Drama King

Over the past three years, Michael Boyd has injected new life—and new money—into the once beleaguered Royal Shakespeare Company. And he’s not finished yet. April sees the start of a year-long celebration of Shakespeare’s complete works; 2007, the construction of a new auditorium. So, what’s his motivation? Al Senter finds out

When, in March 2003, Michael Boyd took over as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), few envied him. What would once have been a dream job then seemed a poisoned chalice. The reformist plans of Boyd’s predecessor, Adrian Noble, who had led the RSC since 1991, had incensed actors, theatre staff and Stratford residents (see box, p29). Dogged by financial problems, the company, according to the press at least, was in crisis. The pressure on Boyd was huge.

He’d been an associate director of the RSC since 1996, having joined the company two years earlier. His production of the three parts of Henry VI and of Richard III had earned him an Olivier award in 2001, but eyebrows were raised at his appointment. Relatively unknown outside the RSC, he seemed to break the mould of artistic director set by Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn in the 1960s and 1970s. As a young man, he’d worked not at one of this country’s principal venues, but at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. Meeting the press, he appeared nervous and ill-at-ease.

Today, though, things have changed. In his modest office in Stratford, Boyd can look back on his achievements with quiet satisfaction. “I was warned that running the RSC was the most difficult job in the world and it certainly gave me pause for thought when I heard that Adrian had resigned,” he says, with a wry smile. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true that the best time to take over an organisation is when it’s not firing on all cylinders. You take a rag and you give it a bit of a clean-up and you’re hailed as a genius.”

Genius or not, Boyd has overseen a remarkable turnaround. The £2.8m deficit he inherited has been transformed into an operating surplus of £1.7m, thanks to better housekeeping and a buoyant performance at the box office. Artistically, the company has struck gold with a succession of three bespoke seasons. The Jacobethan and Gunpowder festivals examined comparatively rare plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and successors, while the Spanish Golden Age season was a revelatory celebration of the Spanish-speaking theatre of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Thanks to a five-year agreement with producer and theatre owner Sir Cameron Mackintosh, the company is assured of a London showcase, and on April 23rd (Shakespeare’s birthday) Boyd launches his most ambitious project to date: the Complete Works, a year-long festival of the entire Shakespeare canon—plays and poems.

If the festival seems a favourite Boyd medium, it’s not hard to see why. Aged 12, he moved with his family to Dalkeith on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He went to school in the Scottish capital and later read English literature at Edinburgh University. The spirit and atmosphere of the Edinburgh Festival left a lasting impression.

“I’d never seen anything like it. The streets of a major city were bursting with performers. In the theatres, you could see the work of companies such as the Comedie Francaise and the Bunraku [the Japanese puppet theatre], great Russian theatre as well as Ian McKellen as Richard II or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” he says.

Fittingly, McKellen will come to Stratford for the Complete Works, playing Lear. He will be one of several distinguished old RSC boys and girls tempted back: Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter will star as Antony and Cleopatra; Judi Dench will feature in a musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. They will be joined by such giants of world theatre as Sir Peter Hall, Sir Trevor Nunn and German director Peter Stein. There will be contributions from legendary companies such as the Berliner Ensemble and innovative ones such as Propeller, which will stage an all-male production of Taming of the Shrew.

More than this, the festival will be a United Nations of theatre—with visiting companies from Italy, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Japan, China, India, the Middle East and the US. Boyd is pleased with his handiwork, but, of course, pays due tribute to Complete Works director Deborah Shaw.

Although not without a sense of humour, Boyd has an earnestness and a sense of purpose that can surprise the theatre world. This is a man who can call himself an “artist” and not sound pretentious. A doctor’s son, he will turn to science not literature for his metaphors. He says he’s impatient with the “very posh amateurism” of much of English theatre. He misses Russia—where theatre was central to life. Despite the tensions of working in the Brezhnev era, “with a KGB man always in the room”, he speaks admiringly of a country where “theatre tickets are on sale outside every tube station, where theatre attracts full houses and yet there is also a high level of debate about the work”.

High-level debate won’t be missing from the Complete Works Festival—speakers such as Fay Weldon and the Archbishop of Canterbury will address issues raised in the plays. Boyd says the RSC is good at taking on large-scale projects, and describes it as “leviathan, a large beast capable of taking great big strides”. It’s just as well, for the festival will coincide with another epoch-making event: the winding down of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), as it prepares for the builders to move in next spring. Boyd promises that “the auditorium will be unrecognisable” once the reconstruction is complete.

In the meantime, the new Courtyard Theatre is taking shape and will open its doors in July. While the RST is festooned with dust-sheets, the nearby Courtyard will house large-scale productions. “It’s important,” says Boyd, “that we tell people it’s not business as usual, but business as extraordinary.” So it’s fitting that the inaugural production in the Courtyard will be the Henry VI trilogy, directed once again by Boyd.

