Royal Shakespeare Company : Spanish Golden Age

Laurence Boswell, Season Director of the RSC's Spanish Golden Age Season talks about the productions.

Laurence Boswell, Season Director of the RSC's Spanish Golden Age Season talks about the productions and what audiences can expect from the season.

Why are you so passionate about the Spanish Golden Age?

Putting on plays from the Spanish Golden Age is like putting on new plays. It's ground-breaking. They are rich, complicated plays which need pioneering reading, research, designs and acting. It's also a temperament thing. There's a big streak of Mediterranean in me - a passionate side. I feel at home with them.

You staged an Olivier Award winning SGA season at The Gate in 1992. Why have you decided to re-visit the period? How different will this season be?

It's been over ten years since we put on the plays at The Gate. The Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement was the culmination of a two year project which consisted of seven plays, all of which I dug out. I directed four of them and created versions of three. So when it came to an end, I felt as though I would never do them again, and that I had run my obsession into the ground. But time moves on, and I'm a different person now. There are new plays to discover, and the Swan is a wonderful place to stage the plays. After a long gap I feel completely refreshed and raring to go.

How did you choose the final five plays from such a huge canon of work?

I've been working closely with three academics - Jack Sage, Catherine Boyle and Jonathan Thacker, and the RSC's dramaturg Paul Sirett. We discussed a number of titles - looking at over 100 and commissioning 30 literal translations. Then we started to select our final ten from the group. The next stage was to assemble a group of directors, and find out what excited them.

We were keen to ensure that they were all very good quality plays, with diversity and originality guiding our choice. It was important to us that there was a play representing each genre in the final selection. For example, Daughter of the Air is a mythological play. This genre has never been touched in this country. The Dog in the Manger is a very sophisticated play. Lope wrote it at the height of his talent. Arguably, it's one of his finest comedies - a comedy that turns the whole notion of resolution through marriage completely on its head.

Tamar's Revenge falls within the biblical epic drama genre, which gets very little attention on British stages. It had a short run at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio many years ago.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the author of House of Desires, was a unique woman. She was a nun who was born and lived in Mexico. She was an extraordinary artist who wrote original plays with an original voice. This will be the first full-scale of performance of the play in the UK, and Nancy Meckler has a great passion for it.

Mike Alfreds was particularly passionate about Cervantes' Pedro, the Great Pretender. Cervantes is mainly recognized as an author of prose – in particular for Don Quixote. I don't even know if Pedro was performed when it was originally written. Apparently, Cervantes first wrote it as a five act play, and was asked by a producer to reduce it to a 3 act play.

Tell me something about the directors and translators you are working with?

Simon Usher (Tamar's Revenge) directed a Calderon play during the Gate Season. I think he's an unsung hero of the British directing community, who has directed new plays at The Bush, the Royal Court, the National, and most recently at Chichester. I’m pleased that he's getting a chance bring his work to the RSC.

Nancy Meckler (House of Desires) is a distinguished director with a great track record and an original physical style of work.

Mike Alfreds (Pedro, the Great Pretender) has been a great inspiration and hero to me and to many theatre practitioners over the last thirty years. He is one of the most radical and original directors of the last 30 years.

One of the grounding principles of working with the translators was not to create adaptations, but translations. Most of the plays will not have been previously seen on the British stage, and I felt a certain responsibility to present them in as accurate a form as possible.

Was it difficult deciding which play you were going to direct?

It was and it wasn't. It was because there was something tantalizing in each of the plays. At one point, I wanted to direct them all. But The Dog in the Manger is such a delicious play that it was the only one for me. In fact, it was the first Spanish Golden Age play I had ever tackled. Over 25 years ago I directed it at university.

You're now in the middle of rehearsals for The Dog in the Manger. How are you approaching the play?

I hope I see the play in a more complex and subtle light than I did all those years ago. I see echoes of Marivaux - the French dramatist. I think that it shows that he must have read and was influenced by Lope. It is a very interesting play with the most audacious plot twists. Lope's work is both painful and funny. When you get it right, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. He has a unique voice, and it's been really pleasing to get into his rhythm.

