Which is Shakespeare’s least loved play? The Two Gentlemen of Verona would come high on many people’s lists. It is clearly apprentice-work. It has had few significant revivals. And it also raises problematic issues since the treacherous Proteus threatens at one point to rape Silvia who is betrothed to his best friend, Valentine. For these and other reasons it is no one’s favourite play.
This could, however, be about to change. Greg Doran – now officially Sir Gregory – is staging a production at the Oxford Playhouse with student actors. After 35 years as an actor and then director with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Doran is this year’s Cameron Mackintosh visiting professor of contemporary theatre at St Catherine’s College. It is a seductive post – whose previous occupants include Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Deborah Warner and Adjoa Andoh – which involves giving lectures and workshops. But Doran has had the bright idea of using his tenure to direct the one play in the First Folio that has so far eluded him: The Two Gents. After spending time watching him at work, I have a hunch that he may have cracked some of the problems posed by one of Shakespeare’s early works.
“It is an ideal play,” says Doran, “to do with students. It is about young people leaving home, falling in love, discovering their identities. It even brings back memories of my own experience of leaving Preston to study at Bristol just as Shakespeare’s characters quit Verona to go to Milan. But working on the play has been genuinely collaborative. It’s been a funny old couple of years since the death of my husband [Sir Antony Sher]. I’ve filled it with various displacement activities such as going round the world studying existing copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio. What this production enables me to do is get back into a rehearsal room and to pass on what I have learned to the next generation. They are also teaching me. There’s a scene where Launce and Speed, two comic servants, discuss the attributes of a milkmaid. One of the actors said to me that it was exactly like a Hinge profile. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about until he explained that it was a dating app.”
How, though, do you cast a play when you are unfamiliar with the students’ work? “Well,” says Doran, “80 initially sent in videos. I saw 40 of them in person and cast 20. What is extraordinary is the range of experience. Half the cast are undergraduates: the other half are doing DPhils or master’s degrees in subjects that include neuroscience, the history of art and professional theatre in the Soviet gulags. Three of the cast I’ve discovered also do drag acts.”
Youth is the key with which Doran seeks to unlock the play. The central quartet – Valentine and Silvia, Proteus and Julia, who follows her faithless lover to Milan disguised as a boy – are all cast from undergraduates undergoing their own voyage of discovery. Doran has also set the play in a recognisable modern Milan whose locations include a Grand Prix final and a bus station. In addition, there are a couple of gender-swaps in that Proteus now has a mother instead of a father and the forest outlaws of the final act are turned into female ecowarriors. Watching Doran at work with the students, what really struck me was the two-way nature of the process. He offers a lot of technical advice: they offer their own views on the characters.
Doran prefaced rehearsals with a two-week “Shakespeare gym” to explore the rules of verse-speaking. But working on the floor he constantly stresses the importance of line-endings: a mantra inherited from Peter Hall. I watched a scene where Proteus’s mum is being attended by a pair of nail-technicians while deliberating whether to send her son away from home. Much of Doran’s focus was on the mum’s PA and his strenuous advocacy of Milan: “There shall he practise tilts and tournaments / Hear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen / And be in eye of every exercise / Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth.” By urging the actor to stress the last word in each line and to make the verse “land”, Doran showed how what might be a routine speech acquires unexpected weight: the irony is, of course, that once Proteus gets to Milan he betrays his birth by behaving like a total shit.
Or does he? This is one of the big debating points of the production. Once in Milan, Proteus falls in love with Silvia thus betraying his best friend and his own devoted Julia. Doran stages with great precision the moment when Proteus is first introduced to Silvia: she greets him with a courteous smile, he stares at her as if thunderstruck. Doran allows the scene to run on to Proteus’s self-justifying soliloquy and then throws a question at the whole company: what are we to make of Proteus at this point?
Answers come from all round the room. A female student says Proteus is like a lot of Oxford men who make love to one woman while keeping a girlfriend at home: another says that you feel a bit sorry for him. One view is that Valentine and Silvia are far from an ideal match in the first place which sort of validates Proteus: another is that “everyone has been in Proteus’s position but you don’t therefore act on your impulse”. What is surprising is how much sympathy there is for Proteus: his lover Julia, who follows him to Milan, is even described as a stalker. But one of the shrewdest comments comes from Jake Robertson, the gulag expert who is playing the Duke of Milan, who says that the only real love relationship in the play is between Valentine and Proteus.
What emerges is that Doran wants us all to radically rethink the play: to banish the idea of Proteus as a moustache-twirling villain, to glory in the verse and to see this early work as an intense study of the pangs of youth. Talking to the actors who play the four leads – Rob Wolfreys as Proteus, Will Shackleton as Valentine, Rosie Mahendra as Silvia and Lilia Kanu as Julia – I am also struck by their own collaboration in the creative process and by how significantly student theatre has changed over the decades.
The idea of engaging professionals like Doran is itself not new. In 1959 I was a revolting Roman citizen in an Oxford University Drama Society (OUDS) production of Coriolanus directed by Anthony Page, then forging a career at the Royal Court, designed by Sean Kenny and featuring Susan Engel as Volumnia. Oxford theatre then was highly centralised with OUDS and the Experimental Theatre Club (ETC) determining the choice of plays and productions. Now power has been devolved with students forming their own production companies and selecting their own venues. The turnover is incredible: I was told there were 23 Oxford productions in the last term alone and at least 60 over the past year. I have no idea whether this affects academic work but I was staggered by the unfazed cool of Kanu who is in her third year reading History and English at Balliol and who will sit her finals immediately after Two Gents has finished its run.
It is a whole new world to me and one that is, I suspect, replicated at campuses all over the UK. But this production will face two iron tests when it moves on to the stage of the Oxford Playhouse. One will be the cast’s ability to project the lines and to that end a professional voice coach has already been at work. The other key test is whether the actors can avoid being upstaged by a live dog in the shape of a cockapoo cast in the role of Crab. If they can do that, they will truly have reclaimed this once unfashionable and unloved play.
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona is at Oxford Playhouse, 15-18 May
