Theatre

The most famous directors are inevitably the established ones, those with the knighthoods. Most people have heard of Peter Hall, Richard Eyre and Trevor Nunn. It helps to have been artistic director of the National Theatre. But after that, who? Deborah Warner and Katie Mitchell, queens of the international circuit, possibly. Nicholas Hytner, Sam Mendes or Stephen Daldry?

Now there’s a new generation of directors who are taking over London’s theatres and will be setting the pace for the future. However anonymous, however poorly paid (especially when the job is shared), they have a crucial role to play because they choose from a pile of wannabes the playwrights they want to coax, encourage and bully into writing bigger and better plays. Dominic Cooke’s initial programme at the Royal Court is the most mixed, including first-time playwrights and twentieth-century classics. Josie Rourke, Lisa Goldman, Tim Roseman and Paul Robinson have all launched seasons of new writing. The playwrights they deign to promote are the ones we are likely to be watching in the future at the National, the RSC, and, if musicals don’t take over completely, in the West End. Just as David Hare, Conor McPherson, and Joe Penhall were in the past.
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In contrast, Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell at the Gate are responsible for ensuring that our horizons do not become too narrow, that Londoners expose themselves to the European playwrights who are often ignored in a city that, as in so many things, tends to look West rather than East for new theatrical influences. One thing that’s clear is that this new breed of directors wants to appeal to a generation that is more visually literate than its predecessors. Time Out spoke to the new intake as they set about trying to put their interview promises into action while still staying within their budgets.

Natalie Abrahami & Carrie Cracknell
Gate Theatre
Appointed in March
I have to admit that when I came back from interviewing Natalie Abrahami and Carrie Cracknell, the young artistic directors at the Gate, the theatre above a pub in Notting Hill, my feeling was that if they were the future of British theatre, I didn’t want to know. There was far too much talk of ‘going on journeys’ and their references to ‘brave and bold decisions’ was in sharp contrast with an apparent desperation not to upset the theatre’s board by saying the wrong thing. It seemed a far cry from the charisma and drive of their predecessors, who include Stephen Daldry, Mick Gordon and Thea Sharrock.

But to be fair, when your programme is still being finalised and can’t yet be talked about, it’s difficult to deal in anything but abstractions as we chat in the theatre’s tiny foyer where, Abrahami points out, all the sets have to be made. They do both have a strong track record. Abrahami recently directed the highly praised ‘The Eleventh Capital’ at the Royal Court, and Cracknell created a stir with ‘A Mobile Thriller’ performed in a car at the Edinburgh Festival. The board must have been astonished to get a joint application. Who would want to share such a paltry salary? ‘But,’ says Abrahami, ‘we applied because we loved the remit, that the Gate is the only theatre in Britain that’s dedicated to international work. That doesn’t feel like a remit – it feels like a cause.’

The interview was tough. ‘The board wanted to be very clear that we knew exactly what we wanted and how we were going to work together. But thankfully we had thought that through,’ says Cracknell.

‘Yes,’ adds Abrahami, ‘one of the best questions was when we were asked to describe each other’s faults in the second round, which was really empowering because we are really honest and it’s a very robust dialogue. The idea is that we are each other’s provocateurs rather than pat each other on the back.’

A week later with crucial contracts signed, Abrahami rings to tell me that Cracknell will be directing the first production, ‘The Sexual Neurosis of our Parents’, by Swiss playwright Lukas Bärfuss. She is then following it up with Fernando Arrabal’s ‘Car Cemetery’, which she describes as an ‘irreverent, exuberant absurdist play’, a celebration of the playwright’s seventy-fifth birthday. Given that Bärfuss has never been seen in this country before and that the Spanish playwright, Arrabal, has never been particularly popular, they are indeed ‘brave and bold decisions’ – and, of course, just what the Gate should be doing. JE

503's company: Paul Robinson and Tim Roseman

Paul Robinson & Tim Roseman
Theatre 503
Appointed in November
If Paul Robinson and Tim Roseman don’t succeed as joint artistic directors of Theatre 503, then they could give a good stab at being a comedy double act. They have the kind of ebullience and jousting-with-the-breeze optimism that they probably need, given that they’re putting in 17-hour days in a job that doesn’t pay them.

‘Well, we are paid for it,’ Roseman gently corrects me. ‘We just have to raise the funds ourselves. Part of being here is ensuring that there is enough money banked for the organisation to run smoothly – and also for us to be able to eat.’

Theatre 503 was relaunched in 2002 as a new writing theatre by Paul Higgins, whose routine of getting up at 5am to tackle the avalanche of scripts sent to him resulted in the premieres of such writers as Dennis Kelly, Phil Porter and Chloe Moss. When he left, 60 applicants vied to take his place, so why do Roseman and Robinson think they got the job?

