May Madness: Le Journal d'un Fou, Henry V and Privacy

This month has seen rehearsals finally get fully underway for Le Journal d'un Fou - a French adaptation of Gogol's The Diary of a Madman - destined for the Avignon Festival in July, that I am assistant directing. I have been assisting Andrew Visnevski (the director) and Mark Antoine (the actor and producer) with the translation process since last November so what has been a slightly exotic sounding, abstract project for the past six months has now suddenly become a reality!

It truly is a fascinating play, that delves into the mind of Aksenty Ivanovitch Poprichtchine, a lowly civil servant in the Russian bureaucratic machine, to a psychological depth that I have never worked before. The story explores the effect of schizophrenia on the mind of Poprichtchine from Poprichtchine's own perspective - we see the world through the eyes of a madman. Not only do we see the world from the perspective of a schizophrenic but from the perspective of the most accurately depicted fictional representation of a schizophrenic ever written. In typical Gogol style, the play is also both farcically comic and deeply moving.

I have very quickly realised how lucky I am to be working as an assistant on this production. There are a huge number of reasons why this provides invaluable experience for a young director: 

Firstly, it provides the opportunity to work in a foreign language. French has a very different quality to English - it has a much faster pace and doesn't contain mid-sentence 'pauses for thought' in the same way that English does. Words and phrases that are comic in English, simply don't work when directly translated into French. I am by no means a French-speaker and it has been (and will be) a real challenge getting to grips with a difficult language - my GCSE French is certainly being stretched to the limit! - but this is a fantastic opportunity to see how different languages behave differently on stage.

Secondly, it provides the opportunity to work in a different country. It sounds stupid but I had never really considered the possibility of working outside of the anglo-phone world before. For me (and, I imagine, most other young British directors) I had always thought in terms of gaining experience in regional theatre and fringe theatre before eventually breaking onto the West End and the larger subsidised theatres like the NT, RSC and Globe. This has opened up a whole other world of possibilities for me. Surely gaining experience of theatre in other cultures and languages can only have a positive impact on the theatre that I then create myself in my own.

Thirdly, as a one man show, it provides a brilliant insight into the actor-director relationship and allows for incredibly detailed work. Our rehearsal process is principally about one actor creating a completely believable individual on stage. As a result, it is an excellent case study in characterisation. It has also really demonstrated the importance of recognising and specifying changes of thought and intention - one thought has to completely end before the next begins but at the same time there can be no point where thought ceases entirely. Having only one actor highlights very clearly how a momentary lack of specific focus can completely drain the energy from a scene. I have learnt an awful lot in just six rehearsals!

Fourthly, since music provides a crucial accompaniment to this production, it has provided me with an excellent opportunity to experience how music can be integrated into a piece and how a composer-director relationship can work. Music is used throughout our production to reflect Poprichtchine's state of mind. One of our biggest challenges over the next couple of weeks is going to be getting the music and the acting to become two halves of a complete whole.

There are undoubtedly many other reasons why this is an excellent opportunity for me but it would bore you to death for me to list them all here! What it has demonstrated, more than anything, is the importance of simply being back in a professional rehearsal room.

The assistant work has also had an immediate impact on my own directing. I directed another piece for Blackshaw Theatre at their New Writing Night this month which, coincidentally, was a one man short with more than an echo of mental illness! The play was called Geppetto's Funeral by Eva Moon and imagines a middle-aged Pinocchio after the death of his creator and father Geppetto. Working with actor, Merlin Fox, I was immediately able to put into practice what I had learnt on Fou. We went through the text pin-pointing each change of thought, highlighting the points of introspection in contrast to those directed to his invisible interlocutor, the Blue Fairy. It was a very challenging piece for just a few hours of rehearsal and I was really pleased with the results and the positive feedback that we all received. As always, the Blackshaw team were brilliant and organised a really enjoyable and varied evening of new writing - I will be sorry to miss their next night when I will be working hard over a glass of rosé in the south of France!

As I mentioned last month, May has seen my new production company, Cyphers, begin to take on a more established form, as we build a team for our first production, Henry V. This month we interviewed for assistant directors - it was slightly bizarre leaving rehearsals as an assistant director in order to interview candidates for my own assistant director! This was also an excellent experience for me - reading and assessing applications was the perfect way for me to see what directors are looking for in an assistant, and will hopefully benefit me when I start applying for assistant positions again later in the year.

