Matthew Amer discovers why Troilus And Cressida director Matthew Dunster decided to stage a play he knew nothing about…
Who would choose to direct a play they had never read, nor seen, without knowing the traps and pitfalls that might lie within its pages? It seems like the decision of a madman. But Matthew Dunster, who did just that when he agreed to stage Troilus And Cressida at Shakespeare’s Globe, appears fairly sane.
In fact, Dunster, when we meet at the end of a day’s rehearsal, is remarkably laid back about the whole situation. A sip of red wine to reinvigorate the energy that has been sapped by a scorching London summer’s day and his explanation for diving headlong into a play he knew next to nothing about actually makes sense. “I think we all carry a lot of As You Like Its, Romeo And Juliets, Hamlets and Macbeths around in our heads,” he explains, “so I sort of thought it would be wonderful to have a go at a play I’d never seen and never read. All you can go on then is the play; that is it, that’s all you’ve got.”
His summer, so far, has been spent with his company of actors exploring this lesser performed of Shakespeare’s plays and discovering that it is about, as the show’s advertising has proclaimed since the season’s launch in November 2008, love and war. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” he says of his process of exploration, “but I didn’t want to be told by a poster what this play was all about.”
Set during the Trojan War, an international confrontation that splits a passionate love affair, Troilus And Cressida is one of those plays that is hard to pigeonhole; part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, part theoretical debate. It has led to the piece falling into the disconcerting and unsatisfying ‘problem play’ bracket.
Dunster, having explored and examined it, has a better description. “It’s a blockbuster really. We can get people to run around like Brad Pitt, whacking chunks out of each other, but it’s got this big love story at the centre and there’s a very serious debate about the nature of warfare and violence. On the other side, there’s a debate about lechery and falsehood in love. There’s a lot going on,” he smiles, just thinking about it.
The play has, like a directionally challenged bus driver, taken him on a surprising journey. His initial reaction to the piece, which historians suggest may have been written for an audience of barristers and solicitors at the Inns of Court, was that it was a “heavy, clever debating play,” which filled him with no little dread.
“It’s a populist play; it’s got shagging and fighting”
Yet rehearsals have seen that view reversed: “It’s a populist play, it’s good fun, it’s got everything you want, it’s got shagging and fighting. I think the play’s been taken out of the popular audience’s sense of what is fun Shakespeare because of some of the productions in the last century. I’m not for one minute saying that this is going to be better than those, but it will be different to those; it will be a Globe production where you never forget how important the audience is.”
“It’s difficult here,” he continues. “You’ve got to look after the play, but here you’ve got to really look after the space in a way that is appropriate to the scale of the audience and the unavoidable engagement with that audience, because you can see them all the time, you can’t pretend they’re not there. I thought that was a ridiculous idea until I actually had a go here and then I just thought ‘This is fantastic.’”
As we sit in the least glamorous corner of Shakespeare’s Globe’s offices, tucked away in a cupboard masquerading as a meeting room, it is clear that Dunster is full of affection for the theatre at which he has now spent two summers. He first experienced directing on the Globe’s unique stage, which is surrounded by a courtyard of standing audience members and offers nothing in the way of cunning mechanical set changes, last year, when he brought Che Walker’s contemporary drama The Frontline to the Bankside venue. The snapshot of Camden life proved so popular that Dunster was asked to revive it earlier this summer. “It’s a very important piece of work for this theatre,” he says of the show. “It reminds people that it’s a writer’s theatre, that, because it’s Shakespeare’s Globe, it’s about writing.”
That sense of importance, and a hint of regret that he didn’t revive one of his earlier works, Love And Money, when he was given the chance, saw him strive to bring The Frontline back to the stage, to have another crack at it with a different cast and see what else he could find. However, “Once it was up, I kind of didn’t want to see it any more, I’d been exhausted by it.”
