Subscribe The audience doesn't want repeated movement so we have added nine new exit and entrance points
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The audience doesn't want repeated movement, so we have added nine new exit and entrance points."Boyd's route to the RSC began with an unconventional apprenticeship. Born in Northern Ireland, his doctor father moved the family first to London, and then, when Michael was 16, to Scotland. While reading English at Edinburgh in the mid-1970s, he ran the university theatre company and was "very lucky" to have a play he had written and directed staged at the National Student Drama Festival at the Royal Court.After graduating, he was fascinated to discover that 1920s Russian theatrical thinking was finding its way back onto the Moscow stage, and resolved to work there. He applied for and won a British Council fellowship to train at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre.
"I don't think there was any precedent for this kind of theatre exchange," he recalls, "because while with ballet dancers or violinists there aren't major language problems, it isn't so easy with a verbal art-form like drama."In 1978, after a crash course at UEA to improve the Russian he had learned at school, Boyd checked into his new digs: the Warsaw Hotel, near Gorky Park "I was the only Briton there. It was mostly Yemenis, Italian communists, Cubans - people from 'friendly countries' So by being there I was accorded honorary 'OK' status It was an astonishing experience. For one thing, a read-through at the Malaya would take up to four weeks. I was amazed by the aesthetic and intellectual rigour, and the way directors were prepared morally to take responsibility for the work, not simply to shove that on to the writer."Cultural life under Brezhnev inevitably had its darker side, too.
"Theatre operated in a society that wasn't in any way free or liberal. You were not allowed to stage Ibsen's An Enemy of the People under its original title; it had to be Dr Stockmann. I think when I came to work on Shakespeare, that Russian experience gave me a greater understanding of the world in which Shakespeare operated, when Sir Francis Walsingham [and espionage] were a reality."After spending most of his year in Moscow "sitting at the feet of the great man", the director Anatoly Efros, Boyd's "chest-expanding" training began at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, where from 1979 to 1982 he was responsible for around 10 shows a year. After three years at the Crucible, Sheffield, he moved to the Tron, which he established as an acclaimed producing house, and a focal point for Scottish actors at a time when, says Boyd, "it was still the norm for Scottish theatres to hold auditions in London".There was widespread disappointment when he left. So why did he decide to head south? The answer is frustration, on two levels: at the way Scottish theatre is marginalised within Britain's London-centred arts scene, and over the Tron's finances. "Our revenue grant was sort of enough to run the theatre, but to put shows on, we had to treat ourselves as a project-funded company, getting money from Toronto, New York and international festivals."With no prospect of an increase in funding, the offer to join the better-resourced RSC, and move to the heart of the nation's theatrical life, proved irresistible.Since then, his Russian training has continued to influence him. His production of The Spanish Tragedy, for example, ended with a silent, morbid epilogue which you will not find in Kyd's text, and in his Romeo and Juliet earlier this year, Mercutio's ghost made some telling, unscripted appearances.