Former artistic director Sir Gregory Doran talks about what he’s been up to, including his first directorial gig since leaving the RSC.
After 35 years with the RSC as actor, director then artistic director, many will be surprised to hear that Sir Gregory Doran’s first directing gig since leaving is at the helm of a student production. He tells Gill Sutherland about his production of Two Gentlemen of Verona which is on at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday.
Lots of people in Stratford will be surprised that your first directing gig post RSC, is a student production. Tell us about that.
Well, I am doing the Cameron Macintosh visiting professorship. The timing has been perfect, it just fits completely in with my life at the moment.I think I’m the the 29th visiting professor [the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Adjoa Andoh and Arthur Miller have previously held the position]and nobody's actually ever directed a show before. I didn’t want to give lectures and pontificate. So I thought the best thing I could do in terms of legacy would be to direct a production. And The Two Gentlemen of Verona is the only one of the Folio plays I have left to direct.
How does it lend itself to a student production?
I can’t think of a better play to do because Two Gents is about young people leaving home for the first time, sort of making their way in the world, finding out who they are, falling in love, making horrible mistakes. Well, that describes my first year at university! [Greg left his hometown of Preston to study at Bristol… in the play the characters leave Verona for Milan.]
I wanted to make it with the students and for it to be a collaborative production. And therefore doing a play that I didn’t know very well would be a way of us working out what it means and what its challenges are together. And that’s basically what’s been happening. It’s been a joy working with the students.
Tell us about the cast.
We sent out the call and 80 students sent in self tapes. I looked at them and auditioned 40. They’re all from across the university. The cast are very lively and very talented. Proteus is the biggest character in the play, and there were very good third year students who are sophisticated and polished performers. But then this first year student walked into rehearsals who was everything that I wanted this play to be about. So I took a punt on him – excuse the Oxford pun! He’s a really exceptional young talent.
And you’ve also got a real-life dog in the cast?!
I said two things at the beginning. One, that I wanted to do it in modern dress, and two, that we had to have a dog [to play Crab the dog – who belongs to Proteus’ clownish servant Launce]. At the RSC there would be worries about where to get the dog from and you’d have to employ a chaperone. But we just used the Rocky the cockerpoo who belongs to the technical manager of the Oxford Playhouse.Rocky’s a total charmer, he’s not trained as such, but he does two tricks in the show… but really we just have to improvise about what the dog decides to do.I’m completely convinced that it’s Shakespeare’s first play, and I think he inherited an actor who was a clown or a comic who already had an act with the dog. I think that this clown said to him, look, I do this bit with the dog and then I do a joke about the dog farting under a table and then I do this very funny scene about a milkmaid.
Some of the politics with the milkmaid scene are a big dodgy – they ogle her basically.
I was unsure that we were going to make it work, so I suggested we either cut it or rethink it. The students said actually it sounds as though he’s just looking her up on dating app, like Hinge or Tinder, and he’s going through her virtues and her vices. At one point Launce actually says it’s a match.So that’s how we played the scene, as if the milkmaid had a dating profile. The rest of the company were in fits when they saw it.
How different is it working with students as opposed to professional actors?
I’ve quite often been directing and teaching at the same time, because a company is often varied in terms of training backgrounds. So I’ve done some basic ‘Shakespeare gyms’. The students’ voices aren’t trained but they have an appetite for it. We’ve been doing sessions in the theatre space where they have learned to project.We’ve also been doing verse work. It’s a very early play, and there’s a lot of rhyme in it. Although it’s quite straightforward, and not complex from the language point of view. They’ve picked it up fairly rapidly.
Everyone’s pitching in. We needed some garden furniture so I basically had to ransack my shed at home – it’s fun, and reminds me of doing drama at uni. Every now and again one of the students has some kind of little wobble, but that’s student life. The guy playing Proteus is 19, and it’s just extraordinary how they’re all holding it together.
Two Gents has been criticised as being one of Shakespeare’s plays. Presumably you would defend it?
Whenever anybody asks me what my favourite Shakespeare play is, my usual answer is the one I’m doing now. But I’ve really fallen in love with Two Gents. That’s not just because Shakespeare’s trying out lots of ideas he then develops later in other plays. I think that the central quartet of lovers and the study of the betrayal of friendships – basically bloke goes off with his best friend’s girlfriend, and the complexities of that I think are really interesting in the way that they’re explored and especially put in a modern context.Proteus tries to force himself on Sylvia to gain her affection and says “tis the curse in love, and still approved, When women cannot love where they're beloved” – and you kind of go that’s incel behaviour! Where young men who feel they’re entitled to women and lose their temper when they can’t have them. So suddenly it feels quite tricky – problematic but really contemporary with questions over consent.Normally they all go off hand in hand and it’s all reconciled. I don’t think that’s how you necessarily have to read it.
It’s nice to have finally kind of concluded my checklist of all the folio plays. And it’s just been great fun doing it with these young people, it’s somehow makes the play feel fresh.
What have you got left to direct of Shakespeare's plays?
I haven’t done Pericles – which is in the third folio. Of course Tamara is directing it at the Swan, and we had a very good session with her on what’s it like directing in the space and what I thought about Pericles – we had a good discussion about that. So I’m looking forward to seeing her production.
Have you been back much to the RSC?
Not really, it’s been a strange. They threw me a really lovely farewell sort of do in the Swan, which was very lovely and overwhelming. All sorts of people, from Judy Dench to Patrick Stewart did film clips. And Harriet Walter, Alex Gilbreath, Paterson Joseph, Adjoa Andoh and others performed. It was a great send off and a lovely thing, but I don’t want to be the ghost at the feast. Although I’m not avoiding it, I will come up and see and see Pericles.
Since we last spoke and the First Folio anniversary you’ve been dashing all over the world and doing some exciting things. What what have been some of the highlights?
A couple of weeks ago I was at the Folger Library in Washington that has over a third of all the folios in the world, it has 82. They have been closed for redevelopment since 2019 and not opening until June, but they had that they did a sort of Shakespeare Birthday weekend and invited me over for a little private view. So I was the first person outside of Folger staff to be able to see their new exhibition with all 82 folios. So that was a great, great thing.
I’ve now seen 200 of the 235 folios in the world, and my goal was to get to 200. I’m delighted to got to have got there and have been commissioned to write a book about my folio journey.There was a point when I realised that the ‘folio roadshow’ was really a massive piece of displacement activity. It was sort of about getting over or trying to deal with the grief of losing Tony [Greg’s husband Tony Sher who died in December 2021], and all the changes, including stepping down from the RSC and moving back to London.So I’ve been writing about that. The book is sort of travelogue, a bit of a kind of Shakespeare nerd journey.But funnily enough after Two Gents I’m off to Padua and Verona with Emma Smith, who is the folio expert, who’s taking me there. It’s a pilgrimage to Verona. So that will be a nice way of just finishing off the Oxford journey.And I have also found a new first folio! But I’m keeping schtum about and putting it in the book.
