It’s tempting to say that by programming All Is But Fantasy the RSC has put a grenade under its own repertoire, but that’s not quite right. Whitney White’s gig-theatre quartet isn’t so much exploding Shakespeare as needling at it. The writer-composer-performer has a love for these plays and their musicality, but she also wants to ask difficult questions about them. Who’s allowed to take up space in these works? Who gets to perform in them? And why do so many of the ugly things in these plays continue to speak to us today?
To grapple with these ideas, White takes on four of Shakespeare’s characters: Lady Macbeth, Emilia from Othello, Juliet, and Richard III. As a Black woman, she questions which parts of the canon are open to her, trying out a series of the playwright’s women before claiming one of his male leads. She is joined in her storytelling by a glorious, shape-shifting chorus of witches (Renée Lamb, Georgina Onuorah and Timmika Ramsay), a white male performer (Daniel Krikler) who is the ever-present “he” to her “she”, and a white female foil (Juliette Crosbie) representing the sorts of actors who will for ever be Juliets.
