Gregory Doran: ‘Shakespeare will last a great deal longer than the culture wars’
Gender fluidity and climate change are not the hot-button topics you’d expect from an author writing more than 400 years ago.
But it’s Shakespeare‘s “contemporary” outlook that means he will “last a great deal longer than the culture wars,” according to Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) artistic director emeritus Gregory Doran.
While parts of the Bard’s texts recently got banned in some US schools due to their sexual content, Doran tells Sky News: “He’s robust, he will always be there. Those plays will always be there.
“If that one single book has lasted 400 years, he is going to survive a few people taking offence.”
And as for trigger warnings – a modern addition to any potentially distressing content an audience might encounter – he finds “the hypersensitivity absurd”.
Doran, who alongside Dame Judi Dench has written the introduction to a new edition of Shakespeare’s complete plays marking the quarter centenary of their original publication, says it’s an “honour” to be involved with the First Folio, which is now considered one of the most influential books in history.
Without it some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays – including Macbeth and Twelfth Night, along with its much-quoted All The World’s A Stage speech – would have been lost to history.
While 750 copies were published originally, there are now only 235 copies known to remain – with just 50 of those in the UK.
In 2020, a copy was sold for over £8m, making it the most expensive work of literature ever to appear at auction.
Doran and David Tennant rehearsing Richard II in 2013. Pic: Kwame Lestrade (c) RSC
Shakespeare is a ‘magnet’ for current obsessions
Doran – who has directed or produced every one of the First Folio plays – says while he didn’t set out to work through them all, he did decide not to repeat plays (although he relaxed his self-imposed rule for a Japanese language version of Merchant Of Venice performed in Tokyo, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he first worked on early in his career, and later revisited).
While he has directed and produced work outside of Shakespeare – including contemporary plays and musicals – he admits “Shakespeare has been the spine of my career.”
It seems once the Bard bug has bitten, it’s hard to tear yourself away.
Because once you work with Shakespeare’s texts as a director, Doran thinks other playwrights struggle to live up to his example.
He adds: “Every play takes you to a different world.
“Shakespeare is like a magnet that attracts all the iron filings of what’s going on in the world… contemporary issues or themes or obsessions.”
He recalls a line in Cymbeline, where the heroine of the play, Imogen – while dressed as a boy – meets a group of young men and says to the audience: “I’d change my sex to be companion with them.”
Doran explains: “The concept of your sex not being a single constant thing, but something that you – even if you can’t – would have the desire to change, that Shakespeare expresses it 400 years ago, it’s just not what I was expected to read.
“In a world of constant conversations about gender fluidity and non-binary, suddenly Shakespeare is articulating this young woman’s desire to try out another gender. And I just find that astonishing.”
Doran also flags Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who gives a speech on climate change.
He says: “Everyone thinks A Midsummer Night’s Dream [happens] on a lovely summer’s evening, but it’s all taking place in the rain. And [Titania] says this is our fault that the weather is changing. She says: ‘The seasons alter.’
“It’s just so surprising to hear something so contemporary.”
Arthur Hughes in Richard III, 2022. Pic: Ellie Kurttz (c) RSC
Trigger warnings about balloons ‘absurd’
Far from a text purist (his 1999 RSC production of Macbeth worked in jokes about Tony Blair) Doran does believe updates should be handled with care – and he certainly isn’t a fan of recent bans on Shakespeare at schools in Flordia.
He says: “You can cut [Shakespeare] in performance. So, if there’s a bit you don’t want to deal with, then don’t deal with it, it’s fine.
“But I would say that certainly students should be given access to the whole thing and the context in which it was written, which is 400 years ago. And attitudes have changed.”
While society has evolved since Shakespeare’s days, Doran’s not a fan of the relatively modern phenomenon of trigger warnings, saying: “I sometimes find the hypersensitivity [around them] absurd.”
