There's a low foreboding hum permeating the meeting room high up in the
Royal Lyceum Edinburgh offices on Grind lay Street opposite the theatre
itself. It's easy to notice if quickly easy to ignore once one gets
into one's conversational stride, but, once her senses pick up on the
noise, Roxana Silbert somewhat accurately nails it as an “end of the
world noise.” Then again, Silbert has just stepped out of morning
rehearsals for Dunsinane, David Greig's audacious sequel to
Shakespeare's Macbeth, so maybe she has that end of the world feeling
more than most.
Silbert first directed Dunsinane in 2010 at Hampstead Theatre. Theatre
for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which she'd recently been made an
associate Director of, with this current remount made possible this
side of the border by the National Theatre of Scotland. Given the
theatre world's superstitious nature regarding Shakespeare's original
Scottish play, it's something of a brave move to open Dunsinane on
Friday the 13th, however much more politically inclined Greig's tale of
invading English armies, insurgent guerilla uprisings and internal
military strife might be.
Silbert had already directed Greig's play, Being Norwegian, for Oran
Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint lunchtime theatre season, by the time
her arrival at the RSC coincided roughly with an early treatment of the
play, so the fit between the two was, in Silbert's words, “a very
comfortable marriage.”
Knocking out a sequel to Macbeth is a tall order for any writer,
however, and in the wrong hands could easily have come a cropper.
“There's a definite brio and a chutzpah to taking it on,” Silbert
observes, “and what I love about what David has done is a correction to
Shakespeare. So Shakespeare's taken a piece of Scottish history and
written it to serve the purposes of his play, but it's actually
historically inaccurate, and what's gorgeous about what David's done is
that he hasn't rewritten Macbeth, but he's gone, okay, what is the
historical reality, and a lot of stuff coming out of the play is
historically true. So there's a glorious spirit of correcting
Shakespeare that I absolutely love, and the contemporary resonances
around a war, and of going into another culture to improve it with the
best possible intentions are very clear.”
There are elements in the play too, not just of how Scots are perceived
by others, but how they perceive themselves.
“You've got an Englishman abroad who doesn't quite understand what's
going on,” Silbert illustrates, “and who doesn't quite get the culture,
and somewhere in the world that sort of thing is going on today.”
Silbert returns to Dunsinane just as her most recent RSC production of
Rona Munro's play, Little Angels, opens, again at Hampstead Theatre.
Based around the figure of rocket engineer and spacecraft designer
Sergei Pavlovich Karolyov, unsung hero of Russia's pioneering space
programme that launched Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit, Little
Angels is a far cry from the Munro's rom-com, Pandas, currently playing
at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, as one can imagine.
It remains telling, however, that both of Silbert's major RSC projects
have been by Scottish writers. This shouldn't come as too much of a
surprise, however, to anyone familiar with Silbert's work at the
Traverse itself, where between 2001 and 2004 she was the new writing
theatre's Literary Director following a stint as an associate director
at the Royal Court. While in her Traverse post Silbert directed Henry
Adam's The People Next Door, Still Life by John Byrne and Munro's
prison-set drama, Iron, and was a regular visitor to the theatre after
she took over the Paines Plough company from incoming NTS director
Vicky Featherstone. One of Silbert's visits to the Traverse with Paines
Plough was with Strawberries in January, another rom-com by Munro,
albeit one translated from a piece by Quebecois writer Evelyne de la
Cheneliere.
Even beyond her current work on Dunsinane and Little Angels, Silbert's
Scots connections are everywhere, from current RSC boss Michael Boyd,
who put The Tron in Glasgow on the international map during his
artistic directorship (and who, coincidentally, has just opened his own
take on Macbeth at Stratford), to singular Edinburgh-sired
playwright/director Anthony Neilson, who is currently an RSC Literary
Associate. As with the incomers in Dunsinane, Silbert just can't seem
to help rubbing up against the Scots, albeit in an infinitely more
creative way than how things turn out in the play.
“I think the time I spent in Scotland was quite formative,” Silbert
admits. “I found something in Scottish playwriting that I felt very
attuned too, and my favourite playwrights are Scottish. I think there
is something about a commitment to theatre and theatricality as a form,
and there's an intellectual ambition that exists in this theatre
culture that doesn't quite exist in England. (Black watch director)
John Tiffany always said that it's very hard to take a Scottish play to
England, and I think it has been, but that's starting to break down
now, because in a way Scottish playwrights have been leagues ahead. But
there's an ability which David and Rhona share, which is to write
really serious plays, but which are entertaining.”
