An Interview with Deborah Newbold

Join Deborah Newbold for King Lear Retold on Saturday 4th November 7pm-8:40pm for a deeply felt and often uproariously funny retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Deborah makes Shakespeare accessible to everyone in her bold and compelling performance that has all the power and grace of the original text, presented in a charismatic, thoroughly modern style.

So click here to book your in-person ticket to this event.

If you can’t make it to Settle but can’t wait for this event, click here to book your ticket to watch it online.

Kaden James recently caught up with Deborah to discuss King Lear Retold, the power of storytelling, her experience working with Shakespearean plays, and more.

So let’s see what Deborah had to say.

You are going to be performing King Lear Retold at this year’s YFOS. In your own words, how would you describe this performance and what should audiences look forward to?

King Lear Retold is a heartfelt storytelling experience which retells one of Shakespeare’s plays in a way that is accessible to everyone – not just those interested in Shakespeare, but the Shakespeare sceptics, the curious, those who like storytelling, and those who really, really dislike Shakespeare but are open to a new experience. Although my performances include huge amounts of Shakespeare’s original text, you won’t always know it’s there because I slip it in as I’m talking to the audience.

On the whole, this is a storytelling performance, so I will be inviting the audience in and facilitating a shared experience of the story. Like all good storytelling events, it can’t happen without the imagination of the audience.

Some things the audience can expect are: they can expect to be welcomed into a very deep and challenging story by a safe pair of hands; they can expect drama and emotion, but they can also expect to laugh a lot; they can expect to hear Shakespeare in a way they haven’t heard it before; they can definitely expect to hear Shakespeare, and they can expect to be invited to participate in a journey through the extreme moments of a person’s life.

This isn’t the only Shakespeare retelling you have written and performed. What is it about retelling Shakespeare’s stories that capture your attention and imagination?

I have been working very closely with Shakespeare’s plays for the last 20 years and for 17 of those years, I’ve been in deep conversation with the Globe Theatre in London, investigating the different ways into Shakespeare. What I love about Shakespeare is the fact that all of his plays explore the depth of humanity and centre around human drama. His works may be set in certain places and certain times, but the stories inside them are stories that we can all relate to. It doesn’t matter that Romeo & Juliet is set in fourteenth-century Italy or that it is a story of noble people, at its heart it’s a story of people who are not allowed ownership of their own decisions and their own love. It’s the story of people who are handed down an enmity that they don’t question. It’s about inherited trauma and anger. That’s something we can all relate to, right?

King Lear, the story I will be performing, is the story of a man who is losing a part of himself and can’t explain why. Lear is old and is losing his desire to bear the burden of leadership, but not his desire to have all the things that being king gives to him. He can’t reconcile those two things or embrace the next stage of his journey through life. This, ultimately, drives him to the edge.

King Lear is also about transformation – how difficult this can be and other people’s response to a human being changing – and love. It asks: Is love telling the truth always or is love knowing when to tell the truth and what truths to tell?

In a sense, King Lear is also about speaking truth to power and speaking truth to those we love. King Lear’s daughter, Cordelia, speaks truth to power when Lear asks his daughters how much they love him. While two of his daughters tell him what he wants to hear, Cordelia tells him something more like the bold and honest truth. But what motivates that and was she right to do that?

The theme for this year’s festival is “Speaking Truth to Power”. What do you believe is the power of storytelling in today’s world, and how do you see it achieving justice in our world?

I can’t make any claims for the power of any individual story that I perform or have seen, but I know from my own experience that talking about things through stories – even things that we find hard to name – can unlock things within us; things we didn’t even realise were locked in the first place. This can happen on an individual level or a societal level.

The power of a story is not something you can measure by ticking a box and saying, “Yep, that’s done”; it’s something you have to have faith in. That being said, there is something magical about the charge in a room where a story has landed with at least a handful of people. When this happens, all we can do is hope that this charge is taken out of the room and reverberates beyond that moment. I think sometimes stories can have this power and sometimes they can’t, but that in itself is a reason to take a leap of faith and keep telling them.

Can you share a memorable or transformative experience you’ve had as a storyteller and performer? How did it affect you and your audience?

Often you don’t know, as a storyteller, that something like that has happened in the audience because everyone is so unique. But occasionally I’ll get people coming to me and sharing what a story has done for them. Sometimes they do this in person, or sometimes I will receive an email out of the blue weeks later. These can be incredibly moving personal revelations or just times when the story has chimed against the strings of another person’s life. I think that’s part of the reason I love storytelling.

I can remember one time when I was telling Romeo & Juliet, there was a row of 8-year-old girls in the audience. They were listening intently, and when it got to the point where Romeo was about to take his own life one of the girls put her hand up and sucked in a deep breath – a completely emotional response for her – and I was able to come off the mic and talk to her directly about what was happening in the story and why. We talked about the fact that she didn’t want Romeo to do what he was going to do, and how I didn’t want him to do what he was going to do, and no one else in the room wanted him to do what he was going to do. We talked about why he might be doing it.

It was an amazing moment of unpacking the tension in the story and naming the fact that this story is about someone who’s about to take their own life, and not taking this fact lightly or trying to explain it away. We put it on the table and there was a powerful moment of collective concentration. I’ve never ever forgotten that and I’ve had people who were there that day come up to me after different performances and tell me that they remember it too.

Are there any particular themes or messages that you frequently explore in your work? What draws you to these themes?

I am not conscious of any themes or messages when I approach a story to tell it. I don’t think, “Oh, I’m the storyteller that talks about this kind of thing” or “I want to tell this to the world”; I go on instinct. If I’m drawn to a story, I work on it for a long time inside my own self before I tell it. Then when I tell it, I have faith that I’ve done the necessary work to make it something that has the valency and tension between me and it that means it wants to be told. But if I’m really honest, only after telling it many times do I come to understand what it’s really about for me, because a story can be about many different things. That meaning then strengthens itself over time as I become more conscious of it, but then of course it can change. It can change because I change, but it can also change because when I tell a story I adapt it to the space and audience I am with.

There can also be things going on in the world that change the meaning of a story as I’m telling it. That’s happened concretely with Romeo & Juliet before, where I have been telling the story and thinking about things that are happening in the world at the time – particularly conflicts. In those moments, an unspoken understanding between me and the audience has arisen regarding what Romeo & Juliet is about but I don’t pre-decide.

I’d say my work is definitely about compassion, as someone once said to me at a festival. And alongside that, if your work is going to be about compassion, it also has to be about conflict and tension because compassion comes from finding a way to bridge conflict or understanding that, sometimes, there is no bridge between two opposing poles. Compassion can also be about finding humour in extremis.

Personally, I love the clashing of high drama and humour or sorrow and humour. I think my work seeks to find clashes. I like clashing my work with unusual sounds and music or clashing themes of horror with themes of ridiculous pantomime (which comes from my background in clowning and European theatre). And that’s the thing about Shakespeare, even a tragedy has a lot of laughs in it.