Sir Gregory Doran, director

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0:51my cast away this week is the theatre director sir gregory doran as former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he's been called one of the greatest Shakespeareans of our age. He stepped back in 2023 after 10 years in post, 35 years with the company and after directing 50 productions. His contribution to the exploration and evolution of Shakespeare's work may be unmatched. He's staged every play in Shakespeare's first folio, including the landmark 2008 production of Hamlet, starring David Tennant and Sir Patrick Stewart. He set Julius Caesar in modern-day Africa, created the RSC's first gender-balanced Shakespeare play and brought Dame Judi Dench back to the company after 25 years.

1:36He grew up just outside Preston and has his mother to thank for his obsession with Shakespeare. She was a member of an amateur dramatics club and took him to the RSC to see Dame Eileen Atkins in As You Like It. Driving back up the M6 together in her little beige mini, he told her, that's what I want to do when I grow up. He says, I find more sustenance, more profundity, more compassion, more philosophy and more simple truth in Shakespeare than I have ever found in the Bible. Sartre said that in a secular age, most people feel a God-shaped hole in their consciousness. I here declare that I filled mine with Shakespeare.

2:15Sir Greg Doran, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much indeed, Lauren. Lovely to be here. Well, it's great to have you, especially as you've been on a Global Pilgrimage for a while recently, Greg. You've been seeing as many copies as you can of Shakespeare's first folio. You've been calling it the Folio Roadshow. That's right. How many copies are out there and how many have you clapped eyes on? Well, I have to say, my sister Jo said to me, let me get this straight, Greg. You're trying to see over 200 copies of the same book. When you put it like that. Well, so this is Shakespeare's first folio, the first time that his collected works were put together by seven years after his death by two friends, John Hemmings and Henry Condal.

2:56And if we didn't have the first folio, we wouldn't have half of Shakespeare's plays. No Macbeth, no Julius Caesar, no Tempest, no, as you like it, no Twelfth Night. So it's a very important book. And in 2023, we were celebrating the 400th anniversary of it. So I thought, well, I'm going to go and see as many as I can. And our copy in Stratford had its own amazing story because we nearly gave it away to the Pope, which is a comedy of errors in itself. And I thought, well, if that's our story, then there may be other interesting stories. That was in the 60s, Greg. We should say it had been presented to him to bless and there was a misunderstanding.

3:38How many exist and how many have you seen? We think there may be 750 originally printed, possibly more than that. There is one census that says there are 228, but now there are 229 because I found another one. Where was it? Where did you find it? It's a long story, but I did meet somebody who happened to say to me, oh, you should come and see mine. And they had a folio, which they had not declared, as it were. and it was a wonderful thing to see. But they are all over the world, so there are mostly in the States. Most of those are at the Folger Library in Washington. There are folios in Japan and the furthest flung ones are in South Africa, in Australia and in New Zealand.

4:29You like the scruffy ones though, don't you? I like the ones that have been written all over and show evidence of readership. There's one in West Virginia. At the end of Hamlet, somebody has written in the margin, in a 17th century hand, I do desire the reader's mouth to kiss the writer's arse. Not sure I'm allowed to say that on the BBC. But anyway, that's what it was. They just take you into the moment of people reading these plays for the first time and being obsessed and interested by them. And sometimes those stories are not easy. two folios, the one in South Africa and the one in Auckland, were presented by the same colonial governor, George Gray, on the basis that they proved the superiority of the English language and therefore justified the suppression of native Aboriginal languages.

5:26So there's a real conflict in the sense of Shakespeare as a colonial imposition and Shakespeare as a vital contemporary voice. You're sharing your music with us today, Greg. I wonder how important that is to you. Obviously vital in theatre productions. What about in life offstage? Yeah, it's been very important to productions. It was certainly part of my life with my partner, my husband, Tony Schur. He would have the music on whenever he was painting or drawing. Did you like the same things? Pretty much, actually. We allowed each other to share our own particular obsessions, I guess. Well, I think we'd better get started.

6:03Tell us about your first disc. So this, this is the most exquisite duet from Handel. And to me, it celebrates diversity. It celebrates difference because it's from his opera, Giulio Cesare, and it's a male and a female voice. But I suspect you may not immediately distinguish which voice is which. It is the moment when Cornelia, Pompey's widow, and her stepson Sesto lament the death of Pompey. It's plangent, beautiful, Baroque music, but the way those two voices interact is exquisite. One is the countertenor, Philippe Jaruski, and the other is the pure contralto voice in a line that goes back to Kathleen Ferrier, who my mum loved, which is Natalie Stoortsman.