‘I think the fact there were two of us was a real plus to the board,’ says Roseman. ‘We had enough experience running our own companies, working on other people’s shows and fund-raising to show that we not only had the artistic vision for the building, but also – just as essential – the executive side of the building. The structure of the programming has changed. There’s more co-programming than there was before; a show here that used to cost about £4,000 now costs £15-£20,000, because we’d rather do it properly than just cobble it together and hope for the best.’

Robinson was associate director on the Royal Court’s now-legendary ‘Rock’n’Roll’, while Roseman directed ‘The Arab-Israeli Cookbook’ at the Gate. Why did they decide Theatre 503 was right for them? ‘You do reach a stage as a director where you do want to do that bit more, and I think we were both there,’ replies Robinson. ‘There’s something quite richly rewarding about not only being involved on one’s own productions, but facilitating other people’s as well.’

‘One of the things that’s been hugely important here is really upping the ante visually,’ adds Roseman. ‘So the first show here we clad the entire theatre in white plastic. The next show we ripped out all the seats and turned it into a ship in the round. The first thing we say to people when we meet them is “Don’t presume, because it’s a small place, that you have to be unimaginative.” ’ RH

Court in the act: Dominic Cooke, backstage at the Royal Court

Dominic Cooke
Royal Court
Apppointed in January
Arguably, Dominic Cooke has the most challenging task of any of the new artistic directors in that he has taken on the Royal Court, a theatre that is always in danger of being strangled by its radical past, most especially the revolution that followed the staging of John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ in 1956. It was for that reason that he hesitated initially about applying, having worked at the Court as an associate director prior to doing the same job at the RSC. The lanky, prematurely greying director says that he wasn’t sure he wanted to spend his time ‘managing others’ passionate responses to a place that people feel very, very strongly about.’ There was also the fact that he knew he would inevitably be saying ‘no’ 90 per cent of the time, sometimes to playwrights he admired if their latest work disappointed. He was in any case happy at the RSC and, as it happens, better paid.

But doubts set aside, he was naturally thorough in his preparation for the interviews and, halfway through, realised he was in with a chance. ‘It was their body language,’ says the director, who should know about such things. Once installed, one way of coping with the past was to take down photographs of the founding fathers in the artistic director’s office. ‘It’s not because I don’t respect those people,’ he explains. ‘I do
hugely, but I don’t want to be carrying that. I want to be re-interpreting their legacy for now.’

He arrived at the Court at an auspicious time. The fiftieth anniversary season raised the theatre’s profile and concluded with a sell-out season of ‘The Seagull’ directed by departing artistic director Ian Rickson. Cooke was lucky too that the literary manager’s cupboard was bursting with promising young playwrights: ‘It just so happened that there were a lot of good first plays around. And I also really wanted to do Anthony Neilson’s “The Wonderful World of Dissocia” and luckily there were plans for a revival; those were things that I was able to be slightly opportunistic about.’ Neilson’s surreal, brutally comic play had been cheered in Edinburgh but surprisingly failed to find a home anywhere in London. By opening his tenure with ‘…Dissocia’, Cooke showed that the Court was moving in a different direction. A rapid turnover of plays by first-time playwrights also contributed to a fresh start.

Nevertheless, his first press conference was a bit hairy. He tried to explain that he wanted to extend the range of social worlds presented on stage to those that were more privileged. Some misrepresented this as a return to the safe, cosy theatre that prevailed before ‘Look Back in Anger’. Was Cooke ditching a 50-year tradition by throwing out the kitchen sink and bringing on the Cappellini sofa? He was happy to provoke a debate but frustrated by the response. He’s conscious that the Royal Court sits in the heart of Chelsea and is, he says, worried by ‘a particular type of cultural tourism, the way that the well-off sit in artfully distressed seats watching plays in which the disenfranchised suffer. Then the audience goes away unaffected. It’s not that you stop doing work about the dispossessed – this theatre has always championed their stories – not for some worthy social reason but because that’s where the energy is.’

His response is to try and extend the social mix of the theatre’s audience and to commission plays about the powerful and the liberal elite: ‘I think liberals are in crisis at the moment, particularly in the face of fundamentalism; that’s a schism that needs to be explored. Those of us who’ve always believed in a pluralistic society and welcomed multiculturalism are having our values tested because the very people we’ve been encouraging to feel part of British society are the people who attack our values.’ He’s also interested in censorship, which he believes is making a comeback: ‘All sorts of frontiers are being shut down again, which I think is alarming. I’m sure that that will become a story in the course of my time here.’ JE

Solo in Soho: Lisa Goldman

Lisa Goldman
Soho Theatre
Appointed in July
This gleaming, glass-fronted jewel in the heart of Soho opened to great fanfares in 2000. The first theatre to be built with National Lottery money, it seemed like a long-awaited opportunity to have a dynamic and flexible centre for new writing in the heart of the West End. Yet although the team who worked to acquire the building had an impressive reputation for finding fresh writing talent, in the first few years several critics felt that – with a few exceptions – much of its output had more bounce than bite. Some kind of shift was needed when the board started looking around for a new artistic director.

