A Conversation with Kate Fleetwood
on playing the Witch in Into the Woods
It’s a privilege to welcome Kate Fleetwood to The Sondheim Hub this week. Kate currently stars as the Witch in Jordan Fein’s acclaimed production of Into the Woods at the Bridge Theatre, London — a role for which she has received an Olivier Award nomination. Ahead of her final few weeks in the role, we spoke about how her Witch has evolved, her extraordinary “Last Midnight,” Sondheim’s Shakespearean qualities, and much more. Our conversation begins below:
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It’s so good to meet you. You’ve lived with the Witch for months now. As you head into your final few weeks at The Bridge, are you conscious of ways in which she’s grown, and that you’ve grown through her?
Yes. Really deeply, actually. I’m finding her incredibly revealing. It’s like a cycle. You start with one focus, and then you go through other shifts and phases in how you want to interpret her, and what she reveals to you.
And more recently, with the events in the world as they are, I find myself very remote in “Last Midnight” in particular. That number has always had an element of nihilism to it. And I’ve always tried to recruit the audience: “You’re the world,” you know? “You’re all liars and thieves like his father.” Not in an explicitly accusatory way to the actual audience, but more in a thematic way. She’s saying to the outside world: if you continue only to blame each other, then there’s an apocalypse coming. And that seems really prescient at the moment.
I find that incredibly moving, that she is willing to give up everything just to make that point. In the early days, I thought it was rather a selfish act, but now I feel like it’s more of a protest.
I’ve always found the mothering side of it very rich and interesting. Because she hasn’t been parented herself, she’s rather shocked about how people are behaving. She really doesn’t have much of a compass on that. When her daughter says, you know, you did this and this and this, there’s obviously a moment of levity when she says, “I was only trying to be a good mother.” But she really doesn’t know how to mother. This really was her trying. She’s so removed from norms of behaviour that, through that, she can reveal the inadequacies of normal behaviour, as it were. And I find that tilt has become richer and richer over the last few weeks.
She’s also incredibly rich to play because it’s such a technical role. The singing requires such concentration. You have to be so connected to what you’re doing that you can’t ever drop the ball. It’s not only listening — and so much listening is involved — but everything is very active. You are constantly passing the baton to your fellow player, which requires massive muscularity and a turning on a sixpence constantly. In this show, nothing’s languid, nothing’s largo. It’s all very front foot, and the show is so propulsive. You have to be incredibly present, with your band and with your fellow players. You can’t switch off for a moment, because you are at the steering wheel.
And then, amidst all that propulsion, you do as the Witch get these tremendous moments of relative stillness.
Absolutely. That’s something else I’ve learned over the years. I haven’t done much musical theatre, but I always approach them in the same way as a classical text or a piece of new writing: you have to find what the pitch and tone is, and what the dramaturgy or the audience is needing from you at each moment And then you can slam something in which is a completely different tempo — not only in literal tempo, but in mood and tone.
Then it’s your responsibility as a performer to know what that shift is, to grab this tender moment because it’s just come off the back of something else, which might then lead into a more staccato moment afterwards. It’s about knowing when you can afford to do something more still and adagio, if you like. Musicals often do require you to turn on a sixpence that way as a performer. You can have great moments of levity and then immediately shift into something more tragic.
Because also — and I think this is really important for any performer — always remember that the audience is ahead of you. And that’s when Sondheim’s lyrics are so brilliant, because even though the audience may feel they’re ahead naturally and intuitively, Sondheim will write a great lyric that catches something really interesting that they maybe weren’t expecting. So it’s your responsibility as a performer to try and get there before them, so that then they’re surprised. You have to be quite brave about tonal shifts.
You mentioned classical texts, and your Shakespeare experience is vast. People often compare Sondheim to Shakespeare — almost as an offhand remark, as if it’s a given. Having lived inside this work, do you have a perspective on that comparison?
When you’re doing stage work, you have to deal with the technical side of repetition, and that requires leaps of imagination, so that you can keep focusing and keep things fresh. That is really important when you’ve done 300 performances of The Scottish Play. And for Into the Woods, we’re heading toward our 180th performance or something like that.
What is very similar is the colour, the depth of the colouring of the characters — the pigment, if you like. That might sound pretentious to someone who’s not involved in this kind of work, but it makes sense to performers, I think, to understand in a painterly way that your characters are either very strong colours, or transparent, or opaque, or whatever, and what they lend to the story.
Into the Woods is really dense and fountain-like. It springs forth a lot of new things all the time, in the same way that Shakespeare’s characters always do. And it all comes from the words.
As anyone who’s seen this production will know, the final sequence of your “Last Midnight” is excitingly distinctive. How early on were you talking to Jordan [Fein, director] and Tom [Scutt, set and costume designer] about those choices?
