Pod Insights Happy Place Book Club Meets: Women speaking their minds, with Dame Harriet Walter About this episode Do you find yourself keeping quiet when you have plenty to say? Dame Harriet Walter – who has played 21 of Shakespeare’s female characters – has written She Speaks, which goes between the lines and imagines what Shakespeare’s women might really have wanted to say.
She Speaks was our Happy Place Book Club read for December. In this chat with Fearne, Harriet explains why she felt it was so important to finally let these female characters speak their minds. Harriet also expands on the characters in order to comment on modern day issues like the way ageing women are treated.
Fearne and Harriet chat about whether art mirrors the social hierarchy of its day, or perhaps offers an alternative worldview. Plus, Harriet reveals how female actors keep themselves in character when they’re waiting (often a long time) to speak on stage...
Thank you to Little Brown Audio for the use of She Speaks audiobook, narrated by Harriet Walter.
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0:28 Speaker 01 Ophelia fooled ya.
0:30 Fearne Cotton? Hey, welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton.
0:34 Speaker 01 "Tobey or not to obey" had been my question.
0:36 Fearne Cotton? Today, she speaks what Shakespeare's women might have said by Dame Harriet Walter.
0:42 Speaker 01 "Perchance cheat death and leave my body to hibernate awhile, then reappear a reinvented, unconnected person, not sickly or with thinking or with fear. Observing Hamlet carefully, I ape'd him, like him, escaped by faking antique ways. If he was mad northwest, I'd be his tailwind, distract them with distraction, seeming crazed. From there it was a breeze to stage my drowning. I sought the help of one who digs the graves. Beside poor Yorick's corpse, there is an orphan not buried yet. I'll see how much she weighs.
1:27 Speaker 01 Then later, as an unobserved observer, I watched them trail my understudy's beer. It worked a treat, so totally enshrouded, she fooled them and they drenched her with their tears.
1:43 Speaker 01 Did Hamlet or my brother howl the loudest? I own I had to eavesdrop on their griefs. The sad truth is, whichever way you sound it, the person they were mourning wasn't me." One last obedient act I did, for Hamlet. He bade me to a nunnery, so I went. And, oh, what marvellous people I have found here, encloistered in these deep, sequestered walls. No saintly nuns to speak of, but some sisters that narrow tongues do fast, loose women call. The learned and the simple, young and ancient, the harlots and the headstrong, wits and bores,
2:28 Speaker 01 the accidental mothers and their offspring, creative, crafty, cracked, or merely flawed. Their heads held high, their feet upon the ground. I fit right in, among the lost and found.
2:45 Fearne Cotton? Have you seen Succession or Killing Eve? Of course you have. Harriet Walter is in both of those shows and she's bloody brilliant. She's also one of Britain's most esteemed Shakespearean actors, which is what makes her the perfect person to have written this incredibly clever book. Having played most of Shakespeare's female characters at one point or another, Harriet is now letting them speak their minds in this book, She Speaks. I love the title, too. It was our Happy Place Book Club pick for December, and in it, Harriet goes between the lines of famous Shakespeare plays to write what she imagines these women were really thinking. I picked this book for December because it's a really lovely read, and it is a book that you can pick up, read a chapter of, pop it down, read another bit while you're having a cup of tea. I absolutely love it.
3:29 Fearne Cotton? It's a real look at women in the late 1500s and early 1600s. It's also a really interesting look at what Harriet wants to say, and the things that Harriet might have wanted to say when she was playing these women. She's played 21 of Shakespeare's characters, and also probably gives us a bit of a clearer idea as to how Harriet thinks. Although not all of the rewritten speeches are Harriet speaking her mind, some of them are, and that is truly fascinating.
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5:28 Fearne Cotton? Right, let's do it. Here's the show.
5:51 Fearne Cotton? Hello, Dame Harriet.
5:52 Speaker 01 Hello, Dame Fern.
5:54 Fearne Cotton? Oh, well, not quite. One day. Oh, it's so nice to see you. I sort of door stopped you at Buckingham Palace the other day.
6:01 Speaker 01 Yes, like you do.
6:02 Fearne Cotton? Like you do. I'd had a Buckingham Palace gin and tonic, so I felt all brave and I was like, I'm just gonna go up and say hi. And it was so lovely to talk to you.
