I saw Mike Alfreds Shared Experience version back in 1975 and had also read the book. Theatrically speaking, it was inspiring as well as thematically a cracking great story. Back in 2015 I was asked by AUB to direct a production and I suggested doing Mike’s adaption. However when I spoke to Mike, he said there was no script so I decided to do my own highly physical production incorporating aspects of melodrama in a contemporary way. It turned out to be very different from Mike’s version.
Jo’s death is a heart stopper. The character of the street kid Jo was the reason that Save The Children was created. Also the moment that Esther recognises her Mother moves me deeply. I always tear up.
I adore Esther who is a beautifully melancholic and yet a hopeful portrait of a young women trying to find her identity in a world that is dominated by men. She is so contemporary.
John Jarndyce is a wonderfully misplaced character, and Caddy and Guppy are two of the most dysfunctional and comedic of Dickens characters. And of course, Jo! His simply tragic story is in a way at the heart of the drama. As a director you have to love and be dispassionate at the same time about all the characters. Our job is not to tell the audience but to move the audience with the story. Let them decide.
Absolutely! I think Dickens remains one of the most relevant of English writers. His acidic take on the entitled class that still control this country is more relevant than ever. All the more after 11 years of Austerity and a Political Class destroying its own people.
Family. Legality. Hope.
Well I’m the first to admit I have ‘made theatrical turkeys in my time, but I do not sell them’ This is a cracking great show that makes you laugh, cry and think. And it’s over in less than two hours.
The climate emergency and the future of our young people.
Stanley Kubrick and Andre Tarkovsky are two of the greatest directors who have ever lived. There are many others but life is too short.
Imaginative stupidity.
Watching 40 street children perform to an audience of 800 including the Mayor of Phnom Penh in Cambodia on the issue of child sex trafficking.
I have been privileged to have taught over 100,000 people in 74 countries from street children to stars. Each one of them has taught me something. And of course my own teachers Lecoq, Grotowski, Alfreds, Boal and Gaullier. I see theatre as both universal and specific and as we are going through extraordinary changes all across the world. The fundamental themes of love, death and greed are again expressing themselves in vivid and powerful stories. I love all kinds of theatre and each story has its way of being told. And working across different cultures reveals many ways of expressing theses stories.
When I was doing a rendition of ‘Falling In Love Again’ in drag and I fell off the front of the stage into a grand piano whose lid then fell on me. I went off despite wanting to bury myself alive.
Just keep going whatever anyone says.
The Ensemble has just finished Tempest in Malaysia which was a huge hit, meanwhile I am directing the first iteration of Fight Club at East 15 Acting School. Next year is our 30th anniversary with a potential tour of Gormenghast one of the Ensemble’s most successful shows and I'd wish that This Changes Everything – our production based on Naomi Klein’s book about climate change – receives the huge audience that it deserves.