Questions for Rupert Goold, director of Macbeth (Feb 12—Mar 22), from Joseph V. Melillo, BAM's Executive Producer.

Joseph V. Melillo: Macbeth is the second Shakespeare play that I have attended where you served as director and Patrick Stewart played the main character; The Tempest was the other play. What have you discovered about this actor and Shakespeare?

Rupert Goold: I'll give you two vintage periods of the Royal Shakespeare Company...one was in the 60s with Peter Hall, and the next was in the 80s with Trevor Nunn. Patrick is one of the few actors who straddles both periods. Just purely in terms of verse speaking, his technique is second to none, really. It's kind of undervalued now. Of course there are lots of ways and rules about how you do it, but the real way you become a great verse speaker is by living with it and performing it for years on a stage. It's like [boxers] Mayweather/Hatton, the only reason they could fight is because they've been in the gym since they were eight!

But I think Patrick and I work well together, because he has a kind of everyman quality. My work is quite conceptual and visual and theatrical, and he anchors it in a humanist position. In plays like The Tempest, but also Macbeth, which deal with extreme situations—almost surreal, kind of fantastic worlds: witches, strange creatures—he's the human anchor in the middle of it. I think it's no coincidence that he was in Star Trek for so long. Because there, you're going to strange, fantastical science fiction worlds, so they needed somebody who was going to say, "this is still basically human drama." In some ways, he's perfect for Shakespeare.

Melillo: What was the process of discovering with your designers this particular physical environment to tell this story?

Goold: What I try to do with Shakespeare, which is something that I've done really only in the last three shows... any contemporary director approaching Shakespeare or a classic text—particularly a British director approaching Shakespeare— has to make the decision about whether they're going to either stage it in the period in which it was written, which is for some plays very difficult, because there's something inherently heritage and politically reactionary or unchallenging about that. Not always, but some plays really reward it. And then if you don't do that, then do you relocate it in a kind of ersatz cultural snap? Oh, this is a bit like Edwardian Britain, or Napoleonic France, and that can give you a context or mise-en-scène. I used to make that mistake... I think it's a mistake made quite regularly. What I've tried to do in the last three years is find a political world that I think resonates with the play, and then also an expressionist world.

In The Tempest, I was interested in issues of colonialism, and spatial geographical identity in both the Arctic/Antarctic polar ice caps as a kind of battleground for both colonial positioning and an imperial project that never quite took off, but is still ongoing. But on the other hand, I also was really interested in these late Shakespeare plays as seen through the eyes of Beckett, in a sense. So I had a kind of Beckett-y side meeting an Arctic side. So with this Macbeth, I was interested in a non-histrionic world of double-speak and espionage and political assassination. I was interested in a world of old men in power succeeding each other in fairly clandestine ways. And so it was a kind of Soviet world that we were looking at. Back in the 80s, there was that line of Brezhnev, and that era of generals—kind of faceless, never quite knew how they took power.

On the other hand, I was also very interested in both high and lowbrow horror movies—the spate of lo-fi, post-Blair Witch, kind of Hostel, Saw, vulgar... what it is that has made that kind of central to what the zeitgeist is. But also Peter Greenaway—The Cook, the Thief, the Wife, His Lover—and Kubrick, most obviously in The Shining, were kind of interesting to me in relation to the play. So what the press have tended to do is tag them with the political side of the play. An Arctic Tempest, and in this cast, the sort of semi-Soviet Macbeth... but actually, for me as a director, I think it's the expressionist sides that are more central to the reading—so the Beckett in The Tempest, and this sort of "kitchen slasher movie," for want of a better term.

Macbeth is a play I knew really well, and so it has this most fantastic second act where Duncan comes to the castle and is murdered, and the murder is discovered. The first act is really hard, because of a lot of backstory about a battle, and everybody to follow, and there's these witches, and it's very difficult to get a hook on. Scenes jump around a lot, compared to the kind of Sophoclean unity of action in the second act. And the fifth act is brilliant, because it's a kind of downfall—it's a big siege, I suppose. The third and fourth acts, again, are quite disparate. What I'm trying to do, which is quite un-Shakespearean in a way, is rather than have lots of bitty scenes, I tried to find long mise-en-scènes around the act structures. The first act takes place mostly in a military field hospital; the second act, this long act, takes place mostly in this industrial kitchen in the castle, and then it becomes a little more flexible as we go on, as the play opens out. And the kitchen thing came from, again, very associatively... I suppose what always interested me in the first half of the 20th century is how large industrial kitchens, and asylums, and prisons, and hospitals—institutional buildings—often looked very similar and that seemed to be very powerful in the world of the play.