As well as interviewing for an assistant director, we also auditioned for our two student actors from The King's Shakespeare Company. I always find auditioning people an incredibly nerve-wracking experience - much more so than being auditioned myself. When I'm auditioning actors I'm always acutely aware that I am being assessed as a director - that they are working out whether they want to work with me just as much as I am assessing their suitability for the production. In the first half of the day we saw each of the applicants individually, before having a group workshop in the afternoon to see if they would respond to our collaborative, story-telling approach to the play. This workshop was also the first opportunity I had to test out my ideas for the production! During the workshop I asked the actors, in groups, to explore sections of the Chorus from Henry V, finding a way of telling us the story of the speech, in their own words and using sounds and physical actions as imaginatively as possible. After this they then transferred what they had learnt to their delivery of Shakespeare's words. The results were fantastic and unlike any other rendition of Shakespeare that I have experienced to date. It got us all very excited about September!

Shockingly, I have only been to the theatre once this month - it is certainly true that as soon as you are working in theatre you have much less time to see any. The one play that I did see was, however, an absolute treat. Privacy at the Donmar Warehouse (rapidly becoming my most frequented theatre) is a triumph. Josie Rourke has created a production that perfectly mixes cutting, relevant satire, audience interaction and engaging narrative. I am not normally a fan of 'techie' theatre, but the use of projection really aided the storytelling and completed a fully-conceived world on stage. It was also a production that made you think and had you on edge - you were never sure whether your personal information or 'selfie' would appear on the rear wall of the theatre (all with your consent, of course - you just didn't know if or when it would happen). Multi-roling was used to great effect - with actors literally switching characters mid-speech. Once more, however, like in Jane Eyre (see my March blog), one actor (in this instance the quite brilliant Josh McGuire, who delights and impresses in everything he does) played one character throughout and this did ground you as an audience member, giving you a focal point you could rely upon. Which was just as well, since there wasn't much else in the production that you could rely upon - the production was full of twists and turns, though there was one particularly brilliant twist that we were sworn to secrecy over at the end of the play! Will be surprised if this doesn't transfer - it certainly deserves to.

Focus is now almost completely on Fou for the next couple of months, whilst getting everything in place for Henry V and my next blog will almost certainly be from Avignon! I am also managing to get some cricket played - in between the appalling weather. I think it is good and healthy to have a complete break from theatre every now and again. Weather-permitting I should be able to get three or four more games in before leaving for France.

This year just keeps 'March'ing on: New Writing Nights, RiverRun and Jane Eyre

As a director, actor and theatre-goer my attention has always been grabbed by the classics - new writing has never been especially appealing to me. I suspect the main reason for this is that, to be completely honest, I'm not very interested in 'current' or 'relevant' 'issues' which, quite naturally, tends to be the focus of most new writing. My interests lie in more abstract universal themes and questions. In short, the very things that the classics are so good at. Although Shakespeare and Marlowe (for example) were undoubtedly grappling with the 'relevant' issues of Jacobean England, they hardly ever set their plays in their own contemporary world (only one of Shakespeare's plays is set in Jacobean England). Instead they created distinct and separate worlds from their own - foreign worlds, historic worlds, fantasy worlds - and allowed their audiences to spot the 'relevancy' for themselves. As a result, these plays are still as 'relevant' today as ever and will continue to be so. I fear this is a skill we have all but lost.

Having said that, the two young writers whose work I have directed this last month (Marietta Kirkbride and Piotr Klinger) can certainly make strong claims for attempting to create timeless, universal work. Marietta's short play, The Land in my Blood, tells the story of someone struggling to leave their family home before it is demolished to make way for a new A-road (ok, that bit's not so timeless!). The struggle this character is going through is cleverly portrayed through the inclusion of an off-stage actor voicing her internal thoughts through a microphone. As a result, her internal monologue seems to come out of the very land that she is having to leave, creating quite a moving sense that a part of her belongs in this land. Plus it allows for some beautifully comic moments during an argument with her, not especially sympathetic, partner. One of the key challenges in rehearsals was to get the two sides of the main character's personality, acted by two different actors, to feel like one person. As such, despite the piece only being a little over 10mins long, I thought it was really important to spend some time doing detailed character work. We thought about super-objectives, emotional centres, past experiences. We also spent time building up a detailed collective image of the family home - sitting with eyes closed, we described the house and its surroundings, going round the circle using one word at a time. This meant that the image created was necessarily shared by all of the actors. After these sessions on character and environment, the play (as I had hoped) essentially took care of itself, so that what might have seemed like overkill actually saved us a lot of rehearsal time - in my opinion anyway!

