Rupert Goold is the director with the golden touch

1/2

10 April 2012

Rupert Goold, talking into his mobile at the National Theatre stage door on a breezy July morning, is instantly recognisable with his square silhouette, leonine Renaissance curls and toffee-brown eyes.

Directors don't come hotter than this 36-year-old Cambridge graduate, crowned king of his generation two years ago for his multi-award-winning Stalinist Macbeth, and now become a giant following the triumphant reviews for Enron, his latest production. One after another, critics have lined up to hail Lucy Prebble's new play about the collapse of America's seventh largest corporation as an instant classic', a dazzling political drama' and a compelling tragedy of modern capitalism'.

In his dreams Rupert couldn't have asked for more. Although, he laments to his PR woman in the lift, I was hoping to be in the review of reviews in The Guardian.' But they were amazing, I say. Yes,' he agrees. I woke up the morning after Macbeth opened and thought I would never get such good reviews again, but I was wrong.'

The young Turk, routinely spoken of as a next head of the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, breaks the mould in the thespian world. He looks not to theatrical greats but the Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger for inspiration (He also has to manage people who are the money, like the stars – the Ronaldos of this world'), is married to the glamorous actress Kate Fleetwood (you could cut glass on her cheekbones)ith whom he has a four-year-old son, Raphael, and has made his name with incredible, horror-movie-inspired productions that owe most to the surrealist suspense of his film-director hero Stanley Kubrick.

You go to his performances expecting a rush of energy,' says The Observer critic Susannah Clapp. He's never afraid of overdoing it, of being florid, and he pulls off the most unforgettable imaginative transplantations.'

Last year Rupert opened his Pete Postlethwaite Lear with a stentorian recording of Thatcher's Francis of Assisi speech; he put his Tempest in a polar wasteland; and intercut his Faustus with the story of the shock Brit artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. His 2007 Macbeth, in which he cast Patrick Stewart as the lead and his own wife Kate as his Lady, and which won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for best actor and best director, was, breathed The Times, a terrifying Stalinist vision, set in a space like an abattoir, with a kitchen fridge of industrial dimensions and taps that ran blood. With its mighty conceptual stamp, its high-energy effects and clear referencing of horror movies (Saw and The Shining in this instance), it was covered from top to toe in his distinctive fingerprints.'

The one fly in the ointment was the Lear, which the critics considered to be messy, a view Postlethwaite controversially validated by saying that Rupert had tried to do too much, a piece of disloyalty that did not go down well. But he must be thrilled by the reception of Enron I ask once we are sitting in the press room. I know,' Rupert exclaims.

There's nothing more exciting in theatre than a new play, and, above all, a new play that feels like it captures a moment about society now: they come along really, really rarely.'The production moves from Chichester to the Royal Court in September and stars Sam West as the energy giant's creepy CEO, Jeffrey Skilling.

Combining elements of mime, satire and musical, it portrays the consultants Arthur Andersen as ventriloquists'puppets and the Lehman Brothers as conjoined twins. Rupert's goal as a director is above all not to be dull. I think that theatre, like a lot of high culture, often forgets that people get bored,' he says. My references tend to be cinematic.

I'm interested in anxiety, and Shakespeare is very interested in anxiety as well – a lot of his best plays feed on social or personal anxiety about sexuality, or power, or death. And for ten years there's been this huge presence of anxiety on screen, from The Blair Witch Project through to Pan's Labyrinth.

These days our lives are so fragmentary. With social networking we want to connect, and yet we tend to feel paranoid most of the time, and horror tends to play on anxiety about isolation and existential loneliness. We have all these fragmented mirrors for ourselves now, in terms of who we are.'

Certainly Rupert is not remotely the playful, confident figure I was expecting, or that his appearance would suggest. Thoughtful and understated, he is dressed head to toe in black.

His hand protectively cradles his cheek or stands sentry across his waist, and his legs are crossed defensively, though he does admit with a grin that his ideal weekend is going off with old Cambridge mates to the countryside and getting hammered'.

He was, he goes on, an incredibly nervous and worrisome kid', a fact he puts down to genetics, although the anxiety stopped at the time he left home for Cambridge. And I think my parents maybe wanted me to be a sort of literary, slightly precious type,' he adds hastily. But no, it's genetic: I can see it a little bit in my son.'

Rupert's father Michael is a founding director of London's Ashridge Strategic Management Centre and a former senior fellow at the London Business School; his mother, a bookworm as a child, writes children's books under the nom de plume Elizabeth Hawkins. His younger brothers Toby and Edward are a banker and lawyer-cum-novelist respectively.

