Sir Trevor Nunn | Tom de Freston

Sir Trevor Nunn- September 2011

Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev… Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Cole Porter… Millais, Burne-Jones, artists of every discipline have given us their ‘take’ on Shakespeare; illustrators have imagined his characters and most famous scenes, film directors have made their screen adaptations, novelists have written works loosely based on the stories of his plays, and especially in the last few decades, theatre directors have re-imagined most of the canon, finding contemporary political parallels in the tragedies, updating the histories, and using the fashion excesses of recent decades to illuminate the comedies anew. Self-styled ‘purists’ are often horrified. But having run the world’s leading Shakespeare company for nearly twenty years, I say a resounding “yes” to every experiment, every disturbance of what has become generally accepted; and however outlandish or unexpected a directorial or design ‘concept’ may be, the text of the play is still there, virgin, unsullied, waiting to be explored by the next group, and most important, by the next generation. As Prospero says, “No harm done.”

This collection of paintings by Tom de Freston, inspired by Shakespeare, and poems by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, responding to those paintings, exactly expresses my belief that personal and passionate responses to Shakespeare are invariably invigorating, exciting and necessary. How could I feel otherwise, having directed a Timon of Athens set in the gleaming plate glass world of international banking, giving way to the detritus of a car graveyard; and a Love’s Labour’s Lost as a memory play, triggered by the nightmare of a battle in the First World War; and a Merchant of Venice set in the war mongering anti-Semetic Europe of the 1930’s; and a Richard II in a contemporary England in the grip of a monarchist versus republican debate; and a… I won’t go on.

It’s clear though that I arrive at Tom’s paintings not resisting but wanting to be challenged by his personal response to plays I think I know inside out. It’s equally clear to me that Tom is what we must term a ‘post Freudian’, influenced not only by Sigmund but also by Lucian. Sigmund would be most interested in the way the paintings are frequently dream like, as in sexual and sensual dreams, and in the collision of opposites (a female mask on a sprawled nude male body, a crowned king on a toilet, a bird beaked creature having climactic intercourse with a naked woman…). And Shakespeare is himself fascinated with dreams, as we know from The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, not to mention the nightmare world of Macbeth and the sexual fantasies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

But these paintings also put the human form under a merciless gaze; Tom refuses to idealise our bodies, our genitalia, our corpulence or our angularity – a gaze which implicitly acknowledges Lucian Freud’s oeuvre, in its unsentimental, unforgiving and at times baleful scrutiny. Ophelia lies naked, confined in a bathtub, rather than floating in a stream; the Macbeths slump in exhausted contemplation in a Psycho blood-spattered bathroom, Othello contemplates the murder of his erotically naked Desdemona in an intensely private situation that might instead become marital rape. Juliet lies abandoned to her sexual fantasies, naked on a shroud-draped bed in a climactic dream of her Romeo. Even Lear is naked, with his naked dead daughter, and naked expresses my belief that personal and passionate responses to Shakespeare are invariably invigorating, exciting and necessary. How could I feel otherwise, having directed a Timon of Athens set in the gleaming plate glass world of international banking, giving way to the detritus of a car graveyard; and a Love’s Labour’s Lost as a memory play, triggered by the nightmare of a battle in the First World War; and a Merchant of Venice set in the war mongering anti-Semetic Europe of the 1930’s; and a Richard II in a contemporary England in the grip of a monarchist versus republican debate; and a… I won’t go on.

But these paintings also put the human form under a merciless gaze; Tom refuses to idealise our bodies, our genitalia, our corpulence or our angularity – a gaze which implicitly acknowledges Lucian Freud’s oeuvre, in its unsentimental, unforgiving and at times baleful scrutiny. Ophelia lies naked, confined in a bathtub, rather than floating in a stream; the Macbeths slump in exhausted contemplation in a Psycho blood-spattered bathroom, Othello contemplates the murder of his erotically naked Desdemona in an intensely private situation that might instead become marital rape. Juliet lies abandoned to her sexual fantasies, naked on a shroud-draped bed in a climactic dream of her Romeo. Even Lear is naked, with his naked dead daughter, and naked again exposed to the elements while his fool disappears under an umbrella. As Shakespeare concluded, the human being is a “poor bare forked animal” and Tom is determined not to let us forget this strand, not only in the ultimately pessimistic tragedy Lear, but in many of the foregoing plays. The most vividly theatrical insight in this distinctly vivid collection (for me, having recently directed King Lear) is The Blinding, a Guantanamo world, lit by a single naked bulb, creating instantly a sense of a featureless grim environment in which anonymous faceless humans can torture, disregarding all the tenets of humanity. It’s my personal conclusion that in this play, Shakespeare abandons all belief in the human species as the central part of a heavenly plan. The gods, the object of repeated appeals during the escalating cruelty, are silent and never intervene, on the side of the good, the innocent, the faithful… and by the end of the play, as they fail to prevent Cordelia’s needless death, Shakespeare seems to be saying, “there’s nothing up there”. I get exactly that feeling of bleak despair from Tom’s harrowing Lear paintings, powerful to encounter and difficult to live with.

I have been discussing my take on Tom’s take on certain Shakespeare plays, but of course the other half of this extraordinarily original exhibition is Kiran’s take on Tom’s take on Shakespeare’s take on our complex nature. The fascination lies in us comparing our own response to Tom’s images, with those of a poet who daringly free-associates and uses her own life experience without restriction. For me, having been an occasional lyricist and versifier, that comparison is a definition of why I am a director and not (nor could I ever be) a poet. Kiran’s language is immediate and totally contemporary, more Beckett than Shakespeare in its tense spare economy, but revealing a wit and clarity without which this project – at once both complementary and competitive – could not have been achieved.

My personal favourite in this collection is her take on Tom’s Midsummer Night’s Dream painting. Boxgrove is both Kiran’s own fantasy, and the Bottom as donkey sexual experience from Titania’s point of view – and against the odds, the poem manages to achieve something both highly sensual and hilarious.

This exhibition is called Scavengers, after Kiran’s poem responding to Tom’s own encounter with the last scene of King Lear. I was reminded by Tom recently that A. L. Rowse once described Shakespeare as “a magpie”. Indeed he was, a thieving magpie at that, as he borrowed his plots and characters from previously existing works. Yes, Shakespeare’s plays were, in large measure, takes on what other writers had previously created, which in our litigious age, would be very close to plagiarism. But he converted his responses into the greatest body of dramatic work ever created. In that spirit, I hope everybody experiencing these paintings and poems will scavenge through them and leave with everything they can take.

From 1968 to 1986, Sir Trevor was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, directing over thirty productions, including most of the Shakespeare canon. From 1997 to 2003, he was director of the National Theatre, where his productions included Troilus and Cressida, Oklahoma!, The Merchant of Venice, Summerfolk, My Fair Lady, The Coast of Utopia, A Streetcar Named Desire, Anything Goes, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Other theatre includes Nicholas Nickleby, Les Miserables, Arcadia, Cats, Starlight Express, Heartbreak House, The Lady From The Sea, Hamlet, Richard II, Rock n Roll, Cyrano de Bergerac, Flare Path, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.