Boudica

by Tristan Bernays

seen at Shakespeare's Globe on 12 September 2017

Eleanor Rhode directs Gina McKee as Boudica queen of the Iceni (a tribe in what is now East Anglia) in this new play with Joan Iyiola and Natalie Simpson as her daughters Alonna and Blodwynn, Forbes Masson as Cunobeline and Abraham Popoola as Bladvoc, kings respectively of the neighbouring tribes of the Trinovantes and the Belgae.

The sources for Boudica's story are fragmentary, and the earliest are of course in Latin and based on a Roman point of view hardy sympathetic to a rebellious queen who for a short time posed a threat to the province of Britannia - although of course after her demise she could be safely used as a rhetorical device to point up contrasts between barbarian integrity and the corruption of the imperial court.

Tristan Bernays has therefore had great scope to fashion a Boudica for our times, and to invest her two daughters, usually depicted as nameless victims of Roman military rapine, with contrasting personalities of their own. The result, couched in a mixture of pentameter verse which only rarely rises to poetic force, and modern invective and slang, is a rather mixed bag. Some scenes are extremely effective, such as Boudica's first confrontation with the Roman procurator (an even more venal character than Pontius Pilate in another Roman province), and her later mutilation of a captured Roman; others miss their aim with a more stagey violence (her flogging) - not that anything more graphic would have been pleasant to watch.

There are interesting and important ideas in the play - the competing claims of tribal and Roman law, which cause the initial clash as the procurator vengefully punishes Boudica and her daughters; the need for squabbling tribes to suspend their animosity in order to fight a common foe; the question of how far brutality on one side exonerates the other in being equally (or more) brutal. Boudica herself is proud and determined, and often recklessly tactless, leaving the hapless ally king Cunobeline to pick up the pieces and in doing so to earn the contempt of the more macho king Badvoc. In the meantime, the two princesses react very differently to their humiliation - Alonna seeks to end the cycle of bloodshed while Blodwynn retreats into unflinching warrior mode, only once revealing the deep sense of shame that she cannot face or extinguish. (While some scenes of their increasing alienation from one another are formulaic, the final confrontation between them carries considerable power and conviction.)

Gina McKee is a commanding presence as Boudica, and she is ably supported by the rest of the cast, but the text creaks at times with exposition and with some awkward soliloquies which address the audience sometimes as Britons (tribespeople), sometimes as Romans (city-dwellers), and the subplot of Alonna defending a 'Roman' woman from Belgic soldiers is a little contrived. Once again the actors' voices were amplified, and even so talented an actress as McKee struggled at times to channel her full powers through a microphone. Again I found that the enveloping sound of the voices belied the visual cues of where the characters were actually standing on stage, particularly when any of them faced away from my direct line of sight. I find this distracting.

Emails warned that there was 'sexual violence' and some 'graphic fight scenes', and the production was therefore unsuitable for those under 14. I am not sure that such warnings have accompanied older plays with similar content (such as 'Titus Andronicus' or some early 17th century revenge tragedies), and the depictions here were tame compared with other productions I have seen even at the Globe. To some extent, then, the production was pulling its punches and covering its back, considering that the actual Iceni rebellion and its suppression were doubtless extremely bloody and grubby. Perhaps there was just too much being packed into the play - the brutality of war, the perturbation about women warriors, the crassness of the Roman rulers, the sisterly rivalry, Boudica's mystical encounter with the goddess Andraste as she dies.

Many Globe performances traditionally end with song and dance; it is not always clear that this is appropriate after a play dealing with the darker aspects of human nature. The outlook of the play as a whole is bleak, foreseeing cycles of violence, revolt and repression, and an uncertain reputation after death. After all this, the cast gave a rousing, not to say joyous,  rendition of the song 'I fought the law and the law won' by The Clash. There seemed to be no irony in this choice, though of course from the Roman point of view this is exactly what happened to Boudica. But the high spirits detracted from the darker messages of the play.