7:29ORCHESTRA PLAYS

7:50This worship is escola segunda-late English Joseph Stanley - beslut and the English division is imprisoned Add 2-1f 2-3 we are leaders from the Eastern league fridge and our Sonata a Lagrimar from Handel's Julius Caesar, sung by Natalie Stutzman and Philippe Zieruski with the Orfeo 55 Orchestra. So let's go back to the beginning, Sir Gregory Doran. You were born, along with your twin Ruth, in 1958 to parents John and Margaret. Which of the two of you arrived first? I did, apparently, though I was told later by B. Bandeli that in Yoruba culture, the oldest one sends the youngest one out first to look around and check it's OK.

8:33So for years I suffered from being the oldest of the twins and my sister Ruth got all the advantages. And it didn't have to be like that. Being a twin, obviously a very special thing. I mean, do the two of you share a close bond still? Very close. I'm very close with all my siblings, in fact. And Ruth married a Tony, funnily enough. And our lives have been parallel in different ways. She called her youngest Gregory. And it is a close relationship. And it was your mum, I think, who was into amateur dramatics when she was younger. Did you ever see her perform? She was a very ardent member of the Women's Institute.

9:14and she was really the director. She was, they called them the producer. And the Women's Institute did wonderful jumble sales and flower shows, but every year they did an elderly people's party and a concert, which she would, I guess, direct. The ladies would sing medleys of popular songs and then at the end, we'd go dark, the curtains would go back and there was a fluorescent scene and the first one was a garden theme, an English country garden and there were two statues in the centre in white on plinths and all the assembled ladies in there dressed as flowers in their fluorescent costumes and then below me, the two characters on the plinths suddenly came to life.

10:03The statues came to life. They stepped down off their plinths and they danced together and I thought, what's better than that? Magic. Magic. That was mum's influence And Dad's influence, Dad was a chemist, a scientist by trade. He'd worked at ICI and was headhunted to join United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in Preston, which is how we moved to Preston. And he loved music and he would get box sets of sort of Beethoven symphonies. I think he was part of a thing called the World Record Club. I mean, he didn't know anything about it, but he wanted to learn. So he would get these. And along with one of them came this 45 RPM record of the incidental music to Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

10:53And it had interspersed between the music extracts from the plays with an American cast. And I remember Puck was played by a woman. I thought she sounded exactly like Mickey Mouse. this was the thing and I and she said I'll put a girdle right about the earth in 40 minutes and I thought that's amazing and then there was this story of forests and fairies and people with donkey's heads and people who get drugged by flowers I mean what's not to love so your passions were in evidence quite young then tell me more about you as a little boy what what kind of kid were you creative my passion was wild animals and African animals at that there was There was a show on the telly called Daktari, which was about a vet in Africa.

11:43I built a game reserve in my back garden. Near Preston? Near Preston. This is in Hutton, outside Preston. And we had an old chicken run in part of the back garden. And I spent all my pocket money on little African animals from the toy shop in Preston. So there was a sort of savannah bit where the elephant was and the giraffe was and the ostrich. And then there was a swampy bit, courtesy of the garden hose, where the hippo was and the crocodile was. And then in the corner, I built a volcano with rocks from my mum's rockery and stuffed in old leaves and lit the leaves. So it actually smoked. This is quite an intricate stage.

12:28It is. You know, I've never actually thought of that. And the gorilla lived up in the dock leaves on the volcano. So I had my own African games reserve, you know, at the age of eight. Miss Nsen, ready to go. Ready to go. Well, on that note, I think we'd better have some music, Greg. Disc number two, what have you got for us? Well, at the same time as Daktari came out, a film arrived at the ABC in Fishergate in Preston and my parents took me to see it and it changed my life. And the music for the film, the score was by John Barry, who later wrote all those, well, I think who had already written all those James Bond themes and things.

13:06I bought the record and the sheet music. So this is Born Free, sung by the golden voice of Matt Munro.

13:22Born free As free as the wind blows As free as the grass grows Born free to follow your heart

13:42Live free And beauty surrounds you The world still is... Matt Munro and Born Free. Sir Greg Doran, tell me about your school days. You went to Preston Catholic College. It was run by the J's, by the Jesuits, and 900 boys. And it was very intimidating when I first arrived. Why? What was intimidating? Well, I had flat Lancashire A's and flat Lancashire vowels, but I didn't speak like the rest of them did, pretty much. And so they just thought I was posh. And it took a while, and it was actually Shakespeare that came to the rescue, because my twin sister went to the convent of the Holy Child Jesus in Winkley Square across the road.

