Noël Coward’s Twelfth Night at Downton Abbey

When I moved to London some ten years ago to teach and research Shakespeare, a large part of the incentive and my excitement was at last to be at the centre of Shakespeare performance. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was central to that eager expectation, but there were many venues, such as the National Theatre, the Barbican and the Donmar Warehouse, among others, where Shakespeare was regularly performed. Some Royal Shakespeare Company productions transferred to London, but Stratford-upon-Avon was, in any case, an easy train ride away. At last, I could take students to world-class events and leaven the text with the 'real', not to say, 'risen', Shakespeare on the stage. I was indeed fortunate to see some very impressive performances, notably the all-female Shakespeare trilogy at the Donmar (2012-16) including a riveting Harriet Walter, and Ivo van Hove's stunning Roman Tragedies (2017), but very few excellent performances at the iconic London theatres. I gradually became disillusioned, bored and irritated by the imposition of director's 'concepts' upon the plays in the quest for 'originality' and 'impact'; actors' poor diction and projection, and inability to understand or command the iambic pentameter's demands of stress, rhythm and flow; and designs that overwhelmed and cluttered up what Peter Brook celebrated as "the empty space". I started leaving at interval; then after the first few scenes; and finally stopped going altogether. I now avoid those iconic theatres, and after performing Shakespeare across Europe and the UK with a small professional group of actors, without a director or designer in a company we dubbed Anərkē Shakespeare (anarchos = without a ruler), I have decided that directors, by and large, should get out of the way of Shakespeare the poet and dramatist.