‘Provoking debate is the best vindication of Shakespeare’
Director Simon Godwin tells Claire Allfree about his new, wildly hedonistic ‘Romeo and Juliet’
When lockdown ends and we can have parties again, I suspect a lot of them will look like the ball scene in Simon Godwin’s new filmed version of Romeo and Juliet. Against a sultry techno beat, a group of beautiful people sway ecstatically together, barely able to stop touching one another.
When Romeo ( The Crown’s Josh O’Connor) first catches sight of Juliet (Jessie Buckley), she’s practically having an orgasm in front of a microphone. Was drenching the film in hedonistic sensuality a conscious reaction against the sterile estrangement in which we’ve all been living?
“I think we’ve definitely all become much more aware of our bodies,” laughs Godwin from a village hall in rural Virginia, close to where he now lives, the signal at home being too erratic. “We’ve all had a yearning to be held. But touching has become highly charged. It can kill you. Living in the proximity of death, as we’ve been doing, has brought a renewed intensity to how the cast touch each other in Romeo and Juliet, which might not have been the case had we been doing it in normal conditions.”
By “normal conditions”, he means the National’s Olivier stage, where the production was supposed to take place this summer, before Covid killed it off. It’s now been turned into a 90-minute film, featuring an empty National auditorium among many other locations.
And perhaps theatre’s loss has in this instance been the screen’s gain: the new medium allowed Godwin to visually exploit the play’s many visions and narrative “flash-forwards” to create an intoxicating, magical dreamscape of mortal premonitions and transgressive desire that might not have been so intimate on stage.
“It was incredibly moving to see the play in close up,” says Godwin. “The film really leans into the honesty and intensity of Jessie’s screen acting, and she has this amazing chemistry with Josh. I was very moved by Josh’s innocent youthfulness when I cast him, but playing Prince Charles in The Crown has really extended his repertoire. He’s acquired this extraordinary complexity as an actor.”
Godwin, 43, is one of the country’s leading Shakespeareans, with a string of scholarly, playful and starry productions to his name: Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo in Antony and Cleopatra; Tamsin Greig in a terrific gender-bending Twelfth Night at the National; Paapa Essiedu in a luminous touring production of Hamlet for the RSC. He’s won awards, had associate directorships at several leading theatres and became an associate at the National Theatre under Rufus Norris in 2015.
But in 2019 he upped sticks, and moved his wife and young daughters to America, after getting the opportunity to run a building for the first time – the Shakespeare Theatre Company, in Washington DC.
His career switch couldn’t have come at a more dramatic moment. Not only did the pandemic force him to close the theatre six months after he arrived (it has yet to reopen), but America has spent the past 12 months embroiled in what Godwin calls a “racial crisis”, following the Black Lives Matter protests. The cultural climate, convulsed by trigger-happy debates surrounding diversity and identity politics, now feels radically different to how it did two years ago – even, perhaps, dangerous.
How does a white middle-class Oxbridge-educated male, leading a theatre devoted to the works of a dead white man, respond? “My job is to lead but also to listen and to facilitate, rather than to boss around,” says Godwin. One of his first moves was to hire two female African-American directors, Whitney White and Soyica Colbert, as associates.
“But I also think that all cultural organisations are going to get it wrong occasional occasionally, including me. It’s about building a tolerant community in which we a accept that things won’t always fit s symmetrically.”
By which he means also accepting that Shakespeare was writing over 400 years ago, and that his plays’ original context is meaningful. For the Bard is at the sharp end of calls, particularly in America, to “decolonise curriculums”. Some academics have accused his plays of bein being full of white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Some schools have stopped teaching him altogether. Godwin is not insensitive to these arguments, but he resists their moral censoriousness.
“When it comes to staging Shakespeare now, I do think hiding in history will no longer work,” he says. “Shakespeare needs to speak meaningfully to us today. But he’s our most spacious, metamorphic and welcoming of playwrights. It’s also helpful to remember he was writing at an extraordinarily partisan moment, when people’s heads rolled for being on the wrong side of the political line, and that you’d pass those heads impaled on London Bridge on the way to the Globe. Yet his plays are always sites of debate, rather than sites of advocacy. He never takes a position. So in the sense that these plays are provocations, they are more essential than ever.”
Godwin realised he wanted to be a director while at Cambridge University, where he was heavily involved in the student drama scene. He founded his own company, Stray Dogs, soon afterwards, and has worked consistently ever since. He’s naturally ebullient and effortlessly personable, which, alongside his talent, may explain why so many highprofile stars want to work with him. Ralph Fiennes is a regular; Romeo and Juliet also stars Greig, Adrian Lester, Lucian Msamati and rising star Fisayo Akinade as a passionate, gay Mercutio.
And Godwin is not averse to taking a risk. His new season is scheduled to include a production of arguably Shakespeare’s most contentious play, The Merchant of Venice. “How we struggle with prejudice remains hugely present,” he says, by way of explanation.
“How we demonise the other, ask for justice, explore mercy: these are questions the play deals with in high-impact ways. And a play that provokes debate is a great vindication of the role of Shakespeare.”
At one point he also hopes to stage Shakespeare’s history cycle, “because they have never been staged in Washington before. There’s a big legal and political community in Washington, and they are very interested in how you present argument, and how argument can change history.”
Another example of Shakespeare as the voice for the moment? “I have a hunch he’ll have the last laugh. He’ll outlive all of us. And he’ll keep smiling through history as we attempt to work it out.”
‘We’ve all felt a yearning to be held, but now that’s highly charged’