Theatre Director Confessions, or How to Sabotage Your Career in Fourty-Four Easy Steps

As the more astute amongst you may be aware from the subtle hints I have dropped from time to time in this blog, my chosen career is that of theatre director (also it's in the sidebar).  I don't often delve into the world of theatre here - this is a sacred space reserved for vital and pressing journalism about which Batman is best, after all - but sometimes the muse pipes a tune and I must dance to it.  To put it in a way that is slightly less absolutely appalling, as the amount of time I spend doing my job increases, the amount of time available to spend thinking about Batman decreases.  Since I am unwilling to give up the one dominion in which I occupy the role of benevolent dictator, I thought I'd try combining the two.

The following is a sum total of all the things I will one day end up proclaiming loudly at the Oliviers at the same moment the room goes unexpectedly quiet.  Howard Davies will shake his head in dissapointment.  Rufus Norris will delicately avert his gaze.  Thea Sharrock will make an awkward face to her left.  I will drink champagne with great dignity, and trip as I leave the room. Thus:

Theatre Director Confessions, or How to Sabotage Your Career in Forty-Four Easy Steps

1) Sometimes when I watch Mark Rylance act, I hear Liz Lemon’s voice in my head saying “Nope. Hipster nonsense.”

2) Every time I try to read a Beckett play I giggle uncontrollably and have to put it down because it’s so very Beckett. Consequently the only Beckett play I have read is Waiting for Godot and it took me three goes to get past the first page.

3) I like Tom Stoppard. Haters to the left.

4) It is ridiculous that any high profile production directed by a female director should have to represent all work by female directors but I am irrationally panicky when such productions are anything less than flawless and I read the reviews poised in a state of hyper-tense paranoia, scouring them for anything that would not have been said about a male director.

5) I am more angry than I let on about the fact that Michael Grandage was allowed to spunk an astronomical amount of money on a season of work that never rose beyond “okay, I guess”, simply by virtue of being Michael Grandage.

6) I have only ever seen one Katie Mitchell production but sometimes I lie and say I have seen others.

7) I lied to Ben Whishaw about being a fan of Katie Mitchell.

8) I have never read Katie Mitchell’s A Director’s Craft.

9) I have never read Peter Brook’s The Empty Space.

10) I own both, and still believe that I will read them one day.

11) I have an irrational fondness for female directors who swear a lot.

12) I get uneasy when directors are criticised for having gone to Oxbridge because I went to Oxbridge and I try and calculate how much my level of privilege is offset by being female and always conclude that it is not enough.

13) I am far too easily influenced by other people’s opinions. I no longer know how I feel about London Road, having heard it praised and eviscerated with equal ferocity.

14) I sometimes have trouble telling Simon Stephens plays apart, which feels a bit like being racist.

15) I believe that everyone has the right to fail, and fail big time, at least once, but I am scared that the reality is such that I have to be hitting home runs from the start.

16) Sometimes my attention wanders in rehearsal. I am secretly convinced that no other director has ever let their focus slip, ever.

17) I would like to be able to point to a defining incident in my childhood that explains why I decided to become a theatre director, like a supervillain origin story. Sadly, I can’t get beyond ‘I like plays and I like being in charge and I have no transferrable skills.’*

18) I can, however, pinpoint the moment when I acknowledged to myself that I wanted to be a theatre director. It was New Year’s Eve 2009/2010 and after repeatedly being turned away from the club my friends were in for being too drunk, I was eventually allowed access, belted up the stairs just in time for the countdown and looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows to see the National Theatre lit up across the river. “In ten years’ time,” I slurred to the assembled party, few of whom were paying attention, “I’m going to be on the other side of the river.” Four and a bit years later, I no longer retain the same sense of certainty, but have at least never been clubbing on New Year’s Eve since.

19) The best thing anyone has ever said to me over the course of my fledgling career is, "I'm not scared of Nick Hytner.  I'm scared of you."

20) The worst thing anyone has ever said to me over the course of my directing career was not actually a comment but they laughed openly at a play I had spent six months working on.  The play was not, per se, a comedy.

21) I am sort of waiting for a certain generation of theatre makers to die out.

22) I am definitely waiting for a certain generation of audiences to die out.

23) I will always rather go and see a Shakespeare play than any other writer, and I believe he is objectively the best playwrighdt in the English language. Fine if there is someone else you prefer, but do not fool yourself that there is someone better. There isn’t.

24) Equally, I sort of wish the RSC was just Greg Doran directing and no-one else.

25) I feel slightly sorry for the Marlowe Society. I feel like they sit around pretending Shakespeare doesn’t exist and if someone says the word ‘Stratford’ the room goes silent except for the sound of a single glass shattering on the floor.

26) I think less of people who dismiss Sarah Kane.

27) I worry that ‘edginess’ is going to become the defining factor in how well a play is received amongst my generation of theatre practitioners.

28) I feel like I should feel like more of a nonsense about using the word ‘practitioners’ but I don’t.

