The Leura Shakespeare Festival 2012 - interview

First published on 13 Jan 2012. Updated on 13 Jan 2012.

 

I still love the indoor variety and the control and clarity it can give you, but the vast majority of these plays were written to be performed outside, and theatre began as an outdoor sport of course! I find that the experience for both the actors and the audience is a strangely authentic one. Shakespeare only had one central design feature and that was the stage itself, above that were the heavens (painted on the canopy and also through the Globe’s open roof) and beneath was his audience’s sense of the underworld ready to throw up its ghosts and visions. So he was conscious I think of taking his audience right back to the roots of comic and tragic theatre – human figures playing out huge conflicts in the empty landscape with the earth beneath them and the heavens above. That is the essential setting for every human story anyway isn’t it?

 

And somehow the effect of bringing a large audience outside beneath the stars or the sun, sharing an open space, picnicking together and taking in a great story returns us to the sense of community and shared experience that we don’t often get in the darkness of modern indoor theatre I think, which has come to resemble church as much as theatre in some ways. We baulk at mobiles going off and people coughing and laughing inappropriately. Outdoors, surrounded by the flux of life, the birds, the animals, the natural world, distant traffic, things aren’t so precious somehow – actors need to be robust and clear and dynamic, and audiences are allowed to genuinely relax and feel like they are part of the event, not simply watching it.

 

It also reveals every time just how robust these plays are – they are so psychologically detailed and the language is so rich and carries so much emotion and humanity that they can easily withstand the bustle and hubbub of a group of people enjoying the experience of dining, drinking and laughing, along with the atmosphere of the natural world imposing itself at times. Nor does it mean the productions can or should lack detail or subtlety or nuance – that is the myth attached to performing outdoors I think. Yes it needs to be vocally strong and physically clear in the big space and without microphones but it’s great to be forced to pay attention to such fundamental things anyway, it need not be to the detriment of a show’s sophistication at all. If theatre is a three-way exchange between a story, a group of storytellers and an audience, then I think all three parties get their due in that exchange in outdoor theatre.

 

 

[2011 was] certainly stressful – we should probably have put ‘La Nina’ on the cast list as she is turning up on cue this summer, but that’s the nature of the beast. Outdoor theatre carries that natural risk and its frustrating but we also make a strong commitment to performing whenever possible and audiences again show you how resilient they are. There have been many times when drizzle has begun to fall and I have asked an audience if they are willing to endure getting a little damp if the actors and crew are, and the response has always been quite overwhelming in its support. I think people feel alive and are reminded that it’s only water after all!

 

 

Our aim is to slowly develop a genuine Australian Shakespeare festival experience, not just a play in a park but a way for audiences and communities to immerse themselves in an experience, to learn things, to have conversations, to investigate things, to contribute, to mingle with artists and spend a day and night delving into something as wonderfully encompassing as we believe Shakespeare’s work is. This year we are furthering our process toward that full festival atmosphere by partnering with the stunning Fairmont Resort, now under new management, and offering classes in acting Shakespeare, for actors, but primarily for people who just want to experience the plays on the floor rather than the page. We will offer in depth directorial lectures on Shakespeare’s work and Macbeth and Shrew specifically, two such famous and provocative plays. Some of Australia’s most brilliant comic improvisers will create ‘new’ Shakespeare plays for audiences straight off the presses! We will have informal meet and greet sessions between actors and audiences at the Fairmont bar, and will also have a hopefully virulent debate on ‘who wrote Shakespeare’s plays’ between some of the divided opinions on the subject. So there is plenty for people to do with a weekend of Shakespeare in the mountains.

 

 

We are so grateful for the way audiences are responding to our work and hope we can continue working hard at what we love. There is so much inspiring theatre in Australia today at the highest levels and around the fringes so it’s a very exciting time to be working.

 

There are a million philosophical and governing approaches to something like Shakespeare, and directing theatre in general, but in the end, each new thing you work on should determine it’s approach from the specific demands of the story you’re trying to tell and that’s all there really is I think. Shakespeare’s plays are so different and so rich with possibilities that they automatically demand a different process in rehearsal for each one, let alone the variant work of other great writers or the work of exciting new writers. I think there is so much written and opined about the great art that is Shakespeare that it can all get a bit ridiculous in terms of its mystique and complexity. There is certainly no need for reverence or romanticiSing of these works, they are a pretty open canvas for modern theatre makers and should be treated as such. They have strengths and weaknesses, they have great conventions and some outmoded ones. The stories belong to us and we should express ourselves with them in ways that make sense to us.