14:29But the girls were never invited to be in the plays. There was no mingling. No mingling, to my advantage. And there was an annual Shakespeare play directed by a wonderful English teacher for whom I will ever be grateful called Jock Malone. And in the second year, I missed out on playing Ophelia. It went to Gag's Ronson. may he rot in hell. Gasp. But in the third year, I managed to land the role of Lady Anne in Richard III. To begin with, I thought to myself, this is just going to make the bullying worse because I'm going to be standing there in a dress and saying all these lines. So I was the third year and Richard III himself was played by this sixth former in the second year, sixth, called Edwards.

15:21We only called each other by our surnames. Edwards looked like Mark Bolan. I mean, he was T-Rex and he was glamorous and sexy and he had to kiss me. When he had to kiss my hand, I then had to respond by spitting at him in the face. Yeah, because Lady Anne's quite dynamic. She is. The fact of not only spitting at a sixth form, but of standing there and saying lines of Shakespeare and not falling over, gained me a kind of respect. And the bullying stopped like that. I suddenly, you know, it was like suddenly I could do something that earned some kind of respect. So I have a lot to thank Shakespeare for in my life.

16:04That was one of them. Shakespeare to the rescue again. So they were very, very supportive, my parents. I can't pretend that they weren't. And they allowed me to do some fairly crazy things. You know, the Shakespeare play wasn't enough for me. And in our summer holidays, I press ganged my friends into putting on more Shakespeare plays. I had a great friend called Richard Sharples, and one wet Saturday afternoon, we were poking around Astley Hall, which is an old Jacobean manor in the centre of Astley Park in Chorley. And I just thought, this is a wonderful space. And we went into the courtyard, and I thought, well, we should do a Shakespeare play here.

16:41And we did. And I got the Hall of 16, managed to persuade Chorley Town Council to give us£13 for costumes, You called yourselves the poor players. The poor players, I know. There's an irony there. And I think we were probably pretty poor. But nevertheless, we had entrepreneurial flair. And Richard and I used to hitchhike down to Stratford. We loved show business. It's time to go to the music. It's disc number three. What are we going to hear next? And why are you taking this one to the island? Richard and I were, apart from being in the school plays, we were in school choir and it was a very ambitious school choir it was run by a wonderful man called harry duckworth and he used to get us to perform and compete indeed in in i steadfast like pontra vendigai and thangoslin and we even auditioned for huey green on opportunity knocks in fact we did a tour of america and we made a record the repertoire was mostly sort of english folk songs and spirituals and hymns.

17:50But Harry Duckworth also introduced us to English sacred music, so music of Bird and Talis of the Spanish Renaissance composer da Vittoria and his Italian counterpart Palestrina. So I'm sure, Lauren, there are better recordings of this particular piece. But this is for Richard, who 50 or either two years later is still my very best friend. And we are singing the treble line in Palestrina's Secret Cervus.

18:54Weıyla C Church

19:12CHOIR SINGS

19:30What's it like for you hearing that back, Greg? It is rather nostalgic, actually, because just being part of making that glorious sound, that brilliant polyphony, to me, that was what God sounded like. And what was it like going to America as a teenager? I mean, that must have been incredible. It was. I remember arriving in New York and in the pouring rain and the smoke coming up from the vents in the middle of the road and there being cockroaches in the hotel. And I remember thinking, I want to go home. But no, we had a fantastic time. So, Greg Doran, after school, you went on to study English and drama at Bristol University.

20:14Now, at that point, did you want to act or had you started to think about directing? A bit of both. My parents had very wisely said, you know, if the theatre is what you want to do, get yourself a degree to fall back on. And even my headmaster, Father Wren, in the only piece of career advice that any of my friends at the Catholic College ever remember getting, he said to me, we're going to put you in for the Oxbridge exams, but because you do nothing but Shakespearean plays, maybe you should think about doing English and drama at university. And I huffed and puffed. And then I thought, well, I went to Bristol.

20:56I fell in love with the place. And I thought that was a great experience. And I read a piece of Flaubert, who says that most people end up in life doing what they do second best. and I thought what do I do I loved acting but I knew that actually directing was for me a much better job much better role because you had a view of the whole thing and I and I loved that so I decided that I would be a director and then lo and behold I get a letter from the Royal Shakespeare Company asking me to audition for the 1987 season. Well, I want to come to that next. But first, I need some more music. Disc number four.

21:42What's next? So I told you I'd been brought up by the Jesuits as a strong, devout Catholic family. I'm named after my uncle, who was a Benedictine abbot. I felt this sense of a Catholic faith. But I also knew that from as early as I could remember, I was gay. I knew that in my soul. And as I went to university, the Catholic Church, the Pope, came out with an encyclical of some kind in which he said that homosexuals were intrinsically disordered. And I remember that being like a slap in the face. It's interesting I can remember the phrase so distinctly that I was intrinsically disordered. And I had gone to university.

