The Theatre of Rupert Goold

Radical Approaches to Adaptation and New Writing

Sarah Grochala

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350090743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Regia e produzione teatrale

Since the late 1990s, Rupert Goold has garnered a reputation as one of the UK's most exciting and provocative theatre directors. His exhilarating, risk-taking productions of both classic texts and new plays have travelled from regional stages to the National Theatre, the West End, Broadway and beyond. Through his artistic directorship of Northampton's Royal & Derngate, the touring theatre company Headlong and London's Almeida Theatre, he has radically transformed, not only the companies themselves, but the landscape of British theatre. This is the first book to survey and analyse the full range of Goold's work to date and is a vital resource for students, scholars and fans of his work. Based on extensive interviews with Goold and some of the playwrights, designers, actors and other creatives who have collaborated with him, The Theatre of Rupert Goold provides an account of Goold's work from the beginnings of his career to the present day, offering a backstage view of the creative processes behind some of his most successful productions including: Paradise Lost, Faustus (Royal & Derngate); Macbeth (Chichester Festival Theatre); The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet (RSC); Six Characters in Search of an Author, ENRON (Headlong); Time and the Conways (National Theatre); Charles III and Ink (Almeida). The Theatre of Rupert Goold is an accessible and fascinating guide to Goold's approach to making theatre, an approach that asks provocative questions of the modern world in the most theatrical ways imaginable.

PART I

THE WORK

---

CHAPTER 1

BEGINNINGS: 1972–2002

---

Goold’s earliest memory is a theatrical one, performing in ‘some Guy Fawkes-y play’ as a small child. He was a ‘very sensitive boy’ and remembers feeling ‘really shy but oddly comfortable under the lights being looked at; I lay in a pile with my friends pretending to be part of the bonfire and felt both hidden and seen’. There was something in that transaction between actor and audience he felt was ‘reassuring’; he felt that it ‘organized the random aggression of the playground into a story’ and that ‘the discipline of doing [something] as a group was pacifying’ (Goold 2018b). Apart from pantomimes, his earliest memory of going to the theatre is seeing Michael Bogdanov’s production of Hiawatha (1980) at the National Theatre (National/NT) when he was eight years old: ‘I remember that feeling of seeing an actor move through the auditorium, the shock of them descending the stairs among us, the final funeral boat – it was electrifying to my love of the heroic. I was really young, but it did make a long-lasting impression on me’ (Goold 2019a).

At school, Goold remembers being on the ‘periphery’ of the drama scene but ‘desperate to join in’. When he was fifteen, he was cast in a school production of Pinter’s The Hothouse (Hampstead Theatre 1980), in which he played Lobb, a ‘tiny role at the end, in a ridiculous outsized suit’ (Goold 2018b). Also in the production were the future novelist China Miéville and composer Thomas Adès as well as the actress Caroline Faber, who would become one of Goold’s earliest collaborators. Goold’s school, University College School (UCS), was a private all-boys school. As there were no girls to play the female parts in school productions, girls were cast from other local schools. Faber, who was a pupil at a nearby comprehensive, was cast as Miss Cutts. She found herself ‘hurled into this very strange but disconcerting new world, working on this sinister Pinter play with this group of brilliantly talented, vivid, eccentric boys’. She remembers Goold as ‘younger than the rest, a little quieter maybe, but acutely observant and fiercely intelligent’. She got to know him better when she was cast as Adelaide in a UCS production of Guys and Dolls. Goold was playing an old man, Arvide Abernathy, ‘smothered in grey panstick and with talc sprinkled all over his lustrous hair’. Faber remembers him offering her a perceptive note on her performance during rehearsals: ‘He came up to me after I had sung “Adelaide’s Lament” saying, “It’s good, Caz, but I wonder if you should hold back a bit, build into it gradually and not throw everything at us at once”’. She ‘was a bit taken aback by this fifteen-year-old boy telling [her] what to do but it was a brilliant note’ (Faber 2019).