 

My advice to anyone wanting to work on these plays is to focus on what is most human in them, think about how exciting the story and situations can be on a stage, try to understand the theatrical ‘shape’ of each scene and how he connects ideas together, then simply get a group of actors together willing to explore them. As long as the play is at the core of the work, something worthwhile will generally happen.

 

In terms of any other thoughts or approaches to it, I guess I don’t enjoy dumbed down Shakespeare or productions that strive for superficial ‘relevance’, trying to simply latch on to the latest social or political idea in the hope that the audience can see just how ‘modern’ Shakespeare is. He will be modern as long as people like stories about people. If you miss the relationships and don’t make the language natural, simple and clear it doesn’t matter how ‘modern’ and hip it appears to be, it will be relevant to no one. I think it can absolutely look and sound like the ‘here and now’, and in most cases probably should where possible, but if it is done with clarity and imagination and inventiveness, it makes little difference how ‘up to date’ it appears on the outside. The relationships are the key, they are so finely observed and undergo such wonderful, moving and funny transformations that only poor productions can actually make a Shakespeare play feel irrelevant to an audience of human beings. They are fantastical stories in many ways but essentially they are so humane and reflective of what people think and feel and fear, in any place, at any time. I guess the aim is to always be trying to open up the imaginative possibilities of the plays rather than closing them down by finding obvious topical conceits to help the audience ‘get it’. Audiences can connect the dots pretty well on their own I think.

 

 

We work toward a connecting theme for each repertory season and this year we were drawn to the idea of Shakespeare’s most dangerous or confronting relationships or marriages. These plays push relationships to their extremes but I don’t mean the blood and violence of Macbeth or the comic chaos of Shrew but the extremes that real people will go to express their love for each other. They are also plays that are traditionally approached in certain ways that I was interested in re-addressing I suppose. Shrew is a much loathed play for many people and productions often treat it as such, focusing on ‘commenting’ on the play or answering its questions rather than letting the play open up its own questions for an audience to worry about. I have long believed it is a better, smarter play than people want to admit. Yes it is unquestionably and reprehensibly sexist but an audience are not silly enough to be influenced by it in such a way. Beyond that problem it has so much to say to us and some of his finest scene writing, and it is criminal that Kate and Petruchio are so easily reduced or condemned by one idea when they express and represent so many in the play.

 

And likewise Macbeth is often overwhelmed by an obsession with its mood and atmosphere I think. I don’t remember many productions that weren’t soaked in blood, underscored by grinding, foreboding, relentless sound designs, black costumes and controlled by a continual presence of the witches etc, blood caked walls and as much graphic violence and gore as possible. I feel that stuff is so beautifully captured in the words and images in the text that they don’t need to be spelt out in design or moody production values that do the work for you. We wanted to see how much light and life we could bring to the play without short-changing its wonderful darkness. It is about a war that ends in the first act and returns in the last. In between my simple thought was to create a Scotland worth living for and living in – something these people have to lose in order to recognize what they have lost. A marriage between two otherwise good people who make a choice to sacrifice the best of themselves out of a desperate love for one another to commit a terrible act they hope they can escape from once it’s done. I wanted Macbeth’s world to be ‘a pleasant seat’ as the texts suggests, a beautiful place, rich with music, with images of family and connection between people and even great joy that gets blasted by the terrible decisions these people make. Horror is created in the real world, the beautiful world we live in, by real people who are equally capable of being beautiful people under different circumstances. I wanted to see if that is perhaps more frightening and atmospheric than a production that revels in a sense of ‘evil’. What are any of us capable of if we give in to the worst in ourselves?

 

 

The stage is entirely different in character and shape, and its backdrop is very different but, as we find when we perform wet weather shows indoors, Shakespeare’s plays are extraordinarily versatile and are so focused on the work of the actor and the language that they really work anywhere. We adapt them as carefully and thoroughly as possible though as I think the key to performing outdoors is making the play feel like it lives quite specifically in the natural place it is being performed in – that it’s somehow born out of that world and makes use of every nook and cranny of the surrounding environment to eek out its story. And yes, images and moments are lost as a venue changes but they are always balanced with new possibilities and opportunities in the new venue. Each of these venues is sublimely beautiful and wonderfully theatrical and the place itself is a key character in the stories. Matinees are also a wonderfully different thing, your careful lighting design is thrown out the window completely and you realise that while it is a terrific bonus to be able isolate things and create mood with lighting, Shakespeare in the end doesn’t need it, sunlight creates a whole new clarity and sense of beauty in the theatre so the change is as good as a holiday I think.