After spending time with the National Theatre, the Sussex-based British-Bahamian theatre writer, director and educator Robin Belfield went on to launch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s youth development programme. 2024 sees him directing Anne Odeke’s Princess Essex (a play about Britain’s first black contestant in a beauty pageant) at Shakespeare’s Globe.
During our phone conversation, Belfield overflowed with fiery enthusiasm and self-deprecating laughter. For someone who has filled Bristol’s old passenger shed with acrobats, reimagined Othello as Conchie Joe for Nassau’s Shakespeare in Paradise Festival and last year directed sketches for a show that included Mackenzie Crook and Simon Russell-Beale raising funds for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), he remains remarkably unconceited. His frank answers frequently began with an ‘I think’, reflecting a disconcerting openness.
So what was the spark that first set him ablaze? “When I was quite young, 12 or 13, my dad took me to a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company when they toured to Community Centres.” It was Henry VI, Part 3 – not the easiest of plays. “I remember not following much of the story,” Belfield admits, “but getting an incredible sense of theatre.” It has stayed with him as a touchstone of “what theatre can be: how exciting, how visually arresting.”
Nowadays, Belfield sees his mission when directing Shakespeare as one of reassuring the audience: “You will get it. You’ll follow the story as much as you need to. You don’t have to understand every word, every moment.”
Play’s the thing
It’s that insight that pushes Belfield to work with young people: “Theatre is all about play, right?” he chuckled. “That’s why we call them plays and playhouses. As adults we lose that sense of playfulness. Young people have it in spades! There are no limits to their imaginations.” He says this lack of cultural baggage and openness to new ideas drives them to discover things in Shakespeare’s work. “They go ‘What is this crazy story?’ and allow themselves to get carried away. It’s a two-way thing.”
When I asked what he has discovered while working with young people, he replied simply, “Crikey! Lots.” He mentioned one workshop on Much Ado in which the group was working on Hero and Claudio’s wedding scene, a scene where a young woman is rejected in front of her friends and family. “Discovering how the young people instantly connected with that public-shaming was really worrying. It had a terrifying resonance for them. Social media means that we live in an age where that is so much more present.”
Shakespeare finds a way
So what draws him to directing and Shakespeare in particular? For Belfield, it’s all about exploring “how we can express the stories of our lives”, how we unleash intense emotions which we have internalised because they feel too private to express.
“Shakespeare finds a way of giving them language. Music does the same, it has a way of expressing the thoughts that ordinarily wouldn’t be said. My job as a director is always trying to be on the outside, always going, ‘How does that translate for someone who is experiencing the play for the first time?’”
Theatre is collaborative
So good directors are outsiders? “That’s my job, to be the audience.” Belfield challenges the old myth that the director is the one who has all the answers:
“Theatre is collaborative. We all have different skills and come together to make it work. My job is to ensure that all the pieces of the jigsaw fit into place, and that all the pieces are from the same jigsaw – that the sound designer isn’t designing sound for a futuristic play and the set designer designing something that’s set in the 18th century. The story is all of those elements: it’s the actor on the stage, the words of the script, the costume that they’re wearing, the lights that are on them, the sounds and music that you’re hearing.”
Can subsidising theatre be justified in an age of foodbanks?
When I wondered out loud whether subsidising theatre can be justified in an age of foodbanks, Belfield paused. “If you think about the NHS being the investment in the physical health of the nation, the arts are a way of investing in the emotional and psychological health of the nation but funding is a real issue.”
Lack of funds is not the only problem. Many theatres express a genuine desire to be accessible to all, but is that really achievable? “We can tell ourselves all sorts of stories about who we want to come to theatre, but until we make it affordable I don’t think we’ll ever truly make that happen.”
Perhaps theatre is not going in the right direction? “I think great theatre is being made, but I think theatre needs to constantly look at itself and question who is making it, what stories we are telling and who’s telling those stories.”
Princess Essex
Belfield’s new project is a case in point: “It’s going to be a fun piece. It’s about identity, about someone finding agency in their own life. You have to ask, ‘Why haven’t we heard of this woman who called herself Princess Dinubolu?’” Since the princess’s brief moment of fame in 1908, she has faded from view, but Anne Odeke’s often humorous play sheds light on a small corner of black women’s history.
Belfield laughed: “There’s something so truthfully audacious about someone saying, ‘No, I’m going to take my life into my own hands. And I’m going to stick two fingers up to the rules. I’m going to be counted and be heard.’ I think that’s a story that everyone can relate to.”
Princess Essex runs at Shakespeare’s Globe in London from 13 September to 26 October 2024.
