If Gregory Doran – Greg to his friends – were a character from Shakespeare, he would be best cast as Kent from King Lear because he has the steadiness, kindness and faithfulness of a self-appointed servant. But instead of being loyal to a madman in a storm, it is to Shakespeare that Doran has devoted 35 years, in Stratford-upon-Avon and, for the past decade, as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director. When he took over from Michael Boyd in 2012, he announced it was the “S” in RSC he would be emphasising, and he has excelled at precisely that. His radical undertaking has been to present the entire canon, including Shakespeare’s more also-ran dramas (his first full Shakespeare production, during Adrian Noble’s reign, was Henry VIII). And now, as we inch towards the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, Doran’s revels are about to end: he steps down as artistic director emeritus having directed over his career – astonishingly – 50 productions for the RSC, with several starring his husband, Antony Sher, who died in December 2021. He has also just published a tremendous homage to Shakespeare that lightly doubles as the story of his own life: My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio. His final production for the RSC will be Cymbeline, the last play in Shakespeare’s First Folio, a work of magical – if overplotted – beauty. A perfect swan song.
It is almost lunchtime, with April showers outside the RSC’s south London rehearsal rooms. Doran greets me at the door – he is letting me in on a run-through. I recognise him at once (we’ve met before, long ago). He looks like a benign bear, if rather too stylish in his maroon sneakers and chic frameless specs, to be altogether ursine. His mane of iron-grey hair, held back by a thin leather hairband, has been cut over 35 years by Sandra Smith, he later reveals, who heads up the RSC’s wig department. There is an immediate warmth, mixed with bashfulness, about Doran. He exudes security and inspires confidence. Adjoa Andoh (who starred as Portia in his Julius Caesar) remembers his rehearsal room as “a safe space in which you feel encouraged to innovate and be fearless”. He introduces me to his cast. We’re in what looks like a crowded war room, tables strewn with papers – only it is magic, not war, that is the strategy here.
A circular structure elegantly made of twigs will represent a cave – today, the actors make do with a plywood stand-in. Everything has come full circle for Doran – who assistant directed Cymbeline in 1989 in Bill Alexander’s production – and it is as if Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set reflected that. A diverse cast gathers at the edges of the room, including a handful of young men who look as though they might have grown their Shakespearean beards to order. “We won’t stop unless we fall apart,” Doran jokes. As one of the actors speaks, I watch him circle a word – the attention to detail no surprise: he is all about textual close work, listening to the lines. He tells us, in his book, how in Shakespeare’s day, you did not go to “see” a play, you went to “hear” one.
We find a quiet room in which to talk, while he has a sandwich and draws breath. By the time Michael Boyd (to whom he had lost out in his first application for the top job) resigned in 2011, Doran had watched several artistic directors at work, including Terry Hands and Adrian Noble. A gifted director of the plays, Noble’s regime as artistic director ended in turmoil with the decision to cut ties with the RSC’s permanent London home at the Barbican, a reckless move still unremedied. Yet Doran maintains: “Michael and Vikki Heywood did an amazing job stabilising the RSC.” However, from the start, he knew what he would change: “I didn’t think we should keep doing the same plays … between 2000 and 2010, we’d done five Romeo and Juliets.”
Casting a company, he argues, is comparable to casting a play. He quotes Tyrone Guthrie: “80% of good directing is casting” and warmly salutes Catherine Mallyon, his executive director, and Erica Whyman, the company’s acting artistic director. Over time, he has worked with many stars, including David Tennant, Harriet Walter and Patrick Stewart – each returning to play leading roles. He writes affectionately in his book, too, of Judi Dench who played Countess Roussillon in his All’s Well. He reveals: “Judi never believes a part is to be hers” and – incredibly – “leaves a bag by the door” should a hasty exit be required of her.
Which productions is he proudest of? He hesitates before offering: Hamlet (2008) with Tennant, adding that it “landed”. In a phone conversation with Tennant, I ask what he remembers about it and he says: “I was terrified, but having Greg there, you always felt safe. He knew how these plays worked. The first thing we talked about was that Hamlet would be a thriller. The challenge – with arguably the most well-known play in theatre – was to see if we could pull off the trick of making the audience feel they did not know what was coming next.”
