Theatre

At first Rupert Goold’s idea about how to stage ‘The Tempest’ seemed completely counter-intuitive. As mad as doing a rap version of Noël Coward, or creating a Walt Disney-cute rendition of ‘The Sopranos’. Even the production’s star wasn’t initially convinced. Patrick Stewart – an actor happy ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ in his ‘Star Trek’ days – confesses to me that ‘I couldn’t see how this was going to be anything other than an eye-catching gimmick’. Yet as a young director, Goold already had a reputation for pulling off – if not the impossible – the improbable. His Britart-style ‘Faustus’ had provoked rave reviews from some of the critical fraternity’s most poisonous pens, while his stage version of Milton’s apparently unstageable ‘Paradise Lost’ had equally proved a triumph. So when he suggested locating ‘The Tempest’ – traditionally one of Shakespeare’s more summery plays – in the frozen wastelands of the Arctic, he was not laughed out of Stratford-upon-Avon. Who would have guessed that his sub-zero staging would prove the RSC’s hottest ticket that season? Feature continues

‘This puts Goold… in the front rank of young directors’ asserted one critic. Certainly it confirmed Goold’s ability to paint ravishing stage pictures which opened up the text in ways that had previously seemed unimaginable. Both in Stratford and the subsequent sold-out West End run early this year, audiences queued to experience the sinister enchantment of the hostile icy landscape where Patrick Stewart reigned as a shamanic Prospero, attended by an Ariel who looked like a cross between David Bowie and Nosferatu. A sound design dominated by Mongolian throat singing added to the eerie other-worldliness of an environment where humans were like tiny pawns subject to elements that could destroy or redeem them at any moment.

Ariel ultra: his eerie take on 'The Tempest' (image © RSC and Manuel Harlan)

Amid the compliments, however, there were some barbed backhanders. Another paper declared ‘Goold’s RSC staging is so exciting, his vision of the play so emotional, that he somehow gets away with his self-advertising desire for novelty at any price.’ It was a cruel, but valid point. Certainly, for those who had watched his career to date, there was room to ask whether Goold was a case of flash over content. After all, an earlier equally flamboyant Shakespeare – his staging of ‘Hamlet’ with Jane Birkin as Gertrude at the Royal Theatre Northampton, where he was artistic director from 2002-2005 – had been ridiculed by some critics. So the jury, though mostly impressed, was out. Either he was someone with genuine flair who could well prove to be one of the most – if not the most – exciting directors of his generation, or else he was a chancer whose best results could be attributed to the element of surprise.

To say Goold’s next step – directing ‘Macbeth’ – was not the wisest move to make when he was aiming to cement his reputation is an understatement. With its problematic witch scenes and prematurely climaxing plot, the Scottish play has routinely tripped up some of our most promising actors and directors. Yet it has been Goold’s Soviet-era-style production – about to open at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End – that has silenced the doubters. A clinical white-tiled stage provides a chillingly effective backdrop for the plentiful gore (at one point when Lady Macbeth goes to wash her hands, blood jets out of the tap). And Macbeth’s motivations are given a modern political twist through the sense that he’s operating in a totalitarian regime, a point artfully underscored by video projections that include march-pasts in Moscow’s Red Square. At the opening night in Chichester, it was instantly clear that this was an era-defining production. Shortly afterwards, a Sunday paper tipped Goold as a likely future artistic director of the RSC.

I’ve interviewed Goold twice over the last three years, and – despite enjoying his productions – was definitely in the camp that wondered if his boldness exceeded his (significant) talent. However, when reviews for ‘Macbeth’ – also starring Patrick Stewart – appeared, I started pondering something different: if he is the next big thing, what is it that shapes a truly great director? As Goold himself has found, being articulate and having brilliant ideas is not always enough. Nor is being able to assemble a stellar team around you – as demonstrated all too painfully by Robert Altman’s ‘Resurrection Blues’ at the Old Vic in 2006. Indeed, sometimes it would be easier to forecast the future from the entrails of a parakeet than to predict whether or not a theatrical production will be successful from looking at the concept behind it, or at the people involved. So what techniques is Goold deploying to pull off the productions that are so endearing him to critics?

Staging the unstageable 'Paradise Lost' (image © John Haynes)

I meet Goold in Chichester on a Saturday afternoon that even by this summer’s woeful standards reaches new lows. Wind whips rain horizontally across the theatre’s surrounding parkland, but crowds are still cramming into the production that’s so popular they’ve reportedly had to turn away Jeremy Paxman. At this point, Goold’s commuting between Chichester and London: on top of the ‘Macbeth’ West End transfer, he’s directing an adaptation of Simon Schama’s slave-trade book ‘Rough Crossings’ for his company Headlong Theatre (formerly the Oxford Stage Company). With his chin-length brown hair, pensive demeanour, and casual clothes, the 35-year-old comes across like one of the more robust Romantic poets. There’s no discernible arrogant swagger, despite his being the toast of the theatre world, not least because his attentions are being commandeered by a toddler with cherubim-cute blond ringlets – the son he had two years ago with his wife, Kate Fleetwood, an actress who also happens to be delivering a galvanising performance as his Lady Macbeth.

