Auckland Writers Festival

Harriet Walter: All the World’s a Stage

English actress Harriet Walter spoke on her book She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said. She spoke with New Zealand actress Jennifer Ward-Lealand about her motivations and her process of writing the book, as well as how her own performances of Shakespeare’s female characters influenced her choices in writing it. Having played many of these characters herself, she started to notice that none of these women ever took centre stage and started to wonder why. She realised that every woman in Shakespeare’s play was there in connection to a man, whether it was her father, her brother, her husband. 

She Speaks! is a collection of verse and prose written from the perspective of many of Shakespeare’s female characters, including Gertrude, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia and Lady Capulet, where she brings new voice and agency to silenced women. 

I personally enjoyed Walter’s readings from her book, including excerpts from Lady Macbeth and A Boy Player Reminices. 

It was interesting to hear from the two actresses about their experiences playing characters written as men, Walter having played Prospero in an all female production of The Tempest, while Jennifer Ward-Lealand played the Earl of Kent in an Auckland Theatre Company production of King Lear in 2023. Well, she played Kent as a woman, making her the Countess, I suppose, who then disguised herself as a man, whereas Walter played Prospero in a way that focused more on the character as a person than on whether they were a man or a woman.

When asked about herself as a writer, she said she enjoyed the ‘minimalist essence’ of poetry. She’d always loved playing with words, having dabbled in writing as something very private and secretive early on. While writing She Speaks! she had the challenge of deciding when to keep to the time period of the original plays and when to make it more modern and contemporary. Sometimes writing both prose and verse came flowingly, while sometimes it was like chipping away at a rock, and being left going ‘Well, now what?’ What writer can’t relate?

Landmark LGBTQ+ Literature

Writers Torrey Peters, Alan Hollinghurst and Nga Huia Awekotuku

These writers spoke about their own landmark works that contributed to bringing LQBTQ+ narratives into mainstream literature as well as their own experiences with queer and takatapui narratives. All three writers spoke about wanting to write stories about their own experiences, for those like themselves, to help give a voice to their people and their community. This often came from seeing nothing else out there, no stories for them, about them.

The sentiment was the same for all three writers:

‘There wasn’t a place for us so we had to make one.’

Torrey Peters spoke about her first times seeing queer narratives and finally finding narratives by a trans woman, for trans women, written to tell a story, not written to explain. She had started noticing similar questions coming from divorced women in their thirties as from trans women, which in turn created a starting point for Detransition, Baby. She found there were challenges dealing with publishers wanting to run away screaming at the mention of a trans narrative, despite the book not being all that different from any other writing they publish. It was ‘still a standard domestic fiction, just with a transwoman …. You’re taking this trans thing and fumbling it, terrified.’

Bringing the Past to Life: Researching Historical Fiction   

Writers Monty Soutar, Catherine Chidgey and Robbie Arnott

These writers spoke about their different approaches to research and why they choose to write historical fiction. Catherine Chidgey always aims to be as historically accurate as possible, whereas Robbie Arnott preferred his research to be more accidental. Monty Soutar spoke of his decision and experience writing historical fiction after having previously written non-fiction. All three writers emphasized the importance of physically being in and experiencing the environment they were writing about.

Someone from the audience asked what would be the most unusual combination of time period and setting, to which Robbie Arnott gave the most unhinged crime novel premise that I would absolutely read the shit out of. Maybe I should write it myself.