6:10 Speaker 01 And you didn't need bravery at all.
6:13 Fearne Cotton? It was a good gin and tonic though, I have to say. It felt special.
6:16 Speaker 01 They know how to do it there.
6:17 Fearne Cotton? Yeah, it had like twirly cucumber in it and everything. It was gorgeous. Um, hey, I really wanna talk about, She Speaks, this book. This bloody great book, which is our happy place pick for December. I love this book so much. It's so clever. Obviously, you very astutely used all of your knowledge of Shakespeare and your experience in Shakespearean plays to sort of rewrite the female voice for many of his characters, having played so many yourself too. When did that idea land? It's a very unique idea and one that I has really captivated me. When did that idea land in your head?
6:50 Speaker 01 The first idea landed, um, it came out of a competition that was set up for school kids to reinvent a character in Shakespeare or rewrite or put themselves into a story or something to make Shakespeare sort of more fun and have more ownership of the plays in schools. And I was invited as a practitioner to kick the, um, competition off with an example.
7:18 Speaker 01 And I started off, first of all, they said, we've got an in-house writer if you want him to do it. I said, no, I'll do it myself. What do you mean? And, uh, I came up with the very first one, which was about Gertrude in Hamlet, who I'd watched every night, sort of, when I was playing Ophelia. I'd watched from the wings and I'd seen, my frustration on her behalf was that she never really got to answer back to Hamlet, who has enough to say, let's face it, you could have given her a bit of space. And that was the first speech that came to mind and it came to mind very immediately. And because it was only for fun and there was no pressure on me, I found all these sort of other stray lines from Shakespeare plays coming into the speech.
8:00 Speaker 01 And I thought, oh, isn't it funny? I could, that was fun. I didn't know I had that in me. And then I started to do others and, and it became, in some cases, it was, you know, me writing what I'd liked them to have said. But it was also me using the structure of Shakespeare's arguments to say something I wanted to say through another character. So it's not always about me telling Shakespeare that he didn't do enough for us. It's more about sort of addressing some of what we feel now through his beautiful structures.
8:33 Fearne Cotton? Yeah, it's it's so amazing. And of course, not only, you know, did Shakespeare wrote these plays, so it's a a male lens. Um, that we're seeing these characters through, but also females, of course, weren't permitted to act in the plays back in the day. So you also had men playing these female roles. So women did really totally. Get left to one side in in terms of of this storytelling. And you've talked there about your frustration of seeing another character, another. Actor play a role and and sort of thinking, God, why why doesn't she have the opportunity to speak back? You've played twenty one Shakespearean roles now. Have you felt frustration on stage thinking, I want to bloody say something, but but obviously, you know, you can't.
9:14 Speaker 01 You definitely do feel that. And female actors find strategies to get through the evening's play. Sort of trying to balance staying engaged in your character. With not, so in other words, not sort of sitting on the back foot and falling asleep, but staying in the play. While you haven't got any action or speech to contribute at that point. So you become very good listeners, you you develop strategies of kind of. Thinking, what am I thinking, even though I'm not saying it? So that, you know, I used to think if somebody jumped up on stage from the audience and said, what are you thinking now? I'd be able to answer and it would come from the character within the play. And we get very used to to to that.
9:56 Speaker 01 And I just wanted to make a bit clear that it's not so much that because women weren't allowed on stage that Shakespeare. He he didn't underwrite for his women. You know, the women have fantastic parts and they're varied and they're brilliant and they're beautiful. And they have just as complicated things to say, but there's fewer of them, they're shorter in length and they don't. Because the boys would grow up quite soon, they don't have the sort of lifespan of the male actors' range. And also. You know, in the the times he was writing and up until. Embarrassingly recently, men ran the story. It was about a king or a magician
10:38 Speaker 01 or a lord or, you know, somebody was running the show and it was a male. And so all the women characters had to fit round or feed into that male.
10:50 Fearne Cotton? Hmm. I mean, you actually make a point in the book of saying that because Shakespeare knew that it would be young men playing these female roles, perhaps he actually accentuated some parts of their character. There might be sexual innuendo in there, or perhaps a bit of humour that he might not have added if he had had women playing those roles on stage.
