Running the Room E-Book

Rosemary Waugh

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Our most brilliant, fearless and creative women directors open the door on their craft, discussing their work in the theatre in intimate and illuminating detail. Through a series of fascinating conversations with many of the leading talents working on British stages, Running the Room explores what it takes to succeed in the field, and how each director approaches the work in their own way. Each interview focuses on a particular facet of the director's practice, examining not just the 'how' – how to talk to actors, how to create the right rehearsal environment, how to handle cuts and previews, how to work with a living playwright – but also the 'why': why certain approaches work better than others, why there's no 'right' way to direct a play, and why work in theatre anyway? As this passionate, inspiring book shows, there are myriad ways to be a theatre director. For aspiring or current directors, it will give you the confidence to be uniquely yourself, develop your own approach, and create the work you want to make. For creatives in other disciplines, it will provide insight into directors' processes, along with examples of successful collaboration. And for anyone who loves theatre, this is an unparalleled first-hand account of how brilliant theatre is made – direct from those making it. With contributions from: Natalie Abrahami • Annabel Arden • Milli Bhatia • Carrie Cracknell • Tinuke Craig • Marianne Elliott • Nadia Fall • Yaël Farber • Vicky Featherstone • Jamie Fletcher •  Sarah Frankcom • Emma Frankland • Rebecca Frecknall • Debbie Hannan • Tamara Harvey • Natalie Ibu • Ola Ince • Lynette Linton • Nancy Medina • Katie Mitchell • Rachel O'Riordan • Emma Rice • Indhu Rubasingham • Jenny Sealey

Leseprobe

Rosemary Waugh

Running the Room

Conversations with Women Theatre Directors

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Carrie CracknellGreat plays and great actors

Nadia FallTheatre and therapy

Ola InceBuilding a visual world – and how to ask an actor to sound more like an egg

Katie MitchellTowards a bicycle-powered future of theatre

Rebecca FrecknallThe poetic gesture of physicality, composition, movement and dance

Yaël FarberThe body as a brain and the rite of theatre

Nancy MedinaGetting out of the head and into the body

Marianne ElliottShutting out comparisons and having space to fail

Emma RiceStories of the subconscious and the skill of naughtiness

Natalie AbrahamiThe art of collaboration

Emma FranklandUsing (or not using) lived experience

Indhu RubasinghamCultural specifics and universal appeal

Debbie HannanTrue accessibility and the reality of having bodies

Lynette LintonThe Queen of Cuts on working carefully with playwrights

Vicky FeatherstoneWeathering disruption and finding new writers

Natalie IbuDeep listening, scaling-up work and doing a vibe-check on actors

Milli BhatiaPolitics and playwriting

Jamie FletcherMaking music and finding a home in theatre

Tamara HarveyMotherhood and making it all work

Annabel ArdenThe theatre of opera

Jenny SealeyReimagining the aesthetic of access and organised chaos

Rachel O’RiordanEmpathy and the alchemical capacity between audience and actor

Tinuke CraigPlaying games and putting character first

Sarah FrankcomImposter syndrome and being the artist only you can be

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright Information

For Lucian and Leo, always

Introduction

This is a book of many voices. It is not a set of rules or a checklist of ‘things to do’ when directing a play. Nor is it a manifesto promoting one approach to making theatre above another. Indeed, if it has a theme, it is this: there is no right way to be a theatre director. Or rather, there are as many ways of being a (female) theatre director as there are (female) theatre directors. What I often enjoyed most about talking to the brilliant creatives represented here was discovering how passionate they are about doing the exact opposite to one another. Or, in a less extreme way, doing a million different variations of each other’s practice.

At one point in the extended interviewing process, I became preoccupied by asking different people the same questions on, for example, the role of the text or their opinions on using personal material in the rehearsal room, just to hear the contrary views that would filter back to me. The resulting edited interviews are, in fact, far more varied in their questions than that, with each interview focusing on a particular facet of each director’s practice. This includes discussing running a theatre in an era of upheaval with Vicky Featherstone, the creation of a visual vocabulary with Ola Ince, the beauty of movement with Rebecca Frecknall, and the use of culturally specific details with Indhu Rubasingham.