The other great thing about working on this play was that I had the opportunity to spend time in Bristol. (On the flip side, this also meant that I got rather too well acquainted with the M4!) Bristol is quite simply a great little city, with quirky independent cafes and bars, beautiful street art and a thriving fringe theatre scene. It is definitely one of the top places I'd be looking to live as an affordable alternative to London with lots of opportunities to make good theatre and to get noticed.

My second New Writing Night this month was, however, back on the old stomping ground in London, with a company called Blackshaw Theatre. This was a truly brilliant evening, with a lovely warm and welcoming atmosphere - largely created by the bubbly compering of Ellie Pitkin (Blackshaw's Artistic Director). Blackshaw run these nights every other month - I highly recommend going along if you get the chance. The piece I directed was a character study on Gertrude from Piotr Klinger's playful reimagining of Hamlet. The Blackshaw team couldn't have picked a lovelier writer to team me up with and since I am borderline obsessed with Hamlet this was an ideal piece for me! I think we learnt a lot from the process, gaining a fuller understanding of Gertrude's relationships with all the characters around her. My staging of the piece owed a lot to Owen Horsley's rehearsed reading of Thomas of Woodstock at the Barbican with the RSC Richard II cast and to Jeremy Herrin's staging of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (another RSC tour de force!). I was inspired by the fluidity and simplicity of transitions in these pieces and (I hope) used that to good effect myself.

Speaking of Hamlet, I don't listen to radio dramas anywhere near enough, but the recent version of Hamlet on BBC Radio 4 with Jamie Parker in the lead role has been quite sublime. I would actually go as far as to say that it is my favourite rendition of the play that I have experienced to date. The opening scene with the appearance of King Hamlet's ghost is particularly effective and Parker captures the method in Hamlet's madness perfectly.

Which leads nicely on to the stage works that I have seen this month. I haven't had the chance to get to the theatre as much as I would like - or as much as I normally do - this month but both plays I have seen have been exceptional.

Firstly, RiverRun at the NT's Shed, a dramatisation of the river in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake by Olwen Fouere. I have loved all of my encounters with Joyce so far (I am currently enjoying Ulysses very much - even if, at times, it can be a little hard-going) but I did have concerns that this would be a bridge too far! I need not have been concerned, however. This was theatre as I have never experienced it before - which is appropriate since reading Joyce is unlike any other reading experience I have had before. Fouere takes you into what I can only describe as a semi-lucid state, I literally could not tell you whether it lasted 5 minutes or 5 hours (the NT website informs me it was approx. 70 mins!). In that time I truly felt like I was living a dream. The space was entirely bare except for Fouere, a microphone and a light dusting of sand. This created a blank canvas upon which our imaginations could paint vivid moving pictures - I almost felt like I was hallucinating. This was a truly special experience which is simply impossible to describe in words.

The second play was the two part adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Bristol Old Vic. Another reason to be grateful for the New Writing Night in Bristol, this was one of the most inspirational pieces of theatre I have seen. I have wanted to adapt novels for the stage for some time but never quite had the confidence to do it - I think Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre may just be what I needed to see before diving into an adaptation of my own. Cookson deliberately distanced her adaptation from the typical period drama, taking lavish costumes and sets out of the equation completely. This allowed us to focus in on the characters and, again, allowed our imaginations to paint pictures. The great power of a novel is its ability to transport us from place to place at the turn of a page. This is simply impossible in theatre if we are constrained by elaborate sets. If, however, we strip the scenery back and invite the audience to use their imaginations, our minds can change the setting in an instant. This is also a much more engaging way of creating theatre, as the audience is actively involved, working with the actors in the creation of a world. Music was used to great effect with a live band on stage throughout, making me realise that the sound-world of a piece of theatre is central to the atmosphere created. The play also confirmed to me the joys of a multi-roling cast, whilst also demonstrating that it is often necessary to have one central character played by one actor throughout, in order to give the audience a grounding focal point. All in all, this was a fantastic production and I congratulate everyone involved!

As all artists will know, finding ways of earning money alongside your creative projects is often the biggest challenge. The beginning of April has seen me start what I hope will be a lucrative venture into the world of corporate training, running communications workshops at the Informatics department at KCL. I really enjoyed my first session last week and have had very positive feedback. Fingers crossed this will be an area where I can continue to get work. It is an excellent way to keep money coming in, whilst utilising specialist theatre skills and allowing time for other creative projects.

Frankly, I feel quite exhausted after the last couple of months! Luckily I seem to be moving into a slightly calmer period where my challenge will be to stay focussed and to continue to lay foundations for the second half of the year (and 2015). The cricket season started this week so that will be an extra distraction - though if the weather continues there won't be much cricket to be distracted by!