As 'Othello' and 'Twelfth Night' come to Dublin, acclaimed director Declan Donnellan talks to Belinda McKeon about making people connect
'I was reading about Oscar Wilde lately," says Declan Donnellan, celebrated international director and co-founder of one of the world's most acclaimed ensemble companies, Cheek by Jowl, over lunch in London's National Theatre. "And you know the thing he said, how all men kill the thing they love? Well, do you know what Alfred Douglas said to him? He said," - Donnellan adopts a tone of innocent curiosity - "what did you mean by that, exactly, 'all men kill the thing they love'? And Oscar said to him: 'you should know . . .'"!
Donnellan, still the "round, tubby, bucolic and jolly" director described by Richard Eyre in his diary of his earliest years as head of the National, leans back in his seat and roars with laughter. From the restaurant door, his stage manager watches anxiously. Our hour is up, and it's time for him to go back into the rehearsal studio, where his version of a Russian play from 1935, Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, is slowly coming to life; it will open in the National in October.
By then, Donnellan will have taken two productions of Shakespeare, Othello and Twelfth Night (the latter done entirely through Russian, with surtitles), to the Dublin Theatre Festival - and shortly afterwards he will decamp to a rural forest in what seems to have become his artistic, even spiritual home - Russia - to begin work on a new production of Chekhov's Three Sisters.
The whole world wants a piece of this director. Othello comes to Dublin fresh from Hong Kong, via Australia. Where does he get time to sit here, utterly at ease, laughing gleefully, and talking about the west of Ireland, where his parents are from, and Co Roscommon, where, in the 1950s, he spent three years of his early childhood, and to which he loves to return?
The answer lies in the gusto with which Donnellan lays into the sirloin steak on his plate; he is a director with enormous appetite for what he does. And if it dwindled for a period in the late 1990s, when Cheek by Jowl decided to disband after nearly 20 years, then for the past four years it has returned, bigger than ever.
So too, incidentally, has Cheek by Jowl - it was reborn in 2002, with Donnellan's production of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul. Founded in 1981 by Donnellan with his partner, Nick Ormerod, it is the company behind the Othello soon to arrive on the Tivoli Theatre stage after an extensive international tour.
Twelfth Night, in contrast, is the work of a second company, one nurtured by Donnellan during the years he has recently spent in Russia. "We have no name for it yet," he says. "We don't want to call it Cheek by Jowlski." What he and Ormerod call the company, in fact, is their "Russian family". It's a family which extends to include theatres and theatre artists, such as the Marly Theatre in St Petersburg, which commissioned him to direct a production of A Winter's Tale in 1997 - the path to Donnellan's artistic recovery, arguably, after the exhaustion to which Cheek by Jowl had ground in that year - and the Russian Theatre Confederation, for which he directed Boris Gudonov. And even the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, which invited him to direct an opera, and didn't think twice when he responded that he'd prefer to do a ballet. His Romeo and Juliet was adored by Russian critics, though, when it came to London's Covent Garden this summer, their English counterparts were more reserved - and the Bolshoi has asked him back.
Russia, for Donnellan, has been a massive success. But, more than that, it has been an eye-opener. "People are always asking me how Russian actors are different. It's not really the actors that are different; it's the system. I mean, the first thing that's different about them is that there is this theatre in London." He gestures around him to the enormous bowels of the National. "There are sixty theatres this size in Moscow. With about sixty, seventy actors permanently there. So we are talking an ocean of theatre as opposed to a lake. I'm not saying they're always doing great work, but the interest is there. And also, the other thing is that they are permanently in work. So they don't have that psychological trauma of being picked up and dropped. Being picked up and dropped is what human beings least like, so it's very stressful."
ADDRESSING THE STRESS under which actors work was one of Donnellan's chief aims when he wrote his 2002 book, The Actor and the Target, at once a manual and a meditation on the psychology of acting, which takes as its focus the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet to dissect the problem of actors' block. Donnellan has always been renowned as an actors' director, placing the performers, rather than his own vision, at the centre of the play. Actors in this country have long wished for more such directors. But if there's something unusual in his approach, Donnellan himself doesn't see it.
"I think it's really just understanding. The actor is primary, more important than the designer or director, or whatever, so we should all be going into making that. And it's not just the actor, it's the actor's relationship with the audience. It's not a narcissistic thing, it's a connection. My job is to make sure that people connect, which is rather different from interpreting."
His words are pounding out now; these are views he clearly has grown used to expressing. And what he hates most, he says, is when people single out one actor or another for praise or censure. "You think, what crap. What matters to me is the acting of an ensemble. But the scene takes place in the space between people. And I think that the director's first priority, duty, is to look after the acting of the ensemble, because the acting of the ensemble will not look after itself, it just doesn't happen like that. For me, the play is not performed by individual actors.'
IT WAS, HOWEVER, an individual actor who led Donnellan to direct the Othello currently en route to Dublin. Nonso Anozie, the Nigerian actor in the title role, had previously played the lead in the King Lear which Donnellan did two years ago for the Royal Shakespeare Company Academy, a training company of which he was the founding director. And, although Cheek by Jowl had already done its Othello, in 1982, the sight of Anozie as the deranged monarch flicked a switch in Donnellan's head.
"Othellos are thin on the ground, they're not like Hamlets. And this mountain of a guy came along, and Nick and I said, we've just got to do Othello for him. It was his grace.' It was, he says, the first time an actor has ever led him to a production.
And Othello is not a play to which he would be led easily. When he talks about it, it is with sheer, unsettled awe. "It's frightening. It's a very weird play, because most tragedies, Shakespearean and otherwise, involve the destruction of the state. Not only does the head of state die, but the whole state crumbles around him - Hamlet, Macbeth, Oedipus Rex - the world falls apart at the same time as the hero falls apart. What's ghastly about Othello and so modern about it, is that the state goes on perfectly happily afterwards. Just clear up.'
The destruction is wreaked by the emotion at the heart of Othello. Iago's envy, Donnellan argues, is terrifying to witness. "We can see so clearly the operations of envy in other people. But we find it very difficult to see its operations in ourselves. And maybe the only positive thing about Iago is that he sees it. The rest of us don't, can never clean ourselves of it. But he sees it, and he acts on it. Which is . . . although I would never say that a human being was evil, it is a diabolical thing to do."
To the unnerving vista of this dark world, the Russian Twelfth Night is likely to serve as something of an antidote. "Oh, definitely," laughs Donnellan, long and heartily. "Othello is fantastic, but it's bleak . . . and in Twelfth Night, there is love."
Then he stops and thinks for a moment, and looks a lot less likely to laugh. "Mind you, the plays have the same line. Viola in Twelfth and Iago in Othello both say: 'I am not what I am'. They quote each other. I could be quite clever, and wouldn't want to be, but I'm sure we could spend 15 minutes proving they're the same play. In each, the main character goes into disguise, love becomes disordered, and in the fifth act the hero threatens to kill the person they love.'
For a moment, it seems, there's a chill in the air; the thin line between comedy and tragedy has been scratched away. But then Donnellan remembers Wilde, and his wit in the face of betrayal. And then the deep, delighted laughter returns.
Othello runs at the Tivoli Theatre from Sept 29th to Oct 1st and Twelfth Night at the Olympia Theatre from Oct 4th to 9th as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.
www.dublintheatrefestival.com