11:10 Speaker 01 Yes, that's just a theory of mine, but I think it does sort of hold up.
11:13 Fearne Cotton? I think so.
11:14 Speaker 01 Some of the feistier female characters he's got, particularly the ones who dress as boys, they were taking part in a sort of Shakespearean Jacobean in-joke for the sort of borderline sort of homosexuality and all of that that was openly, not openly, but in this kind of subtle way was exposed. And, you know, there was a, there was a sort of titillation in seeing a boy dressed as a girl who was then going to disguise themselves back as a boy. We have the opposite titillation because we have girls dressed as boys pretending to be girls, you know. And so we know those sort of innuendo gender jokes are around
11:55 Speaker 01 in his court and in, in the audience of his day. And they are, and the boys are allowed to make quite lewd little references. They're subtle. And they're allowed to be feisty and take part in sword fights and make jokes about themselves. That perhaps if they'd been sort of decorous little females in Shakespeare's, they wouldn't have been allowed to go that far.
12:20 Fearne Cotton? Yeah. I think it's a really, a really solid theory. I mean, was there one particular female character that you felt had the most to say? Who had perhaps been the most suppressed or, or hadn't had the opportunity to speak back?
12:32 Speaker 01 Well, there are a lot of them, but one of the ones that I think of is Octavia in, in Antony and Cleopatra, who's really, she's used really as a pawn.
12:42 Speaker 01 In a in a sort of historical moment when Octavius Caesar, who's then Caesar or about to take over and be the one Caesar and not be ruling with two other people. Is trying to win Mark Antony back into the fold and and he buys him off by marrying him off to his sister. Which is a way of saying, you know, it's like a diplomatic marriage. It's like a marriage of convenience, you know. And it's it has absolutely nothing to do with Octavia's desires or who she wants to marry. And she spends most of the play that she's got about here very few lines and what lines she has is. Oh, what am I going to do torn between my husband and my brother? I don't know where my loyalty is like.
13:24 Speaker 01 And basically that marriage breaks down in a couple of scenes and historically she was great. She was feisty, she was right in there. She and Mark Antony had two children together. They lived together, must have lived together for at least six years. Yes, of course, he went back to Cleopatra in the end. When Antony and Cleopatra died, she became guardian of their children. She brought up his earlier children, her own earlier children, their children together and Antony and Cleopatra's children. Plus, she did a lot of work for the state and for her brother and for Rome. And she travelled to Athens and she did this and that. But for the purposes of Shakespeare's plot.
14:02 Speaker 01 She has to be boring, dull, uninteresting, someone who we can all understand Mark Antony leaving for Cleopatra. So that's a perfect example. Sometimes I did play her when I was very, very young. I thought this is just the most awful part. I've got to give her some words.
14:19 Fearne Cotton? Yeah, I love it. Um, is it the, um, just trying to find, I've dogged so many pages in the book. Is it the rewrite of the weird sisters dialogue that you really get stuck into looking at aging?
14:31 Speaker 01 Yes, that's it, the witches.
14:32 Fearne Cotton? I loved that one. I recently saw Macbeth, actually, at the Harold Pinter Theatre and it was one of the best things I've ever seen in my life.
14:40 Speaker 01 Great.
14:41 Fearne Cotton? I just loved it and I and I loved this impassioned rant that that you were on and I say rant. Purely in a positive way because I'm I'm with you on it. I. I very much love getting older and everything that comes with it. And that just seemed to pour out of you onto the page for that particular one.
14:59 Speaker 01 It's so funny because I've rehearsed those arguments in other forms or, you know. But I've never, and then also, actually, it wasn't one of mine, it wasn't one of the first ones I wanted to write. But my publisher said, how about witches? And I thought, well, how can you write about the witches? Who are they? And, you know, we never know quite where to place them because we don't really believe in witches anymore, most of us. And I thought, I don't know, they're not going to play the function they play in the play. They're going to play another function. They're going to remind the world that if they don't die too young, they're going to get old. And you better enjoy it and face it. And you better look at old people in a different way. And all of that, sort of all my own personal kind of.
15:41 Fearne Cotton? I loved it.
15:42 Speaker 01 Arguments came through them. So that's what I mean by it wasn't always about giving the character as they are in the play, something else to say. Because you can't improve on a lot of Shakespeare's stuff. And I wouldn't want to. But what I've given is sort of more margin room for different arguments to come into, into the story.
