When I returned to Australia in 1970 after five years in England, I was a little shocked to find how much the country had changed. There was a nationalism in the air, assertive and at times aggressive. It seemed to go hand in hand with a celebratory materialism resulting from the recent minerals boom. Or maybe I was just meeting the wrong people . . .
The new Australian plays were identifying the Ocker, the Ugly Australian: a crass, vulgar, drunken loudmouth. He featured in the plays of John Romeril and David Williamson and strutted the stage of Melbourne’s Pram Factory.
Suddenly the RSC with its cloaks, crowns, tights and rounded vowels seemed ten thousand miles away, not just in space but in time. I thought, ‘If Shakespeare’s going to survive in this country, then he has to look and sound more like us.’
Of course I was not the first to think this. Bille Brown, for instance, had played Falstaff in Brisbane in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor directed by Geoffrey Rush as an Australian suburban sitcom. And I played Petruchio in Robin Lovejoy’s production of The Taming of the Shrew set in the Australian outback for the Old Tote Company. But these were exceptions to standard theatre practice of the time.
I was very conscious in the early years of Bell Shakespeare of trying to shake off any trappings that might identify a production as being ‘English’ or ‘traditional’. I encouraged actors to use their own voices rather than whack on plummy accents. We strove to defy the British cultural hegemony. But this self-conscious Australian-ness was short-lived because it became unnecessary. Productions from Europe and Asia touring to various Australian festivals gave us role models other than a British one and we began to see ourselves as part of a ‘global village’ with access, via movies, TV, recordings and the internet, to all the best and latest of work across all art forms. We saw that many different approaches to the classics were viable. Besides, the Anglo-Saxon stage tradition was becoming remote as we saw our population demographic change to include more people from all over Asia, Africa and much of Europe. We had to create a theatre for this new audience.
It became apparent that the English no longer held the franchise on Shakespeare. He had become increasingly universal throughout the twentieth century, as witnessed by great productions from Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe and the films of Kozintsev and Kurosawa. We can learn a lot from their example as we go about the business of creating ‘our’ Shakespeare—not in a self-consciously nationalistic way, but simply by being ourselves and making sure we talk to our audience in ways they will understand.
When the English are good at performing Shakespeare it’s because he’s in their blood and they get plenty of practice. In Australia we still have not done enough, regularly, over a long stretch of time to make it our own. But we can and we will. In some ways we are lucky to not have the burden and expectations of a long tradition bearing down on us. It leaves us free to be inventive, original and fearless. It’s hard enough to take on Hamlet in Australia; how much tougher in London with that long line of Hamlets and Hamlet-experts looking over your shoulder! We are not judged (so much) in comparison to all those who have gone before. It has not been drummed into us that there is a ‘correct’ way of playing every role. The same applies to directing.
There is no one ‘correct’ way to direct Shakespeare. When I was starting out as a director, I tried to evolve a method. Now I try to avoid one. Every play has its own needs and its own circumstances. The director’s job is to respond to these. Who are you directing the play for? Who is your audience? What talent have you at your disposal? What venue are you performing in? And what is the desired outcome of the exercise?
You might wish to attempt a ‘traditional’ production, which generally implies period costumes and what you assume is a ‘classical’ style of acting and speaking.
You might update the costumes and settings, but not the language, or you may rewrite the play in contemporary language.
You might do your own ‘cut and paste’ job on the text, rearranging scenes and introducing new material. You may decide on a parody approach, a revue skit, or you may create a new work inspired by a speech, character or situation in the original.
All of these are legitimate depending on the circumstances. There is no law against them.
How much reverence should you have for the original text? Again, it’s up to you. Shakespeare himself cut his texts for performance, depending on how long a show his audience wanted and how many actors were available.