The book opens with a dialogue between past and present, with Carrie Cracknell discussing her continued forays into working with adaptations of classic texts. It then moves on to the therapeutic values of theatre, with Nadia Fall, before opening outwards to cover everything from politics to playfulness to playing games in rehearsal. It ends with Sarah Frankcom’s call to find confidence in being uniquely yourself. Sometimes, as with three early chapters all relating to physicality (Rebecca Frecknall, Yaël Farber and Nancy Medina), I have deliberately grouped together complementary reflections. At others, like with Debbie Hannan and Jenny Sealey’s respective comments on disability and theatre, I’ve deliberately separated out topics to emphasise the variability in ideas and approaches relating to similar issues.

The one constant is that, across all the chapters, you will see the multitudinous ways of creating work for the stage. Take, for example, the idea of ‘the text’ and the reverence given to the exact words printed in a script. For some, like Lynette Linton, the play itself is king and what’s known as ‘table work’ is a must (or, as she put it, ‘magical’). But for others, like, most memorably, Emma Rice, tables are made for dancing on, and getting everyone sitting down with paperwork-in-hand is anathema to making good art. And, even amongst the text-worshippers, there’s much debate to be had about what lines you cut or edit, when and how.

I began the book in 2021, in the other-worldly era of the coronavirus pandemic. The enforced break gave me an unplanned but useful opportunity to take stock of my career and commit to a project long bubbling away at the back of my mind. As a journalist and critic, I frequently have the pleasure of interviewing artists and performers about the amazing, inspiring, and sometimes infuriating work they make. These discussions are almost always fascinating, no matter what my personal artistic tastes and preferences are. Talking about theatre is the best job because the conversation can go to so many different places. There is a never-ending supply of things to say about both the contents of a play itself – the location, the historical backdrop, the themes and all the things a director is planning to do with it – and how a person approaches making theatre in general, both practically and philosophically.

However, the conventions of journalism and the task of producing a normally short-ish article that is almost always tied to the opening of a new show, means that so much of those conversations remained buried in an archive of transcripts on my laptop. It was all this other ‘stuff ’ – the ‘stuff ’ that was often classed as too niche (or too ‘theatre geek’, as I prefer) for a wide audience – that I normally found the most interesting. It was here that a director would start sharing intricate details of their founding inspirations, approaches and techniques. To reference Yaël Farber’s interview here, these were not the kind of details relevant to ‘the capitalist contemporary pursuit of selling theatre’. These were studious, thoughtful and affecting reflections on an artist’s own practice, developed over years of creating work.

Prior to starting the project, I sought out existing books on the topic. I discovered that the few collections that did exist were either out of date, or focused on a different cohort (for example, international or US-based) than the people I wanted to interview. I wish I had a more interesting answer to why I wanted to make a book about the UK’s leading contemporary female directors than: there wasn’t one. But that was a big part of it. I found it outrageous that the expertise of so many exceptional artistic minds would not be present if, for example, you were a student on the lookout for a book about directing. This included the women who had run many of the nation’s most important theatres and companies for decades, and the women who created a significant portion of the work performed on those stages.

The argument for writing a book that focuses solely on women is, of course, more complex than that. Although I think a glaring blank in the existing literature tells a convincing story of its own. Several years ago, I made a conscious decision in my own interviewing practice to avoid asking interviewees questions based on demographic characteristics. Put more crudely, I wanted to avoid ever again asking a young, Black, female director questions about being a young, Black, female director. While being absolutely open to discussing age, race and gender, I wanted to break away from a reductionist practice which unfairly burdens artists who are not older, white and male with having their work viewed solely through the prism of identity. To borrow Katie Mitchell’s observation, Sam Mendes is not asked what it is like to be a male director (although maybe he should be).

So, to write a book about specifically female directors perhaps runs counter to this ideal. One rule I came up with – and then promptly broke, particularly when talking to Katie Mitchell and Marianne Elliott – was not to ask any questions about feminism, femaleness or femininity. I wanted to approach everyone’s artistic practice in the same way that a male director’s practice would be approached. But the problem is: gender is relevant. And, in my opinion, fascinating. Many of the women represented here, as with other directors I have interviewed elsewhere, explore the concept in their own work and use feminist principles to underpin how and why they make art. Many have also experienced how their gender has impacted on their working life, from one-to-one interactions backstage to job offers given or withheld.

The question of whether being female is a barrier to success in the theatre industry is an interesting one. When I approached the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) for recent statistics on female directors, I was told that 58% of the plays submitted for the 2023 Olivier Awards (eligibility period 21 February 2022 – 14 February 2023) were directed by female-identifying directors. That sounds pretty great, although the numbers fell sharply for musicals (only 18% by female-identifying directors) and ‘entertainment or comedy plays’ (25% by female-identifying directors). SOLT’s remit covers London’s top and mid-sized theatres, including West End venues and places like the National Theatre, Old Vic and Young Vic, Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court Theatre. To be eligible for an Olivier Award, a show simply needs to be on at a SOLT venue for more than the minimum number of performances each category states. In the case of plays, they must have a run of more than thirty performances to be in with a chance of winning an award.

