My Shakespeare chronicles your personal and professional journey as the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Can you share a few examples of some of the most memorable experiences or turning points during your career?
Directing Tony Sher and Harriet Walter as the Macbeths was without doubt one of the greatest experiences of my professional career. It’s a fiendishly difficult play to get right, but somehow for us the stars aligned and the production hit gold. Julius Caesar, another play that frequently fails to live up to expectations, and somehow falls away in the second half, did not in the 2012 production. Our contemporary African setting seemed to release the play, and some truly extraordinary performances from a brilliant cast. My final RSC production as Artistic Director, Cymbeline, was an unexpected highlight as that notoriously challenging, complex, knotty play yielded in performance, culminating in a thrilling last act, showing Shakespeare not failing in his powers but as a master craftsman at the peak of his talents.
My Shakespeare published in the anniversary year of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, as well as being your last year as the Artistic Director of the RSC. Do you think it was important that its publication coincided and how do you think these events informed your writing?
My late husband, Antony Sher, told me before he died that if I was ever going to write a book about directing all the plays in the First Folio, and missed the 400th anniversary of that book, then frankly I was an idiot. He not only inspired me to write it, but ironically gave me the opportunity to do so too, as most of it was written while I took care of him during a period of compassionate leave from the company.
Each chapter of your book focuses on a different play, offering insights into the choices made during production. Was there a particularly challenging decision you had to make for one of the plays, and how did it ultimately shape the performance’s outcome?
When I was preparing to direct Troilus and Cressida in 2018, I auditioned an actress called Charlotte Arrowsmith for the part of Cassandra. (Cassandra is blessed with the gift of prophecy, but cursed in that no one will believe her). Charlotte is deaf and asked if she could do the speech in BSL. Her performance drew upon a lifetime of dealing with the frustration of being wilfully misunderstood, or deliberately ignored, and the performance she gave in that tiny office that day was incredibly powerful. She became the first disabled actress to perform a major Shakespeare role on the RSC stage. When I directed Richard III three years later, I knew that casting Arthur Hughes, the first disabled actor to play the role at Stratford, would be a game changer. He brought a lived experience of disability (he has radial dysplasia in his right arm) which revealed new dimensions to the role and to the play.
My Shakespeare involves a lot of personal reflection. Were there any particular revelations or surprises about yourself you encountered while writing this book?
I was surprised to find that whereas life often seems a random sequence of frequently unrelated events, by writing about the Shakespeare productions I had directed all sorts of patterns and connections occurred. It was as if I was able to detect (and of course to some extent construct) a narrative which had not been evident to me before. By shaping my career for the reader to understand, I became aware of just how lucky I have been, what privilege I have enjoyed in being able to spend a lifetime working on these magnificent plays and the life lessons they contain, and am humbled by the trust others have placed in me. To remember as honestly as possible, and to bear witness has been a sometimes tough, but ultimately cathartic experience.
Directing or producing all of the plays within Shakespeare's First Folio is a remarkable achievement. How do you think this achievement impacted your understanding of Shakespeare's works as a whole?
What continues to astonish me is how different every single play is, how each play takes you into a totally different world. With other playwrights you become aware of similar themes or plots or characters emerging. Not with Shakespeare. Each play has its own temperature, it’s own elemental character, it’s own emotional hinterland. And to piece them together as a whole is to be awed again and again by his variety, by his ability to articulate our lives in the most memorable language, by his compassion for our frailties, by his inexhaustible genius.
Shakespeare's works have endured for centuries and continue to captivate audiences worldwide. What do you believe is the enduring appeal of his plays, and how do they remain relevant in today's rapidly changing world?
He is a magnet that attracts all the iron filings of what is going on in the world. If in production you decide to impose a particular take on those plays, or too specific a setting, or draw too narrow a parallel, you are likely to deny the play’s application to the general, and reduce its wider more universal appeal.
As a director, you must have encountered various interpretations and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. How do you strike a balance between staying true to the original text, especially when multiple versions of the plays exist, and bringing fresh perspectives to the productions?
There is no such thing as a definitive production of Shakespeare, there is only what that cast, that creative team, that director and that audience make of that play in that precise moment. If we bring our hearts and minds to each play as we encounter it, we will understand it in our own context, and that act of interpretation is all we can do. We create Shakespeare in our own likeness after all. And he’s robust, he can take whatever we chose to throw at him.
Finally, what do you hope readers will take away from My Shakespeare? Is there a particular message or insight you wish to impart through this book about your journey with Shakespeare's plays and your time as the Artistic Director of the RSC?
What I hope to convey, if inadequately, is something of the thrill I have experienced working with some great minds on these plays, in this great company. What do I want people to take away, or to feel? Joy. “Joy, gentle friends, joy and fresh days of love accompany your hearts”.
Greg Doran is the author of My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio. Doran has been described as “one of the supreme Shakespeare directors of our era” (Financial Times) and “one of the finest present day directors of Shakespeare” (Sunday Telegraph). He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as an actor in 1987 and became its Artistic Director in 2012. He has directed and/or produced every single play in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays at Stratford-upon-Avon.
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