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Dateline: 29th August, 2006
Dominic Dromgoole - Will and Me David Chadderton reports on Dominic Drongoole's talk to the Edinburgh International Book FestivalDirector Dominic Dromgoole was at the Book Festival to promote his latest book, Will and Me. Dominic Dromgoole was last year appointed to take over from Mark Rylance as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London. Prior to this he ran the Oxford Stage Company for seven years, and before this he was at the Bush and the Old Vic. He published The Full Room in 2002, which aired his not-always-popular views on contemporary playwrights. His latest book, Will and Me, explains how his love of Shakespeare is not something he has just acquired since taking over the Globe, but goes back to his childhood. Dromgoole grew up in a theatrical, bohemian family; his father was a theatre director who directed one of the members of the audience for this talk, Dudley Sutton, in the original production of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane. His father read Shakespeare to him in his cot (actually he began with Racine but even he realised that was a little too much and moved onto Shakespeare). Dromgoole's family were determine atheists with no interest in politics, so Shakespeare became their spiritual body of work and was the source of most of his education. The first speech he remembers having a real impact on him was 'friends, Romans, countrymen' from Julius Caesar, which he is now a little embarrassed about as he thinks it is the most unhealthy speech ever, dealing with the fascistic manipulation of mobs. He learned this speech, but few of his primary school friends were interested in listening to him reciting Shakespeare (they showed their appreciation by throwing him into a hedge) and neither were his brother or his sister, so he tried his speeches out on the family's herd of cows, which were all named after important moments in the space programme such as Apollo, Gagarin and Sputnik. Will and Me consists of a series of short chapters (because that is "all I have the puff to write") each of which hinges on a pivotal moment in Dromgoole's life - all of these have some link with Shakespeare, just like the story above. He also told a story of sharing a venue at a festival with a skinhead band, whose fan club made up nearly all of the audience, and a 'Brechtian illusionist' (sounds intriguing, but he didn't explain what exactly this was) with their naively 'alternative' Shakespeare production when the director kept whispering instructions to cut scenes during the performance. Despite his obsession with Shakespeare, he still sees him as a fallible human being, not a god. He likes to think of him as a nervous writer who would have sweated over his writing and then listened nervously backstage to the audience's reaction to see whether it worked or not. He also said that some of his writing is awful. Despite some academics explaining the more dubious dialogue away as deliberate, he believes completely in Peter Hall's theory of the 'first ten lines of the day', where some lines appear to have been written first thing in the morning when Will may have been a bit tired and hung over and hadn't really got into the swing of it yet. When asked about his predecessor at the Globe, he said that Mark Rylance is a great original who redefined not just what Shakespeare could be but also what theatre could be at the Globe. As an actor, he was a 'tuning fork' who knew exactly how to use the space and to demonstrate this to others. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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