Daring Direction
Gregory Doran is a lion of a man. His immense face is framed by a flowing mane of thick dark hair, and he makes frequent and expansive directorial gestures with enormous arms. The handshake is crushing, the eyes piercing. Shakespeare has been a constant presence in Doran's life. The RSC associate director received a Jesuit education in Lancashire, and even before beginning study at Bristol University had set up his own local Shakespeare company, touring local halls and community centres around Preston. A graduate course at Bristol Old Vic and a stint at the Nottingham Playhouse followed university, before he joined the RSC in 1987, first as an actor, then a director. His first production as director was Derek Walcott's adaptation of The Odyssey in 1992, and since then Doran has risen to become one the country's pre-eminent Shakespearian directors. He has become renowned not just for success in the production of blockbusters such as Macbeth, but also for more esoteric offerings. His last production was a pioneering staging of Shakespeare's dramatic poem Venus and Adonis using puppets.
Doran met his partner, Sir Anthony Sher, whilst playing Salanio to Sher's Shylock, and the two have since established themselves as a powerful force in theatrical politics, described caustically by Norman Lebrecht as the 'Lord and Lady Macbeth' of the RSC. Though his name was widely bandied as a potential Artistic Director of the company following Adrian Noble's departure last year, Doran seems to harbour no hard feelings towards Michael Boyd, who eventually took the top job, declaring himself "thrilled" at the changes that the company has undergone so far. He points out that since the move from the Barbican to the West End audiences have risen and the RSC has succeeded in reducing its debt from £2.8m to £400,000 in the last year alone. Doran speaks of a regained sense of an ensemble company and of a return to the founding principles of the organisation.
Recent triumphs may have included directing Judi Dench in All's Well That Ends Well, Sher in Othello, and his Olivier award- winning 2002 season of Jacobean plays, but Doran shows no inclination to rest on his numerous laurels. He speaks at length about the upcoming 400th anniversary 'Gunpowder Plot' season at Stratford, which includes Ben Jonson's Sejanus, the collectively written Thomas More (thought to be partly Shakespeare's work), and Speaking Like Magpies, a new play written specially for the season by Frank McGuinness.
Though he is keen to establish a Shakespearean link, pointing out that The Gunpowder Plot was hatched by Catholic recusants in Shakespeare's home county of Warwickshire, Doran is also driven by Donald Sinden's maxim that 'Man cannot live by Bard alone'. He passionately believes that the RSC has a duty to put on little-performed and non-Shakespearean plays. "For centuries he has elbowed out his contemporaries - they all have the misfortune of being compared with Shakespeare," he says of playwrights such as John Fletcher, whose Taming of the Shrew sequel The Tamer Tamed, Doran directed last year in tandem with the original. This, and the Jacobean series, were resounding commercial successes, rebutting claims that such projects are mere artistic vanity.
Doran is keen to highlight the contemporary resonance of the 'Gunpowder' season plays, claiming excitedly that the plot was "the 9/11 of the Jacobean era", or could have been, had it succeeded. He detects a "similar sense of a world where God is not in his heaven and all is not right with the world." Some of the parallels are obvious. For example Massinger's play Believe What You Will is about a Middle Eastern leader in hiding, fleeing from state to state, pursued by the Roman Empire, "the superpower of the time". Thomas More opens to the backdrop of London protests about asylum seekers from Lombardy, where a May Day procession has turned into a riot. And A New Way to Please You, (or The Old Law) is a black comedy dealing with euthanasia, presenting us with an England in which the elderly are subject to a compulsory cull.
Doran's mischievous glee at digging up these plays, and at the prospect of holding up a Jacobean mirror to the preoccupations and fears of our times, is followed swiftly with a categorical rejection of the numerous and often painful attempts to make the works of Shakespeare "relevant" to contemporary audiences. The lion bristles: "I feel physically assaulted," he spits in reference to suggestions that Elizabethan and Jacobean language might need to be modernised for some twenty-first century audiences. He is also wary of updating the settings of the plays. "There are times when you can do too much for the audience," he says, citing productions using terrorist and military costumes in attempts to drive home parallels with modern times.
Although Doran successfully filmed Sher's Macbeth for television in 2000, he has no desire to follow fellow theatre directors Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn into the world of film, emphatically denying that there is an automatic hierarchy among the forms which would place film above theatre. There is also clearly plenty to keep him in the theatre. Despite his punishing workload, on average over four plays a year, he shows no signs of exhaustion. He insists that he has much to look forward to following the bonfire planned for this November 5th to celebrate the end of the 'Gunpowder' season. As he points out, of the thirty-seven plays in the Shakespearean corpus he has so far tackled only twelve with the RSC. His position is assured and his course seems clear. After Boyd's departure, who wouldn't bet on Doran taking the helm himself?
Greg Doran was speaking to The Oxford 7.32pm Society. For information on the society's forthcoming speaker events see www.732pm.co.nr
20th Jan 2005