Interview: Patrick Page Gets Inside the Minds of Shakespeares Villains With ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE Off-Broadway

Patrick Page isn't afraid of his darker side. Page, who received a Tony Award nomination and a Grammy Award for his work as Hades in Hadestown on Broadway, is drawn to the villain characters, and is now exploring Shakespeare's most famous in his new show All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented The Villain. The show is now playing Off-Broadway at the DR2 Theatre.

One of the greatest classical actors on stage today, Page takes the audience on a journey through the complexities, motivations, and inner workings of over a dozen Shakespeare's villains, from Richard III, to Shylock, to Falstaff and more.

BroadwayWorld spoke with Page about what draws him to the villain character and why he's "a little terrified of people that are attracted to the hero", why All The Devils Are Here will appeal to everyone from Shakespeare novices to Shakespeare experts, and much more.

All The Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented The Villain is beginning performances Off-Broadway. I would love to hear about the creation of this show. What inspired you to create it?

Shakespeare has brought so much joy and meaning into my life, so much beauty, and when you have something like that, when you see something beautiful, when you experience something meaningful, you want to share it with other people. When you see a beautiful sunset, the first thing you want to do is rush inside and find other people and say, “Come out, look! It’s beautiful out here!” And that’s how I am with Shakespeare.

We just staged a production of King Lear in Washington DC, which was so successful, the director was Simon Godwin. I wanted to do this production All The Devils Are Here in New York for some time. I created the show several years ago when I happened upon the idea of not just exploring Shakespeare’s darker characters, but doing it chronologically, from the beginning of his writing career in 1590 to the end of his writing career in 1611, so that the audience could experience the evolution of Shakespeare’s discoveries about human wrongdoing, along with him.

And what happened is quite remarkable, but Shakespeare began with this theatrical tradition he was handed, which was a very one-dimensional tradition about the nature of evil. And he wrote in that way, but being Shakespeare, he began to ask himself questions, “Okay, people do bad things, but why do they do bad things?” And that really is the Shakespearean inciting contribution in terms of our theatrical language, is that he really delved into the question, “Why do people behave the way they do?” So, he begins to ask himself this with his early plays. “Alright, Richard III is a villain, why does he behave the way he does? Why does he kill the princess in the tower?”

And he continues to do this, and he’s given this tradition of the Jewish villain, which existed in Elizabethan England, which was an antisemitic culture. And he begins to ask himself, “Why? Would Shylock behave this way?” And Shylock becomes not this stereotypical antisemitic villain, but instead a fully three dimensional human being. And this keeps happening over the course of 20 years, he makes his characters more and more complex, and more and more human. And that is the journey that I take during All The Devils Are Here.

So in the creation of this, in the writing of it, where did you start? How did you decide which characters to explore?

Well, I kind of began with the title which is All The Devils Are Here, so I tried to cover as much as I could, all of Shakespeare’s major malefactors. And I do that in the course of the show, there are over a dozen major characters. Of course there are little scoundrels, and rogues, and tyrants along the way that I don’t touch on. But the great milestones in Shakespeare’s career, from Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, Richard in Henry VI, Richard III, Shylock, Falstaff, who begins I think in Shakespeare’s mind as a kind of antagonist character to the protagonist, Prince Hal, and grows into this fully human character who insists on being taken on his own terms. I touch each one of them as I go through the play. Sometimes in depth, and sometimes just lightly glancing over a character, but I pretty much touch all of the major villains.

And on the performance side, how do you tap into these characters, performing so many of them, and getting into that headspace? How do you approach the performance aspect of it all?

Shakespeare is a wonderful guide in that regard in that each character has his own unique and individual voice that Shakespeare has written in a very particular way. There’s a very particular kind of language that Iago uses, which is completely different from the language Falstaff uses, or Malvolio uses, or Claudius uses. And so, in that way, a great deal of the work is done for me, the way the person expresses himself, not only in terms of the vocabulary, but also in terms of the imagery. The imagery, the metaphors and similes, will tell you what the person’s unconscious life is. What are they dreaming? What are the images that come to them when they close their eyes? And so, a lot of that work is done. And then, I work very meticulously to define each character physically and vocally so that they are distinct from one another.

