Shakespeare’s Hamlet, played by actress Maxine Peake

This video from England says about itself:

21 mei 2013

Interview with Maxine Peake: Interview at MIF13 Launch. Maxine talks about her one-women performance in The Masque Of Anarchy at MIF13. Read more here.

By Peter Lazenby in Britain:

We aspire to give women the confidence to take on whatever role they choose

Thursday 4th September 2014

Maxine Peake talks to Peter Lazenby about playing the traditionally male role of Hamlet at Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre.

It’s no surprise that Manchester’s Royal Exchange has extended its run of Hamlet with Maxine Peake playing the role of Shakespeare’s tragic hero.

It opens next week and the actor, a long-time friend of the Morning Star, has won widespread acclaim for tackling the role. There’s a big demand for tickets.

It’s caused her a few bumps and bruises as well. That, too, will raise no eyebrows among those who know her. When she takes on a role she does so “full on,” she says.

She did it in 2012 when she performed Percy “Red” Shelley’s 91-stanza poem The Masque Of Anarchy. It was written in response to the 1819 slaughter of protesters in Manchester’s infamous Peterloo Massacre, when sabre-wielding Hussars rose into a peaceful crowd of 60,000 listening to speakers calling for greater democracy and freedom.

To the public, of course, Peake has many faces — those of the characters she has portrayed in a wide range of TV series. They include Dinnerladies, Silk, The Village and Shameless, along with her performance as Myra Hindley in See No Evil: The Moors Murders. The list goes on.

But there’s always a freshness to her work, maybe because it is influenced by her deeply held political beliefs.

Peake is a socialist and is not afraid to speak out, particularly in voicing her disgust at the coalition government’s austerity measures and attacks on working people.

Now she is breaking more new ground as a woman actor taking on the traditionally male role of Hamlet. It’s never been her desire to play the Prince of Denmark, she says, “but it has always been my ambition to play a male part in a production. I don’t look at a role in terms of its gender, just whether I identify with the character or not.”

So why is she doing it? “I had done a production with Sarah Frankcom, our wonderful director, three years ago in which I played the title role in Strindberg’s Miss Julie and it was quite a success for the theatre,” she tells me.

“So we sat down and put our heads together to think of another project. We wanted something different that would stretch and challenge us both to the limit. Hamlet seemed perfect.”

It is “a mountain of a play, very physically demanding and challenging,” she says. “The design is very cool and minimal with a quite extraordinary use of light.”

Peake’s commitment to her audiences is total and she wants them to take a clear interpretation and accessible version of the play with them when they leave the theatre. “Hopefully it’ll be a Hamlet they can relate to. But mainly I hope that they feel they got their money’s worth and had a full theatrical experience.”

The theatre, as does virtually all the media, suffers badly from gender imbalance and for Peake playing Hamlet is part of the process to redress that. “There is a real sea-change in the gender balance in theatre,” she explains. “The Exchange I think is leading that process. The imbalance has gone on now far too long and it’s so exciting that companies are having a go at tackling it. It’s still not enough but I hope that our Hamlet will help with that.

“In years to come women will be playing these roles and no-one will be questioning it and we aspire to give women the confidence to take on whatever role they choose.

“Hopefully people will now start to tackle the race issue that I feel is still a problem in theatre and television and we’ll start to do more colour-blind casting and begin to represent honestly the wonderful racial diversity of our country.”

Peake chooses to live in the region of her birth – she was born in Bolton in Lancashire and now lives in Salford — rather than London.

In addition to acting she is an accomplished writer and her work has included a play for BBC Radio 4 about the courageous women who staged an underground occupation of a Lancashire colliery in protest at pit closures in 1993.

The Royal Exchange has made her an associate artist, with a wide-ranging role. What does she hope to achieve now?

“I will be writing as a part of my new role,” she says. “I have an idea but what it is I can’t tell you yet I’m afraid. I will be mentoring some young actors on a project next year who have been cast from the local community.

“I am really excited. I think the Royal Exchange is a thoroughly modern theatre that is responding to its surroundings and the times we live in. Up the revolution!”

Such enthusiasm is positively infectious.

Hamlet runs from September 11-October 25, details: royalexchange.co.uk.