Review: She Speaks! The Conversation with Harriet Walter, St Martin-in-the-Fields

The Café in the Crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields is a beautiful underground venue with original brick-vaulted ceilings and historic tombstones lining the floor. It’s a reasonable size, but for some reason, the setting of the stage and chairs for the Harriet Walter episode of The Conversation provided a shockingly bad view for all concerned. Which was odd given the flexibility of the space, and I mention it only for future events there, but shall also move on quickly as the evening was sublime.

The 2026 Conversation Spring Series is billed as exploring social justice and how we imagine the world with curiosity, knowledge and wisdom through the form of a series of in-person interviews which are also livestreamed. In this, Harriet Walter’s new book She Speaks! is explored through conversation between Walter and Lennie Goodings. Walter, doyenne of Shakespeare as well as film and TV, is well known, Goodings perhaps less so but it is with Goodings I start. Current Chair of Virago Press she has been with the feminist publisher since its inception and has published a host of famous female writers including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Naomi Wolf and Joan Bakewell to name but a few. She is, I suspect, slightly fierce, but a supportive interviewer, well prepared but also challenging. It is a pleasure to watch her interact with Walter as she undeniably brings the best out of her subject.

Walter is a delight. She has forgotten her glasses, which proves an issue when trying to read from her book. Helpfully several members of the audience offer theirs and once she has found a pair that works, she is off. She Speaks! is her latest of several books invoking her reverence of Shakespeare. She opens by explaining her love of the Bard but also her fascination with the young boys that would have played the female parts in its origins. Puberty arrived later then, so it is reasonable to expect that boys up to the age of 17 or so would be playing female parts. Would they have had the insight to question motivations of characters? She suspects not: their acting more likely to rely on the craft of mimicry and posturing. But it is those female characters that she is interested in: what they are allowed to say, and more importantly what they are not allowed to say.  

This book contains 30 chapters, each with enlarged parts for Shakespeare’s women, written in faithful Elizabethan verse and prose, and in each the character becomes whole: expressing frustrations and desires that we don’t see in the original. They are funny, angry and real. Walters reads some aloud before taking questions from the audience. Her demonstrable written fluency in iambic pentameter is elegant and surprising. The voices that come out are inspired and challenge perceptions: we consider misogyny versus sexism. Shakespeare wrote of his time, and that was time when women were not heard, but their characters are still there waiting to be explored. When in conversation with audience members she examines whether women could take on some of the famous big male Shakespeare characters, and how Shakespeare’s physiological insight remains ever relevant today. Let’s think of Macbeth she encourages: in his everlasting quest for power and control, he becomes suspicious, isolated and vulnerable. Does that remind you of anyone? Putin perhaps?

It was a most thought provoking, fascinating evening exploring the potential in Shakespearean writing in a way that remain ever relevant: challenging questions for big problems.

Speaker: Harriet Walter
Chaired by Lennie Goodings, Virago Press

The Conversation is a series of events currently running until 28 June.