“Touring is something that we have wanted to do for years, but was something that we could not afford to do without funding,” says Gordon Barr, Artistic Director of Scotland’s only professional outdoor Shakespeare festival, Bard in the Botanics. If there’s any irony attached to the company’s first major tour of Scotland, in early 2015, it’s that the performances of their acclaimed Romeo and Juliet – featuring a cast of five – were played exclusively indoors.
“Nobody is touring classical theatre in Scotland at the minute, so it’s important to us,” he adds. “Our work is so much about accessibility; one of the joys of being outdoors is that people come to see the work who wouldn’t buy a ticket for a theatre. If you can bring a picnic, sit out on the grass while watching the show, it feels easier, more accessible. But people can’t come from Thurso to Glasgow for a night just to see a production of Shakespeare. They should be able to see it in Thurso. So that kind of where the urge to tour came from.”
Bard in the Botanics has presented outdoor Shakespeare within the grounds of Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens since 2003. (This year’s “Unlikely Wonders” season presents new productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in “rep” between 24th June and 1st August.) Founder Scott Palmer, Barr explains, had done a lot of his training at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the biggest in North America. “With the kind of drive and enthusiasm that only Americans have, he managed to convince the entire city of Glasgow that outdoor Shakespeare would work, and that the weather wasn’t going to be a problem!”
Two years later, Palmer moved on and Barr – originally involved as a director – succeeded him as Artistic Director. “If anyone then had said that I would end up spending twelve years running an outdoor Shakespeare festival, I wouldn’t have believed them,” he says, in his office hidden behind some of the Botanics’ gardening sheds. “I very quickly fell in love with it once I started working here. Despite all the trials and tribulations that outdoor theatre in Scotland brings with it, there’s just something magical and special about it. It’s a very close-knit company, and that’s sort of kept us all here as long as we have been.”
While the annual summer season of Shakespeare plays in the Botanics will remain at the centre of what the company does – “Otherwise, Bard in the Botanics becomes a rather strange name” – Barr is very much focused on building on the touring side.
“Because it was our first ever tour, we did end up taking Romeo and Juliet to the established Scottish touring circuit,” he adds. “It takes a while to build up relationships with the smaller venues; that’s going to be an ongoing process for us. Even so, we were taking Romeo and Juliet to places like Mull and Stranraer – communities and venues that haven’t had a lot of classical theatre coming through them.”
The choice of play was deliberate too. “It was a production that was ready to go, which had received five star reviews and sold out its extended run in the Botanics in 2012. So we knew that the work was good, but there’s no doubt that, for a first tour, we wanted to make it easier for the venues to sell it. Most venues know they can find an audience for Romeo and Juliet.”
In time, he hopes that audiences around the rest of Scotland will come to trust the Bard in the Botanics name sufficiently to take on the less familiar plays. “You just don’t know how quickly a community is going to turn out for Henry IV yet,” he says. “Hopefully, three or four tours down the line, they’re going to turn out for Bard in the Botanics – and if it happens to be Henry IV, well, that’s great.”
Given their reimagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a 1920s burlesque musical, is there a particular Bard in the Botanics approach to Shakespeare? “Our kind of unofficial motto is: ‘Be Bold, Be Brave’,” Barr says. “If we’re continuing to stage these plays around 400 years after Shakespeare’s death, I think there’s an urgency to ask: Why? It is important to question: What is the story that we want to tell? I want to see how these plays intersect with history and today’s society, not to present museum pieces.
“It’s always with an eye to try to release something that’s within the text,” Barr insists. “We’re not remotely interested in innovation for innovation’s sake. The plays are masterpieces; that’s essentially why we’re still doing them 400 years later – but to reveal something that’s unexpected or new, that’s important to us.”
First published in Shakespeare Magazine, #8.
