Achieving gender equality in Shakespeare is hard due to the lack of female characters and 'roles available' for women, the first woman to be appointed artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company has said.
Speaking on the Postcards From Midlife podcast, Harvey said: 'The inequality, and this is something that my co-artistic director Daniel Evans and I are really kind of facing into at the RSC, the inequality, of course, arrives from the roles available, and that's more noticeable in Shakespeare. Last summer, Evans and Harvey were appointed as Co-Artistic Directors at the RSC in Stratford Upon Avon, West Midlands.
'So, I have to take a step back in order to acknowledge it's changing. I think the roles on stage, and the roles in front of the camera are becoming a little bit more balanced.'Because often, a company of actors are paid the same, or we've been quite front-footed certainly in the places I've worked about making sure that there is equality in pay.'She added: 'For example, wardrobe teams, costume making, still tend to be very female.
In an £800,000 project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, researchers at the University of Roehampton aimed to challenge this 'normative trend' by mounting a production of Gallathea, which features characters disguised as the opposite sex.