News of the death of Sir Michael Boyd at the age of 68 has come as a shock. Boyd took over the directorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2003 when it was at crisis point. It had a deficit of more than £2m, had forfeited its London base in the Barbican and, in the words of its former literary manager, Colin Chambers, was in danger of becoming a corporation rather than a company. By the time of his departure in 2012, Boyd had restored the RSC to something of its former glory and I would highlight three facets of his achievement.
For a start there was his skill as a director. It first hit me in 1999, when as an associate to Adrian Noble, he did a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the best since Peter Brook’s – that turned the play into a foot-stamping erotic fertility rite. But Boyd’s greatest success came with his eight-play cycle of Shakespeare’s histories which reached fulfilment in 2008. At its heart lay the idea, to borrow a phrase from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, of “time future contained in time past”. You saw that at the start of Richard II when Jonathan Slinger’s king stepped gingerly over the corpse of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester: a vital image in that Richard’s implication in Gloucester’s murder leads to the unravelling of his authority which in turn produces decades of civil strife.
