Golden Age Transvestism on (Inter-) National Stages: La vida es sueño/Life is a Dream in Spain and Don Gil of the Green Breeches in Great Britain

In a round-table discussion incorporating academics and British actors at the Ustinov Studio in the Theatre Royal Bath on 28 November 2013, held as a postscript to the previous evening's performance of Tirso de Molina's Don Gil of the Green Breeches, Katie Lightfoot, who played Donna Ines,¹ noted that one of the pleasures of forming part of an English-language repertoire of Golden Age classics (Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza/Punishment without Revenge and La dama boba/A Lady of Little Sense, alongside Don Gil de las calzas verdes), and the Tirso play in particular, was what she claimed to be the unheard-of experience of having a dressing room filled with actresses of her age; women, in her words, too old for Rosalind, too young for Lady Macbeth. Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave are rightly lauded for early performances with the RSC, but actresses in general have been far less prominent in the British company than in the Spanish Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico/National Classical Theatre Company (CNTC), founded in 1986: the first artistic director, Adolfo Marsillach, refers in his memoirs to how Adriana Ozores "se convirtió, durante muchos años, en la actriz más importante de la compañía. Casi un símbolo" [became, for many years, the Company's most important actress. Almost a symbol] (Marsillach 468). More recently, there was a consensus amongst critics and spectators that Eva Rufo was the undisputed star of the Joven Compañía de Teatro Clásico/National Youth Classical Theatre Company (Mascarell 390–93), created in 2007 by the then artistic director, Eduardo Vasco. Perhaps as a result of women being allowed to perform on the Spanish early modern stage, the comedia (the generic word used for both individual plays and the broader dramatic tradition of Spain's so-called Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) features a range and depth of female roles absent from the Shakespearean canon where, as actress Janet Suzman notes, "There is simply no spiritual, intellectual or metaphysical equivalent to Lear, the Richards, the Henries, nor the twin peaks of Othello and his demonic tempter, Iago, and certainly no woman baddies of that order."

This has provided the rationale for the adoption of affirmative action by a number of the UK's leading theater companies: in 2014, the Donmar Warehouse launched a competition open only to teenage girls to submit videos of up to ninety seconds of them reciting Shakespearean monologues (see Clark); following her appointment in 2016 as the Globe's first female artistic director, Emma Rice announced she was aiming for a fifty/fifty split between male and female actors despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that, on her calculations, the average number of lines spoken by female characters in Shakespeare's works is 13% (see Malvern). With the qualified exception of La Celestina,² that there are fewer roles for middle-aged and elderly actresses in Spain's classical repertoire provides one explanation as to why Blanca Portillo (b. 1963) was cast as Segismundo in the CNTC's 2012 production of La vida es sueño directed by Helena Pimenta, Vasco's replacement and the first female director in the Company's history. In another first, "Portillo's performance marks Spain's most high-profile entrance into the experimentation with cross-gender casting in contemporary Comedia performance" (Seagraves, "Cross-gender" 113), a trend that had become increasingly normalized on the British stage, with high-profile examples including Kathryn Hunter as King Lear at the Leicester Haymarket (1997), Vanessa Redgrave as Prospero at the Globe (2000), and Dawn French as Bottom in the West End (2001).

It has become axiomatic to the point of cliché to bemoan Spain's lack of a performance tradition for its national classical drama, the establishment of the CNTC construed as a belated attempt to provide an autochthonous equivalent to the Comédie Française or the RSC. In relation to...