Theatre

Rupert Goold could certainly not be accused of lacking in ambition. Where certain directors aim merely to unlock a text, he does the equivalent of administering electric shock therapy. Faced in his early thirties with the challenge of casting a Gertrude for his ‘Hamlet’, he invited – who else? – but ’60s icon and chanteuse Jane Birkin, who graciously sped over from France to be of assistance. Deciding to spice up ‘Faustus’ for the twenty-first century, he interspersed Marlowe’s text ‘Dr Faustus’ with scenes of the Chapman Brothers’ famous defacing of Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’, creating an intriguing marriage between Brit Art and blasphemous communion with the devil. Feature continues

Condescending and London-centric though it may sound, what makes this really impressive is that he pulled it all off in Northampton. It was at the start of 2004 when critics really started to notice the surge in the normally negligible levels of theatrical electricity coming from the East Midlands town. The event was a surprise battle of ‘Paradise Lost’ productions: after decades of being deemed unstageable, it emerged that Milton’s masterpiece was being tamed for two different theatres by a pair of artistic directors in their early thirties. One was the Lyric Hammersmith’s current artistic director David Farr – who back then was adapting and directing it for the Bristol Old Vic – and the other was Goold, who was at the helm of Northampton’s Royal and Derngate theatres.

Goold is completely upfront about the fact that one of the reasons he went for the artistic directorship in Northampton was to gain a broad canvas for experiment. ‘If you feel you’ve got something to say as a director, you can either form a company – which was certainly very financially difficult when I started out, in terms of where Arts Council priorities seem to be – or you set out as a director in your own right. Being artistic director at Northampton was empowering because it felt that they wanted something to be proud of. What was extraordinary for us was that we were programming material that in other reps would have been relatively safe – Wilde, David Hare – and got disappointing audience numbers on good productions. So then we’d put on shows like “Paradise Lost” or “Faustus” with the Chapman Brothers, and they’d sell out.’