There's lots of Shakespeare around this month and who better to ask about the playwright's enduring relevance than the renowned Bristol company who have made Will their life’s work? On the eve of Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’s thirteenth spring season, Steve Wright quizzes artistic director Andrew Hilton on the pleasures and pitfalls of Bard-worship.

There is certainly no ‘right’ way to do a Shakespeare play, though there are many that I would privately consider as wrong-headed or just plain silly.” Andrew Hilton knows more than most about staging Shakespeare. For the past 12 years Andrew has directed Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the company he created in 1999 and which has played a major role in south Bristol’s cultural renaissance, in lauded productions of Will’s work at the Southville theatre. Taut, atmospheric, emotionally acute and faithful to both Will’s words and his dramatic intentions, SATTF’s annual seasons at the Tob Fac are inked-in theatrical highlights for audiences and critics from Bristol and way beyond, as a string of annual national press reviews testifies.

And, as Andrew is explaining, his approach to directing the Bard is based not on some timid deference to Shakespearean tradition, but on having the emotional intelligence to accurately read Shakespeare’s words, characters and scenarios. “For me there is one question every Shakespeare director should ask themselves: Whose mind am I really interested in – Shakespeare’s, or my own?” he continues. “If the honest answer is ‘Shakespeare’s’, then I think anything goes in one’s efforts to express the product of that mind on stage; even the substitution of AK47s for swords and computer screens for pen and paper – though they both ring alarm bells for me – are potentially completely legitimate strategies.”

Before a six-week, late-spring run for ‘The Cherry Orchard’ (SATTF’s third Chekhov, and the augurs are good – but more of that nearer the time), Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory kick off their thirteenth Tobacco Factory season with ‘King Lear’. Will’s great (greatest?) tragedy, ‘Lear’ is also the play that began the company’s story on a late winter’s night in Southville 12 years ago (pictured below). Crowds were small at the start of SATTF’s 2000 ‘Lear’ run, and for a while the company looked in danger of folding almost as soon as it had begun – until enthusiastic reviews in The Independent, Venue and elsewhere quickly turned fortunes around.

So how will SATTF’s 2012 ‘Lear’ differ from that anxious but auspicious debut? Will it reflect changes to SATTF, Hilton or the wider world since then? “Peter Hall once said that Shakespeare turns a new face to every decade,” says Andrew. “In broad terms I think that is true – his work is continually alive because of its capacity to both reflect and interrogate the great spectrum of our experience, the whole range of our moods.

“And without any intention on my part to ‘do it differently’ second time around, this ‘Lear’ will be different, both in terms of the personalities (the cast is completely new), and how the times have changed. The revolutions in the Middle East highlight Lear’s function as a despot – a benign one, if you compare him to Saddam, Gaddafi or Assad, but still an all-powerful, overbearing personality who rules his people, and defines their behaviour and relationships, as if they were all his children. Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Cornwall are not sweeties by any measure, but the energies released in them by Lear’s surrender of power in the play’s first scene can and should be compared to what we have been witnessing recently in Cairo, Homs and elsewhere. A thirst for self-respect and self-empowerment is common to both ‘Lear’ and modern politics.”

‘Lear’ can be seen variously as an examination of one man’s descent into madness; a stand-off between loyalty and ambition; a portrait of a warring family and its impact upon a whole nation; a study of love and duty, power and loss, good and evil. Hilton, though, is wary of ascribing such major themes to Shakespeare’s plays. “Some playwrights do set out to illustrate a thought or a concern, or – like Ibsen – they create a variety of different scenarios in which to wrestle with life-long obsessions. Shakespeare, though, began with pre-existing stories (‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ is perhaps the only exception) and mined them for all the humanity and drama they could provoke in his imagination. There is no attempt to prove a hypothesis, or beat the drum for one cause or another.

“‘Lear’ is about everything; what it is to be human. It’s about civilisation, and the substance of mankind stripped bare of it; it’s about growing up, and growing old; about self-knowledge and self-ignorance; about sexuality and power; about naming, about status and position, about identity itself.”

And how, meanwhile, does the 2012 SATTF differ from the young company of 12 years ago? “We have learned a huge amount, although it has been a gradual process – I don’t recall any great lightning-flash revelations. I hope we are a little bolder in expression, as well as a little more skilled in the use of the Tobacco Factory space. We are fortunate in that we can spend a little more on design, which means that [designer] Harriet de Winton can achieve our ambitions to express the plays visually with greater clarity and detail.”