That 58% suggests women directors are well represented in the industry and in line to receive its biggest accolades. Yet if we look at one of the awards those women could win, the Sir Peter Hall Award for Best Director at the Olivier Awards, the other side of the picture presents itself. Since its inauguration in 1976, this award has only been won by five women: Deborah Warner (1988), Marianne Elliott (2013 and 2020), Lyndsey Turner (2014), Miranda Cromwell (2020, alongside Elliott) and Rebecca Frecknall (2022). Despite being a significant and integral part of the British theatre industry, the work of female directors remains overlooked and undervalued when compared to their male counterparts – although the dates of those female winners suggest this is improving. This tallies with what I’ve been repeatedly told when interviewing female directors over the years: gender is both irrelevant and relevant. Which, if nothing else, certainly makes it worthy of continued conversation.

Deciding who to include in this book was a ‘problem’ I was largely happy to have. The wealth of talented female directors working in British theatre meant the book could have easily contained twice the number of interviewees, or more. The aim was to capture the diversity of the women working in the theatre industry in terms of age, race, geographical and economic background, non-disabled and living with a disability, and the type of theatre they make. I also wanted to include a combination of artistic directors and freelance practitioners, and a mixture of people predominantly working in London and throughout the wider UK, and those who also work internationally. Necessarily, there are omissions and gaps, hopefully not too many egregious ones. Flat-out schedules – directors tend to be exceptionally busy people – meant that not all the women approached were able to spare the time, but I was overwhelmed by the generosity and enthusiasm received from all those who feature here.

This collection also includes two trans women directors, Jamie Fletcher and Emma Frankland, and one non-binary director, Debbie Hannan, who uses the pronouns she/her and they/them. Hannan was happy to be included in a book with this title because they felt that being assigned female at birth had a significant impact on their career, both in positive and negative ways. As Jamie Fletcher notes in her interview, there are few trans female directors currently working in mid- and large-scale theatres. The rise in the number of female directors working at the highest level in recent decades has been noticeable – and indeed is part of the argument for this book. I wonder, were we to create another volume of this book in ten or fifteen years’ time, if the number of trans and gender non-conforming directors will have also risen. If it has, or hasn’t, it would be interesting to then look at what these directors are being commissioned to direct and at which venues. For example, are they only being approached by theatres to direct work with an obvious link to gender or trans identities and, if so, how do they feel about that?

I conducted the first of the interviews, with Natalie Abrahami, in 2021 when the pandemic was still very much raging, and the last one, with Marianne Elliott, in spring 2023, when it felt like an odd fever dream. It’s fair to say that the pandemic and its devastating impact on the industry hung like a cloud over many of the conversations I had during these years, especially for the artistic directors trying to keep their theatres afloat. So as not to date the text too much, I have tried to keep direct mentions of the pandemic to a minimum, but, of course, there are aspects of the conversations tied to when they took place, either because of the global events underpinning them or because they relate to a specific moment in an artist’s career. It’s quite possible, and usual, for a person’s thinking on a topic to evolve and change over time.

But to return to that overarching theme. The edited conversations reproduced here contain a great array of advice and information that will remain useful and interesting for years to come. Most of it is focused on the ‘how’: how these directors talk to actors, how they create a certain environment in a rehearsal space, how they work with a living playwright, how they run the room. Intermingled with this is the ‘why’: why they approach a text in this way, why they never ask for personal information, why they ever entered a theatre in the first place… It’s not a ‘do-this’ doctrine, but a multicoloured patchwork of insights gleaned from Britain’s most ferocious, fearless and creative female directors. These are the words of women who, to paraphrase Sarah Frankcom, weren’t ever content to just sit there, silently.

Carrie Cracknell

Great plays and great actors

Carrie Cracknell is an Olivier-nominated director of theatre, opera and film. At the age of twenty-six, she became the co-Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre in London’s Notting Hill alongside Natalie Abrahami. During their tenure the tiny, above-pub theatre became a powerhouse of new writing, adaptations of classics and contemporary dance theatre. After leaving the Gate in 2012, she became an associate director at the Young Vic and Royal Court. Her work includes a visionary staging of A Doll’s House (2012) in a version by Simon Stephens and starring Hattie Morahan, which transferred to the West End, a double bill of Sea Wall/A Life (2019), starring Jake Gyllenhaal on Broadway, and two critically acclaimed collaborations with Helen McCrory, Medea (2014) and The Deep Blue Sea (2016).

