Foot-in-mouth disease….

No one, it seems, can quite so dependably cast himself the cat amongst the arts pigeons than Dominic Droomgoole, new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, who always gives what they call “good quote”. In yesterday’s Guardian, he speculated about his own, self-inflicted misfortune in being king of these kind of soundbites in a fascinating piece on the consequences of his press conference at the Globe last week – and the interviews that followed – to announce his first season in charge.

He writes: ‘I’m no great Shakespearean,’ splashed the headline over the London Evening Standard’s interview with me last week. Possibly not the best beginning to a year in which I’m starting work as the director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and publishing a book on, yes, Shakespeare. This unfortunate disclaimer was one of a series of foot-in-mouth incidents that studded a week in which we launched the new season at the Globe. It often seemed it was impossible to say anything without it being skewed off in some unfortunate direction….”

He doesn’t dispute the things he says: in the same Evening Standard interview, the line that prefaced the headline was, “It’s true, I know fuck all about that space”, to which the interview adds, “he says, cheerfully gesturing towards the Globe’s unique auditorium.”

But the refreshing thing about Dominic has always been his fearless honesty. No one quite speaks it like it is as he does; he doesn’t mind enemies, even powerful ones. (On David Hare, he once wrote, “How has such a flat writer come to be afforded such a mountainous reputation?” And of Tom Stoppard’s more difficult plays, he has said, “It’s like dealing with a lunatic who keeps telling you he’s got a map showing where he buried his underpants, but he’s eaten it”).

It’s the pointed brilliance of observations like this that make one feel he is wasted as a director and would actually be even better as a theatre critic. Not for nothing did the Sunday Times, for whom he writes regularly, once court him as such.

Dominic talked astutely in his Guardian essay yesterday of how press conferences actually work: “The conference, in an undiluted form, is a microcosm of the whole media contract. A lump of information, arranged into a narrative, is delivered to a group of people, who filter the information and rearrange the narrative according to their own agenda. The media is a prism, through which a single story gets refracted into a democratically complex collection of stories. Some bear a distinct resemblance to the original, some none. Nowhere is this more starkly apparent than at a press conference.”

He proceeds to unravel how, even as he spoke, he could see the story being spun in different directions. As he holds up the various narrative possibilities that were emerging to the light, he notes that the assembled journalists “started in on what was clearly their favourite theme: the purported battle between us and the RSC. I offered up a brief encomium to the revived RSC, and to their audacious idea of producing the complete works, but I saw eyes glazing over at such feeble diplomatic politeness. Nobody wanted agreement; everybody wanted war. A classic media phrase, ‘Stay in control of the story’, flitted through my brain. But I was immediately struck by the restrictions of that approach. Why stay nervously in control of a single story? Isn’t that rather dull? All the straitjacketed, uptight aloneness of the politician, adamantly arguing a straight line, which does no justice to the strange curves of their own personality or the world, suddenly becomes miserably clear. Why a single story? Why not let the thousand stories of any exploded democracy happen all around us, and enjoy them?”

Dominic’s Globe is clearly going to be a Globe for lots of storytelling, on as well as off the stage. I look forward eagerly to the fireworks continuing to explode around him.