What actors and directors must always strive for, says Andrew, is to treat Shakespeare’s work as living material. “His plays are not mere frameworks in which to stuff your own obsessions and worldview. Nor are they showcases for your own invention. Yes, you might hope to bring something ‘new’ to a Shakespeare performance, but it’s far better if that is provoked in rehearsal by the company’s responsiveness to the text, rather than some grand, pre-conceived scheme to relate the play to Watergate or Afghanistan.”

Talking of setting, though, is it ever necessary to update Shakespeare’s rather rarefied worlds – a Renaissance court, early Medieval England – or are his themes and moods universal enough to negate these quantum jumps in space and time? “There’s nothing wrong in asking your audience to make a leap of imagination in time, place and culture,” is Andrew’s firm belief. “Isn’t it rather patronising to assert that a Bedminster audience, for example, will ‘connect’ with ‘Measure for Measure’ only if it is set in contemporary Bristol, to assume that audiences want to see only their own immediate world portrayed on stage? The real task is to bring those distant times and cultures alive, not by slavish recreations in design and manners, but by the vivid representation of humanity.”

Exotic clothes and outlandish settings, he insists, are no barrier to recognising your life and emotions in Shakespeare’s stories. “The danger lies in lazy assumptions about people ‘then’ being different; that sticking daggers in people, autocracy, the subjugation of women in society, were all unquestioned, unexplored facts of life in the past. I am currently gripped by the first series of ‘The Killing’ on DVD. It engages so strongly because, unlike run-of-the-mill crime thrillers, it takes grief seriously. That’s all we need to do to bring stories from the past alive – to take the human life within them seriously.”

The Shakespeare Unplugged festival over in Bath (see page 18) is doing some very innovative things with Shakespeare’s work – reinterpretations, circus-style explorations, a ‘Macbeth’/‘Hamlet’/ ‘Lear’ soap opera omnibus. What are the opportunities, and the risks, involved for those who choose to play around with Shakespeare’s words? “I am no purist,” says Andrew. “The only real crime is to be dull, and to send people way from the theatre not wishing to see ‘Shakespeare’ again. But as for the plays ‘speaking for themselves’, they don’t. That is simply not in the nature of dramatic writing. Even at Shakespeare’s level, a play is a negotiation between author, actor, designer and director. If actors can’t interpret, they can’t truly engage; and if they can’t look at a text anew, they will just reach down their performances from the dusty old shelves of tradition. To act with conviction and passion actors must make choices and risk being wrong.”

Factory records

Six seminal SATTF shows

1 King Lear (2000) Andrew: “It nearly saw our rapid demise, but we were saved by an enthusiastic half-page spread in The Independent by Toby O’Connor Morse, to whom we owe an everlasting debt. That turned our ship away from the rocks in a matter of hours.”

2 Coriolanus (2001) “That production thrilled Jeremy Kingston of The Times and, for the first time, saw us move a play across the centuries, from the Roman era to Europe in late-18th-century Europe.”

3 The Changeling (2004) SATTF’s first non-Shakespeare production earned them a run at The Barbican in London (pictured).

4 Titus Andronicus (2006) It was the production that nearly finished SATTF, playing to only 40% capacity. “We had misjudged our established audience and failed to expand it to include more of the younger generation who would have relished its bloody, black humour.” An appeal for funds followed, and SATTF’s audiences answered generously.

5 Othello (2007) “For me, one of our most complete achievements. Elegantly designed (by Chris Gylee), and I just couldn’t have assembled a better cast.”

6 Uncle Vanya (2009) The company’s first co-production with Bristol Old Vic – and their second Chekhov – later toured to the Galway Festival.

KING LEAR WAS AT THE TOBACCO FACTORY, BRISTOL FROM THUR 9 FEB TO SAT 24 MAR. FFI: WWW.SATTF.ORG.UK CLICK HERE FOR VENUE'S REVIEW AND HERE FOR MORE SHAKESPEAREANA.

Copyright Steve Wright 2012; pics copyright Alan Moore ('King Lear', 2000); Graham Burke ('Hamlet', top).