Simon Godwin: how the British director is taking on US theatre
As Donald Trump surged towards a jawdropping election victory in late 2016, scholar Stephen Greenblatt wrote in the New York Times: “In the early 1590s, Shakespeare sat down to write a play that addressed a problem: How could a great country wind up being governed by a sociopath?”
The play was Richard III, currently being performed just a mile from the White House by the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Its resonances are hard to miss for audiences in Washington, a liberal bastion that some liken to a city under occupation during the Trump presidency.
The theatre company’s own monarch is about to step down. Artistic director Michael Kahn retires at the end of the season after 33 years. His successor is Simon Godwin who, having earned plaudits at the UK’s National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), now swaps Brexit Britain for Trump’s Washington. Nowhere is the collision of politics and art more acute.
“To think about putting on Shakespeare in the city of power is so exciting because so many of his plays are about rhetoric and the law and language and persuasion and high stakes,” Godwin, 40, says in an interview with the Guardian at the company’s Sidney Harman Hall.
“I’m conscious that it’s a very charged and very emotional time and it’s a time that is volatile. I think that theatre can often either benefit or suffer from those moments, partly because you do become a barometer for certain energies and ideas and if you misstep those it’s perilous but, if you exquisitely capture the moment, theatre becomes more charged than ever.”
Godwin, whose father David Godwin is a literary agent, grew up in St Albans, studied at Cambridge and exudes a quirky English self-confidence. His first season at the helm will be a suitably Anglo-American affair. There is Everybody (a retelling of the 15th-century morality play Everyman) by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a new version of Peter Pan by Lauren Gunderson that puts Wendy centre stage as a proto-scientist, a reimagining of Godwin’s acclaimed production of Timon of Athens starring Kathryn Hunter, The Amen Corner by James Baldwin (back in the spotlight after his novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, was adapted for the big screen), Emma Rice’s play with music Romantics Anonymous and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
“I think what people are hungry for here is generosity of spirit,” he suggests. “They’re happy to go to the darkness so long as you also bring them into the light. But look, the comparison that I used when I was sharing the programme with people is that I am running a very successful restaurant in London, I’m about to open a new restaurant in Washington, some of the dishes people will enjoy and some of them, I will discover, they don’t like at all.”
Back in Britain, Shipwreck, a History Play About 2017 by Anne Washburn, brimming with debate about the meaning of Trump and Trumpism, has just opened at the Almeida Theatre in London, prompting theatre critic Ben Brantley to wonder “why does this New Yorker have to cross an ocean to see what promises to be this season’s most exciting American play?” Despite his new company’s close proximity to the White House, Godwin has no immediate plans to tackle the subject of this peculiar presidency head on.
“I think I need to understand a little bit about what Trump represents in people’s imaginations so that I can be in dialogue with that rather than simply reproduce him. What forces does he represent, what forces is he the emblem of and how do people feel about that and how to put that in a debate? Because after all, what makes Shakespeare great is that the balance of argument in his plays is so finely matched. That’s why they’re an intellectual workout and I think that’s why audiences in Washington have enjoyed them so much.”
Don’t expect glib Trump-bashing screeds designed to preach to the Washington converted. “The great thing about Shakespeare is we didn’t know what his politics were. You could find examples of him taking one view and then in another play really a very different one. So I feel that what we should be doing is doing shows that lots of different sides can feel heard within rather than being partisan or easily caught in one position or another. For me, the Shakespeare values that are there are things like empathy, generosity of spirit, attention to detail, the power of language, the ability of art to rekindle a love of life. And so he’s political and yet he’s beyond politics.”
Shakespeare has a long and winding history in America. During the civil war, a production of Julius Caesar in New York starred John Wilkes Booth and his two brothers to raise funds for a Shakespeare statue in Central Park. The following year, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. As the actor fled into hiding, he quoted from Macbeth in the last words of his diary: “‘I must fight the course.’ ’Tis all that’s left in me.” Washington is also home to the Folger Shakespeare Library, which contains the world’s biggest Shakespeare collection.
What is Godwin, who starts in September, expecting on this side of the Atlantic? “Probably there’s an approach that is fresher and that’s freer from history and from any kind of habit. There’s Shakespeare to be discovered here and actually the Brits are learning from the Americans about classics because there’s such freedom. Zesty, free thinking about Shakespeare is devoutly to be wished. Having said that, what I am most excited about is bringing some of the rigour that I’ve grown up with in terms of the language, the meaning, the nuance, and meeting a fresh curiosity about what Shakespeare means now, which this country so vividly asks, and bringing them together.”
Last year Godwin brought a touring RSC production of Hamlet to Washington’s Kennedy Center. It was the company’s first rendition of the play to feature a black actor, Paapa Essiedu, in the title role. “What strange destiny it was that I ended up in Washington with that play just when they [Shakespeare Theatre Company] were searching for their new director,” Godwin reflects. “That week I went to have my first meeting with the theatre here. It was important I could say explicitly that I might look like a white male, and indeed might be a white male, but my wish and my work is striving to be beyond that and be open to all kinds of influences and people and collaborators and voices.”
Godwin’s inclusion of Baldwin and Jacobs-Jenkins suggest a desire to explore race relations at this most sensitive of times. “People have mentioned to me in Washington that things move very fast here, that the news cycle and the dialogue about race and gender and power and appropriateness and meaning are all in a very quick and incendiary relationship.
“Perhaps in England there is Brexit, but even that seems be rather like a long and boring play as we’re sort of chugging along, and stuff happens yet we’re all so exhausted by it we just wish it would finish, whereas you can’t afford to be asleep on your post in America, it seems.”
He adds: “And yet I also have to maintain enormous modesty in terms of going, ‘What does something mean? What is appropriate? What is the relationship? How does the relationship differ in terms of the British relationship with race and the American relationship with race.
“I should be very much a learner about that and find people that I can engage with and indeed artists and writers and actors and directors and academics who are African American, who I can actually say maybe the best thing is if you make work here and speak and share your feelings as much as me trying to make work for you. I need to clear out and give them the space and the power to speak, the agency to tell the stories that are going to count.”