15:59 Fearne Cotton? You're so brilliant. Talking of Macbeth, you know, you say in the book, playing Lady Macbeth was a challenge because at first it was particularly hard to get in touch with who she was and what her motivation was. And it wasn't necessarily chiming with you. How, how did you remedy that? How did you get to the point where you thought, right, I totally understand where she's coming from and, and why, and why she's acting in such a way?
16:20 Speaker 01 Yes, it's quite a process that I had to go through. And I'm sure anyone else who's played Lady Macbeth would have had to as well. First of all, you're confronted by her reputation, which is way bigger than the, the size of the part in the play. It's a small part. But, you know, people talk about modern Lady Macbeth and the power behind the throne. And, you know, Madame Mao and, you know, you know, everybody talks about the, the evil woman breathing into the ear of the quite nice man, who then becomes horrible. And so I was facing that reputation. My first thought was I've got to look behind that, investigate it. And if it's not the case, I want to try.
17:02 Speaker 01 And make people look at it a different way. Well, whatever you do, you do a play for a year and you do it your way. But after it's finished, everybody goes back to thinking the way they always thought. But yeah, I mean, so it was partly, it was actually a funny, funny thing that came to me and I don't want to sound woo wooish. But I was in Yorkshire on a walk and I thought I'm going to go on this walk, not as me, but as Lady Macbeth. I'm going to look at the trees and the hills and the rotting ground underneath me and the birds and the, you know, and I'm, and the wind rattling in the leaves and I'm going to see it as her. I'm going to experience it through her eyes and her senses. And it was a brilliant sort of stepping stone into her character because I realised that I walk around the world
17:47 Speaker 01 and largely see nature as benign and kind of on my side and, you know, for my delight. And I searched to get through to a person who thought nature had been her enemy and had spoilt her life because she couldn't have children or she'd had children and they'd died. And because that, there are very heavy hints of that in the play. And my Macbeth, who was Anthony Sher, came along on that ride very much so and, and felt that was a core to the bitterness she has, to the urgency of making him king. While they were, you know, while they were still able to take that power, because we, we were in our middle age when we did it.
18:32 Speaker 01 And it became the heart of her, this sort of, this woman who'd been turned too poisoned by the accident of nature. And her milk had turned to gall.
18:43 Fearne Cotton? Yeah. Oh, my gosh, I love that. And, and I guess, you know, if you can't find that instant connection with a character, with a role, you know, you, you, you have to seek it out. You have to try and see through their eyes. It's remarkable. I mean, I, I loved watching Macbeth recently. It was a really interesting production where you wore headphones. So they were almost whispering. Yeah, it was so cool. Um, I was mesmerised by the whole thing and the music was really gorgeous. And I felt like I understood the play really well after watching it. I just, I absolutely, I loved it. I loved it so much. Who would you say has been your favourite Shakespearean female role to play?
19:19 Speaker 01 Gosh, um, well, the, the.
19:22 Speaker 01 I like the big ones. It's quite as simple as that. The juicy ones. The ones where you get to spend a lot of stage time and exercise your muscles and because it's a physical thing as well. So the biggest parts I've played in Shakespeare and loved the most because they have so much complexity. I would say first of all Imogen in Cymbeline, which is not very often done, but she's really mercurial and she changes from tragedy to comedy to she dresses as a boy. She, you know, she, she's feisty, she's gentle, she's absolutely everything. And there's a bit of so many of his other characters in her. There's a bit of Juliet in her. There's a bit of Cleopatra in her. There's a bit of Isabella in her. You know, she's, she's a really complex, full character. The trouble is the play's a bit silly and people don't do it very often.
20:08 Speaker 01 But so fun. Very good fun. And then I suppose, and then Cleopatra, of course, gets to do some wonderful stuff. And Helena in All's Well, Ends Well, you see, she's another one. The play is complicated. People find it a problem play. They literally call it a problem play because we don't know who's sideways supposed to be on. I think that's one of the problems. But I find her wonderful. She's, she goes out and gets what she wants and she doesn't lose her humanity. She's not, she's not horrible. She's not evil, but she tries to get the love of her life, who doesn't love her back as it happens. So she's a fun character. And then Beatrice in Much Ado is just pure pleasure.
