Born in England, and raised in Alberta, Kate Hennig is a diverse, multi-award-winning theatre artist, with over thirty years of professional experience as a performer, including seasons on Broadway, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and with both the Shaw and Stratford Festivals. Her play The Last Wife, inspired by the life of Katherine Parr (1512-1548), the last of the six wives of King Henry VIII (1491-1547), will be our first 2016 Fresh Takes Play reading on April 17. Katherine was an educated woman who had had two husbands before Henry and took her fourth and final husband three months after his death. She died a year later, most likely of complications from childbirth. Hennig’s play tells the story of Kate, Henry, and Henry’s children Mary, Bess, and Eddie in the contemporary world.
WAM THEATRE: How did you come to write this play?
KATE HENNIG: This strange journey started for me in 2011, during the Arab spring. I was looking at all these dictators, these men in the Middle East who were overthrown, and I started looking for the women. Where were the women in this story? My thoughts went straight to Henry VIII, as he is an identifiable dictator of my own cultural past.
WAM: And what drew you to specifically to Katherine Parr?
KATE: I learned how unique her relationship with, and influence on, Henry was among his wives. She could speak to him the way none of the others could, and he would take the sharpness of her tongue. Her influence over his daughters Mary and Elizabeth was tremendous. The letters between Katherine and Henry’s son, Edward VI, are intimate and moving. And I propose in the play that her relationship with Thomas Seymour – the brother of Henry’s late third wife, Jane Seymour, and therefore the uncle of Edward VI – who became Katherine’s fourth husband, went on before, during, and after her marriage to Henry.
Did you know Katherine Parr was the first woman to have her writing published in the English language under her own name? Why don’t we know more about this woman who had so many accomplishments in her own right? She was essentially a mother to Elizabeth – what influence did she have over the future Queen? And Katherine was goddaughter of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon -would she have been schooled with Catherine and Henry’s daughter, Mary?
WAM: What inspired you to move the story to the present day?
KATE: I set it in the present day because that’s the root of my interest. There are women now who are silent, like the women behind those Arab Spring leaders. I look at ISIL/ISIS – where are the women? That led me to use the contemporary voice, to try to echo what women are dealing with now in what Katherine was dealing with. It is still happening. We struggle to find a place in leadership as women and we still struggle to find a voice. We have come a long way in recent decades, but the Tudors had come a long way too. Tudor women were given fantastic educations, they were writers, they were humanists, and then BOOM the Puritans came in and it was all undone. The male animal is larger and can always physically dominate, and is prone to dominate. We see that now. This story fits neatly in to present day American politics, audiences will see the correlation.
I’m delighted that WAM is doing this reading because it speaks to your mandate to get the stories of women out there. Women’s stories were dangerous to tell and it is still dangerous to present women’s points of view of history. It is my raison d’etre as a playwright to see women’s stories through their own eyes and with a contemporary lens.
WAM: You are a respected and successful performer with a distinguished career. Is playwriting a new venture for you?
KATE: I’ve been writing plays for 14 years, which is not long in the scope of my 35 year career in theatre. Being an actor, I have an understanding from the inside of how the play structure works and how characters work. I would be happy to act any of the roles in my work. I wouldn’t want to put any character up on stage who is boring to play or who has little to do.
WAM: How many plays had you written before The Last Wife?
KATE: I wrote three plays before this one, and one of those I think still has legs. My friend Neil Munro said “Someone has to take a chance on you.” No one had taken a chance on me before but Stratford took the chance with The Last Wife last summer and my play proved itself worthy of the risk.
WAM: The Last Wife had its premiere last summer at the Stratford Festival. That’s an auspicious beginning!
KATE: This is the first major production I’ve had of my work. I have a long history at Stratford and with Bob White, who is Director of New Plays at Stratford, and he brought my work into the Festival and was one of the dramaturgs on the piece. It is thrilling to have an organization of this caliber take your play and do it with some of the best actors and a top-notch creative team. It was an extraordinary experience for me; a real “pinch me” moment. Before anyone had even seen the play, six months before the opening, we were selling out, so obviously the subject matter and the actors and the Stratford setting appealed to audiences. Then once the play was running they sold out and extended the run three times. I was gob-smacked and really humbled to have a beginning like that to my playwriting career. But it’s not like I’m a 22-year-old who’s going to try out a lot of shows at the Fringe. I needed to start this way at this level.
WAM: And now The Last Wife is becoming the first play of a trilogy. You are writing contemporary feminist plays about Henry’s daughters, Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I.
KATE: Yes, I was at work on the Elizabeth play, The Virgin Trial, at a workshop in February, and I will write the rehearsal draft this summer. The third play about Mary, called Father’s Daughter, I just started writing at a recent two-week residency at The Banff Center. I keep on writing for the joy of writing.
WAM: And what is happening in your acting career right now?
KATE: I am currently in rehearsals for Shakespeare’s History Cycle at Stratford, called Breath of Kings playing Mistress Quickly. And I will be playing Margaret Thatcher in the Canadian premiere of The Audience, first in Winnipeg and then bringing it into Toronto. I was in Billy Elliot on Broadway and in that work Thatcher is the enemy. It will be fascinating to dig into her psyche and find some compassion for her kind of power.
[button link=”https://www.wamtheatre.com/the-last-wife-fresh-takes/”] More Info[/button]