Referring to his 2022 production of Richard III, which had a balloon popping in the first soliloquy, he says: “We all have a reaction when someone has a balloon, you kind of cringe waiting for it to pop, but that doesn’t need a trigger warning.
“And in fact, if you’re given a trigger warning, then the danger is that people are not listening to what the rest of the play is because they’re anticipating something they’ve been told is going to happen.
“It’s an absurd thing to say, ‘There are latex balloons in this production,’ when you could also say, and children are murdered, or people are abused and killed [in this play].
“But that’s also a spoiler, you don’t want to hear about that to begin with.”
From actions on stage to behaviour off of it, Doran is aghast at the idea of an audience code of conduct, saying such a list of stipulations would signal “too much of a nanny state”.
He goes on: “I know actors who if the audience are coughing they get furious, and other actors who say, they’re coughing because they’re bored.
“So coughing is very difficult, but I’m not sure that putting in the programme ‘don’t cough’ actually helps them not cough, you know?”
Doran says actors and fellow audience members should be able to keep any poor behaviour in check.
“Any audience is a live thing, and as an actor, you have to be in control of that,” he says.
“Like any good stand-up comedian knows how to, if there’s a rowdy section, then you’ve got some put-downs of those heckles and you get them onside.
“There are other ways of heckling, one of which is to direct the line directly at the noisy person or the person who’s on their phone… They can suddenly realise, because there are sometimes young people who think they’re in front of a television screen.”
Doran and the then Prince Charles viewing the RSC costume store in 2020. Pic: Jacob King
Shakespeare would have ‘shrugged off’ his national poet title
A director known for his progressive attitude towards diverse casting during his decade in the RSC’s top job, he acknowledges not all sections of the viewing public were fans of his approach.
His RSC firsts include an all-female director season, a gender-balanced cast for a production of Troilus And Cressida and hiring the company’s first disabled actor in the role of Richard II.
Doran says he was not surprised by the backlash some of his choices attracted, saying: “The point is not to provoke, but provocation isn’t a bad thing.
“We fetishise Shakespeare.
“We can regard Shakespeare as being the upholder of a particular kind of national sense of identity or spirit.
“I think Shakespeare would have shrugged off any such kind of attribution.”
Some might question whether it’s problematic to centre a white, male perspective and say it speaks for everyone.
But the problems occur, Doran says, when we try to fit Shakespeare and his work into boxes that don’t necessarily fit.
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He says: “In the 18th Century, there was a huge effort to make Shakespeare – and it continues to this day – the great national poet, the speaker of empire, as it were.
“And if you’re doing that, then you have to erase the bits where maybe there is homosexual desire. We can’t have that, so we’ll write it out.”
He flags that of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, 126 of them are from a man, addressed to another man.
Doran goes on: “In the 19th Century… there was an absolutely identifiable process of the heterosexualisation of the sonnets.
“So, the pronouns were changed, because we couldn’t, if we were having Shakespeare as our national poet, we couldn’t have him being gay.
“We all make Shakespeare in our own image… Or if you don’t like Shakespeare, you point to the bits that are difficult and may be misogynist or racist or appear to be so, and we hold those up as reasons why we should no longer study it.
“He’ll last a great deal longer than the culture wars.”
William Shakespeare’s The Complete Plays will be published by The Folio Society on Tuesday, and My Shakespeare: A Director’s Journey Through the First Folio by Greg Doran is out now.
At West London Film Studios – where major productions from Bridget Jones’s Baby to Killing Eve have all filmed – while Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso is currently being shot in one of their 10 sound stages (across two sites), it pains owner Frank Khalid that one of his biggest stages is empty.
But he has a theory as to why – Donald Trump’s social media posts threatening tariffs on films made outside the US.
“Prior to [Trump] posting that we had quite some big major features come to us looking for space,” he says, “and it’s just gone very quiet since he posted… maybe it’s a coincidence, I don’t know, but I believe it has affected us.”