Tell me about the Spanish Golden Age ensemble.

The Spanish Golden Age ensemble consists of twenty actors. Some are in all four plays, and most in three of them. There's a mixture of actors who have previously performed in the company (like Simon Trinder – Measure For Measure, Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed – Season 2003/4) and some who are completely new to the company. Joe Millson, who is playing the male lead in my show (Dog in the Manger) and Nancy's (House of Desires) is a very exciting actor. He was recently in Sir Peter Hall's As You Like It for which he has been nominated for an Ian Charleson Award I can see him playing other leading roles for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the near future if that’s what he wants. It's the first time in the company for Rebecca Johnson - I can see her as a Viola of the future (Twelfth Night). And then there's the wonderful John Ramm - who has worked a great deal with Mike Alfreds - most recently as Bottom in his Dream. It's essentially a relatively young company, working hard and immersing itself in all things Spanish - including Flamenco lessons!

Who is your favourite playwright from the Spanish Golden Age era?

It has to be Lope de Vega.

What do you think British audiences will get out of these plays?

I think that they will be delighted to experience such incredibly accessible classic drama. To get the most out of Shakespeare, you have to have a certain level of understanding of his language. Although they are also great poets, the playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age tell incredibly plot-driven stories with a baroque theatricality. They are not rooted in a detailed social reality with topical references which audience would not necessarily understand without some kind of social history degree. They are more like folk drama - telling stories of essential human situations, like couples struggling with very recognizable dilemmas of love. They are passionate and down to earth Hispanic dramas with an emotional intensity - very different to our more clement, gentle English drama.

The RSC has been invited by the Festival de Otono to bring the plays to Madrid. How do you feel about this? How do you think the audiences in Spain will feel about British actors interpreting their own playwrights?

I hope and believe that they will be delighted, in the same way that we love to see foreign companies interpret Shakespeare. We recently saw a brilliant Icelandic Romeo and Juliet at the Young Vic, and I've seen amazing Japanese, Polish, French and African versions of Shakespeare's classics. International interaction is a wholly healthy phenomenon.

In England, the theatrical tradition has been unbroken since the seventeenth century, with skills being handed down through generations essentially by word of mouth and practice. In Spain, the theatrical tradition was broken - even before Franco. There was no democratic or middle class revolution in Spain as there was in the rest of Europe. Spanish society remained influenced by the medieval tradition for much longer. Theatre became far less important and it withered away. People continued studying the plays as texts, but the performance tradition dwindled. There is a National Classical Theatre in Madrid, but it hasn't existed as long as the RSC, and doesn’t go through the works as regularly or on anything like the same scale as the RSC does.

There is a huge repertoire of plays from the Spanish Golden Age, but there are only about twelve which are regularly performed in Spain (The Dog in the Manger is one of these). So I think that Spanish audiences will be fascinated to see plays which probably haven't been performed in Madrid since they were first staged in the seventeenth century. Hopefully the visit will spark off some cultural debates and more interest in the classical tradition.

Are the works of these writers viewed in Spain similarly to Shakespeare in Britain?

There seems to be a great reverence to the text in Spain, and the plays are read regularly in schools and colleges. However, I think that is a lot of fear and anxiety about actually interpreting them on stage, because of lack of practice and familiarity.

There is a complementary season of events running alongside the plays organized by the Education Department - including Girls on Top, Salsa nights and debates and workshops. What do you think this will bring to the season?

The 'Girls on Top' event, when we separate the audience by gender, will be an exciting experiment. I'm convinced that the authors used the fact that women sat in different places to their advantage. I can imagine actors talking directly to the men or women, depending on the text. The rest of the season is jam-packed full of related events which will help us all celebrate the season.

Further information

For further press information please contact;

Dean Asker
RSC Press Office
01789 412660
dean.asker@rsc.org.uk

Notes to Editors

This Q and A is free to use in full or in part in any editorial supporting the RSC’s Spanish Golden Age Season.

The Spanish Golden Age Season opens in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 14 April and the plays run in repertoire until 2 October 2004.