By the time he left school, Goold knew there was something about theatre that resonated with him: ‘I thought, “I really want to stay part of this but I don’t really know what that means”’. His English teacher asked him if he had considered directing: ‘I thought, “No, I want to be in plays, you just don’t think I’m good enough.”’ Just after he finished his A-levels, Goold met the future actor Sacha Grunpeter at a party. They hit it off straight away. Grunpeter was incredibly ambitious: ‘I couldn’t believe someone could be so confident’. Goold absorbed some of Grunpeter’s drive and chutzpah ‘in his slipstream’, helping him to overcome his shyness: ‘I owe any assertiveness and self-belief I have to him’. In a strange twist of fate, both Goold and Grunpeter were offered places to study English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between finishing at school and going to university, they spent a year together ‘working in bars and trying to set up a theatre company to do a touring production of Othello for schools’ (Goold 2018b).

Cambridge

At Cambridge, Goold become involved with the Marlowe Society, whose remit is to revive Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The society produces an annual production in which student casts and production crews work with a professional director and design team (‘The Marlowe Society’ n.d.). Goold played small parts in these professionally directed productions as, initially, he felt he would learn more about directing by working with professional directors than by directing his own productions.

Goold positioned himself as a director within the university scene before he had done any actual directing: ‘wandering around going “I would like to be in theatre. I think I might be a director” without any proof of it’. Despite this lack of proof, ‘people seemed to accept I was a director’. Goold attributes this to his shyness, which meant he tended to listen very carefully, often in adulation of his fellow Cambridge thespians: ‘I think they could tell that I would listen to them really hard and that probably appealed to their vanity. So at some level, I was vaguely taken seriously’ (Goold 2018b). Towards the end of his first year, he directed his first show, Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (Corpus Playroom 1992). It was ‘duck water, day one, this feels right’. After Fool for Love, he continued to direct, taking a couple of shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, but it was not until his third year that his practice really started to take form. In autumn 1993, he directed a gangsta rap version of Othello (Cambridge University European Theatre Group), which he now sees as ‘embryonic of all the basic flaws of my abilities, but also the strengths’. The production was ridiculous: ‘the idea a bunch of Cambridge kids could go around Europe with a gangsta rap production of Othello was every bit as risible as it sounds’. Through directing it, however, Goold ‘really began to learn about holding an audience’ (Goold 2018b). He managed to convey the story of the play ‘very clearly despite the absurd relocation and in no small part due to an extraordinary performance by Grunpeter as Iago’. As a result, he noticed the audience were engaged and often rapt.

After Othello, Goold directed a production of Twelfth Night (ADC America Tour 1994). This was the first show he tried to approach ‘theoretically’. He had been to see his youngest brother in a school play and become interested in ‘the relationship between how parents watch school plays and how audiences watch professionals’. When a professional play is bad, the audience tend to have a bad experience, but with the school play, Goold noticed, ‘the worse it got, the more beloved it was’. With his production of Twelfth Night, Goold aimed to replicate the ‘atmosphere’ of the school play and elicit the same audience response. He describes the outcome of this experiment as ‘embryonic of clowning’ in the sense that it was ‘sort of playful, quite alive, quite fresh’. While the show was on tour in the USA, he again had a chance to observe the reactions of different audiences. As with Othello, he could tell they were ‘responding’. This gave him confidence: ‘I thought I had a bit of an aptitude for this’ (Goold 2018b).

Starting Out

The first play Goold directed after graduating from Cambridge was María Irene Fornés’s Mud (Etcetera 1995). Fornés was a writer with no real reputation in the UK but whose spare dialogue and politics appealed to Goold: ‘her writing felt raw and genuinely distinct, perfect for the fringe’. The production was self-produced on the London fringe, Goold having ‘saved money from working overtime in a bar to pay for it’ (Goold 2018b). Faber, who played the role of Mae, remembers it was done on a shoestring: ‘None of us were paid a penny. Rupert was director, producer and on the lighting board every night. We rehearsed wherever we could find a room. The costumes were our own or from charity shops’ (Faber 2019). The production was scathingly reviewed by Sara Abdulla in Time Out, who claimed the only good thing about it was that it ‘closes on March 19’ (Abdulla 1995). As a result, audiences stayed away. For Goold, this was a shock to the system: ‘I’d just left university, I’d got a good degree, I’m being headhunted, I’d spent eight months trying to raise money and I’d lost it all overnight on a show that Time Out said reminds them why they get paid to do this job’ (Goold 2018b).