Frank Khalid, owner of West London Film Studios
In September, on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump wrote that America’s “movie making business has been stolen….by other countries…like…’candy from a baby’.”
Repeating a threat he’d first made last May, he claimed he’d authorised his government departments to put a “100% tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States”.
For bigger studios, like Pinewood and Elstree, block-booked years in advance by the major movie producers, his words haven’t had any immediate effect.
But, at smaller studios, like Khalid’s, he certainly feels like there’s been a ripple effect.
“We had a letter from one major big American production saying [the tariff] is not possible, [Trump] legally can’t do it… but at the end of the day, he doesn’t have to do it, the damage is done, isn’t it? By him just posting that… the confidence in the market goes down.”
As Jon Wardle, director of the National Film and Television School, explains, the industry has “always been a bit feast or famine, and we’re in a slight lull… it’s not quite the boom of what it was in 2022 after COVID, but probably at that point we were making a few too many projects.”
Jon Wardle says the UK ‘needs to be more committed to homegrown talent’
Wardle says, Trump’s threatened tariffs are certainly likely to make film companies “slightly more nervous” and “dither a bit more” when it comes to signing off on projects a few years down the line.
But he says it’s important to remember that US studios have “invested hugely” in the UK.
“Disney has a 10-year lease at Pinewood, Amazon has a 10-year lease at Shepperton, the investment for those companies is massive. And the other part of this is that it’s not going to be cheaper to make those films in America. In fact, it’ll be more expensive.”
West London Studios has 194,000 square feet of production space and is one of the UK’s leading independent studios
While the UK industry appears to be finding its feet after the knock-on effects of COVID shutdowns and the US writer’s strike, some smaller studios say Trump’s tariff threats are certainly on their radar.
Farnborough International Studios told us that while it has “recently hosted major TV series for companies such as Paramount and Amazon”, it has “seen film bookings and enquiries slowing down since the first sign of imposed tariffs”.
While West Yorkshire’s Production Park said they’d “not seen any slowdown”, a spokesperson for their studios said they are “tracking wider policy changes that could affect us”.
Mr Wardle says: “I think is it’s a good warning to the UK industry. I think the UK needs to take more seriously the commitment to its own homegrown talent. How do you make projects that aren’t funded and paid for by Americans or another nation?”
This year’s London Film Festival
With little detail for now, few working within the industry can fathom how a tariff would deliver the happy ending of shoots returning to Hollywood that Donald Trump might desire without driving up costs and stifling investment.
“There’s a huge number of questions about how you actually make tariffs work,” Mr Wardle explains. “It seems like a silly example, but production accountants: we train production accountants and nowhere else in the world does… we planted those seeds 20 years ago and we’re now reaping the rewards.
“It’s not going to be cheaper to make those films in America… so they’ll just make less.”
While Number 10 awaits full details of the latest US tariffs and their potential impact on the UK, a government spokesperson said: “Our film industry employs millions of people, generates billions for our economy and showcases British culture globally. We are absolutely committed to ensuring it continues to thrive and create good jobs right across the country.”
Listen below to Trump100 from May where we discuss Trump’s tariff threat:
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The madness of trying to second-guess what the president might mean becomes all too apparent at an event like this year’s London Film Festival.
Mr Wardle explains: “There are films in this festival that were made in Britain and in the US, made physically in terms of the shoot in London, post-produced in Canada, with VFX done in India…. how do you apply tariffs? At what point do you do that?”
Read more:
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On the red carpet, actor Charles Dance – who stars in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein – questioned Trump’s knowledge of filmmaking.
“I don’t think he is generally known for his own understanding of culture,” he said, “this is a man who wants to concrete over the Rose Garden.”
Rian Johnson, director of the Knives Out franchise, said it was “dark times right now in the States, for a lot of reasons”.
“All we can do is keep making movies we believe in, that matter, that say things to audiences… I think we need more of that so we’ll keep forging ahead as long as we’re able,” he said.
