The job sounds easy but it isn’t, as Artistic Director of A Season Before the Tragedy of Macbeth, Andrew Hobbs chats with us and tells us about this most elusive of processes.   As Executive Producer of Facsimile Productions and Artistic Director of the British Touring Shakespeare Theatre Company, The Bard of Avon is forever inspiring.   The show will be playing at the Camden People’s Theatre from Wednesday the 4th to Sunday the 8th of August each evening at 9.15pm as part of the 2010 Camden Fringe Festival.

1.    As Artistic Director of the British Touring Shakespeare Theatre Company, how do you see your role going forward?

The ethos of BTS as a company is all about trying to take Shakespeare back to being performed in its original spirit. Most people’s contemporary perception of how Shakespeare ought to be performed stems from the Victorians – people in pseudo-authentic Elizabethan outfits stood around declaiming in very big voices. This is the reason that a lot of people have this idea of Shakespeare being elitist and boring, and when it’s done well it’s really not at all – it should be something that anyone can enjoy, be they children or adults and no matter what background they are from. There has been a pleasing movement in recent years towards recapturing the original spirit of the plays, particularly from organisations like the Globe, and I see the mission of my company as being to make these great plays accessible and enjoyable for as many people as possible around the world.

2.    How did you become involved in directing Gloria Carreño’s new play, “A Season before the Tragedy of Macbeth”?

My other theatre company Facsimile Productions specialises in new writing, both from myself and our other resident writers as well as from other talent across the world, so we get sent a lot of plays for our consideration. Gloria’s piece stood out as being a wonderfully fresh take on a well known classic, and obviously has the Shakespeare connection, so it was something I really wanted to look at for BTS.

As well as keeping Shakespeare’s work alive for modern audiences, we are always on the lookout for new writing which can augment and enhance our understanding of his work, so when the opportunity came up for BTS to stage the world premiere of this play at the Camden Fringe Festival, we naturally jumped at the chance.

3.    As the Artistic Director of “A Season before the Tragedy of Macbeth” what do you think we can we learn from Shakespeare to help us understand the world around us?

It is when you think about it quite an amazing achievement that plays that were written so long ago can still resonate with the everyday concerns of ordinary people today. There are parts of Shakespeare’s work which don’t necessarily work for a modern audience, specifically some of the humour which makes reference to topical issues or wordplay whose comedy the English language has moved on from, but at the heart of these plays are human emotions that have not changed one bit. The reason that these plays are so enduring is that Shakespeare understood the human psyche in a depth that few other writers have ever achieved. When you compare it to the equivalent mainstream entertainment of today, you have to wonder if children in schools will be studying scripts from Eastenders or the cinema of Jason Statham in schools in five hundred years time? Appealing as I find the notion of an A-level class being taught on the use of imagery in Transporter 3 it seems somewhat unlikely!

4.    How do you go about changing the static setup of reading a play to making it a dynamic tour de force for an audience?

That’s a very interesting question, and I think the answer lies in the fact that a play script is not a piece of literature to be sat and read, any more than a piece of sheet music gives you any realistic idea of how a song will sound when it is performed. There’s so much more to a theatrical performance than simply the words, and you just don’t get that from reading the script. As a side note, I think that’s why the teaching of Shakespeare and other dramatic works in schools can be so uninspiring. I used to hate Shakespeare at school because it was treated as an academic literary text – you need to see it as a production up on stage in order to understand it.

5.    When you look at the world of theatre, what are you most optimistic about?

The fact that the fringe in London is currently doing very good business. Mainstream West End commercial theatre is currently in a very stagnant position, much like Broadway was in the early 90s. If you look at what’s on, you’ll seriously struggle to find anything that isn’t either imported from America or based on pop songs or a film that people already know. This is largely because big commercial producers in the current economic climate are wanting guaranteed success which makes them fairly unlikely to take a punt on anything new or different. I suppose at least it’s good that these shows based on films or well known songs are getting people into theatres and keeping the art form alive, but if we are to keep up our country’s reputation as the creative home of theatre then there needs to be something of a renaissance. For me the fringe is a much more exciting place, not only for the quality and originality of the work, but also because it is real theatre that requires the use of the audience’s imagination which is, as the Chorus in Henry V so eloquently tells us, what theatre’s supposed to be about. So many big West End shows are presented as pretty much films on stage with all of their spectacular effects that I think this important element of theatre has been lost to mainstream audiences. I don’t know whether the current boom in fringe ticket sales is down to a credit crunch effect of people being unable to afford expensive West End tickets, or whether people are genuinely getting a little bored of uninspiring blockbuster shows and wanting to seek out something exciting and new, but either way it’s got to be a good thing for theatre in general.