29) I feel guilty that I am more likely to remember young male actors I like than young female actors.

30) I find actors easier to get along with than playwrights, which is why I prefer working with dead ones.

31) I am a bit sad when actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston find international film and television fame because it means I am less likely to see them in the theatre again and, probably, less likely to see performances as good as the theatre ones I saw at the beginning of their careers. Andrew Scott, stay with us.

32) I have invented a fictional Royal Court playwright whose work includes such plays as 'Savage Genuflection' and 'The Quiet of Skin'. The title of the play is said in context approximately two-thirds of the way through each.  I am not sure to what purpose this imaginary person exists but I'm sure I’ll find out in due course.

33) I’m pretty certain I’ll write a humorously personal yet insightful collection of essays about Shakespeare plays one day and when I do, I’ll probably call it ‘Lear’s Button’. It will have moderate success, read mostly by dramatically minded English undergraduates, being too academic for most theatre-goers and too silly for most academics.

34) I once had a whole conversation with another theatre director I was trying to impress that I thought was about the Marvel Comics Avengers but was actually about the 1960s television series Avengers.

35) I once thought my cast had locked me in the lighting booth where I was doing some work so they could order pizza without me.  It later transpired they were writing individual thank you cards.  I still would have liked some pizza though.

36) The fact that I will now never direct Richard Griffiths as King Lear almost makes me not want to bother directing King Lear at all.

37) I think anyone who actually likes Titus Andronicus will grow out of it.

38) If I were offered a choice between running any theatre building I wanted or being the next companion on Doctor Who, I am genuinely unsure what I would say.

39) Everyone always uses the example of a Shakespeare play 'on the moon' to denote ridiculous relocations of classics.  I have never seen a Shakespeare play set on the moon.  I would like to.

40) I thought Joss Whedon's Much Ado film was better than Kenneth Branagh's.

41) There is no role I would not like to see Cush Jumbo play.  Literally no role.

42) Going to see a high-profile production of a play you know and thinking to yourself ‘I could probably do that better’ is one of the most enjoyable feelings you can have in this business, and you must never ever tell anyone about it out loud.

43) I genuinely don’t understand why Hamlet at least is not played equally by male and female actors now. (Hedda Gabler is not the female equivalent of Hamlet. Hamlet is the female equivalent of Hamlet.)

44) Jerusalem wasn’t all that.

*Slightly disingenuous, but I don’t think you want to hear the long-winded, over-earnest version I save for job interviews.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Review

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

The Haymarket, 11th July 2011

First, a confession - or perhaps just common knowledge: I love Tom Stoppard. Not romantically, that would be weird, but he is, without doubt, my favourite playwright of the 20th century, perhaps my favourite of all time after that little so-and-so from Stratford who manages to sneak in and steal the top spot. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead comes second only to Arcadia in my list of Stoppard favourites and, in many ways, seems to be a play tailor made for me: it's full of erudite, self-satisfied, undergraduate humour, contains long philosophical tennis matches on death, free will, determinism and storytelling, and, best of all, it does clever things with my actual favourite play of all time, Hamlet. (I'm aware, by the away, that all these are highly unoriginal favourites but, what are you going to do? Cliches are just truths people are tired of hearing.) Add in the fact that this is the first time I'd actually seen the play onstage and the whole production seemed to have been created entirely for my viewing pleasure (Directed by Trevor Nunn? Great. Tim Curry as the Player? Outstanding - even if he then dropped out due to a chest infection. Two History Boys as Ros and Guil? Yes. Please.) and I was almost bound to be disappointed - or at least incapable of reviewing it fairly and objectively. So please, if I get little excited at times, bear with me.

The play even opened with one of my favourite theatrical devices: precision lighting. In a lovely piece of foreshadowing, the disembodied heads of Rosencrantz (Samuel Barnett) and Guildenstern (Jamie Parker) seemed to hang suspended for a moment before the lighting spread slowly over their bodies and then the stage in general, revealing a very Beckettian tree in front of which the two hapless travellers are seated. Cue a sophisticated ripple of laughter from the audience. After all, how often do you get to laugh at a reference to a reference? Thankfully, however, Nunn's production handles the self-referential side of things with welcome restraint and the production is gloriously funny as a result, gently inviting us to laugh at the philosophical knots the characters tie themselves in, as well as with them. A word about the set here, actually, which is constructed of lines that vanish towards infinity and archways that seem to lead nowhere, perfectly evoking the idea that somewhere Hamlet is happening, only we can't quite find it but are stuck in its landscape anyway. The staging, too, is similarly simple yet inventive, making great use of two large leather satchels that Ros and Guil constantly sit on, use as pillows, pick up, sling round their chests, pull cloaks out of and put them back in, always travelling, never arriving. There was a nice touch also that took me a while to notice: Barnett and Parker's Renaissance courtier costumes turn out to be, on closer inspection, contemporary boots, jeans and jackets, leading to a lovely moment when they are faced with actor-versions of themselves, dressed this time in period costume that is familiar enough to give them pause, strange enough to make them uneasy.