What do you think it is about the villain roles that attracts you to them? Some people are drawn to the hero.

I think I am a little terrified of people that are attracted to the hero, because to me it indicates a kind of shunning of their darker side, which we all inevitably have. And it is only in exploring that darker side of ourselves that we can find any light. We have to know the monster within us very thoroughly, and then we can go out and we can do good things. But if we think that monster doesn’t exist I think we’re in deep trouble.

You touched on this earlier, but what do you think it is about Shakespeare’s villains specifically that make them so compelling and memorable?

It’s a number of things. One of the things of course is that very frequently, in spite of the fact that they are all liars in terms of their relationships with people in the play, they tend to be very frank and truthful with the audience. That’s a lot of fun, and it’s a lot of insight that you frequently don’t get. Frequently, the interior life of a character is opaque. But with a villain, the villain will come forward in soliloquy and say, “Here is what I’m really feeling. Here is what I’m really doing.” And that’s wonderful. They also tend to have a terrific sense of humor, because the villain realizes that to a large extent, life is a game, and it’s something that they’re playing to win. That’s a lot of fun to play as an actor.

They also, and I think most importantly, are all broken people. They’re all people who have tremendous challenges and flaws. For example, Richard III has his physical disability, Shylock is an outsider in an antisemitic and Christian culture, Falstaff obviously has fallen on hard times as a knight of the realm, he’s an alcoholic, a drunk, Malvolio is a steward, when he really thinks of himself as a nobleman. So, they have something to fight against usually, and that’s very rewarding to play.

What do you want to tell people who are coming to see the show?

I have had a number people reach out to me on social media and say, “I’m a little bit frightened of Shakespeare,” or “I don’t know Shakespeare’s canon at all. What do I need to know to come to the play?” And the answer to that is you don’t need to know anything, because I am your tour guide. We are going to go to a brand-new city, you’ve never been to Rome before, but I know Rome inside and out. So, I am going to show you, and take you through, and explain to you everything you need to know. I fancy myself a little bit of an expert on this [laughs], I have been studying how to do this for over 40 years, so I’ll take you by the hand, and there is nothing that you won’t understand.

When people come to Shakespeare, they’re worried they won’t understand the language, that they won’t know where they are, that they’ll be bored. And I can guarantee you that none of those things will be the case. We made a film of All The Devils Are Here during the pandemic, of an earlier version of the show, and it was so rewarding to find so many people coming to me and saying, “I never thought that I would love Shakespeare, but this has really given me an appetite, and I see what all the fuss is about.” I think a lot of the time when people go to Shakespeare plays, the plays are done poorly. The terrible combination, of course, is if the play is done poorly and that it’s well-received. If the play is done poorly and it’s well-received, the poor audience member who was bored out of their mind thinks, “Well, I must be to blame. I must not be smart enough.” And it’s not true. If you don’t understand a Shakespeare play, or if you’re bored, it’s not your fault. So, that’s what I would like to tell them.

On the flip side of that coin, if people are Shakespeare aficionados, or Shakespeare experts, I believe it will also be an evening that will delight them. When I first did the play, when I was workshopping it several years ago, the first audience I did it for was 1000 high school students. With no lighting, no sound, no set. I wanted to do it in the barest possible terms for the most challenging possible audience to see how it held. And it held them beautifully. So, that was my first experiment, because high schoolers will tell you when they’re bored, they’ll tell you when they think it’s pretentious. They do it through actual sounds and noises, they also do it through their boredom, by checking their phones, or by sleeping, they’ll tell you right there. So, I was in the same room in full light with all of these high school students, and that was a great test.

The next place I took it was to the Shakespeare Theatre Association Conference in Prague, which was all Shakespeare experts, and I did it for them, because I wanted to make sure that it could hold on both sides of that scale. Both people who were completely new to Shakespeare, and people who were experts. And so, that’s how I developed the show.