Dame Harriet Walter is regarded as one of the greatest living Shakespearean actors: in the past decade, she has delivered revelatory interpretations of Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But because of her gender and her age—she is sixty-five—the roles available to her are dwindling. “Shakespeare just doesn’t do mothers,” she said the other morning, in the lobby of St. Ann’s Warehouse, on the Dumbo waterfront. “In one way, he’s very honest—he didn’t know much about women at that age. But he didn’t know much about so many things, and he could get into the Moor of Venice, so why couldn’t he understand an older woman? The longer I live with him, the more that feels like a sad little disconnect for me.”

Fortunately, Walter has discovered a partial remedy for her Shakespeare problem. This month, she takes on the title role of “Henry IV” in an all-female production of the play, directed by Phyllida Lloyd. (It originated at the Donmar Warehouse, in London.) Two years ago, the company performed an all-female “Julius Caesar,” also at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Both productions are set in a women’s prison, with the actors playing prisoners who are playing Shakespeare. “Many of the younger actors have said it has really helped, because you go, ‘Oh, God, I can’t play Prince Hal, but I can play a prisoner who is playing Prince Hal,’ so it’s a way of accessing something that’s true to you,” Walter said.

Walter and her colleagues worked in rehearsal on their body language. “It was a question of inhabiting a body that felt unapologetic about taking up space. So we will sit like this”—Walter, who was wearing dark-blue pants and a dark-purple wool coat, spread her knees, like the stick figure in the monitory poster on the subway—“because a man will go like that. It is sort of getting behind the person who owns that kind of a body.” They sought to diminish their reliance on gestures that indicated submissiveness—Walter folded her hands on her breast by way of example—and to eliminate automatic vocal patterns. “Sometimes women do what is called devoicing, which is when they deliberately soften their voices so as to be non-threatening,” she said, with a demonstrative huskiness. “All these techniques we don’t even know we are doing suddenly come up in the rehearsal room, and they become blocks to the audience’s believing who we are.”

Reviews in London were almost universally laudatory, though the Spectator grumbled about the “wrong-sex casting” and disparagingly compared Walter’s gaunt appearance, with her chin-length hair slicked back, to Peter O’Toole imitating David Bowie. Walter said, “Shakespeare’s a non-naturalistic writer: the theatre of his day wouldn’t have said you have to be black to play Othello, or you can only be an old man to play King Lear, or you have got to be a woman to play Juliet.” The challenge as an actor is not playing a man but playing a man with power. “That’s the big leap—the leap of having the weight on your shoulders of all decisions in the country—‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’ ” she explained. “Women today do have access to power—not enough of them, but it is part of our experience. We are part of public life, when the female characters in Shakespeare are very definitely not part of public life.”

She added, “There are exceptions, but pretty much the women in Shakespeare are talking about their man, or putting themselves in relation to the man.” Shakespeare fails the Bechdel test, she suggested: “There’s a lovely scene between Emilia and Desdemona, all talking about men; Rosalind and Celia mostly talk about men. So it is wonderful to play Brutus and Cassius talking about how we should go about changing the world.” Walter went on, “He doesn’t write less well for women; it’s just that the themes are smaller, on the whole, and they are less fulfilled characters. When the greatest playwright—so considered—in the English language leaves women out of the picture so much, it has a bad effect on your sense of worth, because the culture that followed in his shadow has reinforced that. It does have an effect on us.”

A third production with Phyllida Lloyd is planned, and although the play has not yet been determined, there is one tragic hero Walter would relish taking on. “Having played Lady Macbeth”—opposite Antony Sher, in 1999—“I would love to play Macbeth,” she said. “We were yin and yang. I would like to try the yang to the yin—or whichever the female is. I can’t remember.” ♦