Demystifying Shakespeare: Simon Godwin and Joe Hill-Gibbins discuss ‘embarking on a fascinating jungle’

Going to watch a Shakespeare play can sometimes feel like the theatrical equivalent of eating your greens.

The plays, written 400 years ago, are inflicted upon every sixteen-year-old at a time in their life when they’d rather be out snogging and drinking. The language can be difficult to decipher, the plots are complicated; it sometimes feels like they are shielding secrets. And yet the plays continue to outlive all of us, enduring in ways that the stage will never know again.

This February, Shakespeare is ubiquitous. More so than usual, at least. Three productions open within days of each other, offering vivid, searching, brand new interpretations on the Bard’s work. Simon Godwin’s Twelfth Night at the National Theatre casts Tamsin Grieg as Malvolia, exploring sexual and gender fluidity in a play about cross-dressing. Joe Hill-Gibbins delves into the subconscious of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Young Vic, exploring the extremities of love. And at the Almeida, Andrew Scott takes on Hamlet in a production by Robert Icke.

Hill-Gibbins, who directed Romola Garai in a production of Measure for Measure that featured bongs and blow up sex dolls, offers a reminder that Shakespeare’s plays are far from dusty artefacts.

“They are pretty wild,” he tells me. “Shakespeare’s plays have statues coming back to life. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, you have the queen of the fairies having a relationship with a man who is half-man, half-ass. These are pretty unusual things.”

Looking at them closely, it’s easy to find a sense of extremity, he suggests. His version of Midsummer Night’s Dream drills into the “dark and complex picture of love” painted by the playwright. “What the lovers go through is actually quite painful. The way they are obsessed with each other, but that they can’t find a way of being together, the way they hurt each other, is extreme in a way.”

The National Theatre’s Twelfth Night will be exploring the contemporary resonances in the play’s ideas about sexuality and gender, by which Godwin hopes to “return some of the danger to the play which might have got lost over the 400 years since it was first written.”

“In our version, Malvolio is now a woman who nurtures a secret love for Olivia,” he says. “The play is so infinitely mysterious and so full of subversive gestures, that by making a few subversive gestures of our own, I hope it’s unleashed the kind of subterranean sexuality of the play.”

Godwin has a good track record for finding freshness and joy in work that could easily be drowned by its own cobwebs; the last time he directed at the National he packed out the Olivier and the Lyttelton for revivals of The Beaux’ Stratagem and Man and Superman respectively. Twelfth Night is a new challenge; Godwin says it’s not a play he grew up knowing, nor has it been on either of the National’s bigger stages before.

Coming to the play fresh allowed him to be more curious, he says - he isn’t trapped by memories of past productions. But does the interpretation come from the text, or is an idea germinating beforehand?

“I try and really stand under the play, like standing under a tree and waiting for an apple to fall,” he says. “But also trying to get to know the play as much as possible, to try and see what it might be murmuring to me, and then link that with some ideas that I feel are culturally very present. So I guess it’s always trying to make a bridge between the past and the present.”

Playing with Shakespeare, making it clear and vital and engaging, is truer to Shakespeare’s spirit than preserving his texts as period pieces, Godwin thinks. In fact, the latter would have made the playwright sad. “This was a man who wanted to be the most popular dramatist of his time, to sell loads of tickets and be really accessible,” he says. The plays were designed to be “very universal, welcoming and hospitable, and we’ve got to get back to that same sensation today.”

Whilst acknowledging the importance of preserving the poetry and detail of his writing, Godwin notes that the plays were edited or altered at the time. “The text was never a stable object even from the very beginning,” he says. Shakespeare would have been happy that they could be used to pick apart contemporary ideas, so many years on. “I think he would have loved the fact that his plays are going to be there forever, and are going to outlive all of us, so he’s always going to win. Because whatever we do with them, they’re there in tact for the next generation to pull from the shelf and explore.”

Hill-Gibbins also has some uncertainty around how useful it is to be ‘purist’ about Shakespeare. “People talk about wanting to be a Shakespeare purist, and it’s hard to know what they mean sometimes by that. Because, in the best sense, Shakespeare is very impure, in that he is pulling together lots of different styles and tones,” he says. “You’ll have some of the most beautiful poetic writing about love, next to some of the crudest sexual innuendo. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, he’s mixing together two worlds: the world of Athens and the world of the forest. So to have a pure vision of Shakespeare I think isn’t always the best way of speaking about it.”

Like Godwin, Hill-Gibbins also has lots of experience directing new writing at the Royal Court. Working on Shakespeare is something he admits to finding “quite demanding.”

“Because it’s so rich and so complex and it’s firing on so many levels at the same time, it’s quite challenging to do. But working on the plays of such a great writer, you also get to learn a lot about yourself, and you get to learn a lot about people and the world, so it’s also a really great thing to do,” he says.

That Shakespeare is challenging for a director is perhaps unsurprising. The Globe’s outgoing director Emma Rice recently said she wanted to be transparent about the fact the plays aren't always fun to watch. “I’ve sat in many Shakespeare productions and not understood them. That is what I refuse to lie about,” she told The Telegraph.

Godwin also feels it is important to acknowledge there is truth in the idea that Shakespeare can be intimidating or feel like hard work. He tells me that a lot of work in the rehearsal room involves the company translating the language into their own words first, so they know they understand it entirely before communicating it to an audience, as well as finding the clearest ways of staging the work to them.

“I think that’s partly through modern dress, partly through finding a style of acting which is as transparent as possible. Partly through trying to find a language of gesture and costume, and language of action, which try consistently to make the story clear,” he says. “Because it’s so joyous when it’s clear, but we can’t assume it’s clear from day one. In fact we have to assume it’s a kind of fascinating jungle that we’re embarking on.”

Hill-Gibbins hopes to tackle The Winter’s Tale at some point; Godwin is soon to direct Measure for Measure in America. “It feels a really exciting time to be going back to that country and to be doing that play, which is so much about the corruption of power, women’s rights being transgressed, and the rise of the far right.”

Shakespeare's plays are still speaking truth to power in the age of Trump, and that’s not bad for someone who died in 1616.

“You can never really hit the bottom. There’s such depth, you can sort of swim downwards, dive deeper, deeper and deeper, but you’ll never get to the bottom. There’s always more to discover,” Hill-Gibbins says. “In a way, that’s quite scary. Because you can’t ever go, oh, we’ve got that, we’ve sorted that out! So however far forward you move, you’re always chasing these incredible pieces.”

Simon Godwin directs Twelfth Night at the National Theatre 15 February - May 13, with an NT Live broadcast on April 6; nationaltheatre.org.uk. Joe Hill-Gibbins directs A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Young Vic 16 February – 1 April. Box Office: 0207 922 2922 www.youngvic.org.

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