Liberating Shakespeare

Wednesday, 2nd April 2008

Mary Wakefield talks to the RSC’s Michael Boyd and learns how he scared the Establishment

Halfway through our interview, in the middle of a discussion about the future of the RSC, a tired Michael Boyd rubs his face with his hands, looks up at me through the gaps between his fingers and says, ‘Well, my aim was, and still is, to knock Shakespeare off his pedestal.’

Is that the last sentence you’d expect to hear from an enthusiastic director of the RSC? Half an hour ago, I’d have said so. Half an hour ago, I’d have prickled with outrage, made a tetchy little note in my reporter’s pad: ‘Boyd bonkers.’ But after only a short while in his company, I’ve been brainwashed — or re-educated, let’s say — by Michael Boyd. I’ve undergone the same sort of shift in perspective that the RSC has since he took over five years ago: an uncomfortable but exciting dismantling of old prejudices. And now I, too, am all in favour of knocking Shakespeare from his plinth.

An hour with Michael Boyd is less like an interview with a theatrical type than a tutorial with a passionate Eng. Lit. don. There’s no dramatic dash to his wardrobe, no flash of daring pink sock. He has the greyish skin of a serious smoker and he’s as likely to refer to ‘the bard’ or drop an arch reference to ‘Larry’ Olivier as he is to belong to the Garrick. I haven’t seen his cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays (coming this week to the Roundhouse from Stratford), so I can’t judge how well his ideas translate into drama, but in conversation they’re gripping, and the reviews over the past few years suggest that his RSC transformation has been a success.

To be fair, the company didn’t have much choice about its overhaul. Boyd’s predecessor, Adrian Noble, left trailing lofty soundbites (‘It is now time for me to seek new artistic challenges’)and nearly £3 million debt. Enter Boyd (then 47): ‘We either reinvent ourselves, or we go up in flames,’ he said at the time, and not (ironically) being a drama queen, he meant it.

Was your first impression of the RSC really that bad? I ask. ‘Well, I’d been working with the lead guitarist of the Specials on a musical,’ says Boyd with a grin, ‘so the RSC did feel elitist and slightly heritagey, backward-looking. It was always calling itself a family, which is lovely, but at times it felt like a dysfunctional family and a very patriarchal family and a very hierarchical family.’

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