Taking the Bard around the Globe in a camper van

"I would like to see someone who could clear away all the cant about original practices' and the fetishistic obsession with Elizabethan underwear. I sometimes wonder if the feverish proponents of authenticity would like us to see the Elizabethan drainage system similarly restored," wrote critic Michael Billington in the Guardian a couple of years ago. He was reviewing the possible successors to Mark Rylance as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, on London's South Bank.

In the event the job went to Dominic Dromgoole, who for the previous seven years had been artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company. When we last spoke, Dominic was about to move from OSC, so when we met up in his attractive, half-timbered Globe office, I asked him if there had been any surprises when he took up his new post.

"There have been a huge number of surprises actually. The biggest surprise is the audience, and how generous, excited, enthusiastic, and loyal it is. Audiences are a very important part of this theatre, because unlike anywhere else, the audience makes up 33 per cent of the event - a third of each event is the audience, a third is the extraordinary Globe building, and a third is the show. Discovering that fact was a very steep learning curve, and a great joy."

As for the productions staged at the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, like any new theatre artistic director, has introduced some changes to the policy followed by his predecessor.

"Mark Rylance's's horizons were pretty healthily wide, but we've taken on several new things. We're doing new plays to a degree that we didn't before, and in terms of Shakespeare, we're working our way thorough a different brand of titles from those Mark worked on. Last year we opened with Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, which are more visceral, muscular, and bloody in many ways than was naturally Mark's temperament. This year we've taken on Othello, which is cold-blooded, passionate, and intense." At this point, Dominic is interrupted by some ominous rumbles coming through the wall from the theatre below. "That's a technical rehearsal for Holding Fire, which is full of pleasant noises," Dominic explained.

Now Dominic has expanded outside the Globe itself, by mounting a touring production of Romeo and Juliet. It's a first for the present Globe, but it most certainly isn't a new idea.

"It's a linkage back to the original Globe," Dominic said. "They used to tour regularly - there used to be a body of opinion that they'd only tour when there was plague, or when the city fathers wanted to close the theatres down. But everybody's reassessed that now, it seems that they toured all the time, whenever they could. Touring was in their blood. But also I love touring - coming from Oxford Stage Company, which is of course a touring company, I love doing it, I love touring round. But all theatre comes from touring. Theatre was touring before it was bricks and mortar. Buildings only started coming up in the 1570s.

"In some funny way this place - the Globe - has proved that you can go forwards by going backwards, and rediscovering. Theatre is not about the proscenium arch, or a little black studio box. The Globe has thrown open a whole range of possibilities about what theatre could be."

"In the same way, I think that if you take touring away from theatres, and just do it in the open air, and here, there, and wherever, you're discovering an interesting and exciting new way of presenting both Shakespeare, and other plays too. So I've always wanted to tour, but I didn't want to do it just as a reconstruction of the past. I wanted to do it as a way of refreshing what theatre is."

By all accounts, the Globe's touring Romeo decidedly isn't a reconstruction of the past. Director Edward Dick and designer Anthony Lamble are using a camper van, which caused a memorable moment when the production opened with a performance at the Globe itself.

"Indeed it did. We had a fantastic opening performance here - the whole of the set is based around this very classic, 1970s Californian camper van. But having decided on the van, we then discovered that we couldn't get it into the theatre, there wasn't any aperture large enough. I was, of course, very delighted to discover this fact. Every problem is always challenging. So we hired a crane on a Sunday morning, and we lifted it in over the roof, dropped it down, and put it on the stage. The camper van is terrific, it sharpens the mind, it engages the intellect, because you look at it, and think how on earth are they going to make the play work around that?'."

Yet in spite of the camper van, according to the Globe's advance publicity Romeo is being performed "in fine period costumes". That must make it easy to get in and out from behind the steering wheel, I suggested to Dominic.

"It becomes period costumes," he replied. "It's a very fine and intelligent game that the director and designer play. It starts out not in period costume, but the characters don Elizabethan gear as the play goes along."

Advance publicity also states that this is "a stripped-down version of Shakespeare's love story" - music to the ears of this reviewer, who has endured outdoor student productions of Romeo from which not one single word has been cut. By the time the Oxford college clocks strike 11 at night, you really do wish Juliet would get on with it and die.

"This is really quite cleverly, but firmly, cut," Dominic laughs. "It's very lean, there's not too much fat on the bone anywhere. More than any Romeo and Juliet I've ever seen, you really get the momentum of the story, that it's hurtling on, that it's sort of uncontrollable. Which I think is what Shakespeare intended. I think those elongated, slow productions really don't do the play any service at all. You've got to go at the Friar, the Nurse, and some of the prose gags a bit, and then you end up with something very honed, very sharp-edged, and very full of anger. It's a play that's full of rage in various ways."

In view of the dreadful weather this summer, it was quite a surprise to hear Dominic say that Romeo is already making financial sense as it tours outdoor locations around the country. So two more Globe tours are already being planned. But one location is missing this year: Oxford is the nearest the tour gets to Stratford itself. I asked Dominic if he had deliberately decided not to set foot on hallowed Stratford turf.

"We almost had a date in Stratford itself actually," he laughed. "But we hope we can get closer to Stratford in future. It would be delightful to visit our country cousins!"

The Shakespeare's Globe production of Romeo and Juliet runs from August 11 to 16 in the gardens of Wadham College. Tickets via the Oxford Shakespeare Company at 0870 609 2231 or www.ticketsoxford.com