‘I think they wanted a change and they wanted to make a bold move,’ concurs their choice, Lisa Goldman. ‘I think they appointed me partly because the kind of work I’ve produced has been contemporary and quite radical – openly experimenting with form as well as pushing the boundaries of what the piece of work is saying. I’ve also worked with interesting writers – including Anthony Neilson and Kay Adshead – and produced a high quality of work on quite limited resources.’

So Goldman has been brought in to change the Soho, but will she too be changed – both by the nature of the building she’s taken over, and its location? ‘I think Soho – which isn’t the City, and isn’t the West End – has its own distinct character as well as being seen as an area for migrants and subcultures,’ she replies. ‘I really want to take forward that identity, and I will use the building’s geographical positioning to explore that. I’ve always had a particular interest in London and London voices, being from London myself. Through the theatre’s programme, I d want to explore their concerns – though obviously I’m talking about London as a global city, not just the people who are born and bred here.’

It’s one thing to dream about a job, quite another to deal with its reality. How has she found the collision between what she expected and what she got? ‘In the first eight months I was there, I was very focused on creating a three-year plan for the organisation: for the funders, for the board, but really looking at everything and trying to question everything. That was very different to what I was used to. On the flipside, the most positive difference is the range of artists I get to work with, which is just fantastic. And – I think – feeling that you can reach a greater number of people with your vision. If you’re putting on one show a year or even two shows a year, that’s very different to running a building where you can invite people in the whole time.’

As theatrical responses to the Iraq war and its surrounding issues have shown, theatre has a fascinating and ever-shifting dynamic within a democratic society. What needs does she – as an artistic director – think it must fulfil at the moment? ‘Obviously I see an engagement with the changing world around us as being a core part of what we do, but artists will always see that as central to what they write anyway. Any interesting artist will be engaged with making change.

‘I’m not so much looking for polish as I am searching out originality and uniqueness of vision, and throwing our perspective on the world around a bit. That’s what I’ve always aimed for, and that’s where I’m coming from now.’ RH

Good shepherd: Josie gets an audience's-eye-view at the Bush

Josie Rourke
Bush Theatre
Appointed in April
The Bush Theatre may be small – no more than a room above a pub on Shepherd’s Bush Green – but it’s always been a powerhouse with a well-trained nose for sniffing out talented new playwrights from Jonathan Harvey to David Eldridge. As the new artistic director, Josie Rourke will be deciding who of the young hopefuls we’ll be watching in the future. She’s clear that in W12 at least, it’s the single-authored play that dominates.

‘There’s always been a purity about what happens here,’ she say. ‘It’s about people who get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, sit at their desk and write a play. They send their work in and hopefully we put it on.’ Not that she’s planning to sit on her hands waiting for the scripts to arrive. She’s keen to be pro-active as a producer and has already started putting writers and designers together, hoping that fruitful, creative relationships will blossom as a result.

Taking over from Mike Bradwell, widely acknowledged as the master of naturalistic theatre, she feels that the biggest change will be in the emphasis on design. ‘Design is something I’m terrifically interested in. Extraordinary things can happen in that small room and it’s part of my to job to help open up the imagination of writers and interpretative artists to what can go on in there.’ Her own first production is ‘How to Curse’ by Ian McHugh, which takes Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ as its inspiration. Rourke has been lucky to persuade hot-shot designer, Christopher Oram, a colleague from her days at the Donmar Warehouse, to work with her. Meanwhile, ‘tHe dYsFUnCKshOnalZ!’ by Mike Packer is a comedy about the days of punk and glory and, unusually, she’s programmed two short plays by the controversial and far from tyro, Neil LaBute.

Rourke has previously worked at the Sheffield Crucible, the Royal Court and the Donmar. She says she’s happy to be putting roots down at the Bush – although her tenure may finally see the move that has been long anticipated. ‘I’ve always felt like a building person. Last year as a freelancer I did six shows pretty much back to back, and I was thinking at the end of that that I would like to be a bit more invested in a company or a building. The rhythm of a freelancer is a completely different one to that of an artistic director. For me, there’s something fantastic about having somewhere to turn up every day, having a sense of continuity and engaging with the ongoing life of people who are running a theatre with you.’

That’s not always been the way with women directors. Deborah Warner, Phyllida Lloyd and Katie Mitchell have chosen not to be distracted by the minutiae of running a building. But Rourke – who has already had to mop up a flood in the theatre – doesn’t think there’s been a sudden change. ‘Thea Sharrock has been a fantastic role model at Southwark Playhouse and the Gate. When I was growing up in Manchester, Marianne Elliott was one of the artistic directors at the Royal Exchange. There’s also Jude Kelly at the Southbank Centre. Change happens incrementally. It would be disingenuous of me to go “Yeah, there’s me and Natalie and Carrie at the Gate and Lisa at the Soho, and we’re this bold, new generation of women who are taking on this work.” Actually, it’s happened in the past.’ JE