When that sensational production moved to London, it sold out in a day. Between 10am and 10.10am, the theatre received 120,000 attempted calls. But then calamity struck: Tennant had a prolapsed disc that kept him off stage until the last week of the West End run. He remembers how Doran reacted with “nothing but compassion, though I’m sure that, behind the scenes, there was all sorts of mania, but I was in a fairly delicate place. What makes Greg a great director is his kindness. He has buckets of it. His humanity shines through in his work, makes him the person he is.”
Doran goes on to single out the 1999 Macbeth, with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter portraying a blazingly ambitious fusion of a marriage, later filmed for Channel 4. I can’t get him to boast further but other triumphs include Julius Caesar (set in modern Africa), Troilus and Cressida (the RSC’s first gender-balanced cast in a Shakespeare play on stage), and Shakespeare’s exquisite poem Venus and Adonis (with entrancing puppetry). There have been great non-Shakespeare productions, too, including The Odyssey, in 1992, adapted by Nobel-prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, about which Adjoa Andoh admiringly recalls: “Greg more or less doorstepped Walcott in the West Indies to get that production…”
Doran struggles to define his “process”, but one thing is crucial: he skips the traditional read-through on the first day of rehearsals. Instead, the cast spend days working through Shakespeare line by line: “There are a few rules: no one can read their own parts or comment on the interpretation of their own characters.” It is a great way to encourage collective responsibility for a production. He believes a director should not get between play and audience. This might involve “not knowing but exploring, trusting the play will reveal itself”. You need to “love the language. It’s a craft that doesn’t necessarily come naturally: you need to work at it”.
Some would argue that Doran has, at times, been taken for granted as a director (those who do not seek attention risk being overlooked). I ask Harriet Walter about this and she points out that it is precisely the fact he is “not a high-concept director who uses productions as a springboard to announce stuff about himself” that is his strength. She adds: “I’m of an age that caught the martinet directors with black polo necks, who did not bring out the best work in anyone.” Doran mixes “schoolboy enthusiasm with lightly borne erudition”. She sees him as “the keeper of the keys, the one who listened to John Barton [the director who established RSC house style, honouring blank verse].” And this matters today because: “People are afraid of acting becoming unrelatable. Acting, like football, is a skill you have to learn.”
When I ask Doran why he announced, as early as 2022, that he would step down, he offers a sheaf of reasons: turning 65, the folio celebration, the end (had the pandemic not intervened) of directing 50 plays. He adds: “It’s 50 years since I saw As You Like It [with Eileen Atkins]. My schoolboy diary reads: August 11th: Matinee: Seen As You Like It…” He “floated out of the theatre”. He reminisces about his mum, a member of her local WI drama club, “driving her little beige Mini down the M6 from Preston to Stratford”. His father worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority company. He grew up in a close Roman Catholic family, one of four, with a twin sister to whom he is devoted. “I turned to Mum after the show and said, ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.’” For a while, acting was his path. After reading English and drama at Bristol, he joined Bristol Old Vic drama school. He went on to act in BBC sitcoms, in which he was “truly awful”, and had a stint as an assistant director in Nottingham. He joined the RSC – as an actor – in 1987 and had not been in Stratford long when it was suggested he assistant direct. Having been an actor helped – it still does: “It’s key, especially these days, with different people from different backgrounds, some without any training. I champion there being more voices at the table, but you can’t assume the same level of shared language.”
A little later, pressing him further, the public reasons for resigning recede: “During the pandemic, Tony became ill. When the diagnosis [of liver cancer] came, they said he might have five years but, within two months, that had gone down to six months.” Although an inspiring leader of his team during the pandemic, Doran took immediate compassionate leave. “After Tony died, my next play, ironically, was Richard III [one of Sher’s greatest roles]. Shakespeare defines things when you can’t. Richard has a line before the Battle of Boswell Field, ‘I have not that alacrity of spirit nor cheer of mind, that I was wont to have.’ And I thought: that’s exactly right.”