‘Helen McCrory walked in and said: “I think Medea should be brushing her teeth when she walks on stage”.’

When you were co-Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill from 2007 to 2012, the theatre became known for, among other things, programming punchy new adaptations of canonical plays by young, contemporary playwrights – many of which you directed yourself. What inspired this desire to revisit the canon and remix it for the Gate?

I think when you’re developing your practice as a young or emerging director you both need to develop your own, muscular directing style but also find your own voice. You need to try to discover your identity as an artist and that can be pretty challenging. Natalie Abrahami, my co-Artistic Director at the Gate, and I had a strong interest in creating new work and devising new pieces. But we also both felt there was something incredibly nourishing and deepening about working on great plays that have a very strong structure, incredible characterisation and a real depth of emotional landscape. Working on these types of plays as an early career director enables you to flex your own muscles and find your own voice, but in response to something that gives you an enormous amount back. And I think that was what we both found very exciting.

One of the things I loved directing at the Gate was a new version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler by Lucy Kirkwood. It was thrilling to be able to work on a play that has such a robust and deep identity, and to be able to find my own voice in relation to that. The thing I loved then, and still love now, is being able to work on plays with complex psychology and lots of subtext. And, of course, Ibsen has that in spades. One of the things Natalie and I were trying to do with our programming was offer young or younger artists the opportunity to work on those kinds of plays so they could discover themselves in relation to other great artists, which I think can be a really galvanising way to work.

When you commissioned writers to create these new versions of canonical plays, were you seeking radical rewrites, or were you hoping the new versions would emphasise and hinge on the timeless, essential qualities of the originals? Or, indeed, something else entirely?

Translation and adaptation is a fascinating and complex area of theatre practice. Personally, I tend to approach the subject on a project-by-project basis, in that sometimes a classic play feels so connected to the now and so in sync with a contemporary audience that almost all it needs is clarifying and sort of enlivening by a thoroughly good translation. Whereas at other points, it feels exciting to adapt the text and find a deeper connection, either with another moment in history or with the now. At the Gate, we were always very excited to work with writers who would bring their own lens to the play and find a way to make sense of it through their own perspectives and interests.

When you approached playwrights with the seed ideas for these commissions, what response did you generally receive?

People were thrilled because in the same way that it’s exciting for an emerging director to work on a great play, it’s also really good practice for emerging writers to work on great plays. Many of the playwrights I’ve worked with, such as Polly Stenham, Simon Stephens, Lucy Kirkwood and Nick Payne, have also done adaptations of classic plays for me. Living in the dramaturgical DNA of a classic play is a very interesting thing to do as a dramatist. Something from that process imprints on you in the way you think about, for example, dramatic action, which means it’s a pretty exciting space for an emerging writer to exist in. It’s also a kind of release because one of the most frightening things about making anything is having an original idea and seeing that through. Whereas bathing in somebody else’s brilliance and somebody else’s ideas for a moment and responding to that – in a way becoming a secondary artist, rather than a primary artist – can be very releasing and creative.

When you’re directing a work like, for example, Lucy Kirkwood’s version of a Henrik Ibsen play, where does your own vision as the director factor into the equation? Do you feel like you’re creating Carrie Cracknell’s version of Ibsen or is it something closer to Carrie’s version of Lucy’s version of…?

There’s a three-way marriage at work in the process because, as a director, you spend an enormous amount of time with the writer working on the adaptation. Which means, to some extent, the adaptation becomes an expression of your production interests. And that collaboration is often very meaningful. It also means you’re then working on a text that’s come to life through the director’s vision. Ultimately, it becomes a very active and exciting collaboration between two contemporary theatre artists (director and playwright) over a great piece of material, which is like the lifeboat that you set off on. And it gives you both the opportunity to work in microcosmic detail together on how you want to bring that play to life.

As a rule, do you tend to work very closely with playwrights on this kind of new text?

Yes, I think that sort of detailed dramaturgical support on new plays and adaptations is one of the most important parts of the director’s role. It’s a place where you can encourage a writer to do their best work, and hopefully bring clarity and a directorial vision to the way the text evolves. If you do that well, that’s when you get a really holistic form of theatre-making. That not only feels exciting but means the writer and the director are in lockstep moving towards the same kind of artistic expression.

