Stephen A Russell

The title of Carla Kissane's latest work, Whores and Weeping Women, is wickedly provocative. It's an irreverent cabaret that reveals Shakespeare's leading ladies at their worst, as well as their finest. The show takes the Bard's dramatic verse and mashes it up with pop music from Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and Rihanna.
"I called it Whores and Weeping Women because of this idea that you can either be pure or debauched, black or white," says the playwright and performer.
"This idea of binary oppositions that doesn't allow us to find a middle path."
In comparing Shakespeare's queens and court ladies to today's controversial pop stars, Kissane aims to challenge traditional notions of womanhood.
"He didn't put these women on a pedestal," she says. "He really expressed their weaknesses and foibles ... but at the same time he has so much compassion. He's never judging."
The germ of the play was born when Kissane was touring Australia with Motherhood the Musical, while also playing understudy for the Australian Shakespeare Company's The Comedy of Errors.
"I was living in two different worlds, quickly embodying lots of different women," Kissane says. "It just felt a bit like a brain workout, a huge exploration on the theme of what it means to be a woman."
Having studied the texts at length, she feels that Shakespeare was something of a proto-feminist. Even the most troubling of Shakespeare's characterisations, such as Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, can be unpicked, she says.
"It's hard to interpret from a contemporary perspective, but I can appreciate the levels of irony. For me, Shakespeare's making a comment on the contract of relationship, of compromise, and how to become more skilled in the navigation of that."
Jane Montgomery Griffiths, head of the centre for theatre and performance at Monash University, has performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain and toured Australia with Bell Shakespeare's King Lear.
"Shakespeare's women are pretty amazing, but the bummer for a middle-aged actress is that they start to dry up once you hit 30," she says. "When you hit your 40s, that's when the harridans start to appear."
Griffiths' Shakespearean roles have included Imogen in Cymbeline and Goneril in King Lear.
"You have the autonomous and self-motivated characters ... or the characters that are absolutely subsumed within a male world, so you get somebody like Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew - that's some very interesting sexual politics, because she starts out baulking against the patriarchy and, of course, is tamed into it."
With the exception of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, Shakespearean heroines don't have children.
"They tend to be autonomous and searching for a degree of freedom, but then they are always reincorporated back into the patriarchy," Griffiths says. "It's very interesting to work it out now, from a contemporary perspective. Are these decent role models or not?"