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Juliet finally follows her father into Shakespeare
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent23 Jul 2008
The daughter of actor Mark Rylance is following in his footsteps with her own theatre company presenting Shakespeare.
Having long resisted the Bard to avoid comparisons with her father, who ran the Globe for a decade, Juliet Rylance has succumbed.
The Rada-trained actress will play her namesake in Romeo And Juliet at Middle Temple Hall in the City. She will use the company, the Theatre of Memory, that she founded two years ago.
She has assembled a team that includes Santiago Cabrera from TV series Heroes as Romeo and Will Kemp, one of Matthew Bourne's male leads in Swan Lake, as Mercutio. The director is Tamara Harvey, who directed Christian Slater in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.
Rylance, 28, whose mother is composer Claire van Kampen, said: "I remember my parents reading me Shakespeare before anything else.
"I don't want to just keep following in the footsteps of my father but ... I don't really feel it's an issue any more. I've very much created my own niche." The family worked hard for years to avoid claims of nepotism. There was a rule that Juliet would not work at the Globe while her father was there.
Only in his final season was it relaxed at the request of actordirector Kathryn Hunter who wanted to cast her - an experience the young actress loved.
Rylance was thrilled, too, when Middle Temple Hall asked her to perform. "I've never played Juliet and I had always wanted to," she said. She is older than the Juliet Shakespeare wrote but said: "I remember very clearly what it felt like to go to my first party and be around men for the first time."
The play is part of a festival marking the 400th anniversary of the lawyers at Middle Temple being granted a royal charter.
Middle Temple Hall is where the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place in 1602. Shakespeare himself is believed to have appeared in the production.
Rylance said: "The hall is an equal star of the production. The public really don't get many opportunities to get inside. It's extraordinary."