Doran and Sher met in the late 1980s, acting in The Merchant of Venice. Harriet Walter remembers dismissing Doran as “a very pretty young actor, overenthusiastic as a puppy”. Sher was Shylock, Doran was Solanio – he had to spit at Sher. “He was having to avoid my rheum on his beard … but something clicked – whoever loved who loved not at first sight? We just, I don’t know … Stratford is a magical place … I was overwhelmed, I thought he was magnificent. Being on stage opposite him as he howled through ‘Has not a Jew eyes?’ was a terrifying experience. He was mesmeric.”
The book is filled with examples of the way personal and global events impinge on theatre. But the most poignant collision between art and life (not in the book) happened just before theatres closed at the start of the pandemic. Sher was in the West End in John Kani’s Kunene and the King. He was playing a Shakespearean actor, dying of cancer, trying to get to Cape Town to play King Lear. Sher commented: “Who says actors don’t take their work home with them?” Janice Honeyman, the show’s director, later observed it was as if Sher were rehearsing for his own death.
The gap he leaves behind feels unbridgeable. Doran was recently given CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed. “I started reading it and the first line is, ‘Nobody told me grief would be so like fear’. I couldn’t read on because I realised I don’t want somebody else to tell me what grief is like…” I suppose, I say, people often say or do, with the kindest intentions, the wrong thing. “They did. People would say: he’ll be there in the wind or lapping of the sea … and I’d say: that’s just bollocks. When Tony was Lear, cradling Cordelia in his arms, he said, ‘Thou will come no more: never, never, never, never, never.’ I’d not realised why Lear repeats the word five times, but now I’m going: What – I’m never, never, never, never, never going to see him? He is never going to walk through that door again?”
It was Sher who encouraged Doran to write about Shakespeare, but also said: “If you’re going to write a book about the First Folio and you miss the 400th anniversary, you’re an idiot!” And so during that period of leave, while Sher “slept more and more during the day”, Doran slogged: “I’m an early riser and, in summer, I’d get up at 6-ish to write…” In the late afternoons, they would sit together in the window, with a gin and tonic, and Sher would say: “Right, read me what you’ve written today.” He was “a brilliant editor. On the King Lear chapter, he said, ‘Yes, really good… [Doran switches tone] but that first bit, where you talk about the play’s history, I can read that anywhere. It’s when you say: I couldn’t watch the play for years because my dad had dementia that I’m hooked.’” Doran did not direct Sher’s Lear until six years after his own father’s death.
“We did Tony’s funeral soon after he died in Holy Trinity Church [Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was buried]. His family couldn’t come over from South Africa because of Covid regulations. We’d been able to talk about it and Tony had said, ‘You know you’re going to have to speak.’ I remember saying, ‘I can’t – I won’t be able to.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no – you have to, you have to speak.’ So I did and, weirdly, because he’d told me I had to, I managed it.” He says, “The difficult thing is we were known, in the family, as G and T … Having spent 35 years being G and T, I really don’t know how to just be G…”
Doran’s hope for the RSC’s future is that devotion to craft will continue. He is confident that Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey (who take over in June) will do “a great job – under increasingly difficult circumstances”. He envisages completing his “road trip” to see the First Folios worldwide – in Japan, Australia and New Zealand. He hopes to find himself back in a rehearsal room soon. And this enthusiastic, energetic and unpretentious man has just received the Pragnell award for his services to Shakespeare. David Tennant salutes the achievement: “He’s steeped in Shakespeare but it’s not idolatry with him – Greg is looking to unlock plays, take them somewhere new.” Cymbeline started previewing on Saturday to coincide with the weekend celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday. And today, Doran will return to the Avon, where he scattered Sher’s ashes a year ago: “I still have the protea [South Africa’s national flower] that the nurses put by the pillow when Tony died. I plan to revisit the bridge and put that flower in the water.”
• My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio by Greg Doran is published by Bloomsbury (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Cymbeline is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 27 May 2023. Tickets: rsc.org.uk
