When Beatriz Romilly’s Joan of Arc wades into battle in Shakespeare’s Globe’s Henry VI (reviewed in Weekend today) it is with martial moves choreographed, perhaps appropriately, by a woman. Kate Waters, one of only two women on the Equity register of fight directors, is clearly working very hard at present.
Reading her biography in the Globe’s programme, I was surprised to discover just how many of her rumbles I have lately witnessed.
They include, for the RSC, the formal swordplay of Hamlet (see below) and the grisly slaughter of Titus Andronicus.
Her work supplied the vicious punch-up involving the drunken Cassio and Roderigo in the National Theatre’s brilliant new production of Othello. At the Old Vic she planned the racist mob-attack that is such a shocking feature of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (on till the end of the month) and the blood-drenched murders that figured in the recent production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.
You know, I think I might be slightly nervous in the company of Ms Waters, who also answers to the name Kombat Kate.
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