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• Director Jimmy Fay discusses his production of Macbeth

  Why did you choose Macbeth?
  I’ve always loved Shakespeare. The first thing I directed was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the mechanicals section, and it went really well. When the opportunity arose to suggest a few plays to Fiach Mac Conghail (the director of the Abbey Theatre) we agreed on Macbeth because I love the politics in the play, it’s the politics of paranoia. No one really suggests to him he has to kill the king then he goes and kills the king. I also identified with the main character. Okay, he’s an anti-hero but I can kind of see where he’s coming from.
  
  
  What does a director do?
  It’s difficult to summarise. You have directors like John Dexter, who did The Royal Hunt of the Sun, who staged things very elaborately but didn’t seem to care much about the actors’ process. And then you’ve got directors who were very good with actors, like Eli Kazan, who got in there with the actors, pushed them forward and helped them find their way to create that role. Then there are people like Peter Brook and everything becomes organic. He talks about it like guiding, as if you’re in a ship.
  Which I quite like. I quite like the idea that you’re searching for a way into the jungle and then out of the jungle. Because texts are very strange, people come at them in different ways. What you try and do is keep everybody’s creativity going in the room – your own as much as everybody else’s. I don’t believe directors should just sit back and allow everybody else to create. It’s about helping people find the key. The director’s main job is to keep everybody in as fertile, as open-to-suggestion a state as possible.
  
  Read the full interview here:http://www.abbeytheatre.ie/behind_th...

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• Where was Shakespeare born? 0 Taken

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• Have you seen Macbeth before?

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