‘It’s quite complicated to work out whether directing is an art or a craft,’ he declares, once we’re seated in the Chichester Festival Theatre restaurant. ‘I learnt stacks from Matthew Warchus, who I assisted once on “Art”. He was working with two actors who had been best mates for 30 years, and they were playing Mark and Serge – the two friends in the play. But when you saw them playing the scene, you didn’t believe they were friends. Some directors would say, “Connect with the idea of what friendship is” – big mystic notes. Matthew was able to say, “You’ll be more convincing if you move your knees 20 degrees that way when you talk to each other.” So they did, and they looked like they were in love! So often that’s how it works. All it can take is one little tweak. A tiny move of a light, someone standing two feet further away, and emotionally the whole thing unlocks.’

There’s nothing glib or cynical about the way Goold relates this, rather a deep satisfaction – like some boy who’s discovered the man working the controls behind the curtain in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, but still believes in the magic. Throughout his twenties he devoted himself methodically to studying directing as a craft. ‘I’d deliberately try to direct a wide range of works – musicals, new writing, classics – so I could keep learning and getting better.’ However, there had been a career hiccup: though he had turned down a Fulbright scholarship to study at New York University so he could instead go on the Donmar director’s training programme, the year did not go well, and – as he puts it – ‘I was pinged out into the regions’. Pressed on why the year (which happened during Sam Mendes’ artistic directorship) didn’t go as planned, he explains: ‘I was really shy there, which I think people read as being aloof. Also,’ he jokes, ‘around the times of the mid-’90s when in-yer-face theatre was hitting in, it wasn’t a great time to be called Rupert from Cambridge [University].’

Aged 30, the north London-born director became artistic director of the Royal and Derngate Theatres Northampton. For both Goold, and Northampton, this was to prove cataclysmic. ‘I hit 30, 31, and thought: You’ve got to have something to say,’ Goold asserts. He equally clearly wanted theatre’s big guns to listen. His choice of collaborators indicate his ambition as strongly as the scale of his projects. Jake and Dinos Chapman allowed themselves to be represented – not always sympathetically – in his split-era ‘Faustus’. Jane Birkin, as mentioned, was Gertrude in ‘Hamlet’. Since he’s become artistic director of Headlong, the high-profile names have continued to respond to his approaches: the notoriously prickly playwright Edward Bond wrote a new ‘suicide bomber’ song specially for Goold’s production of Bond’s ‘Restoration’ and now Schama’s working with him. So who’s turned him down? Goold smiles: ‘Various people. For instance, in “Paradise Lost” the person I really wanted to play Satan was Fiona Shaw, and we talked quite a lot about it. But one has to be realistic. The first time she didn’t know me, and Northampton was a bit of a stretch; the second time it was a long tour, and we didn’t pay much…’

'Faustus' meets the Chapman brothers (image © Manuel Harlan)

During the much publicised spat that Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre’s artistic director, had with the culture of ‘dead white male’ theatre critics this May, one of the more interesting debates that arose was about theatre critics seeing more film. Certainly to appreciate every nuance of Goold’s work a critic should know their film references – take his stunning Banquo scene in ‘Macbeth’, where the first time Banquo appears, projected blood spreads across the white-tiled walls in a manner evocative of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’. ‘I think Kubrick is the greatest artist of the twentieth century,’ confesses Goold, conceding that film has influenced his visual vocabulary so much that he can list exactly which movies have influenced which production. ‘ “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover”, “The Private Lives of Others”, “Downfall” and “The Shining” were the four films that influenced ‘Macbeth’. “The Tempest” was “Touching the Void”, “Fargo”, “Saw”, and “The Shining” again. When in doubt, steal…’

Goold’s responded very well to my initial accusations that he’s flashy, and it strikes me, as our conversation progresses, that perhaps that’s because his personal style’s not flashy at all – something which also comes across a week later when I watch him in rehearsals for ‘Rough Crossings’. Patrick Stewart – now so much of a Goold convert that he compares his style to both Peter Brook, and Trevor Nunn – pays testament to his thoughtfulness. ‘There are times in the rehearsal room when you’ve done a scene and it’s finished, and you’ll turn to Rupert and he’ll say, “Just a moment”. And then there will be this long silence. They’re quite typical of him. And then he’ll say something very quietly which has a massive impact on the work. There was a point when he asked me “I wonder if Prospero’s frightened of Ariel?” Instantly it opened a massive door, and for me created a wonderfully different character.’

It seems clear that Goold’s daring production of ‘The Tempest’ – one of three possible interpretations that came to him, he tells me, during a run in the park after he had doggedly spent two and a half months studying the text, focusing on its problem scenes – will prove the moment when his career turned, the point that started people asking if he was the new Sam Mendes. For a worrying interlude, however, it seemed like it was the end. ‘I was physically sick for the first preview of “The Tempest”. I was so hyper – I was worried I had lung cancer. The following Sunday I went to the Whittington Hospital, and they sent me downstairs which was terribly deserted. There was this incredibly beautiful Chinese doctor in white, and I thought I was with the angel of death! Just imagine. You’ve got your first show at the RSC and now you die.’

Luckily for Goold he was wrong. Across the theatre hallway, ‘Macbeth’ is now playing to another rapt audience, and his toddler son has just arrived to be babysat. Oh Raph!’ he exclaims. The toddler’s face is covered in lipstick. Goold looks at me and laughs. ‘He seems to have been snogged by witches.’

‘Macbeth’ is at the Gielgud Theatre from Sept 21. ‘Rough Crossings’ is at the Lyric Hammersmith from Sept 25.