How I got hooked on theatre: Simon Godwin

It began with sawdust, clowns, and the high wire. It began with walking excitedly across muddy English fields to a gaudy big top. It began with spectacle and a world elsewhere.

Then, on my ninth birthday, sawdust met the stage when my mum took me to see the ultimate circus musical, Barnum, starring Michael Crawford at the London Palladium. Crawford became the consummate showman P.T. Barnum. When he dared to walk across an elevated tightrope live, it was a defining moment for me: spectacle with a story. I was hooked.

Four years later I was squeezing along the aisles, about to watch the seventh preview of a brand new West End musical. I was there, once again with my mum, to see Crawford, now my hero, play the lead in an unproven show called Phantom of the Opera. As the chandelier ascended and we travelled to 19^th century Paris, I asked myself: Where was the optimistic, wide grinned, agile Barnum? Who was this colossal presence, descending into vistas of subterranean desires, commanding such awe and grandeur? That night I discovered something about theatre: metamorphosis. Theatre is an art where worlds are created and transformed, time periods collide and irrepressible circus stars become heartbroken phantoms.

Spectacle, story, and transformation: these were the planks of my passion. Then Shakespeare arrived.

In my final year at high school, I got the chance to play Hamlet. Exhilarated yet terrified by the challenge, I spent weeks beforehand listening to Kenneth Branagh’s radio recording for the BBC. As I followed the ebb and flow of Branagh’s delivery, I saw how Shakespeare’s writing was like a fast moving river – shifting, transforming, expanding. His syntax could be slippery and serpentine, with poetry that captured the sublime beauty of the world or unlocked great depths of meaning.

Here, I realized, was the ultimate synthesis of spectacle, story, and transformation. As well as introducing me to Shakespeare, Branagh’s recordings taught me how great classical actors match the versatility of their material. To embody the river means to fearlessly embrace extremes and to become transformed.

My future lay not with acting but with directing. I could transform intellectually but not physically. As Michael Crawford had shown me, great actors are athletes of both the heart and the body. As a director, I have always cherished actors who embody extremes. I’m thinking of Tamsin Greig as Malvolia in my re-gendered Twelfth Night for the National Theatre, bringing together exuberance and delicacy. She was funny, courageous, and idiosyncratic in her comic scenes, while expressing great anguish and pain when the character is cruelly humiliated in the play’s final dark scenes.

I’m thinking of the duality captured by Ralph Fiennes playing Antony in my National Theatre Antony and Cleopatra. He was every inch a soldier (the company attended a military training camp as part of rehearsals), yet found tenderness, remorse, and beauty as he prepared to take his own life. A soldier who, finally, becomes a man.

Shakespeare was the reason I first came to D.C. At Cambridge University my obsession with Hamlet continued, and I directed an undergraduate production that we presented one summer across universities in North America. The show played at George Washington University and I was immediately struck by the beauty of the city and the intellectual energy of the audiences. I strolled along the streets of Georgetown marveling at the architecture and wondering if I would ever return. It was Hamlet that would bring me back to the District in my new vocation.

Paapa Essiedu was the first actor of color to play Hamlet in the history of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I had been invited to direct the play for the company in 2016 and had met Paapa during an enthralling audition. Collaborating with him allowed us to explore together his West African heritage alongside the dynamism of Shakespeare’s writing. Ritual, music, spectacle, and poetry fused to animate the play through a new lens. Reimagining Hamlet in this new way was an unleashing of Shakespeare and his “poem unlimited.”

The production toured to The Kennedy Center in 2017, where members of the Board of Shakespeare Theatre Company saw the show. I was pleased to be back in D.C. after so many years and they were searching for a new artistic director to helm the Company in a new era. A new chapter of my life was about to begin.

SIMON GODWIN, Artistic Director, Shakespeare Theatre Company
Associate Artistic Director, National Theatre

Simon Godwin joined Shakespeare Theatre Company as Artistic Director in September 2019. He has served as Associate Director of the National Theatre of London, the Royal Court Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Royal and Derngate Theatres (Northampton). While at the Royal Court, Simon directed seven world premieres, including Routes, If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep, NSFW, The Witness, Goodbye to All That, The Acid Test and Wanderlust. He made his debut at the National Theatre with Strange Interlude followed by Man and Superman, and went on to direct The Beaux’ Stratagem, Twelfth Night, a celebrated production of Antony and Cleopatra with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo, and most recently, the world premiere of Simon Wood’s Hansard. Simon has also directed at the Royal Shakespeare Company, including productions of Timon of Athens with Kathryn Hunter in the titular role, which will be reimagined in early 2020 for Theatre for a New Audience in New York City and Shakespeare Theatre Company, an acclaimed Hamlet, which toured to the Kennedy Center, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Simon recently made his Tokyo debut, directing a Japanese cast in Hamlet for Theatre Cocoon. Other productions include The Little Mermaid, Krapp’s Last Tape/A Kind of Alaska, Faith Healer, Far Away, Everyman, Habeas Corpus and Relatively Speaking. In 2012 Simon was awarded the inaugural Evening Standard/Burberry Award for an Emerging Director.