Different theatre companies have many different approaches and philosophies. In the case of the Bell Shakespeare Company, I urge actors and directors to err on the side of caution. Having established ourselves as the national touring company of Australia for Shakespeare’s plays, with a huge commitment to education and school performances, I am aware that for many people we may be their only contact with Shakespeare, so I feel duty-bound to present as fully as possible the words he wrote and what he meant by them. I have no problem with other companies doing their own spin on the plays, but I see my company having something of a conservationist role in keeping these plays alive.
But that position is by no means inflexible. I was happy to let Barrie Kosky cut and rework King Lear to make his own theatrical statement and, as mentioned, I am seriously pursuing some contemporary translations of dense texts like Troilus and Cressida. The staging of a modernised version would not invalidate the original, but reawaken interest in it much in the way that modern translations of The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf have reintroduced those works to a wide general readership. Bell Shakespeare’s development arm, Mind’s Eye, exists precisely to create new works inspired by Shakespeare’s thoughts and scenarios.
But with my own productions I try to be as sparing as possible with cuts and translation. Occasionally a modern word or phrase may be necessary where the original is simply too arcane to be comprehensible. But if the actors know what they’re talking about and play a scene with conviction, it’s amazing how much an audience will understand. Words which would baffle them on the printed page seem crystal clear in performance. And one way to keep Shakespeare’s language alive is by speaking it, not watering it down. As for length, I am very aware that today’s audiences have a much shorter attention span than Shakespeare’s audience. Here, I think, we can take a hint from Shakespeare’s original productions, which had no interval and no scene-changes. The action flowed uninterrupted and the actors spoke and moved quickly about the empty stage. They rarely had time to sit down.
Over the last fifty years or so I’ve seen a number of stand-out productions of Shakespeare. All have influenced my own aspirations as a director.
Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream had a huge impact on the theatre of the 1970s and beyond, especially on Shakespeare. Gone was any illusion of romance or moonlit forest. Brook’s play took place inside a stark white box. His actors wore brightly coloured silks; they swung on trapezes and spun plates on sticks—real theatrical magic. In contrast, his artisans were solid serious workmen in cardigans and cloth caps. Their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe was heartfelt and poignant and helped show up the shallowness of the courtly lovers. The program announced ‘Music by Felix Mendelssohn’, which struck me as being quite out of place. But this was Brook’s little joke at the expense of the ‘traditionalists’. Mendelssohn was indeed used, but only once: at the end of the first half Bottom was borne aloft by the fairies making a triumphant entry into fairyland. Mendelssohn’s Wedding March blazed out over the speakers while the fairies skimmed paper plates over the stage like a shower of confetti. Brook’s theatrical acumen and daring were always underscored by a wicked sense of humour. Michael Bogdanov was Brook’s assistant on that production and when I asked him what was the greatest lesson he had learned from Brook he quoted, ‘Give them a good show!’
Declan Donnellan directed a beautiful Twelfth Night which came to the Sydney Festival in 2005. It was played by an all-male Russian cast and performed in Russian with English subtitles. As with Brook’s Dream its great virtue was in stripping away preconceptions and generations of production clichés, seeing the play afresh. And, like Brook’s Dream, it was set in a white, neutral space with few props and no tricksy effects. The actors playing Viola, Olivia and Maria made no attempt to disguise themselves as women or play effeminacy. In fact the actor playing Olivia was completely bald and wore a headscarf for the role. But their observations of female behaviour were so acute as to be a revelation. One suddenly understood the power of Shakespeare’s all-male companies. Impersonation was not the point, but observation and comment. The audience was simultaneously distanced and enchanted by the theatricality of it.
The drinking scene had a Russian wildness and earthiness about it—Sir Toby decked Maria when she criticised his behaviour. And Malvolio was no pompous blow-hard, but a sprightly ambitious young butler, just attractive enough to believe that his mistress might have fallen for him. Because the text was a modern Russian translation, the actors spoke easily and naturally without any of the English-speaking actors’ constraint to sound (or not sound) ‘Shakespearean’.
