personally didn’t invest in them that much. But you have your amazing shows, your bad shows and your “eh” shows.