“Our revels now are ended”, quoth Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame, echoing the same bleak acceptance of death first coined by Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Only Hamm, in the shape of modern-day theatre hero, Mark Rylance, is muttering this to Clov, played by Complicite’s Artistic Director Simon McBurney, 400 years since Prospero’s expiration.

The revelry of the stage doesn’t ever seem to dwindle – despite fears of recession, cinema, and an endless recycling of snoring boring classics. And for many, the Cambridge drama scene seems to be a step-shuffle kick into stardom. It has played nursery to household names with fantasy résumés that read: ‘brief ADC fling; Footlights legend; did Edinburgh; picked up by the BBC; Artistic Director of the Old Vic; Nine Academy Awards’. Dominic Dromgoole, current Artistic Director of the Globe, Simon McBurney, the founder and artistic director of experimental company Complicite, John Barton, co-founder of the RSC (centre, from left to right) are three such directors who assumedly spring from these origins. I met up with the three alumni to discuss their varying physical, philosophical and meta-theatrical paths from the Cambridge streets.

McBurney is the only one who was born and raised in Cambridge. Consequently, attending Peterhouse “didn’t hold the same mystique”. He flitted indiscriminately from show to show, making people laugh. As with the fantasy résumé, sooner or later the Footlights got wind and invited him to participate in their Revue. “I wasn’t very much of that world”, he admits, “it was the era of punk: I’d dyed my hair pink, I was busy attending anti-Nazi rallies, and taking a lot of drugs”. While the Footlights were thrashing out endless wordplay, McBurney wrote ‘situations’ without words, and showcased his work in the Corpus Playrooms, which he co-founded with friends.

Sitting in his dressing room at the theatre where Endgame is showing, dressed in a grimy white tank-top costume and tanking up on food, McBurney looks every inch the maverick practitioner. “[At Cambridge] I had the feeling I was treading someone else’s path or dancing to someone else’s tune”. So he ran away to Paris, to L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, the international drama school with origins in Commedia dell’arte clowning.

Whilst McBurney comes off as part-rebel and part-Shakespearean fool, John Barton more than satisfies the wise-man stereotype. As a Cambridge undergraduate, the 81-year-old Barton refused to do the Tragedy paper in Part II English. “There’s no such thing as tragedy, particularly with Shakespeare– it’s a Greek title”, he maintains, so he switched to Anglo-Saxon, aced the exam, and became a fellow at King’s in the early 1950s.

He probably would have stayed there if chum Peter Hall hadn’t asked for his support in forming the RSC. Hall had only directed one Shakespeare play during his time at Cambridge, and Barton’s proficiency was an asset the company craved. As Barton explains, “Hall wanted to create a more permanent ensemble, he wanted everyone to be expert with the text”.

The emphasis on ‘expert’ is what differentiates Britain’s two most famous mainstream Bard-centric establishments. Barton is a paragon for the RSC, having directed every single Shakespeare play at some point, some many times. Sipping tea in his London home, he maintains he is not lecturing me on theatre, but there is no doubt that I am listening to an ‘expert’.

Dominic Dromgoole, on the other hand, chats to me with his feet up on his desk. His office backs directly onto the Globe, sharing a wall with the theatre – which is plainly evident from the clashing sounds of an Elizabethan band entertaining schoolchildren.

There is much debate about the standard of shows that take place in the Globe. Barton, for example, refused to sit on the council for it, declaring “it is there for the tourists”. Of course, Dromgoole vehemently defends it: “It is not kitsch, and there are not that many tourists in the audience…any interesting buildings will surely court attention”.

To be fair, Dromgoole has a point. “I think everything should be approached as a new play. Whereas at the RSC you are reacting to four hundred years of performance history, when we do Shakespeare here our our ambition is to say ‘no one’s done this before’ and come to it with freshness and immediacy”. He believes that the architecture of the Globe demands shows that are naked and honest. “It can’t be about directorial ideas – it’s got to be about human beings in the moment, and that’s what writers write are for; not for the directors to come up with something… It’s very easy to do something theatrically new, but it’s totally fucking pointless.”