Another confession, this one a real one: despite having been directed by Sir Tom himself and starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth in the respective title roles, I don't really like the film. I find Oldman's Rosencrantz too obfuscatingly stupid and Roth's Guildenstern too prickly and defensive to be enjoyable and their chemistry sadly lacking. So it was a joy to see a kind of role-reversal enacted here: Barnett's Rosencrantz was childish and petulant but also highly strung and panicky, whilst Parker's Guildenstern had an air of stoicism, almost lugubriousness, that covered an altogether different kind of anxiety, a constant and wearying uneasiness about who they were and what they were doing and why he seemed to be responsible for it all. If forced to choose at gunpoint, I'd say that Barnett's Rosencrantz is more successful than Parker's Guildenstern by a hair, and I lay this more at the feet of the direction than the acting: a few too many of Guildenstern's lines that could be shocking or poignant or thoughtful are played for laughs.

In the event, this was my only disappointment about the production as a whole: in his note in the programme, Nunn calls the play " a masterpiece". It is a masterpiece, but Nunn doesn't direct it like one, or if he does, it is a comic masterpiece. The real, devastating impact of some of the contemplations of mortality are subsumed under the humour of the inept philosophers delivering them: Guildenstern's struggle to articulate the sheer negativity of death ("Death is nothing...death is not...it is the endless time of not coming back") seem oddly glossed over and the climactic moment in which he believes he has killed the Player was not climactic or shocking, with a fairly unconvincing death from the Player and little to no reaction from Guildenstern. Guildenstern accuses the players of cheapening death through performing it over and over again, arguing that it does not bring the experience of death home to anybody; it seems to me that the young Stoppard - as obsessed with mortality as anyone in their 20s - was trying to accomplish exactly this with the way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern simply vanish at the play's end. It is strange then, to see the actors march offstage, all the mechanics of theatre on show; one might have expected some of the fantastic pieces of lighting trickery exhibited elsewhere. Of course, much of this is just personal preference but I can't help but think the production would have been aided by a little more faith in the play's ability to do exactly what the travelling players fail to - "catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says - 'One day you are going to die.'"

But this does not significantly detract from all the wonderful things Nunn does do with play, and I was pleasantly surprised at some aspects of it that I had forgotten or just never occurred to me in the reading of it. The play's relationship with Hamlet, for once thing, with Nunn staging the extracts from Shakespeare almost as parodies, exaggerated versions of images we all know with the actors' lines echoing and reverberating through the corridors of Elsinore. I had also never appreciated Stoppard's sheer audacity: the moment in which Rosencrantz threatens to interrupt the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy in order to clap Hamlet on the shoulder and ask him "man to man" what's wrong is gleefully wicked, as is the Player's claim that he "extracts significance from melodrama, a significance that it does not in fact possess", in the middle of a rehearsal for a play that bears a suspicious resemblance to The Greatest Play In the English Language.

On the page, the constant sparring between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can be quick and dry, on the stage, Nunn, Barnett and Parker bring it gloriously - and believably - to life. Individually, Barnett and Parker put in fine performances but together they are wonderful to watch. The best moments of the play occur when the two are alone onstage together, simply reacting to each other's absurdities. The relationship is fierce, tiring, desperate, immensely affectionate and by far the best aspect of the show; after a tiff, Guildenstern comments, "The only beginning is birth and the only end is death - if you can't count on that, what can you count on?" and the two spontaneously (well, 'spontaneously') embrace, eliciting an actual "aaw" from the same audience that had tittered so politely at the Beckett joke. An odd mix of brothers and lovers, Nunn's greatest achievement is in locating the emotional heart of the play in a relationship so co-dependent they can't even keep track of which is which. The charge often levelled at Stoppard is that his plays are too intellectual, that they are plays about ideas, not people - in some way soulless. I never found this to be the case and it seems neither does he: in a very interesting interview between Nunn and Stoppard, printed in the programme, Stoppard states that the Ideas-with-a-capital-I follow the story, not the other way around - that for all the treatises on death and determinism, he was really only writing the story of two courtiers in Elsinore out of their depth. This production embraces the idea that we are simply following the narrative of two men who have no idea what to do and its most moving moments are where it acknowledges the state we are all in: clinging together for comfort against the coming dark.

It is not a perfect production and, as I said, more could have been made of the play's serious moments but it is dazzlingly funny and sweet, and Parker and Barnett make a wonderful double act. A well-deserved four stars then, and I look forwards to my next Ros and Guil with some apprehension. Above all, it achieved the thing that is the mark of great art: it made me want to go and make my own. Here's hoping that next time Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is revived in the West End, I have a hand in it somewhere.

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Apologies for the unintentional hiatus - the blog is officially back now! Expect posts about New York and lots of lists coming soon.