Melillo: Your Lady Macbeth happens to be your wife, Kate Fleetwood; how challenging was it to work on the play together and find the time to have a family life?

Goold: We worked together once before, about six or seven years ago, and it was quite tough, because I was an artistic director then, of a theater in England. And I think that if you're the wife of an artistic director, it's a bit like being a politician's wife; you have to be nice to everybody, every usher... Kate is always nice to everybody anyway. But with Macbeth, I was just hired as the director. And it was actually really easy this time. I think we were better about leaving it at work. We didn't have to talk about the work at home. Kate had a background of playing the leading classical roles at the RSC and the National Theatre, so I don't think there was any, "you must get Kate, you must get Kate." So it felt like she had earned her stripes, as it were, to be there.

The weird thing about theater as well, is that the darker the material, the better the company tends to get on. So famously, light comedies produce poisonous companies. And Greek tragedies, and these horrible Shakespearean tragedies... I think it has something to do with, you're gonna go out there, and embrace madness, and suicide, killings, you know—in the wings, you clown around more, there's much more fun and sport.

Melillo: What was your greatest insight about the play?

Goold: I don't know about in the States, but in Britain the play has a really famously doomed reputation—it's supposed to be unlucky, cursed—and really, there've been only about three productions since the war that have been really successful. And you read the play, and this is actually one of Shakespeare's best stories, iconic characters. Why should that be? It's put on all the time. There were two good insights. I think it's the second hardest play in the canon to stage. The first is Romeo and Juliet, because you often have young actors who aren't ready to take on big roles. The acid test is, you can never watch a production of Romeo and Juliet and enjoy it if you don't believe the couple are in love. And if you have the best production and the best actors in the world, but you don't feel there's a chemistry going on, then it’s a non-starter.

Now Macbeth is a similar thing—unless Macbeth is frightening, it doesn't happen. And fear in theater is quite tricky to achieve sometimes. So we went all out to try and make it as scary as possible. I think that was important and recognized. But the other thing was, we tried to not overcomplicate it. I'm always saying to Kate, actors tend to want to see three dimensions in every character. But actually, if you look at iconic movie performances—Steve McQueen's, or Jack Nicholson's, or Nurse Ratched, say, in Cuckoo's Nest, it's often incredibly vivid two-dimensionality, rather than loads of layers, that you remember. Maybe because she is my wife, it's easy to say to her don'’t show me everything about why you're doing it—you're there to drive the action, and to scare us, and to just be a force of nature. Macbeth is there to unravel; you're there to be simple. And then with Patrick as well, I said, it's a simple story in our context. Patrick, he's getting on a bit for playing the role. There's a kind of implicit fascination in what ambition is at the end of one's life, rather than at the beginning of one's life. To gamble everything for promotion when you're 22 is kind of low risk; it's understandable to do it when you're 40, in the prime of life, but to do it when you're—he's a tactfully late-middle age —is a different thing, and that's kind its own flavor in the play.

Melillo: Do you use the same directorial process for a classical play versus a contemporary one?

Goold: No. (Is that true? I just jumped to that.) I suppose my approach to classical work is operatic, not in the sense of being overblown, but recognizing that these plays do need to be reimagined. And the retort to that is, all those audiences who have never seen Shakespeare before. And what I hope is, that with my work, especially in the last few things that I've done in classical work, have appealed more to younger audiences than traditional audiences. So I don't feel I'm alienating any new audiences. But I think also you do need to kind of jolt people a bit, and if you do Cosi fan tutte, or Macbeth, you can't just put a tartan beret on somebody or an 18th century frock, and not immediately sense a sort of little death in the theater. You have to freshen up.

With new work—I suppose in some ways you are more authorial with classical work. You're unapologetically narcissistic; you might be saying, "it's me and my reading of the play." Whereas with new work, the writer is everything. I did Glass Menagerie in the West End earlier this year, with Jessica Lange. It's not new work, but it's 20th century work. There's a kind of witching hour with a play—culturally, if you took the oldest person in one's society and said "can you remember the first production?"—the point when that slips off, then it becomes a sort of classic, and you can move it away from social realism, or some sort of context towards abstraction or expression. It's just beginning to happen with Pinter in Britain. And that's a really exciting moment for a play when it moves from documentary to poetry in the cultural sensibility. The truth is, each text you kind of read in a virgin manner, really.