6.    What do you feel about the current state of Arts funding available?

It’s a difficult time for Arts funding, particularly due to the upcoming London Olympics, which have diverted a lot of the funding that has historically been available for the arts from sources such as the Lottery. I know a lot of companies that are very reliant on this have gone under as a result, which is a terrible shame, so perhaps we are fortunate that we have never really gone down this route and have generally funded things independently but it is certainly difficult. For the reasons I’ve outlined in my answer to the previous question it is difficult to get mainstream commercial producers interested in original creative work, and a lot of Arts funding perhaps quite rightly tends to have a bias towards work focused on issues or communities, so if you’re working on something that’s pitched as entertainment but is original and creative new writing then you can often find yourself caught in the middle with no ready source of funding available.

I’d like to give a mention here to Chris Mellor of Camden Council, who is doing a lot of good work at the moment to support independent creative producers who are staging work in the borough of Camden. He’s been an invaluable support to my company and many others, and if more council arts officers start following his lead then we may yet see the creative renaissance we so desperately need in this country. Do check out the website Chris has set up www.camdentheatres.com which is helping creative producers get funding for their work.

7.    Do the reviewers of Fringe shows do a good job?

Only if they give us a good review! But seriously, as a theatre practitioner I tend to not to take a huge amount of notice of reviews be they good or bad. I think the duty of a reviewer is simply to comment in as unbiased and professional a way as possible on whether or not they would recommend seeing the show in question. It is always a little uncomfortable when you see a review turn into a personal attack on the person responsible for the work, although of course perversely a really bad review can often sell as many tickets as a glowing one. It is clearly in the interests of both theatre practitioners and theatre reviewers that people continue to be interested in theatre and go and see it, so I think a well written review is one that speaks constructively and objectively about the work pointing out what works well and what doesn’t.

8.    Which three famous people would you invite to dinner and why [dead celebrities included]?  And what tasty treat would you prepare?

I’d obviously choose William Shakespeare as my first. We know so little about his life, so it would be a great chance to fill in all the gaps and find out if I’ve got things right in trying to present his work in the spirit in which it was written.

For my other two I think I’d choose the main characters in my two most recent plays. Bacchus, the god of wine who features in Bacchus In Rehab which I wrote with S P Howarth and which has its premiere at the Etcetera Theatre last year, and Grigori Rasputin, the mad monk who features in rock musical Rasputin Rocks! which I wrote with Alistair Smith and which had its premiere at the Kenton Theatre, Henley-on-Thames in 2008. Both of these shows will soon be making a comeback, and if any of your readers are interested in learning more about them or helping with funding them then they should visit www.camdentheares.com or our company website www.facsimileproductions.co.uk.

Not sure what I’d cook, but I’d definitely stock up on wine and vodka to kick off a drinking competition between Bacchus and Rasputin. Don’t know who my money would be on to win, but it would be a lot of fun to watch.

9.    Tell us 5 interesting and unknown facts about yourself!

As well as my theatre work, I’m a performance poet and will shortly be appearing as a special guest at the Estonian International Poetry Festival.

I nearly became a lawyer when I left school and then thought better of it and ran away to the theatre.

I’m a big rock fan and my favourite band is The Wildhearts. Ginger is the finest song writer the English language has ever known (including the Beatles and Dylan!) and I would urge any of your readers not familiar with their work to check them out.

My favourite writer is Iain Banks and I one day hope to adapt one of his early novels Walking On Glass for the stage.

My girlfriend Lucyelle Cliffe is half Hungarian, and is appearing in two exciting new musicals called Piramania and Plague at the C Venue in Edinburgh this summer which are well worth seeing if anyone gets the chance.

10.    What would be your dream come true?

I would love to have my own regional rep theatre to run with sufficient funding for me to be able to put whatever I liked on with no commercial pressures of how many tickets I need to sell. Maybe one day…