The Royal Shakespeare Company is this month presenting a new production of Tamburlaine - a tumultuous tale of triumph, cruelty and deceit...  What’s On caught up with its director, Sir Michael Boyd, to find out more about the play and his stellar career... 

Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine follows a man who starts out as a shepherd but manages to overthrow the Persian emperor and ascend to the throne. He marches on to conquer other nations, and even continents, in his quest for an empire. 

Tamburlaine was a bold, innovative piece of Elizabethan drama when it was written. The RSC production’s director, Sir Michael Boyd, explains why: “I think the reason it was such a turning point was the concept of freedom of speech. The language in the character’s speech was much more vivid and human. He shook up what used to be quite a stiff way of talking on stage that was designed for courtly or academic audiences. Previously, dialogue didn’t quite speak to the thoughts of the everyday common people, or represent the ordinary voice on stage. Marlowe was also incredibly daring with subject matter. He’s talking about power and religion in Tamburlaine in a way that really would have landed him in hot water.

Shakespeare was very clever in not getting involved in this, while all his contemporaries were being arrested, having their books burned or being tortured. It was this daring in Marlowe that ended up getting him killed, probably by the government.”

Sir Michael believes there’s a common misconception that Elizabethan dramas such as those by Marlowe and Shakespeare are too difficult to understand.

“This really complex, dense, fast-flowing rhythmic language is quite common, and I think very understood, among young people because of the music they’re listening to: J Cole, Kendrick Lemar and others. Those rappers talk in a very complex, dense way, with elusive, coded, symbolic, metrical speech. I think younger people would have no problems with Marlowe at all - perhaps there may be one or two vocabulary points, but very rarely. If anything, Marlowe is cleaner and simpler than Shakespeare.”

Sir Michael’s first stint directing this play was back in 2014. He believes there is much in the themes and the plot of Tamburlaine that speaks to contemporary concerns.
“The biggest contemporary ghost on stage in 2014 was probably the Islamic State. This fundamentalist, charismatic vision was a big shadow on Tamburlaine that we had to listen to and respond to, but also control and not let it take over the play. Tamburlaine contains instances of utter disregard for religion. In some ways it’s a carrier for the idea of fundamentalist protestantism being the scourge of God and cleaning out all the corrupt Catholic courts of Europe. There’s very much a vision of that underneath the play.
“But of course, in the intervening years, individualist, charismatic male leaders - just like the character of Tamburlaine himself is - have sprung up all over the place like dragon’s teeth - whether in America, whether in Eastern Europe, or whether it be someone like Nigel Farage in this country. If Time Magazine was honest, the man of the year would definitely be Putin. The idea of this kind of autocratic male leadership is the shadow over our show at the moment.”

Sir Michael is no stranger to theatre that’s heavily steeped in politics. He started his career training to be a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow, where the KGB were still very much in control.
“I’d say there are three ways in which that experience inspired me. One would be that, being in a country where a film, a poem, a novel could very easily be censored, live theatre became the most important place to make art under a totalitarian regime. So to see theatre as the most important art form -  and the responsibility that it carried as a result of this - was massively inspiring. That sense of moral responsibility is something I brought back with me. 

“Secondly, the Russian theatrical tradition is one of intense stagecraft and training. This has survived post-Soviet Union due to generous state funding. Their training is longer and more rigorous than anywhere else. The art of the director is taken more seriously there. 

“That brings me onto the third way the experience affected me. Living in a country where you have to question everything the government tells you teaches you to be critical of what you’re told. It teaches you to look extra hard at the work you are making artistically. Working under that kind of censorship awoke me to the extent to which Shakespeare was probably working under censorship in his own time, and how rebellious Marlowe really was.”

Tamburlaine for the RSC needed very little reimagining from its original staging, as Sir Michael thinks the Swan Theatre offers the ideal space for the play to be at its very best.

“There is a very direct and a very intimate relationship between the play and the audience. There are lots of gags with the audience, or they’re recruited at various points as soldiers or as citizens, and there’s very direct address to them - scaring, cajoling or teasing. So I didn’t really have to adapt it at all, as it really lends itself to the simple, very open space that the Swan is.

“We won’t have done our job properly if people don’t leave the theatre at the end of the show feeling differently about power and cruelty. Probably also about men’s power over women - I think Marlowe was quite ahead of his time on that. The play is a revolution that goes horribly wrong, so it’s a little case study on how not to change the world.”

Sir Michael was the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2002 until 2012. When he arrived, the company was in financial trouble. He believes that trust was the key to kickstarting the RSC’s recovery.

“It seemed obvious to me there was an enormous amount of talent there, and it wasn’t being trusted. Each area wasn’t being trusted with its own money. There was this weird centralised way of keeping the information about money contained, so people were working completely in the dark about budgets. That seemed crazy to me. So one of the very first things I did was devolve responsibility for keeping budget much deeper down into the organisation. So for example, people who actually knew about the carpentry workshop had control over their budget. Obviously, they ran it better. There was a very simple principle of trusting people. 

“The RSC has such a great history, and the burden of that history always comes with the danger of trying to replicate the past. We needed to actually be thinking forwards to establishing who we were and what we could do in that very moment. What the RSC should be doing, as a very privileged, subsidised organisation, is stuff that commercial theatre can’t, and doing it in the most brave and imaginative way.” 
Sir Michael’s passion for theatre started in the simplest of ways -  children’s play-acting with family and friends.

“Really the starting point was probably playing games with my sister. We found a compromise where we sort of played doll’s house but with cars. Then, with my friends, we would cut out characters from Christmas and birthday cards, voice them and make up stories in little shoebox theatres.” 

His passion for theatre eventually evolved into a desire to direct: “I was in a play at university, and a really good director had adapted it and directed well. I knew the play was fantastic and it would go well, but I still thought every decision he made was wrong. Then I had a revelation: I was either going to be a really annoying actor not enjoying sitting inside someone else’s vision, or I was going to have to stand up, be counted and create my own.”

Looking ahead, what plays would Sir Michael  like to direct in the future?
“I haven’t done King Lear, and I’d really like to at some point. I’d like to do more Samuel Beckett, and work more with the lovely American playwright Will Eno. I’d love to do a lot more Ancient Greek work because I’ve done hardly any of that at all. There’s just masses I want to do! I’m really enjoying challenging myself with different forms, like I started doing a bit of opera recently, and I’m working on a couple of musicals at the moment. I like going into new areas, to keep my brain cells working.”

Tamburlaine shows at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Thursday 16 August until Saturday 1 December

Interview by Lauren Cole