It may be cod psychology, Silbert admits, but her passion for new
writing might have something to do with her Argentinian background and
learning English as her second language. This prompted a love of the
creative nuances of words from an early age, and all the writers she
works with today have significantly powerful voices. If Silbert found
it strange last year directing The Comedy of Errors, a piece that
already existed, at Manchester's Royal Exchange, making the leap from
relatively small companies to a huge institution like the RSC is
something else again.
“There isn't a playwright who's been commissioned by the company who
doesn't feel the weight of Shakespeare,” Silbert says, “and if you're
putting on your new play whilst King Lear is opening at the Roundhouse,
the comparisons are implicit, and you feel that.”
With all of Silbert's Scottish connections, one question remains, as
indeed it must for all theatre directors since incoming director of
Glasgow's Citizens Theatre Dominic Hill left a huge vacancy for his
former post at the helm of the Traverse. Will she be applying for the
job as artistic director of Scotland's major new writing theatre when
it's advertised? Her name has been mentioned in the plethora of gossip
that has emanated out of theatre bars anticipating a puff of white
smoke, and she is a perfectly credible candidate. Silbert's answer,
however, points to an immediate future with the RSC.
“It's very unlikely,” she says. “That's not to say I don't love The
Traverse. I love The Traverse and what it does, but it's probably not
for me right now.”
Having already directed the world's first play on Twitter, Silbert will
be programming a season of sixteenth century plays at The Swan, where
she will also direct Measure For Measure. In 2012 Silbert curates a
season of Shakespeares running alongside a trio of Mexican plays. With
all this rehearsal-room activity, if Silbert does harbour ambitions to
run a building, that time seems a long way off yet.
“Being an associate director means you get all of the fun and none of
the stress,” she points out, “but running a company like Paines Plough
is more pro-active, and means you can change the culture. I can see
there might be a point where I might quite like that to happen again,
but I don't have an over-riding ambition to run things. I just like
getting involved.”
Dunsinane opens at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, May 13th-June
4th, then tours to Glasgow and Stratford-Upon-Avon
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The Herald, May 3rd 2011
ends
Royal Lyceum Edinburgh offices on Grind lay Street opposite the theatre
itself. It's easy to notice if quickly easy to ignore once one gets
into one's conversational stride, but, once her senses pick up on the
noise, Roxana Silbert somewhat accurately nails it as an “end of the
world noise.” Then again, Silbert has just stepped out of morning
rehearsals for Dunsinane, David Greig's audacious sequel to
Shakespeare's Macbeth, so maybe she has that end of the world feeling
more than most.
Silbert first directed Dunsinane in 2010 at Hampstead Theatre. Theatre
for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which she'd recently been made an
associate Director of, with this current remount made possible this
side of the border by the National Theatre of Scotland. Given the
theatre world's superstitious nature regarding Shakespeare's original
Scottish play, it's something of a brave move to open Dunsinane on
Friday the 13th, however much more politically inclined Greig's tale of
invading English armies, insurgent guerilla uprisings and internal
military strife might be.
Silbert had already directed Greig's play, Being Norwegian, for Oran
Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint lunchtime theatre season, by the time
her arrival at the RSC coincided roughly with an early treatment of the
play, so the fit between the two was, in Silbert's words, “a very
comfortable marriage.”
Knocking out a sequel to Macbeth is a tall order for any writer,
however, and in the wrong hands could easily have come a cropper.
“There's a definite brio and a chutzpah to taking it on,” Silbert
observes, “and what I love about what David has done is a correction to
Shakespeare. So Shakespeare's taken a piece of Scottish history and
written it to serve the purposes of his play, but it's actually
historically inaccurate, and what's gorgeous about what David's done is
that he hasn't rewritten Macbeth, but he's gone, okay, what is the
historical reality, and a lot of stuff coming out of the play is
historically true. So there's a glorious spirit of correcting
Shakespeare that I absolutely love, and the contemporary resonances
around a war, and of going into another culture to improve it with the
best possible intentions are very clear.”
There are elements in the play too, not just of how Scots are perceived
by others, but how they perceive themselves.
“You've got an Englishman abroad who doesn't quite understand what's
going on,” Silbert illustrates, “and who doesn't quite get the culture,
and somewhere in the world that sort of thing is going on today.”
