Every year, the Royal Shakespeare Company goes out on the road to take Shakespeare to the masses. Rachel Kavanaugh, director of The Merry Wives of Windsor, tells ANDREW WHITE about our love affair with the Bard
I like entertaining people. I don't think that is any less important an aim than being conceptual and erudite about a play," explains Rachel Kavanaugh, the RSC's latest hot young director, as she embarks on the challenge of directing one of Shakespeare's least fashionable, and in some ways most peculiar, comedies, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Her mission is simple: fun.
"Basically I want to show the audience the delights that are in this play, so that they have a good time."
It is such a passion for the sheer pleasure of the theatre that brought 34-year-old Kavanaugh to the attention of RSC artistic director Adrian Noble. He gave the former RSC assistant director a major break last year when he asked her to direct the blockbusting family hit Alice in Wonderland on the main house stage in Stratford.
The show was so popular that she is now directing her first Shakespeare for the RSC's Mobile Auditorium Tour.
The daughter of an actress, Kavanaugh's relationship with the RSC goes back a long way. She started seeing the company at the Aldwych theatre in London when she was just a child, and went on to become an assistant director with the company when she was in her 20s.
"The RSC has been a big part of my life. When I was young I loved nothing more than coming up to Stratford and seeing the same company of actors playing a range of parts in different shows. I'd try to see all the shows in a season."
Kavanaugh initially wanted to be an actor. "That's the face of theatre that young people see, and I didn't really know what a director was until I was lucky enough, between school and university, to work for Kenneth Branagh as assistant to the director."
Accessibility and clarity of storytelling are the keys to Kavanaugh's approach to directing. She says that she finds it helpful to assume from the outset that her audience does not know the play. There are personal reasons for this approach: Kavanaugh recalls seeing Shakespeare when she was a child and failing to understand the story.
"I was so angry because I felt I should at least have been able to understand what was happening, even if I didn't understand every word. I never want any of my audience to feel like that."
Kavanaugh was attracted to The Merry Wives of Windsor before she was asked her to direct the play. She admits to finding this rather oddball play fascinating and unlike any of Shakespeare's other comedies.
"It's the only comedy set in England and the only one which is primarily about the middle classes and, furthermore, is entirely written in prose. The language is extraordinarily robust, inventive and rich.
"It's a very eccentric play, and in some ways the language is surreal. There are also so many wonderful farcical moments - men dressing up as women, people being carried out in baskets, people getting locked in cupboards. There is just so much wit in the play."
Kavanaugh is particularly thrilled to be tackling a play with such fantastic parts for women. "It's unusual to have a Shakespeare in which the title relates to two female parts. This gives a really good insight into the balance of the play."
Although this is her first Shakespeare for the RSC, Kavanaugh has already directed a large number of other Shakespeare plays, including some for the Open Air theatre in London's Regent's Park.
Design is another important feature of her work. For this production she and her designer Peter McKintosh have set the play in the late 1940s, a period that Kavanaugh cals "the beginning of fun".
"There is a struggle in this play between men and women and then between men and women of different classes. I needed a period that reflected this, but I didn't want a setting that was too outlandish and that would take over.
"At the same time I didn't want to do the play in Elizabethan dress, as it makes a play which is already quite eccentric in its language seem quite distant. This can also be particularly hard for an audience who might be new to Shakespeare. I want the audience to think that the play has something to do with them, and I think that this 1940's period setting does that."
The RSC bring Corialanus and The Merry Wives of Windsor to The Mountbatten Centre, Portsmouth from Tuesday to Saturday April 26. Box office: 023 9269 0011.
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