This Twelfth Night was a very different one to John Barton’s magical version of the late 1960s. Fully Elizabethan in its setting, costumes and music, Barton’s production was steeped in scholarship and a love of the play. It ambled along effortlessly, greatly enhanced by Judi Dench’s puppyish schoolboy Cesario and Donald Sinden’s magisterial Malvolio. A triumph for the traditionalists.
John Barton was responsible, with Peter Hall, for one of the great RSC successes of the 1960s—an adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III into an epic saga, The Wars of the Roses, which was televised internationally. The landmark aspects of this production were similar to those I’ve mentioned above: a stripping away of sentimental and romantic theatrical conventions in order to show the plays in a new light. This time what was chucked out was the technicolour period sets and costumes, the velvets and ermines, the cloaks and tights, the trains and wimples. This was a production based on the realpolitik of Polish critic Jan Kott’s Cold War perspective. In his book Shakespeare Our Contemporary Kott asked innocently, ‘Who doesn’t know what it feels like to be woken by a door-knock at four in the morning?’ Hall and Barton realised with a shock that Kott’s experiences were closer to Shakespeare’s England than were their own cosy Oxbridge existences. Their Wars of the Roses was a hard world of hard men—plate-metal walls like some gigantic battleship and heavy iron furniture. The clothes and armour had a medieval toughness and were mud- and blood-splattered, devoid of decoration. After that, history plays would never look pretty again.
The great Georgian production of Richard III featuring Ramaz Chkhikvadze predated the RSC version but was informed by the same political scepticism, only this time from behind the Iron Curtain, so it had a lot of extra edge and far greater risk attached for those involved. Less literal and formal than the RSC productions, this Richard featured an impressionistic set (somewhat shambolic), a sleazy jazz band, a choric Queen Margaret who acted as narrator/commentator and a sinister Richmond in a long black leather coat who followed Richard about, taking notes and studying his tactics. There were undoubted elements of parody of Soviet leaders and hidden messages that must have thrilled the Georgian audiences. But whatever repressive measures the Soviet censors enforced, Eastern Bloc theatre was still way more experimental than its English counterparts of the time. I first saw the Georgian Richard III at the Roundhouse in London. Sitting next to me was an old chum from my RSC days, Clive Swift, who remarked dourly, ‘If we did this to Shakespeare, they’d crucify us.’
I’ll finally mention a production of The Winter’s Tale by London theatre company Complicite, which in the early 1990s showed Australia yet another kind of Shakespeare. The production was dominated by Simon McBurney as a terrifyingly insane and erratic Leontes. But he showed his clowning skills by doubling as the Young Shepherd. His troupe was a bizarre mix of shapes, sizes and accents which destroyed any audience preconceptions about ‘appropriate’ casting; and their delivery of the language was likewise idiosyncratic—not the standardised uniformity one expected from, say, the National or RSC.
As with the Georgian Richard III, the set was impressionistic and featured a huge wardrobe on which Leontes occasionally perched. The cloaks worn by Leontes and Polixenes were made up of dozens of suit jackets sewn together, as if the two kings were dragging their subjects around on their backs. The whole production had an air of nonchalant freedom occasionally bordering on anarchy that defied the conventional ‘well-made’ production, and was thus liberating.
My forty-odd years of directing for the stage have taught me a few ‘don’ts’:
• Don’t over-direct. Know when to stop and let the actors have their heads. Micro-managing can destroy initiative.
• Don’t demonstrate how to do it—find ways of letting the actor discover it for herself. Evoke a performance, don’t prescribe it.
• Don’t play favourites—give everyone equal attention and respect. Greet everyone, including the stage crew.
• Don’t decide everything in advance; come to rehearsal well prepared but with an open mind and encourage new ideas.
• Don’t try to control—don’t dictate; collaborate instead.
• Don’t destroy actors’ confidence. Be constructive in your criticism. Praise where possible.
• Don’t panic and rush to lock down solutions. Stay fluid and open to change up to the last minute.