Despite the wave he is riding, Rupert is still quite bruised by the reception to his Lear. Enron has been a huge success and I had a run of about four or five critic darling hits: Macbeth and Judas Iscariot and Faustus and Six Characters in Search of an Author.

But the King Lear initially got quite bad reviews and I remember feeling quite – I didn't have any crisis about it – but I thought I'm interested in artists who take risks, and by definition if you take risks it's not always going to work, because you're not risking anything.' He pauses. The King Lear I thought was one of the better things I've done, and it got a standing ovation every night, and I got really hacked off with the media response. Maybe I should get more thick-skinned about it, but it made me think, "Should I get more conservative?" – because there is a more conservative way of doing things. A lot of directors see their role as more discreet.' He laughs.

But then I realised that my anxiety was really middle class – you don't make a lot of money as a theatre director, and it was the anxiety, "Oh God, if I'm a flash in the pan, am I still going to get any work?" And I decided my fears were probably inherited rather than natural. And that as an artist one shouldn't worry about that, you just do the work and respond to the world you live in.'

And perhaps Postlethwaite is not the easiest person to work with? No,' he agrees. He laughs again. It's a bit like sport, it should stay in the dressing room. To be honest, I think Pete wears his heart on his sleeve and sometimes it's a lubricated heart, and so if someone catches him he'll speak from the hip.'

Brought up in Highgate, Rupert read a lot and was a Dungeons & Dragons geek'. He came to directing via acting in plays at his fee-paying University College School (I was the guy who got two lines at the back – I was naturally not a performer, I'm quite shy, so it was groupiedom really'). But it was at Trinity College, Cambridge, that he blossomed and threw himself into directing.

Despite the fact that he toured student productions of Othello round Europe and Twelfth Night round the East Coast of the States in his final year, he got a First and a Fulbright scholarship to New York University. Rupert also landed the Donmar theatre traineeship under Sam Mendes, but it was with a bursary to the Salisbury Playhouse that he broke through.

You can assist whoever, I assisted Sam Mendes, but it doesn't really make a difference to getting on,' he explains. You've got to get a show and invite people to it. I got a show very early on, Bouncers, no sets, four actors, which was good enough that when someone pulled out of Travels With My Aunt, a Graham Greene adaptation,

I was asked to do it at the Salisbury Playhouse. 'Directors always get two opportunities, he goes on, but the trouble was he screwed up his second. So I did The End of the Affair, which opened doors, and the next show I did was a touring production of Romeo and Juliet. Trevor Nunn was just coming here [to the National] and it really could have been a gateway show for me, but it wasn't very good.

I remember thinking afterwards, "That was my break, and I f***ed it up." Everything had been leading up to that, and everyone came to see it, and it wasn't good enough. And I was having a difficult personal time, I was in a bit of a bad place.' This was the production on which he met his wife (they have just celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary). He bursts out laughing when I ask about it. Blinded by it probably,' he admits. He adds, Crass, I know,' with a smile, that Kate was playing Juliet. We got together, we were both in relationships, so it was a bit muddy.'

His lowest ebb followed. I would do some good rep work that no one would see but people would hear was good, then I'd be offered something that everyone else had turned down in London, and which was probably not very good. I remember I did a remount of Speed-the-Plow because I needed the money, with a slightly troubled cast member, it was someone else's show, in the West End, and I felt like a tart, because it wasn't my thing, and it didn't do very well. I was six, seven years out of university and by that point my peers were doing well and earning, with mortgages and proper careers. I was thinking, "God, this is just not happening." And financially I was really up against it. I was 29 and really in debt.'

He was living in Finsbury Park with Kate at this stage (they are still there, in a nicer flat). I think it's easier if you don't want to have a family,' he observes. I'm not materialistic. I don't need to go out, I've got a really shit old car, I don't buy clothes. But when you want to have a family you need a certain level of income.' I ask how his wife feels about his success.

Far more successful than him when they met 11 years ago, she has become the less glittery partner in a classic marital theatrical pas de deux, alternating Shakespeare in the RSC or rep with small TV parts. I hope she's pleased,' he says. Well, I know she's pleased because she knows how depressing I am to be around when it goes badly. She said after the Enron reviews came out, "Thank God for that!" ' More relaxed at last, he bursts out laughing and heads outside to slay a few more sacred cows and set another wave of audiences on fire.

Enron is currently at the Chichester Festival Theatre and comes to the Royal Court Theatre on 17 September (royalcourttheatre.com)

MORE ABOUT

Anxiety

Rupert Goold is the director with the golden touch

Read More