Mark Rylance, artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, tells Belinda McKeon why he is so passionate about Shakespeare.
In 1991, Mark Rylance and his wife mortgaged their flat to stage their production of The Tempest in the "big, wet, hole in the ground" that was soon to become the reconstructed Globe Theatre at London's Bankside; as co-founder of Phoebus Cart, an adventurous company of young actors, Rylance was wildly excited by the possibilities of Shakespearean drama. He had been that way, too, in 1978, when he returned to England after a childhood spent in Chicago, to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and in the late 1980s, when he perplexed critics as an unkempt, unmannerly and deeply-unhinged Prince in Ron Daniels's production of Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Ten years into his role as the first artistic director of the Globe, he's still excited - programming, directing, and delivering increasingly acclaimed performances - a "bravura" Richard last year, an "exquisite" Olivia the year before. (To non-Shakespeareans, however, he's probably best known for his role as Jay in Intimacy, Patrice Chereau's controversial film of the Hanif Kureishi novel.)
Daringly unconventional, with its open-air stage, its lack of sets - and seats - and its single-gender casts, the Globe, initially dismissed by many as merely a thatched theme park, has become England's most successful theatre - and one of its most respected. It offers a regular diet of Shakespeare, staging four plays a season, and aims to draw in audiences who might find off-putting the more self-consciously highbrow approaches to the bard taken in other theatres.
Shakespeare matters to Rylance - fiercely, deeply, relentlessly. His dialogue is a steady stream of admiration, of consideration, of how to explore Shakespeare is to explore identity, personal and communal; of how to constantly revise Shakespeare, to reinvigorate his plays, is to rethink culture, politics - and not least, theatre itself. So it's little wonder, when I mention that professional productions of Shakespeare are remarkably thin on the ground in Ireland, and that Irish audiences rarely get the chance to see plays unconnected to the self-sufficient drama of school exam halls on tense June mornings, it puts a stop to Rylance's gallop. "Really?" he says, disbelieving. "Don't you?"
It may be with a sense of public service, then, that Rylance approaches the task, this Sunday, of directing Spearshaking, a masterclass in performing Shakespeare, at the Helix in Glasnevin. It's the first event for a new classical theatre company to be based at the Helix, and to launch this summer with what is, incredibly, the first professional production in this country of All's Well That Ends Well. The director and playwright Andy Hinds, who has trained actors in the performance of classical texts, from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London to the Gaiety School of Acting, and Marie-Louise O'Donnell, artistic programmer at the Helix, are behind the venture, Classic Stage Ireland, which has a two-fold aim: to produce the classics and to offer, to actors and directors, training towards further production.
While this weekend's masterclass will present an opportunity for established Irish actors, including Declan Conlon, Derbhle Crotty and Owen Roe, to stretch their classical muscles, it will also be open to the public, who can experience Rylance's intense interest in the part played in theatre by an audience. That interest sparked controversy in the mid-1990s, when Rylance's policy of opening Globe productions up to authentic, Elizabethan-style audience participation, led to accusations of coarseness and crude pantomime - and worse.
Rylance stands by his theory of the audience as a crucial player. "Faithfulness to the text is very important," he says, "but these are texts which are written for performances, and to be met by an audience. So I am as interested in fidelity to the audience." It's hardly disputed, after all, that Shakespeare's scripts grew from the experience of playing in the Globe and other Elizabethan theatre-spaces, responding to the reactions of the audience as much as of the actors. Fidelity to the audience - to what happens during a performance, to what arises, to what responses shape and colour the action, is, he believes, the path towards fidelity to the author's intentions.
Rylance is confident that an Irish audience will respond well to a masterclass of this sort. "Shakespeare wrote his plays not to be read, but to be heard," Rylance explains. "And that's particularly important, I would think, in a culture such as the Irish culture, which goes back to such an oral tradition - a passing on of all the experience through sound, either through song or story, or through humour, in a much stronger way than in the English tradition."
With its minimal scenery, lack of lighting, and vulnerability to the vagaries of the weather, the Globe does not so much encourage a contribution from the audience as necessitate it - during a performance, audience and the actors are essentially in the same boat, creating meaning anew on each occasion. But this relationship is more than an offshoot of architecture. Something is happening to English Shakespearean theatre, and it has Rylance's approval.
The era of Brooks, Hall, Barton and Nunn, the era of the Cambridge-educated directors, with their intellectual approach to theatre, informed by a complex cocktail of F.R. Leavis and Jan Kott, is coming to an end, he feels, to be replaced by something which he finds more exciting and productive.
"The desire of Brooks and Barton was to reduce the over-sentimental or emotional nature of the theatre, and to sharpen the intellect, the speed, the wit," he says. "It was a movement of amazing scholarship, too. But I feel that that period has served its purpose, and now those intellectual attentions need to be placed into the body of the plays. If anything was wrong during that period, it was that the aesthetic of the plays was reduced. The beautiful clothing, the beautiful music, the beautiful speaking, movement - all these things became secondary to the intellectual content and the concept of the director - and the response from critics."
Unsurprisingly, Rylance agrees that the critics, as well as the directors and performers, bear a responsibility for the well-being of Shakespearean drama. The academic Samuel Crowl, in his 1992 book Shakespeare Observed, may have felt confident in arguing that a new breed of performance criticism, marked by an empathy with the live processes of production rather than merely an emphasis on literary analysis, was thriving, but from his position on the ground, Rylance sees some progress yet to be made.
"I can see in the culture around me here in London that there are many more restaurants, and that the cooking is much better. And that there are many more dance halls, and many more styles of dancing being learned. The whole culture has moved much more into the physical senses."
Theatre is moving in the same direction - Rylance has had Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter of Complicité at the Globe recently, and speaks of the influence of Lecoq on Shakespearean work. "There is much more delight now in the physical trickery, in the manifestation of theatrical form." What remains to be achieved is, not to put it too lightly, a rediscovery of truth.
Rylance talks of coming home to England in 1978 and discovering that the dominant theatrical style consisted of what he saw as a masking of the truth. "Gielgud and all of the old speakers were using a singsong eloquence to hide the truth, to draw attention to themselves. But now we need to revive the faith that someone can be eloquent and truthful." He looks to contemporary politics to prove his point.
"You see that same eloquence in the politicians, who attempt to show their honesty and lack of trickery by pretending to stumble through their parts - or really stumbling, in the case of Bush, who was probably cast aspresident by the corporations because he was so ineloquent. And they think that the public is fooled into thinking that this guy is trustworthy because he can't string a sentence together."
What he wants to rediscover in the work of the Globe is "a kind of Martin Luther King-type of speech, which is trustworthy and also powerfully eloquent". What Rylance wants to inject into classical theatre is substance, depth, reality - attributes, he cautions, which it already has, but which, too easily, we have neglected or forgotten. "With Shakespeare, I admire so much the way he structures his stories, the choices he makes and the way he arranges the events of the stories, his use of hiding and revealing. I think in too many productions it was felt, oh, we know better than that, and the concept, or the intellectual idea, is much more important than that. But I think that a concept or an intellectual idea is something that each performer, and each member of the audience, should have the liberty to enjoy as they see fit."
Mark Rylance's Shakespearean masterclass is on in The Helix, this Sunday (10.30 a.m.-6.30 p.m., €40)