• Don’t come to rehearsal with the actors’ moves worked out in advance. Let the actors discover them, otherwise they’ll never own them. It’s sometimes called ‘blocking’—and to me that’s just what it is, like blocking a drainpipe and stopping the flow.
• Don’t lose your temper or cry for help. Your actors will secretly despise you for it. Stay buoyant—you’re the leader.
• Don’t be too solemn—it’s a play, and plays should be playful. If you’re doing a tragedy, all the more reason to stay light-hearted: solemnity will bog you down.
• Don’t try to force comedy. If it’s truthful it will be funny. Go for the truth, not the gags.
Remember that as a director you have a huge responsibility—to your writer, to your cast and to your audience. You have no responsibility to yourself—you are a mere functionary, there to make everyone else look good and make sure everyone has a good time. It’s your job to make every actor look his or her best. Their reputation and future employment may depend on it. Your audience may have come a long way and paid good money to see your show. You are ethically obliged to give them the very best you can do (that goes for actors too).
Shakespeare is more interesting than you are. Submit your ego to his and try to do his work justice. You’ll never fully succeed. His challenges are too great, his vision too huge for any production to get it in one, but even from halfway up the mountain the view is grand.
Whatever else you succeed in bringing out, it’s Shakespeare’s humanity that carries the day, and it’s what audiences delight in.
The most fundamental job of the director is to tell the story. No matter how many times I see Hamlet or Macbeth (and I know them both by heart), I want to follow the story. How much more the case for people coming to the play for the first time . . . Sometimes you might need to simplify a complex text to tell the story more clearly. You may have to engage in a little careful cutting and/or translating. That’s okay. The audience will understand the play more fully and if they want to study the original it’s still sitting intact on the library shelf. When I’ve directed Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra I’ve tried to simplify the complex series of battle scenes at the end of both plays. I think Shakespeare was being a little too faithful to his source material for once, probably knowing that his audience was fully versed in Plutarch and would complain if he distorted history.
It’s no use baffling your audience—they soon lose interest. So make sure you spell out the plot as clearly as possible. Signpost the characters’ names. After a few weeks’ rehearsal we start to take things for granted and forget our audience will be hearing these names and this information for the first time.
As a director you soon learn that casting is seventy-five per cent of the job. With the right actors the play can take wing. With the wrong ones, you’re pushing it uphill all the way through rehearsal, being overly grateful for small breakthroughs. But typecasting can make the show dreary and predictable. Having the ‘right’ actor for a role is not the same thing as typecasting. It’s exhilarating to see a role brought to life by an unexpected choice of actor, revealing elements of the character you’d never considered before.
It’s unfortunate that most theatres, in Australia at least, are of the proscenium-arch variety. It’s not sympathetic to Shakespeare and makes it all the more remote. Shakespeare’s plays, like the ancient Greek plays, were written for a very specific space and architecture. In Shakespeare’s theatres the actors stood among the audience who surrounded them on three sides. They spoke to them intimately and naturally. There was no ‘set’ to distract attention. Everyone focused on the actor and the words. Some of the most exciting Shakespeare productions I have seen have recreated these circumstances or at least subverted the tyranny of the picture-frame stage.
When I set out with a designer to create a new production my first priority is to provide a playground for the actors, a space they will find liberating and stimulating. It must serve the actors, not hinder them.
Sometimes you walk into a theatre auditorium, take your seat, look at the set and groan, ‘Oh, it’s going to be that all night . . .’ If you must have a set then it should have an element of mystery or surprise, something to stimulate the audience’s imagination and expectations.
Rather than clutter up the space, ask your actors how many ways they can use the same prop to mean different things. That’s the kind of theatricality audiences enjoy. And do all you can to avoid scene-changes and blackouts—they are just so much dead time. Whenever I set out to design a show I always cast my mind back to the Globe and think about how the play would have first been staged, what elements of that I can incorporate. It solves a lot of problems.
