Their Julius Caesar was met with applause - and derision. As Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham prepare to leave the Donmar, they reflect on how they changed the theatre landscape`Quite a senior male director, who will remain nameless, went around calling it Julius Beaver,` remembers Josie Rourke, artistic director of London´s Donmar Warehouse, where Phyllida Lloyd´s all-female version of the Roman tragedy was staged in 2012. `People would just scoff at it. And scoffing did two things: it trivialised it, and it made it look experimental.` But for Rourke and her partner at the Donmar, executive producer Kate Pakenham, Julius Caesar was a serious statement of intent about addressing the lack of representation of women in theatre. It came to define their Donmar tenure which is about to end: Pakenham steps down this month and Rourke next year, when she will be succeeded by Michael Longhurst.By 2016 the Donmar, a tiny but high-profile theatre in Covent Garden, had put on not one but three all-female Shakespeares, each with the great actor Harriet Walter, directed by Lloyd and with an ethnically diverse cast drawn partly from ex-offenders. The trilogy - which includes Henry IV and The Tempest - has already been staged back-to-back in a large tent in King´s Cross and travelled to New York. Now it is to be aired on the BBC. Continue reading...
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