Of the playwrights you’ve worked with over the years, what’s specifically excited you about certain writers and the texts they created with you?

When I worked with Lucy Kirkwood on Hedda Gabler, there was an inventiveness, a kind of granular playfulness and instinctive emotional depth to her writing. We were trying to make contemporary links between the original and its new setting in what was then contemporary Notting Hill. So, for example, in Ibsen’s play, the paper manuscript gets burnt, whereas in the updated version, Lucy decided to put it on a memory stick – which was a thing at the time. Her idea was that Hedda would break that open and eat the middle of the memory stick, and that was how she got rid of the book. That felt symbolic to me of how Lucy was trying to finely reimagine the material, which I found very enlivening.

Then, when I worked with Polly Stenham on Julie for the National Theatre in 2018, Polly essentially created a new play that was based on the structure of August Strindberg’s original play, Miss Julie. To do so, she drew very deeply on her own experience and tried to evoke a world that felt absolutely contemporary and very particular. The result was a new play full of the chaos and sadness and anger and joy and privilege of a certain kind of North London house party. In bringing an enormous amount of herself to the text it again made for a very interesting relationship between the original material and the contemporary audience who were going to watch the new play.

In contrast, when I worked with Simon Stephens on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for the Young Vic, and later for the West End, Simon and I both wanted to render up the play in a very subtle and psychologically detailed way but leave it in its own period. In a way, the decision we made together was that the play was kind of dramaturgically perfect and that the central conflicts might be diminished if we tried to bring it into the contemporary world. So, we decided to set it very much in the period Ibsen set it in, but tried to make the emotional, sexual undercurrents of the play as alive and fizzy as possible, which made for quite a different process of adaptation.

When you’re working on an adaptation that is closer in style to Polly Stenham’sJulie – meaning it is quite freely adapted from the original – how much do your conversations centre on the original text? Do you find yourself returning quite frequently to the original or does the focus lie almost entirely in the new creation?

Each writer works differently. Often, they will read a section of the original play and then work on the adaptation from that. At the beginning, it tends to be very much rooted in the original. Then over time, as the new adaptation becomes more robust, our time and energy are spent improving that in a very granular way. Sometimes, you’ll reach a stage where you’ll read the whole of the new adaptation and then think: ‘Right, it’s time to go back and reread the original.’ It’s often useful when you can see there’s a problem, like a fault line in the structure of the new piece, to go back and understand whether that’s something you have created through adaptation, or whether it’s a weakness in the original text.

But it completely depends. If it’s a relatively faithful translation to a large extent, then you’re working all the time from the new literal translation. If it’s a fairly free new adaptation, then normally the original text becomes the jumping-off point, or the sort of springboard. It remains in the DNA of the new piece, but you can be released from it over time.

As a director, has your approach to working on classical and canonical texts changed over the course of your career? Are you now coming to this sort of project with a different approach than you used to?

Not enormously, no. I always start a project with a huge amount of visual imagery and a very strong impulse about the people I want to work with on it. This often includes members of the design team, the writer and sometimes a specific actor. Once that team is established, we all start to build a relationship with the text where all these different ideas and instincts feed into establishing the world of the play we are making.

When you’re working on a classic that has been performed, in some cases, for generations, and has potentially received now-iconic or very famous productions, does the production history of the work weigh heavily on you?

Yes, always. In fact, there are definitely some classics I wouldn’t touch because they’ve been so brilliantly realised in recent theatre history. Past productions can have a complicated impact on the development of each new piece. When I was working on A Doll’s House with the brilliant designer Ian MacNeil, we kept trying to think about what the traditional baggage the play carried with it was, and what the traditional ways of staging it involved. And although the production choices we made were not particularly radical aesthetically, we found it helpful to try to keep saying: ‘The clichéd version of this moment would be x’, and then we would deliberately put that idea or concept in the bin, as it were, and instead try to find our own moment, our own motif, our own image, and our own idea.

When you’re working on classics, you’re working on them in response to their own performance history, and how you navigate that is a big part of the challenge of working on those texts and bringing them up to date. I watch as many earlier productions of the plays that I’m working on as I can, because you always learn things from other people’s impulses and interpretations. It’s also a helpful way of learning where there might be, for example, structural fault lines in the play, as these are normally revealed again and again by watching other people’s adaptations or productions, which then – hopefully – helps you to circumnavigate those issues in the text.

