Treading the broads

Imagine the delight among the marketing staff at Shakespeare's Globe when they read last month about the "sensational" discovery of a portrait of the Bard's patron, the Earl of Southampton, apparently wearing women's clothing and make-up. All that newsprint devoted to Elizabethan cross-dressing was perfectly timed to whet appetites for the Globe's new season, with an all-male production of Twelfth Night on stage and, at its Exhibition, a new attraction inviting gents to be laced into Ophelia's corset, petticoat and silk skirt, and ladies to don Hamlet's doublet and hose. Meanwhile, north of the Thames, rehearsals continue for the West End transfer of Rose Rage, Edward Hall's acclaimed all-male adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy. For Shakespearean actors and game tourists, this summer's dress code is "Come as you aren't".

If you mention cross-dressed performance, contemporary audiences' immediate associations are not with Shakespeare, but with the over-stuffed bras and steepling wigs of the panto dame, or the great movie drag acts: Lemmon and Curtis in Some Like it Hot, or Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. Their gender swaps are played for laughs, whereas "original practice" productions such as Twelfth Night and Rose Rage have serious intentions. They remind us that when Shakespeare wrote Ophelia, Cleopatra and Viola, "drag" was a professional necessity, not a gimmick. As we watch our local Widow Twanky, or Hoffman as Tootsie's Dorothy Michaels, we never forget that we're watching a man. For the drama to take hold when we watch Paul Chahidi as Maria in Twelfth Night, or Robert Hands as Queen Margaret in Rose Rage we must forget they're men – or, rather, imagine that we've forgotten.

So how do the actors avoid the drag trap while still making us suspend our disbelief? They start with movement and voice work. Director Tim Carroll's Twelfth Night company had an early session with choreographer Sian Williams. "We watched her move, she watched us move and we noted the differences in how we use our bodies," explains Paul Chahidi. "I tried to introduce a feminine side to my movement, a greater sensuality to the hips. The main thing was not to make it pantomimic, or seem to be making fun of playing a woman."

He notes that while an actor's performance becomes richer once he's in costume, with Maria, clothes were the making of the woman. Chahidi's intricate costuming process involves corset, petticoat, farthingales (the "bum rolls" used to give men a more curvaceous rear view), doublet and skirt, topped off by a Queen of Hearts wig. The effect of all this on his portrayal of Maria "was as good as weeks of movement practice. Because in that costume you have to take small steps, and if you need to move fast you have to glide. It told me so much about feminine deportment."

Where Chahidi's transformation into Olivia's resourceful right-hand woman is a "straight" swap, Michael Brown has another angle to exploit with Viola/Cesario – that of the boy playing a girl playing a boy. "After her first scene, an actress playing Viola/Cesario has to find male mannerisms," says Brown. "Whereas I have just that first scene after the shipwreck in which to give the audience a memory of my "natural" state. Then I have to tone down my natural male behaviour and make being a boy feel awkward for her. It helps that we're using period costumes. Cesario's doublet and hose are foreign to me as an actor, and they're foreign to Viola, too."

Costume was equally important for Robert Hands, who plays Queen Margaret in Rose Rage. "We all have a standard costume of Doc Martens, evening trousers and dress shirt, but mine is accessorised with fur stole, pearl choker, and earrings and an Alice band. I added bright-red lipstick and a beauty spot because I wanted to be glamorous. When I thought about what she would have looked like, I couldn't get Sharon Stone out of my head, because Margaret uses her sexuality a lot."

To find a complementary voice, Hands has slightly softened his natural tenor, as have Michael Brown and Mark Rylance, who is the Globe's Olivia and artistic director. "I have a fairly soft voice and used sometimes to be mistaken for a woman when I rang up banks," says Rylance. "For Olivia I've listened to recordings of a few women whose voices have the right intonations for a countess.

"I've learned a lot from watching the onnagata [female impersonators] of kabuki theatre, in particular Nakamura Ganjiro III, who still plays 18-year-old women at the age of about 65. I use onnagata tecnhique in terms of making smaller movements with the feet and pulling my arms in to make them seem shorter and more delicate. Kabuki started around the same time as Shakespeare's theatre, but the tradition of men playing women has not been broken the way the Puritans broke ours – it has instead evolved. Although I think there's enormous art to being a pantomime dame, it would be a demeaning way to treat Olivia or Cleopatra [whom Rylance played at the Globe in 1999]. The Japanese way is not demeaning. They do it with great respect for women and we do the same at the Globe."

It's not surprising to learn that kabuki was a major factor in persuading Edward Hall to explore all-male Shakespeare with the Propeller company created at the tiny Watermill Theatre, Newbury. In the mid-Nineties, Hall spent a year working in Tokyo theatres, and noted "how the onnagata could create the most intense emotion from the smallest detail". Those observations have informed his Propeller productions of Henry V, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors and now Rose Rage, first seen at the Watermill in February 2001. "We always present the idea of a woman," Hall explains. "It's never a man trying to con the audience. This way, the audience has to use their imaginations, and, with poetic work like Shakespeare, the drama dies if you fail to make that demand of them.

"Having men play women also has an interesting effect on the sexual politics of the plays. We can get away from the audience's neurosis about what the physical chemistry between an actor and an actress needs to be. With men in the female roles, you watch and listen, and Shakespeare's words work for you."

If we respond to Twelfth Night and Rose Rage as Hall would wish, it will be because the cast have honoured the emotional truths of the verse – truths which all four actors interviewed for this piece believe make a character's gender almost irrelevant. "Margaret is so complex and interesting as a person," says Hands, "that I've long since stopped worrying about playing a woman. I'm just playing a character."

On a historical level, cross-dressing deepens our understanding of the circumstances in which Shakespeare wrote. Emotionally, watching men play women in various extremes of love, hate, grief or mischief reminds us that Shakespeare believed the sexes had much more in common than the enforced gender roles that his or our eras might suggest. In Twelfth Night's conspiracy against Malvolio, it's Maria who wears the trousers. In Henry VI, Queen Margaret is seductress and mother, but also slips easily into the role of ruthless political and military leader. As Paul Chahidi says: "All the way through the plays and the sonnets, Shakespeare tests our ideas of what it is to be male and female."

For Mark Rylance, "all of the characters, male and female, are archetypes brought into harmony in the comedies. So having male actors get in touch with the feminine side of themselves is philosophically connected to the nature, form and content of the plays." If that weren't the case, would audiences have continued for decades to play along with two-way cross-dressing in girls' school stagings of Hamlet or boys' school versions of Much Ado? "It doesn't matter if men or women or boys or girls play the parts," Rylance concludes, "because all Shakespeare's characters are aspects of each single member of the audience."

'Twelfth Night' opens tonight at Shakespeare's Globe, London SE1 (020-7401 9919); 'Rose Rage' is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1, from 12 June to 21 July (0870 901 3356)