22:27I had lost my virginity along with those flat Lancashire vowels. I had fallen in love and I thought this cannot be wrong and I felt rejected by the faith in which I had been brought up. This is 1979 the first gay kiss on television isn't for another decade and that was a rather chaste peck on EastEnders. The AIDS crisis hits in the early 80s and so there was a lot in terms of coming out and identifying as gay at that time was really hard. And were you out did you? I did because I'd fallen in love because I had decided that I felt so angry about being called intrinsically disordered when I knew I was intrinsically homosexual so I came out to my friends first to my family and I thought well I'm not going to hide this I'm in love with this guy I'm going to celebrate it.

23:20And were your family supportive? They were frankly I had played all these girls at school. The clues were there. The clues were there. Yeah. But it was a big decision. And, you know, even my very best friends who I came out to didn't immediately then come back and say, yes, I'm gay too. At least two of them were. And even when I admitted that they couldn't admit it. So it was a tough time. And so this record, I think I'll need something to dance to on the island. And I wasn't a great clubber, but I did love dancing. and this in a way felt it was about the celebration of the energy of that gay community.

24:03So this came out in 1982. I have to say it was 2014 when a UKIP politician blamed the terrible flooding in the UK on the fact that the government were allowing gay marriage, that the UK was suffering all this flooding. So this is, of course, the weather girls singing It's Raining Men.

24:59The Weather Girls and It's Raining Men. So Sir Gregory Doran, you got your big career break when you first joined the RSC. It was 1987 and you were an actor there at first. What was it like walking into that institution for the first time, not as an audience member who'd hitchhiked there to see a play, but as a member of the company? It was the most extraordinary experience because the company itself were extraordinary. There was Brian Cox and Harriet Walter and Fiona Shaw and this quite famous by then actor called Anthony Shaw. Yes, about him. Your very first role, you were playing Solano in The Merchant of Venice, one of the Salads.

25:46I think those roles are referred to. Salad roles. The Salad roles. And Anthony Sher was playing Shylock. Now, the two of you would go on to spend many happy years together. You would get married eventually. But tell me about your first impressions of him. Well, there's a scene in The Merchant where the Salads taunt a Shylock. The scene was that I had to, you know, we were basically beating him up with sticks. And in the middle of that scene, Shylock delivers the astonishing speech, Hath not a Jew, Ives. And he exploded with this sort of volcanic, white-hot intensity. And it was amazing to just be that close to it.

26:31And indeed, once we started performing, to be there every night. I basically just fell in love with him. Tony was from South Africa and the two of you were active in the anti-apartheid movement. In 1995, you directed Tony in the lead role of Titus Andronicus in Johannesburg. What was that experience like and how did the play connect with the audience? It was astonishing. It was a rough ride, I have to say. And this was Tony appearing for the first time as an actor in his own home country. So it was a big deal. And there is a line at the end. It's a very violent play, but somehow the violence in that play, instead of seeming gratuitous and sort of gronguignol as it can in modern productions, we had to honour the violence because this was a country which had invented necklacing, you know, the process of throwing a burning rubber tyre over somebody and executing them.

27:23At the beginning of the rehearsals, we went round the room asking everybody what their experience of violence was. And whereas if you'd done that in the UK, Somebody would have said, oh, yeah, I know somebody was mugged or whatever. In South Africa, the violence was extreme. The girl playing Lavinia, the character has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out. She had researched it by going to meet somebody who'd had their tongue cut out and somebody who'd had their hands chopped off. So it was an extraordinary experience. But at the end of the play, Marcus Andronicus, Titus's brother, turns to the audience and says, oh, let me teach you how to knit again this scattered corn into one mutual sheaf.

28:05So the play became about breaking cycles of violence. It became about reconciliation. And did you get to meet Mandela? I did. I did. We met when Mandela came to the UK and it was in South Africa House, the very place that we had protested outside for so long. And there he was. And I remember being introduced to him and thinking of all the questions I wanted to ask this man about Shakespeare, for instance, because he had signed a copy of Shakespeare on Robin Island. I wanted to ask him about that, but all I could do was sort of burble. And I remember him taking my hand and putting his hand on top of mine and of my whole metabolism, you know, going down as sort of, and just becoming calm as if he was just saying, for the moments we are together, I am totally focused on you.

28:56I thought the man was astonishing. And I danced on the stage with Desmond Tutu and Tony and I listened to Hugh Masekela, the father of South African jazz, playing jazz in Kippy's, the bar outside the Market Theatre. It was just a glorious, glorious time. It felt that we were doing a tiny little bit to create a little bit of justice in the world, in a way. I think we should have some music, don't you? Yes. What should we hear? Well, this is, of course, celebrating that time. And it is the great Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing with Paul Simon on his seminal, if controversial, album, Graceland. And this is Diamonds on the Sols of Her Shoes.