Central to Boyd’s approach is a belief that the RSC must return to the ensemble idea of its early years. Conventional wisdom has it that actors no longer wish to make a lengthy commitment to Stratford, away from families and the London hub and unavailable for lucrative film and television work.

But Boyd has defied such scepticism in assembling a crack company for his return to the Histories. The Henry VI trilogy will, the publicity says, “be the first salvo in an unprecedented two-year ensemble project to stage Shakespeare’s complete history cycle using only one company of actors”. Says Boyd: “Since I’ve rather nailed my colours to the mast by promoting the ideal of the ensemble and advocating the benefits of collective theatre-making, I have to put my money where my mouth is. I’m going back to the Histories, partly to do them better, partly because we all felt that the plays, which had largely been performed in small spaces, were bursting out of their cage, demanding to be played on a much larger scale. There were also good commercial reasons for doing them again. There was always a long queue of hopefuls who couldn’t be accommodated in such comparatively small venues.”

While listening to “popular demand”, Boyd must maintain variety and balance in the RSC programme. When the more commercial parts of Shakespeare’s canon are produced, critics are quick to complain that the artistic director is playing it too safe. Significantly, the main stages at Stratford over this past winter were occupied by adaptations of Chaucer and Dickens and productions of Arthur Miller and Thomas Middleton.

“I think we must be the only theatre company in the world with a playwright in our name—and that can be a problem,” says Boyd. “Ambition and passion for a play must come first when we’re planning a programme: a play mustn’t be produced simply because its time has come around again. Equally, when we’re looking at the world repertoire, we shouldn’t behave as if we’re standing at the pick ‘n’ mix counter in Woolworths, ordering a bit of Chekhov here and a bit of Ibsen there. It’s important, too, that we gain a better understanding of Shakespeare’s culture by producing the plays of his contemporaries. It’s also vital that we stage new work by contemporary writers and it’s only now that we’re beginning to understand how to make flesh the proper relationship between Shakespeare and a 21st century writer.” So, is there a danger of the RSC colluding with the deification of Shakespeare?

“I don’t mind the cheap and tacky manifestations of ‘bardolatry’. I can’t see the tea-towels as the enemy of mankind. But its dangerous when it worms its way into the rehearsal room. I think about Shakespeare all the time. I’m fascinated by his binary nature—his two-sidedness. There is the Shakespeare of London and the Shakespeare of Stratford, the religious duality, Catholic v Protestant, bisexuality and heterosexuality, the way he responds to being a playwright in an age of censorship. As a theatre artist, you do try to work out what makes him tick. You sense him offering the audience one proposition and then its antithesis and then inviting them to discover the truth in that black space between. You feel like saying to him—what are you really on about?”

Looking to the future, Boyd is nothing if not ambitious. His target is to overturn what he calls “the ad hoc philistinism of much of English culture and the short-termism of the theatrical world” and to blend the two traditions that have nurtured him. “I want to take the eccentricity of English theatre, its flair, its honesty and its vulgarity and combine these with the rigour, the professionalism and the ambition of theatres from other cultures.”

These are grand plans, but after a three-year reign in which he has restored to the RSC its self-belief and its sense of purpose and stability, who’s to say he won’t achieve them?

Bard times: the RSC in trouble

For decades, the RSC, which took its current form under Sir Peter Hall in 1960, set the gold standard for theatre. Theatregoers making the pilgrimage to the RSC’s base at Stratford-upon-Avon or entering the company’s London flagships, the Aldwych, Donmar Warehouse and Barbican theatres, could feel confident of seeing theatre of the highest quality. The RSC brand seemed unassailable; it reeked of prestige.

And then, cracks started to appear. In 2001, Adrian Noble, the then artistic director, began a much-needed but painful programme of reform. He announced that the RSC would be quitting its London base, the generally unloved Barbican. The plan led to threats of strike action by backstage staff.

It was also decided that the main auditorium in Stratford, the 1932 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (now known as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre), not a favourite with audiences or directors, would be demolished and replaced by a “theatre village”. MPs and the actress Sinead Cusack, a member of the RSC board, backed the plans, but locals worried Noble would turn Stratford into a “Shakespeare theme park”.

In London, the company effectively reverted to being a band of strolling players, taking up residence in whichever theatre was available (and invariably losing money).

Although well intentioned, the result of these changes was that RSC’s deficit ballooned, jobs were cut and morale plummeted. To add insult, at theatre awards ceremonies the RSC’s greatest rival, the National Theatre, scooped up the trophies.

At the height of the furore in early 2002, Noble—then directing the stage production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—resigned. Officially he left to spend more time with his family. Exit Noble, pursued by the glare of publicity. Enter Boyd.