Is something similar true for actors who are taking on those big, classic roles we find in canonical plays? Do you find, for instance, that actors sometimes arrive at the rehearsal room with pre-existing assumptions, ideas or beliefs about a certain character or storyline?

Yes, I think this is particularly the case with great classic roles. Actors walk into the rehearsal space with terrifying baggage about how the roles have been performed before. Part of the role of the director in that moment is to actively work with the company to find your own taste and sensibility in how you want to render those characters, and to encourage the actors to put that baggage away and think for themselves as much as possible.

All great actors want nothing more than to find an original way in. Actually, if all of their concentration and focus is on them as an actor meeting the character in a genuine way, then they will find something new. Working with Helen McCrory on Medea at the National Theatre in 2014 was extraordinary because she had such iconoclastic ideas about how to play that character, which were completely enlivening and influenced the whole production. On day one, she walked in and said, ‘I think Medea should be brushing her teeth when she walks on stage.’ And it just set the whole tone for everybody. Because then we were thinking about how to find a truthfulness and a realness in these characters, rather than keeping them as archetypes, which Greek characters can feel like in those epic plays. Similarly, when Michaela Coel came to play the nurse in Medea, she didn’t have a clear route in at the beginning. So, I kept saying to her, ‘Bring your self, Michaela, your self is extraordinary.’ The question I was really asking was: ‘What happens if you really meet that character on stage?’ And she did. Having the actors working in that way on these kinds of parts empowers the entire company to find their own route through.

Is it often the case that an actor, like you describe Helen McCrory doing with Medea, will end up shaping an individual character so much they also end up heavily influencing the feeling of the entire staging?

Of course. Great actors like Helen McCrory have limitless imagination and this instinctive understanding of the character they’re playing. That’s what’s so beautiful about directing because when you’re preparing the production pre-rehearsal, you’re thinking about an entire world, which you’re trying to evoke through image, idea, text, music. But then as soon as the actors arrive, they see the play through the perspective of their own characters and, suddenly, the detail and the complexity becomes infinite. The best productions I’ve worked on have always had the identities of the actor indelibly stamped on them.

When you’re in the rehearsal room with those actors, what do your conversations typically focus on together?

I try to keep talking as much as possible about the conditions of the world the characters are in, and what they’re doing to each other. We also talk a lot about the backstory of the characters and the history of their relationships. Other than that, I try to minimise bigger, more generalised conversations about what the play is and what it represents or means. Of course, some of our time has to be spent doing that, and we have to understand the context of what we’re making and where it sits, but I try to focus the rehearsal time as much as possible on the act of doing and the act of being.

Do those rehearsal-room conversations ever hit on the personal experiences of the actors in the room and how that connects with their characters?

We talk an enormous amount about lived experience in rehearsal. I talk a lot about my own lived experience, and I’m interested in an actor’s connection to the concerns of their characters. For me, everything that is interesting in drama is psychology, and so trying to use experiences from life to understand the psychological impulses of a character is the core of the work, in a way. However, I do try to encourage actors not to use incredibly raw, unresolved life trauma in rehearsal. I don’t think it’s safe or massively appropriate. Which means that if we were going to use emotional history to inform the work that we were doing, we would try to find events or experiences that felt somewhat resolved for the performer. But of course, we don’t know what a performer is thinking about or even doing, ultimately, when they’re on stage. One of the many things that was extraordinary about working with Helen McCrory was the sense I had of the very wild and dark exploration she was doing night to night to bring to her character. That kind of exploration will forever remain a mystery to everyone apart from the actor themselves, and is one of the things that makes a great rendering of a character feel complex, mysterious, unknowable and, most of all, compelling.

What does it give you, as a director, to work with an actor like her?

Everything. I’m so lucky to have worked with such wonderful actors because when you work with wonderful actors they offer you and the play their instincts, thoughts, feelings and renditions of particular moments. Thanks to that, the work becomes about encouraging that level of investigation in detail. When that happens, the task of the director becomes editorial. Rather than starting each day trying to generate ideas from yourself, the task shifts to become a very acute form of listening, and observing and encouraging. That’s innately more creative because something’s being generated by the actor in the moment and you’re there supporting and shaping that. It’s a really thrilling feeling.

Are there any specific ways that working with great actors has altered your process or methods of working in the rehearsal room?

