Theatre

Dominc Dromgoole No!
Born 1964
Job Artisitic Director, Globe Theatre
First Shakespeare Play read Julius Caesar
First Shakespeare production seen Macbeth at the Bristol Old Vic, 1970
Question to ask Shakespeare if he were alive today Do you have another play in you?

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Almost everything I love about our theatre is down to the influence of one man. If you travel abroad, it quickly becomes clear why other countries celebrate our contribution to the global gazette of international theatre. It’s not for our brow-furrowed, up-its-arse directors’ theatre; it’s not for the legions of people who have tried to redefine theatre as some eccentric thing called performance; it’s not for any archaic folk style, be it Noh or Sturm und Drang or Commedia. No, we are celebrated for our writers. Across the world, theatre bills are splashed with names familiar to us, like Alan Ayckbourn, Sarah Kane, John Godber and David Harrower. The centrality of the writer in our culture is the result of its particular godhead, a writer himself, a shadowy and tantalising figure, about whom we know not much but just enough: William Shakespeare.

And the greatest virtue of our theatre, its glorious, free-wheeling variety, is the result of the bonkers unpredictability of Shakespeare’s work. , To indulge in a little gentle Shakespearean stereotyping, we have not been frozen into a template of mannered classical purity (the French), of heavy, unleavened philosophical debate (the Germans), or of eternal gurning (the Italians). No, our inspiration is drawn from a Catherine wheel of a genius, who could veer from the macabre glee of ‘Titus Andronicus’ to the feather-light philosophy of ‘The Tempest’, from the public combustibility of ‘Coriolanus’ to the domestic sitcom of ‘Twelfth Night’, from the complex clockworking of ‘Comedy of Errors’ to the picaresque pottiness of ‘Pericles’. Shakespeare’s gift to subsequent generations was a spirit of chaos, not a desire to fix or to control. It is the principal reason why one of the chief virtues of our theatre is its ragbaggery.

If Shakespeare were surgically removed for five years, who would replace him? Writers? I very much doubt it. Shakespeare is their last line of defence. No, I see a landscape dominated by producers packaging high-gloss marriages of Venezuelan puppeteers with Mongolian chanteuses in defunct public toilets; I see brainboxy directors serving up dead-on-arrival conceptual nonsense about their tortured relationship with their mother; I see a lot of stuff trying so hard to be interesting that it has forgotten to be about anything. Shakespeare keeps us all honest. He reminds us that the theatre is about the audience, about talking to them, about saying things that matter to them. That is why they flock to see him – not because they’re brainwashed by some cultural con trick – but because he addresses their most private concerns. Take him away, and watch the speed with which theatre collapses into some self-regarding cul-de-sac.

London itself would be infinitely inferior without Shakespeare. A Warwickshire boy, he walked here and found a convulsive and dynamic metropolis, permanently on the verge of outright chaos. Gaudy display floated past street violence. Playwrights were knifed in taverns; apprentices rioted in the streets; bears tore chunks out of each other in amphitheatres; religious terrorists conspired to obliterate governments; dismembered heads sat on pikes on bridges; and through all that sailed exquisite and gracefully ordered pageants, as the court made its fragrant progress through the stink. Shakespeare was exhilarated by this fertile ground, and he trapped the genie of the place in his plays. The character of London pervades all of Shakespeare’s work – its violence, its wit, its irreverence, its festivity, its drunkenness, its fumbling eroticism, its battered dignity. Shakespeare didn’t only reflect that spirit, in some sense he helped to create it, and the repetition of his work down the centuries has helped to perpetuate it. If we want a meaner London, a better-ordered one, a more civil one, a tamer one, we should remove Shakespeare from the picture, but if we quite like the messy laughter of the d shagged-out old beast, we should keep returning to the man who helped create it.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a performance at The Globe of ‘As You Like It’ by about 300 primary school kids. They chanted the Shakespeare, they danced to it, they shouted it and spoke it. You could see their lungs filling with pleasure as they revelled in the language and the space. The audience responded with the same delight. It was a huge, young, multicultural cast and audience, with nary a middle-class theatre-goer in sight, and there was no sense of Shakespeare as alienating, or distant, or archaic. I have recently met two young actors who discovered Shakespeare in prison. Their approach to him isn’t the approach of people who feel this language isn’t theirs. It seemed more as if they had discovered a writer who could match their own voice.

The disenchantment with Shakespeare stems from a thin coterie of critics, directors and theatre people who spend too much time watching too many productions that are pitched too far away from the audience. There is one easy tonic to suggest to all such folk, one that large London audiences know all about already. A trip to The Globe.

Dominic Dromgoole’s ‘Will & Me’ is published by Penguin at £16.99. His production of ‘Coriolanus’ opens on May 5 at The Globe.