Maybe it’s because Dromgoole is the baby of the three – he graduated in the 1980s – or maybe it is because he was a student during a period of recession where most of his university mates  graduated into unemployment – either way, he talks about theatre with cut-throat cynicism. He studied Classics at St Catharine’s and then switched to English, which he calls “a total doss”. He wangled his way onto the ADC, Marlowe, and Mummers committees (which specialised in bringing heavyweight shows up to Edinburgh), squeezing out budgets of nearly £2,000 for his shows, some of which he spent on ‘hammers and nails’ (booze and speed).

Except for a devastating blip when his application to direct the European Theatre Group was rejected (“it seemed at the time so definitive, as to whether you were going to be alright or not”) , it sounds like he had a blast.

Upon graduating, Dromgoole worked as everything from a barman to an agricultural consultant. He was in and out of the praised Bush Theatre as an assistant before becoming its artistic director at age twenty-six. He is ‘alright’ now but his path was certainly not clear-cut.

So how do burgeoning Cambridge directors make their own path and break free from the shackles of the text, having started off in Cambridge with impressive academics and one of the finest libraries in the world staring them in the face?

Of the three, McBurney’s theatrical history is the hardest to get to grips with. He describes Lecoq as a thoroughfare for weird and wonderful theatre and performance acts at odds with his staid academic background: “It was a huge liberation to see people making theatre from scratch”. So there’s always unconventional schools like Lecoq, which have a habit of unleashing all sorts of inspiration. He compares the course to RADA: “They say, ‘we’ve got to do these plays, and you have got to learn to act in them, and they will prepare you for the profession’. [Lecoq] didn’t really care about the profession, what he cared about was life and how you create it.”

McBurney’s company is named after one of the three founding principles of Lecoq – complicité is French for togetherness – and it is based entirely on collaborative work. In fact, if there’s one thing all three directors have in common, it’s their admiration for the talents of their peers and their emphasis on collaboration and respect.

Despite Barton’s wealth of experience, he comes across as pragmatic and appreciative. He talks of a hugely successful production of Troilus and Cressida he directed in 1969 starring Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren, saying, “it was their doing, not me. I could do it because there was the talent around.” For him, the key to good directing lies in “good casting”.

Barton and Dromgoole are sensible about the art of directing, valuing the ability to crack open a text and facilitate a company over any kind of directorial vision.  “[The latter] is pretty few and far between,” Dromgoole says. “I’m not one of them. Most people that claim to be are horrendously fraudulent, and their work is a hodge-podge of other people’s ideas.” The advice he offers is practical: “what you learn as a director is how to cast, how to get the right groups of people together, how to get them working: treat people like grown-ups, don’t fuck about with them. Make sure you are the right sort of clownish, but that you have the right sort of authority to make decisions as well”. Dromgoole makes clear that directing is something to ‘learn’: it is a humbling process.

On the other hand, it doesn’t exactly sound inspiring. According to Dromgoole, if you’ve got the balls to stand in front of a group of people and take control then you will make a fine director. But don’t hand in your director’s toupee if you’re a sensitive mouse with a passion for bringing texts to life. There is an infinite abyss that yearns to be filled by the avant-garde. It’s no surprise that McBurney’s experimental approach invites more room for directorial creativity. “I wanted to make theatre that I didn’t see,” he says. He looks outside the text and turns to the space, the actors, and the audience: “the audience in the end literally creates the theatre, because theirs is a creative act, because it’s so obviously fake”. In this respect he agrees with Dromgoole’s ideas about the openness of the Globe, understanding that “you can create a world on stage, where the whole theatre is in a sense absolutely alive”.

But nowadays you don’t have to go to the Globe to have that kind of immersive experience. The avant-garde has been co-opted by the mainstream, with the National Theatre commissioning plays by companies like Punchdrunk and Complicite. The RSC remains as a stalwart emblem of high art and academia, the ten-year old Globe is still finding its feet, and companies like Complicite straddle the border between convention and the avant-garde.

John Steinbeck said that “the theatre is the only institution in the world which has been dying for 4000 years and never succumbed”. For every stifling rendition of Wilde or Chekhov, there will be another that is smartly directed and beautifully observed; there will also be a smattering that are outrageous, brave, and progressive.

So, whether you are an audience member sitting tight and suspending their disbelief, opening up a new Cambridge theatre space, or hanging by a thread from the Bridge of Sighs after another rejection, take heart: you are responsible for preventing theatre’s death. You can run from East Anglia to Paris through the Forest of Arden, via a disused warehouse, and onto the West End stage. But above all, as Dromgoole puts it, “get some bloody sleep”.