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22:53 Fearne Cotton? I'm always so fascinated by actors that gravitate towards Shakespeare. You know, we recently had David Tennant on who, well, he's currently in Macbeth at the moment and he's obviously got a longstanding history in his career of doing TV, then going back to Shakespeare plays, much like you have over the years. And you've had an unbelievably diverse career. You know, I can't do this interview without saying how much I absolutely bloody loved you in Succession. But I'm always so fascinated with that, that wonderful to-ing and fro-ing from TV to Shakespeare. It's a real dedication. You have to be insanely good at Shakespeare. It's a real specific skill set, the flow of it, the cadence, the understanding of the plays. What first captured you when it comes to Shakespeare?
23:38 Fearne Cotton? What sort of drew you in?
23:40 Speaker 01 It's funny, isn't it? Because I never knew how to answer that question there because, you know, people's, it was framed slightly differently, you know, why Shakespeare? When did you first get interested? And I always said, oh, you know, I never, I never got, I didn't really get excited at school. I didn't get excited by going to a lot of Shakespeare plays. I think the first one I went to was 21, I was on. And I realised that it was at drama school and I'd I'd I'd forgotten this literally until a few years ago, I hadn't sort of registered. I was at drama school and I was being put through my paces in a scene. Yeah, you know, most drama schools only do Shakespeare for a term, maybe two. Out of all the other things they do, um he's only part of it. Some of them don't do him at all, I hate to say.
24:25 Speaker 01 But at my drama school, Lander, there was a wonderful woman teacher called Shetty Salomon, and she put me through. Hermione's speech in the trial scene of Winter's Tale. And it's very extreme. She's been locked up in prison. Her boy has died. She's been publicly shamed. She's been treated by her husband as an adulteress. She's been starved. Da, da, da. And then you walk on stage, right? And so all of that has to be in your imagination. You can't demonstrate it to the audience very easily. You've just got to bring it on with you. And Shakespeare gives her these powerful, long speeches that are fighting for her life.
25:11 Speaker 01 And this teacher was relentless. She kept saying, okay, forget, remember, you haven't eaten for three weeks. Remember, da, da, da. Remember, you've just lost your boy. Remember, you're the Empress of Russia and you've been humiliated publicly. Remember, you used to love your husband. Uh she piled all this information and then she said, I didn't hear that line. Well, what you what are you saying? What are you doing? And she went on and on and on at me. And I was loving it, because there was something about how difficult it was and how challenging it was, that I was absolutely loving. And there were other people in my class who sort of walked out and said, to hell with this. I'm not going to be, you know, harangued by this. She wasn't gentle.
25:51 Speaker 01 But I learnt so much in that afternoon. I'll never forget it. And if if nothing else, I learnt that you have to juggle about ten balls when you're doing Shakespeare. You know, you've got to remember where you are, you've got to be emotional, you've got to not be too emotional so that we can't hear what you're saying. You've got to drive the argument through, you've got. To particularise all the images, you've got to make them land in the audience and not affect you too much, because if you're too affected by them, they won't get it. Yeah, it's it's very, very, very, it's it's very hugely challenging, and I think a lot of actors love that challenge.
26:27 Fearne Cotton? Yeah, I mean, you've got to love it, otherwise there's you wouldn't stand a chance. I mean, even just learning the text, it's not something where, you know, you could go off piste and and make a bit up if you've forgotten where you are. There's a certain rhythm and a cadence and exact language that you've got to use. What's your method for really getting that script in your head and and getting it to stay in there?
26:47 Speaker 01 There are lots of tricks and I've, you know, and I think that Shakespeare wrote them in. I think he did them on purpose because his actors had to learn very quickly. So he uses, for instance, alliteration, he uses internal rhymes, he uses strong imagery that you can't forget and he uses music, rhythm, you know, all these things. I mean, we can learn songs because we we can put words to music, you know, it's and once they're in there, they don't go away. So all those kind of tricks, there's nothing generalised about it. There's nothing more difficult than learning generalised language, because it's, you know, it's harder to get a hook in and and remember it. So I I found, you know, I suddenly realised he was full of tricks helping me learn.
27:33 Fearne Cotton? That's handy.
27:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And I think he put them there because either they came to him because, you know, and I found writing the book that sort of rhymes would chime in my head. I said, there was one where I said something about a kitten's mouth and then something about litter and I suddenly realised, oh, litter and kitten and I've put them both, you know, you suddenly realise that they come to you, not not that you didn't consciously write the rhyme, but it but it comes into your head because you've just had the former thought, so the latter one kind of catches up with you or echoes you. And I think possibly that was how he wrote sometimes, is he was thinking a thought, he wrote it down. And then something else chimed with that and he wrote that down. And then when you're backtracking and learning it,
28:18 Speaker 01 those little stepping stones are still there.
28:20 Fearne Cotton? That's so interesting. Do you think, um? Shakespeare's women, say, speak more to how women were thought of in the late 1500s, early 1600s, or more specifically about what Shakespeare thought about women?
28:36 Speaker 01 I don't think it's about Shakespeare, what, because Shakespeare seems to have such a huge range of opinions about women, if they are opinions. I mean, we know that he's famously elusive. We don't really know what Shakespeare, whose side he was on. Sometimes he's talking about revolution in a wonderful way, then he's talking about the establishment in a wonderful way. He's talking about women being traitresses and lying, and then he talks about them being absolutely the parody of beauty and human. Everything is about being human. He writes about the human condition and he doesn't leave women out of that. We're absolutely included in his embrace. I think that a lot of it is, as I said before, about who's running the
29:19 Speaker 01 show out there in the world he's living in and what the general public and the world and culturally women are thought of as, you know, they're the weaker sex, they don't have the vote, they don't have hold of the purse strings at this point. I mean, they did in medieval England, they had a lot more power. But, you know, as things evolved, women have gone up and down in society, really. And this is a time when you had a woman on the throne, for heaven's sakes, but she was having to really play the game amongst men. And, you know, there were a lot of very educated women who were very scholarly and brilliant, and he would have known about them. So he wouldn't have not respected women's potential. But I
30:03 Speaker 01 think within his stories, it made a good plot if the woman was a victim, or if the woman was going to commit suicide, or if the woman was a laughing stock, or if the woman was a traitorous, or, you know, it made a good story.
30:13 Fearne Cotton? Yeah, they're bloody good stories. And quite frankly, all stories are a Shakespeare story. They're just a regurgitated Shakespeare story, we've realised. Literally every film, every story is a Shakespeare story. It's remarkable. Well, I love this book, and I know that our Happy Place followers will love reading it throughout December. She speaks, Dame Harriet Walter. What a joy to read this book and a privilege to talk to you today. I'm so very grateful.
30:37 Speaker 01 Thank you for, wonderful.
30:40 Fearne Cotton? Oh, thanks, Harriet. Love interviewing people like that. It's all quite nerve wracking. You have to say, Dame. Hello, Dame Harriet. She called me Dame Fern, which is, let's hope, a premonition for the future, guys. She Speaks was our Happy Place Recommended Read for December. You'll already have known that if you follow at Happy Place Book Club on Instagram. We always post loads of extra content and discussions about the book we're reading together on there. So join us. Come join the party. If you love books. I would bloody love it if you started reading along with us each month, if you don't already. January's book is by David Larby and it's called Frequently Happy. Yes, please. Listen, we all know that life can be bloody stressful. Each day can feel like a bit of a struggle
31:22 Fearne Cotton? to get through, but David's aim with this book is to help you see and build pockets of joy in every day. He combines poetry with weekly reflections that will help you explore your emotions and seize opportunities to grow. It is a gorgeous concept. I'll be chatting to David on the podcast in just a few weeks, so you can keep an eye out for that episode. For now, though, a huge thank you to Dame Harriet, to the producer, Anushka Tate, at Happy Place Studios, and to you, you lovely Shakespearean lot. Make sure your voice is being heard.
32:22 Speaker 05 Hey, this is Penn and Kim Olderness from Laughlines.
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34:02 Speaker 03 This December, the magic of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol returns to Virginia Repertory Theater in downtown Richmond. Experience the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge as he's visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and rediscovers the joy and true meaning of the holiday season. Performances run November 18th through December 27th. Tickets on sale now at virginiarep.org or by calling 804-282-2620.
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