When I worked with Jake Gyllenhaal on Nick Payne’s A Life, I realised that because of his history as a film actor, he was less interested in working with as much structure or planning as I normally would. It was actually fascinating for me to let go of some of that structure and instead operate in response to Gyllenhaal’s instinctive understanding, moment to moment. I learnt an enormous amount during that process, because it was a different way into a play than I would normally take. I had to also accept that what he would do each night would be very different to the one before and the one after it, but that it was always a version of his truth and it always felt very connected.

The whole experience was fascinating because it upended a lot of the beliefs I had about my role as a director and my relationship to acting. When you work with actors who have enormous identities in their own right, you tend to come out of the process slightly changed. But when you go into the next process with a different actor you need to respond to them in the way they need to be responded to. As I’m getting older, I think my process is more fluid because I’m responding more actively to who, and what, is happening in the room.

Nadia Fall

Theatre and therapy

Nadia Fall is the Artistic Director of Theatre Royal Stratford East. A playwright and director, she has created work for theatre, television and film. Before leading Stratford East, she was an associate director at the National Theatre. Her productions there include Michaela Coel’s electric Chewing Gum Dreams (2014), and Inua Ellams’ affecting Three Sisters (2020), which relocated Chekhov’s story to 1960s Nigeria. She has also created work for the Bridge Theatre, Bush Theatre, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith.

‘When you step inside the rehearsal room, you’re stepping inside this very intense space.’

In an article forThe Stage in January 2021, you wrote that, ‘Theatre is by its very definition a congregation of people, engaging us in the act of empathy. I believe it’s the cheapest and most effective form of group therapy there is.’ I thought that would be a nice jumping-off point for talking about your practice and what you do. So, to start with – why is theatre like group therapy?

Scientists have looked into the physiological things that happen in a theatre, like heartbeats synchronising – those of the audience with those of the players on stage – which I think is so profound. We sit in the dark, and although you might not have particularly noticed on your way in who the other members of the audience are, in the dark you become one powerful entity. And when we see live storytelling, characters going through whatever the given struggle is in that particular story, we very naturally project our own lives and struggles onto what we are seeing. Whether the play mirrors our own lives or very different ones – theatre engages us in the act of empathy through which we get the gift of sensing we’re not alone.

And I think that’s the ultimate human struggle, the feeling of loneliness and being alone, and that occasional insurmountable feeling of alienation. It’s the human condition. So yes, I think that when you’re sitting together as an audience and watching stories on stage as a shared experience, something about that makes you feel less lonely because you become aware, at least on a subconscious level, that we all struggle, but we’re all in it together.

Do you think that is something that’s unique to theatre rather than other art forms?

Yes. Though all art has its merit, and we need the different forms because, sometimes, watching a film is perfect, whereas other times it just doesn’t hit the spot. Sometimes, you need to go and dance at a live concert. But I think what’s unique about theatre is that, and all of us who work in the industry know this, it’s got this profound therapeutic quality. It’s ancient and it doesn’t matter what culture or country you go to, there’s a form of theatre going on. Theatre is part of our human existence, it’s storytelling in one form or another, so it won’t go away, even in very difficult times.

Does that understanding of it inform how you make work?

I don’t think it’s a conscious, intellectual part of what I do. But I do know that, as an artist, when I read a play and become interested in directing it, that’s because something in that story feels true, and by ‘true’ I mean that I recognise that human thing in it.

As audience members, we all recognise when something doesn’t feel true or truthful. This doesn’t mean the play has to be a work of naturalism or a ‘kitchen-sink drama’; theatre that is very abstract or absurdist can feel true. It’s dependent on whether the artist has managed to manifest life and the human condition authentically. But when we sit down in a theatre and feel something isn’t truthful, we clench up and get a bit uncomfortable, because we’re all experts in the human condition and we can kind of smell if something isn’t quite true.

And does it also feed into the programming decisions you make as the Artistic Director at Stratford East?

Definitely. Everyone has their own affinities and styles of storytelling, but as an artistic director the sweet spot is all about having a real breadth of work represented. I want different types of stories and different storytellers from different backgrounds, whether that’s being from different countries or different ethnicities, ages, or whatever. Basically, I’m trying to get variety because variety is dynamic and rich.