Silbert returns to Dunsinane just as her most recent RSC production of
Rona Munro's play, Little Angels, opens, again at Hampstead Theatre.
Based around the figure of rocket engineer and spacecraft designer
Sergei Pavlovich Karolyov, unsung hero of Russia's pioneering space
programme that launched Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit, Little
Angels is a far cry from the Munro's rom-com, Pandas, currently playing
at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, as one can imagine.
It remains telling, however, that both of Silbert's major RSC projects
have been by Scottish writers. This shouldn't come as too much of a
surprise, however, to anyone familiar with Silbert's work at the
Traverse itself, where between 2001 and 2004 she was the new writing
theatre's Literary Director following a stint as an associate director
at the Royal Court. While in her Traverse post Silbert directed Henry
Adam's The People Next Door, Still Life by John Byrne and Munro's
prison-set drama, Iron, and was a regular visitor to the theatre after
she took over the Paines Plough company from incoming NTS director
Vicky Featherstone. One of Silbert's visits to the Traverse with Paines
Plough was with Strawberries in January, another rom-com by Munro,
albeit one translated from a piece by Quebecois writer Evelyne de la
Cheneliere.
Even beyond her current work on Dunsinane and Little Angels, Silbert's
Scots connections are everywhere, from current RSC boss Michael Boyd,
who put The Tron in Glasgow on the international map during his
artistic directorship (and who, coincidentally, has just opened his own
take on Macbeth at Stratford), to singular Edinburgh-sired
playwright/director Anthony Neilson, who is currently an RSC Literary
Associate. As with the incomers in Dunsinane, Silbert just can't seem
to help rubbing up against the Scots, albeit in an infinitely more
creative way than how things turn out in the play.
“I think the time I spent in Scotland was quite formative,” Silbert
admits. “I found something in Scottish playwriting that I felt very
attuned too, and my favourite playwrights are Scottish. I think there
is something about a commitment to theatre and theatricality as a form,
and there's an intellectual ambition that exists in this theatre
culture that doesn't quite exist in England. (Black watch director)
John Tiffany always said that it's very hard to take a Scottish play to
England, and I think it has been, but that's starting to break down
now, because in a way Scottish playwrights have been leagues ahead. But
there's an ability which David and Rhona share, which is to write
really serious plays, but which are entertaining.”
It may be cod psychology, Silbert admits, but her passion for new
writing might have something to do with her Argentinian background and
learning English as her second language. This prompted a love of the
creative nuances of words from an early age, and all the writers she
works with today have significantly powerful voices. If Silbert found
it strange last year directing The Comedy of Errors, a piece that
already existed, at Manchester's Royal Exchange, making the leap from
relatively small companies to a huge institution like the RSC is
something else again.
“There isn't a playwright who's been commissioned by the company who
doesn't feel the weight of Shakespeare,” Silbert says, “and if you're
putting on your new play whilst King Lear is opening at the Roundhouse,
the comparisons are implicit, and you feel that.”
With all of Silbert's Scottish connections, one question remains, as
indeed it must for all theatre directors since incoming director of
Glasgow's Citizens Theatre Dominic Hill left a huge vacancy for his
former post at the helm of the Traverse. Will she be applying for the
job as artistic director of Scotland's major new writing theatre when
it's advertised? Her name has been mentioned in the plethora of gossip
that has emanated out of theatre bars anticipating a puff of white
smoke, and she is a perfectly credible candidate. Silbert's answer,
however, points to an immediate future with the RSC.
“It's very unlikely,” she says. “That's not to say I don't love The
Traverse. I love The Traverse and what it does, but it's probably not
for me right now.”
Having already directed the world's first play on Twitter, Silbert will
be programming a season of sixteenth century plays at The Swan, where
she will also direct Measure For Measure. In 2012 Silbert curates a
season of Shakespeares running alongside a trio of Mexican plays. With
all this rehearsal-room activity, if Silbert does harbour ambitions to
run a building, that time seems a long way off yet.
“Being an associate director means you get all of the fun and none of
the stress,” she points out, “but running a company like Paines Plough
is more pro-active, and means you can change the culture. I can see
there might be a point where I might quite like that to happen again,
but I don't have an over-riding ambition to run things. I just like
getting involved.”
Dunsinane opens at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, May 13th-June
4th, then tours to Glasgow and Stratford-Upon-Avon
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The Herald, May 3rd 2011
ends
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