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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
In an article in The Sunday Times a few days before the 1976 Stratford season opened, Trevor Nunn showed a healthy distrust of current cliché:
’Free Shakespeare! Banish conceptions. End the tyranny of Directors’ Theatre. Let the plays speak for themselves
I disagree with these essentially academic slogans.
His distrust of academic cliché had positive results, especially in Macbeth. As Robert Cushman put it in his review in The Observer, Macbeth
is the most self-aware of tragic heroes, and the play makes us free of his mind. (Here of course lies its greatness - not … in the piling up of external symbols of chaos to point a perfectly obvious moral.)
Since Mr Nunn's production brought this out, 'the play gets into your bones'. The implications of the imagery were made clear, but with a lightness of touch, and through character. Again, his imaginative independence enabled him to re-value the second half of Romeo and Juliet, or at any rate to turn its weaknesses to positive account.
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