At Stratford East, we’ve historically had quite a strong political stance, which I try to reflect in the programming, along with simply trying to commission all the people I rate as directors, playwrights, actors, and creatives. In a way, we’re trying to create the perfect storm with each production and each season but there are always things against us – like money! Some plays call for a really big cast or complicated scenography and that costs more to put on. Another factor is getting the rights for plays. This seems to be changing but, to many people, there’s still a kudos attached to being in the West End or on the South Bank or wherever and, of course, we sit outside of that. So sometimes, particularly if you’re approaching someone from abroad, you have to try to convince agents, rights holders, and artists that this is the place where their play should be on. None of this is insurmountable, they’re the parameters you work within and the obvious challenges you face as an artistic director. We’re also constricted by the amount we can produce each year, and it’s harder to get your vision for a theatre across to audiences if you’re only able to produce three or four things a year, with the rest having to be touring shows. I mean, with touring shows you’re still very picky and only select the ones that fit with what you want to be on the stage at your theatre, but it’s a bit trickier because, obviously, you can’t note a touring show or have deep, detailed conversations with a director about the work. And, of course, to an audience, whether something is produced at home or is touring doesn’t matter, what they see is just a show on at your theatre and they expect it to be of a certain quality.

It’s very challenging, but I remember David Lan saying to me years ago that when he first started as Artistic Director at the Young Vic they could only afford to produce one show of their own per year. But by the end of his tenure, look how prolific that theatre was! His message was that you’ve got to hang on in there and in time you’ll earn the right – and be solvent enough – to produce more and get more people in to make work.

That sounds like a lot to fill your head with. Do you find it hard negotiating the balance between being an artistic director and an artist?

Headspace is challenging. But actually, I really, really love both aspects of the jobs. They overlap, but they are integrally different. The truth about being an artistic director is that the more solvent you are, the more scope you have. I’m not saying that money alone makes you a better artistic director, but it does mean you can express yourself more artistically. Working within tight parameters is the tough bit. There’s all the unglamourous things like health and safety, and budgets and HR – which are a huge part of running a building.

I love it more than I thought I would. I love choosing the director to go with a play and helping them talk about it and cast it, and then being in read-throughs and noting the runs and, most of all, championing the team. It’s like when a friend or family member does well, you get this immensely proud feeling. I find that really joyful and absolutely fantastic.

With my own work, I love creating it but I’m very self-critical. I’m always thinking that this could or that could have been better, and so I find it hard to genuinely celebrate it in the same way I do with other people’s work that I’ve programmed as an AD.

Going back to the ‘theatre as therapy’ theme, do you find the act of making your own work therapeutic, despite being very critical of it?

I do. When you step inside the rehearsal room, you’re stepping inside this very intense space where you might be encountering characters with histories that overlap with your own traumatic incidents, and that can be quite difficult. I think this comes from my background in making participatory theatre, but I’m extremely careful about how I talk about ‘theatre’ and ‘therapy’, because although I believe rehearsing and making theatre can be therapeutic – it isn’t therapy. I’m not qualified to be a therapist and the rehearsal space is not group therapy, it’s a place of work where we’ve often got three or four weeks – in the rehearsal space – to make a piece of theatre and open a show.

But there are, of course, moments when you’re talking about or working on tough stuff which can be enormously challenging. I’ve tried to address this in some way at Stratford East by signing up to a counselling service that anyone can access to talk through and process emotionally and psychologically taxing stuff brought up when working on a play. It’s also there for our team to access to support them through the process. It’s an anonymous resource there if people need it. Nowadays, we’re much more aware of mental health whereas, in the past, I think there were times when creatives and actors were encouraged to open their hearts – but there was nobody available to teach them to how to pack it all back up again after they’d accessed the pain and trauma.

But in terms of the therapeutic value of making theatre, I’ve certainly found that in the toughest moments of my life, once you step inside the rehearsal room it calls for such complete concentration that everything else kind of disappears for those hours. I think it’s also because everything that happens in the rehearsal room forces you to work in the present and be completely present. I tell young directors that you can do all the prep you want, but there’s nothing that beats getting a good night’s sleep and arriving at the room fully engaged – like absolutely in the moment. I don’t do meditation or mindfulness or any of those things, but I guess this is my version of being fully in the present.

You mentioned working within participatory theatre. Do you think there are some types of theatre – whether that’s community theatre or verbatim theatre or theatre-in-the-round or theatre outdoors – where the therapeutic value is particularly pronounced?

I honestly think it can be absolutely anything. Because you never know what story in what form is going to connect with someone – you can’t call it. I think if something is very abstract and cerebral, then maybe a completely first-time audience might find it off-putting. But even that is a bit of a British thing. When you go to Europe, young people are much more open to abstract thought and to things that aren’t linear or literal. But if we look at visual art, people come in droves to the Tate Modern and they’re not asking, ‘What does it mean?’ any more. They’re up for having an immersive experience.