A closer inspection of the Time Out review reveals Abdulla’s main issue was with Fornés’s play rather than Goold’s production. She summarizes the action of Mud in the following terms:

Mae and Lloyd are white trash (how very de rigueur) underneath the dirt. They spit a lot and clutch at their groins. Lloyd has prostatitis. Henry, on the other hand, doesn’t, nor does he spit. At Mae’s behest, Henry shacks up with the Family Flob, has an accident and is paralysed. Mae, having learnt to read, leaves. Lloyd shoots her.

While she dismisses the play as ‘an utterly inglorious, dispiriting, dissipated hour of drivel’, she identifies the company as ‘talented’ and laments that they are ‘wasting time, energy and electricity’ on Fornés’s work (Abdulla 1995). Other critics praised the production. Laurence Kennedy in What’s On proclaimed Mud ‘one of the best shows on the fringe at present’. The production is ‘vibrant’, the cast ‘impress’ and Goold’s direction is ‘sharp and intelligent’ (Kennedy 1995).

In April 1995, things started to come together again. On the same day, Goold was offered two opportunities: a Fulbright Scholarship to join the Performance Studies programme at New York University (NYU) led by Richard Schechner and the trainee director position at the Donmar Warehouse with Carlton Television. Goold turned down NYU to go to the Donmar, where he arrived at a mixed time for the company. Under Sam Mendes’s artistic directorship, the theatre was enjoying critical success but the company’s financial future was in doubt. In autumn 1995, the theatre’s owners and their principal sponsor announced they would be withdrawing their funding from the following spring (Lister 1995). Threatened with imminent closure, the theatre was desperately seeking funding to stay afloat: ‘everyone was very stressed’. During his time there, Goold assisted Mendes on productions of The Glass Menagerie (1995) and Company (1995). When The Glass Menagerie transferred to the West End, he also had the chance to work for Thelma Holt, ‘a maverick West End producer’ who had a ‘great history and backed strange things’. Thelma became an influential figure for Goold. Whereas ‘the Donmar felt like a taut, electric machine’, with Thelma ‘it was all weird anarchic folk band’ (Goold 2018b).

Goold’s time at the Donmar was not a great success. He felt he did not fit in. Referencing the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, Goold identifies two different strains in British theatre: the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. Tynan associates the Cavaliers with the 1960s, with Oxford University, with ‘flair, audacity, imagination, outrageous aplomb’. The Roundheads, by contrast, are indicative of the 1970s, associated with Cambridge University, with ‘stubborn, obdurate, “hard hat” persistence’ (Tynan 2002: 33). At the end of Goold’s time at the Donmar, he had a ‘pretty frank and brutal debrief’. He remembers an exec at Carlton suggesting, ‘It would probably help if you cut your hair,’ and thinking, ‘My god, this is like the army’. For Goold, this offhand comment reflected the heart of what ‘they thought about me’. Apprentices were expected to be Roundheads, to support and to subjugate their individuality. He was seen as too much of a Cavalier and his shyness meant that his ideas and demeanour were read as aloof and cerebral rather than charismatic. Goold felt caught in between ‘wanting to wear a hair shirt on one level’ but also ‘as a director being drawn to flouncing around a lot!’ Negotiating these impulses were, he says, ‘part of growing up as a man and as an artist’ (Goold 2018b).

Salisbury Playhouse

After the Donmar, Goold was awarded a place on the Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme (RTYDS). It was his third application for the scheme. The first year, he had a ‘really odd’ interview where his hair again featured as a topic of conversation, one of the panel commenting: ‘But doesn’t he look like Byron, with his hair like that!’ (Goold 2018b). The second year, he did not eve...