Making a show is like building a house. First, there’s the imaginative stage of what it’s going to be. Having been given this job through my audition process, I think I learned “Last Midnight” first. I wanted to get it really under my belt, and in my breath, and in my body as soon as I possibly could, so that it was just like air. I actually find it incredibly easy to sing, even though it’s a hard sing. It’s tiring — my intercostal muscles are really quite painful afterwards, after I’ve sung it. I’m always clutching my belly.
Jordan is so delicate and sensitive to the performance and to the vision of what he wanted. We staged “Agony” first, and then he said, “Shall we put a little staging together of ‘Last Midnight?’” He told me where to start, where to move, where to finish. And then I just did it, in one. I said, “Okay, I think I know what you want.” I think it was maybe two or three days after that that he said, “We’re thinking about putting Rapunzel back in and pulling you down from where she’s been sent.” I thought that was a great idea.
I’ve always been interested in finding other ways of telling a story that’s so well-known — ways that might pique something interesting, even if it’s just a thought experiment. I think there was a moment during previews where we thought about taking it out, just as a thought — but then we all changed our minds and said, “No, we must keep it in.” We were really wedded to it, and we wanted to be bold. And I find it fascinating to play. How I feel when Bella [Brown, playing Rapunzel] comes up is always different, always changing. It’s another rich beat. You can mine so much out of it. It’s an incredible number to perform. I never get bored of doing it. Ever.
I’d love to ask you about your costume design trajectory throughout the show. How collaborative was the process of finding your look(s)?
When playing a big iconic role like this, I allow myself the indulgence of immersing myself in other people’s performances for about two weeks. Looking through the crack in the door, as it were, or listening behind walls. And then at some point you have to just let that go.
Jordan asked me if I wanted to come to Tom’s workshop, his design studio — which in itself is a huge honour. They showed me a whole model box presentation, which was great. But before I went in, Jordan and I had a cup of tea for about an hour and a half; he asked me about my life and who I was. We’d known each other peripherally in the industry for a while, but not really very well. We talked about our families, and then we got kicked out of the café and went out to sit by the canal, and we talked about mothers.
And then I said, my biggest provocative question is: who was she? Who was she before she was cursed? And what role does she play in society after she’s transformed? The show goes through so many archetypes in the storytelling — you’ve got Jack, Little Red Riding Hood, princesses, princes — and I thought, well, what is the archetype of the woman who was a witch, who is now not a witch, who no longer has any powers? Who is she in the community? And often it’s done as a sort of pin-up, or a movie star, or that type. That was my main question, and I could see a little glint in Jordan’s eye, because he said, “Yes, exactly. That’s our big thing. Who is she?” And then I said — we both sort of said it at the same time — “Because she’s sort of a gardener, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah, exactly, she’s a gardener.” She tends the garden. It’s hers. She inherits it.
Before I was due to talk to you, I was in the garden. I have very witchy hands right now. I’ve got to wash my hands, but I didn’t have time. I think it’s quite a good homage to the Witch, my gardening hands. So if you ever see my hands and they’re covered in dirt, it’s not because I’m getting ready for the show early — it’s the fact I’ve just been digging in the garden.
Your garden thrives!
Exactly. Anyway, I then went up into the design workshop, and Tom showed me his ideas, and it all gelled. We looked at it as three witches. One is the hag, which is the first witch. We looked at the cultural dread of an ugly old woman, and what that does in society, and how we feature — or don’t feature — those women in our cultural narrative. How we dread and fear them, and how they are wrapped and warped. I was thinking of that Alexander McQueen Voss show, that woman in a box surrounded by moths. But I wanted her to be nimble as well. We wanted her to look like she was from the earth, but we also wanted her not to have a mask on, so we could still use my face.
And then, for the young version of her, before she was punished by her mother, we imagined a sort of Pina Bausch character who comes out of the water, as it were, fresh and taking her breath. That’s the girl in the white dress with the long hair. And that’s a really good example of a sixpence moment: you’ve got the kitsch joke of the transformation, followed immediately by, gosh, this feels amazing. It’s really real for her to feel that young and beautiful again.
And then we move into what I call the Vita Sackville-West meets Katharine Hepburn type. Katharine Hepburn lived next door to Sondheim, as you probably know. They had quite a tricky relationship, apparently, and she was always up her trees gardening. We wanted to plumb into that kind of woman, who is powerful and no-nonsense. We have a great heritage in our country of women like that, so it’s a mixture of those things.
So we were all roughly on the same page. But obviously I couldn’t have dreamed up all those incredible things that Tom and Jordan came up with, and so I was completely blessed by their level of vision. I just sort of fed into it, and I continue to interpret it.
We are all just caretakers of this work in this moment, until the next person takes hold of the material and hopefully cares for it and cherishes it and waters it, just like a garden. We’re the gardeners of this work. We watch it grow. And we’re all standing on the shoulders of the giants who made it.
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Loved this production! The best "Last Midnight" I've seen since Bernadette