When it comes to costume I like to spend several months before rehearsals start collaborating with the actors and the designer. We explain to the actors the overall concept of the production and its likely setting and then ask them for feedback on how they see their characters. At our next meeting the designer will show them a range of sketches, photographs and magazine clippings based on their feedback. Little by little we work towards a consensus, so that by the time the costume drawings are finalised, the actors have had maximum input as to how they want to look. The only snag is, of course, that many actors won’t ‘know’ their characters until some time into rehearsals, but meantime the production manager has to have all the costumes completed in time for week five of rehearsals. So one always aims for as much latitude as possible to allow for last-minute changes and adjustments.
The first thing to nut out with the designer is what the costumes are for. They can’t be merely decorative items to titillate an audience’s taste for spectacle or admiration of the designer’s taste and wit. The cleverest costumes in the world are absolutely useless unless they convey the audience into the world of the play and help the actors realise their characterisations. At the same time they can’t do too much of the actor’s work for him. Some costumes make such a strong character statement that the actor is redundant: they become the designer’s or director’s comment on the character, and leave the actor’s contribution out of the equation.
Ideally, costumes, or at least reasonable replicas of them, should be got into rehearsals early on. This rarely happens because everybody is racing to meet deadlines. But the sooner an actor can get used to his costume and learn how to work it, the better. Otherwise it’s just one more hurdle, one more distraction in the week leading up to opening night.
I count myself lucky that I’m an actor as well as a director because it gives me the opportunity to observe other directors at work. I’ve learned a lot from working with good directors. Here are just a few examples:
From Peter Hall I learned the potency of identifying the scenarios of the classics with current events and politics.
From John Barton I gained an understanding of the importance of verse structure and the mechanics of Shakespeare’s language.
From Steven Berkoff I discovered the thrill of precision of gesture, intonation and physical dynamics.
Michael Bogdanov demonstrated the infinite patience required to get a moment just right.
Liviu Ciulei has a thoroughness and attention to detail I admire. (He took four days to light The Lower Depths for the Old Tote. Most lighting sessions are about six hours.)
Barrie Kosky taught me the importance of fun and jokes when you’re rehearsing a tragedy.
And from Peter Brook I learned a seemingly endless range of things. No other contemporary director (except perhaps the late Jerzy Grotowski) has undertaken such a serious lifetime’s quest to understand the meaning and significance of theatre. His work has always been earmarked by a stripping away of worn-out conventions. Unsentimental and uncompromising, he combines a fierce intelligence with a warm sense of humour and a flair for showmanship. In his many books of theory as well as his landmark productions, he has been one of the most important theatre personalities of the last sixty years.
What are the hardest parts of directing? They include:
• Scheduling: Trying to envisage how many hours to rehearse each scene.
• Keeping everybody working at roughly the same pace. Some will be galloping impatiently ahead, some lagging fearfully behind. I find it useful to begin each day with a quick round-the-circle—‘How’s it going? How are you all feeling?’—and to finish each week with a longer version of the same so everyone can air frustrations or anxieties.
• Dealing with tricky temperaments. Often they’re a disguise for fear and insecurity, and recognising this makes them easier to deal with. Either way it’s no use losing your cool.
• Knowing how far to push it if an actor can’t realise the moment. When do you let go?
I once read an interview with one of Fellini’s film crew. He was asked, ‘What’s it like working with Maestro Fellini?’ He laughed and replied, ‘It’s not work, it’s a holiday!’ That’s the kind of director I try to be.
He understood his age perfectly, and the depth and profundity of that understanding which continued to draw contemporaries to his plays has ensured that we still read him and see these plays performed today in ‘states unborn and accents yet unknown’, as he prophetically put it in Julius Caesar (III, i, 114). More, perhaps, than any writer before and since, Shakespeare held the keys that opened the hearts and minds of others, even as he kept a lock on what he revealed about himself.
James Shapiro, 1599