That was not the case with Dunster’s other revival of 2009, You Can See The Hills, the one-man piece that Dunster also wrote and which enjoyed a successful run at the Young Vic in 2008. “I wanted to see that nearly every night,” he confesses about the autobiographical piece that drew from his childhood. “I wasn’t an orphan in Zimbabwe, but in terms of what I was going through – some of the worst things that happened to me in my teenage years – watching people piss themselves at those moments was a very cathartic experience. It’s a real way of putting them in the dustbin.”
“Directors, like actors, are just glory boys”
Until spring this year, the Young Vic had been Dunster’s artistic home for four years, and though he left his post as Associate Director in May, he remains the only director so far to have staged a production in each of the venue’s three theatres; The Member Of The Wedding in the Main House, Love And Money in the Maria and You Can See The Hills in the Clare.
While he is justifiably proud of this claim, it is in his work behind the scenes at the Waterloo venue that he takes most pride: “It was great for me to do shows there, but I can do shows anywhere, and I do do shows in lots of places. But what the Young Vic does for the community, there’s not really any other theatre in London that does it as richly and as deeply. I did a lot of work with people recovering from crack cocaine addiction and ex-prisoners; the people I would be working with, that night would be watching plays in our auditorium. That’s what I’ll miss. It’s very grounding. It reminds you of who you are. Directors, like actors, are just glory boys, so it’s nice to do other stuff as well.”
Dunster should know; he started his career as an actor, before branching out into writing and directing. That side of his career has slipped away in recent years, with directing consuming most of his time. It is, he explains, an awkward balancing act. Directors are offered jobs a year or 18 months in advance, whereas actors are hired months if not weeks before they are needed. To make a living, he is always booked up with directorial duties. His last stage appearance, which came earlier this year in Nocturnal at the Gate theatre, did not even involve him performing each night; it was recorded and screened during each performance.
While he clearly enjoys directing, there is no hiding the fact that he misses an actor’s life: “The actors finish at six and they can just f**k off home; I have to plan what we’re doing tomorrow. It’s a bit like – and actors would hate me saying this – the parent/child relationship, which is not to say they’re all infantile, it’s just that I have to make a set of decisions and set up a structure for how we’re going to live in our home, which is the rehearsal room. In the times when I have acted while I’ve been directing [a different production], I just felt like I’m on holiday; I skip to work. Somebody else is going to tell me what we’re going to be doing that day, and that’s nice.”
As he describes his directorial process, the relationship also sounds a lot like that of a teacher and his class; setting them tasks, leaving them to it and then returning to see what they have achieved. “You edit and you shift and you change and you provoke,” he explains, “and then you go away and let them have another go. When you’ve got actors with fertile minds, their ideas are always better than yours.”
“When you’ve got actors with fertile minds, their ideas are always better than yours”
Dunster, like all good directors should, sounds like he revels in bringing the best out of his casts. As he talks about Matthew Kelly, the most recognisable name in the Troilus And Cressida company, there is undeniable pride as he describes watching the former Stars In Their Eyes host adjust and ease into the longer rehearsal periods allowed by Shakespeare’s Globe that he may not have been used to. While actors and directors may be “the glory boys,” there is a sense that Dunster, thoughtful and understated, wearing a plain white t-shirt and combat shorts that will allow him to disappear seamlessly into the London crowd when he leaves the venue, is more than happy being the man behind the scenes quietly pulling the strings to make everything work as one.
There is no denying that at the moment, exploring a piece which is brand new to him with a large cast of eager actors and in a venue with which he has fallen in love, though he might get a little fed up with having to be the man in charge, he is enjoying himself: “It’s a wonderful place to spend your summer. Actors are seriously high maintenance, not as individuals but as a group of people, and not because they’re temperamental or because they’re difficult or because they’re infantile, but because they’ve got energy and ideas. It’s the same as having 11 Ronaldos or 11 Robinhos in my football team, you’ve got to deal with all that talent and all that energy and all those ideas. The great thing about the Globe is that there’s over 100 of them here all summer, all having fun, drinking, shagging each other, whatever actors get up to, and that’s a wonderful climate in which to live and work.”
MA