A BBC Gaza documentary breached the broadcasting code, an Ofcom investigation has found.
The regulator said the failure to disclose that the 13-year-old boy narrating the programme was the son of a deputy minister in the Hamas-run government broke the rules and that it was “materially misleading” not to mention it.
In July, the BBC said it breached its own editorial guidelines by failing to disclose the full identity of the child narrator’s father in the Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone documentary.
The documentary was made by independent production company Hoyo Films, and features 13-year-old Abdullah Alyazouri, who speaks about life in Gaza during the war between Israel and Hamas.
It was pulled from BBC iPlayer in February after it emerged that the boy was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who has worked as Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.
A report into the controversial programme said three members of the independent production company knew about the role of the boy’s father – but no one within the BBC was aware.
Ofcom’s investigation into the documentary, which followed 20 complaints, found that the audience was deprived of “critical information” which could have been “highly relevant” to their assessment of the narrator and the information he provided.
The report said the failed to disclose a narrator’s links to Hamas “had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war”.
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Crises within the BBC
Following an internal review into the programme, followed by a full fact-finding review the BBC’s director of Editorial Complaints and Reviews, Peter Johnston, the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, and Hoyo Films apologised.
Hoyo films said it was “working closely with the BBC” to see if it could find a way to bring back parts of the documentary to iPlayer, adding: “Our team in Gaza risked their lives to document the devastating impact of war on children.
“Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone remains a vital account, and our contributors – who have no say in the conflict – deserve to have their voices heard.”
Israel does not allow international news organisations into Gaza to report independently.
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Describing it as “a serious breach of our rules,” Ofcom said they were directing the BBC to broadcast a statement of their findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date yet to be confirmed.
Responding to the findings of Ofcom’s investigation, a BBC spokesperson said: “The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston’s review, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code.
“We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom’s decision in full.
“We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised.”
The BBC has faced numerous controversies in recent months, and just last week, former MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace filed a High Court claim, suing the broadcaster and its subsidiary BBC Studios Distribution Limited for “distress and harassment” after he was sacked from the cooking show in July.
The 61-year-old ex-greengrocer was dismissed after an investigation into historical allegations of misconduct upheld multiple accusations against him.
The BBC has said Wallace is not “entitled to any damages,” and denies he “suffered any distress or harassment as a result of the responses of the BBC”.
Kiss founding member Ace Frehley, the rock band’s original lead guitarist, has died aged 74.
He passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, in Morristown, New Jersey, his agent said.
He had suffered a recent fall.
A statement from the rocker’s family said they were “completely devastated and heartbroken”.
Ace Frehley celebrates as Kiss are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. Pic: Reuters
New York-born Frehley was Kiss’s guitarist when they started in 1973.
The other members were Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Peter Criss.
Like his bandmates, Frehley took on a comic book-style persona on stage (he was known as “Spaceman”) and captivated audiences with his elaborate makeup and smoke-filled guitar.
The band’s shows were known for fireworks, smoke, and eruptions of fake blood, while the stars sported platform boots, black wigs, and – of course – the iconic black and white face paint.
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Especially popular in the mid-1970s, Kiss’s hits include Rock And Roll All Nite and Detroit Rock City.
They sold tens of millions of records and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014.
‘Irreplaceable’
Frehey’s family said they would “cherish all of his finest memories, his laughter, and celebrate his strengths and kindness that he bestowed upon others”.
Criss posted a simple tribute on X, describing his shock. He added: “My friend… I love you!”. A photograph of Frehley, smiling in his “Spaceman” makeup, accompanied the message.
Meanwhile Stanley and Simmons described him as an “essential and irreplaceable rock soldier”.
Paying tribute, the duo said they were “devastated” by his death.
Frehley’s Kiss career first ended in 1982, before he returned for a reunion tour in 1996, staying on until 2002. He also released several solo albums.
He is survived by his wife Jeanette and daughter Monique.
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