Tristan Sturrock on Don John
March 15, 2009
“This is really the director Emma (Rice)’s childhood,” Tristan Sturrock explains. “It’s to do with the whole Winter of Discontent. It goes back to a story in which she had a big loss with a mate in 1978 and it had a massive impact on her. She just had a hunch – an inkling – about that time. After talking, she and the designer, Vicki (Mortimer), felt that it was a good setting point, with the disco and rock, that would sit well with the piece. There wasn’t anything political about the choice – it’s just that it seemed right for the world that she wanted to create.”
Ruth Carney on Sheffield Theatres and Lord of the Rings
March 10, 2009
“I said to Matthew (Warchus) that one of the most fantastic things about Lord of the Rings, for me, is that I will never fear any space, whatever size, again,” Ruth Carney enthuses. “It’s meant that I can go into rehearsals with confidence about large-scale pieces of theatre.”
Carney, who became Sheffield Theatres creative associate on 19 January, was associate director to Yorkshire-born, thrice Tony-nominated Warchus on the gargantuan project. She opines that there could scarcely have been a better way for her to have honed her directorial talents: “It’s the biggest show that’s ever been done. To manage 70 people on a daily basis for 18 months was a huge challenge. My dad described it as me getting my PhD in Theatre because I just learned so much about not only the artistic aspects of directing, but also the managerial side.”
Jenna Bailey on Can Any Mother Help Me?
February 20, 2009
“It was not just about being friendly,” says Jenna Bailey, “actually they encouraged the opposite. They really challenged each other on religion, education and literature – everything. It was no holds barred. It was not tea and knitting and niceness – it was a chance to challenge and be challenged.”
The intellectual vigour of the Co-operative Correspondence Club’s letters evidently left a durable mark on Bailey. Their route to fruition, however, was no less striking. In 1935 a young mother of four from a small Irish village, whose husband had abandoned her, wrote to the magazine Nursery World expressing her frustration at the limitations of her life and asking if any of its readers could “suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking’ and cost nothing”. After receiving numerous responses, she founded a letter-writing community of 24 women that lasted until 1990. Bailey’s 2007 study of its correspondence takes its title, Can Any Mother Help Me?, from the original letter. Hence Foursight Theatre’s dramatisation of her account, which visits the West Yorkshire Playhouse between 3 and 7 March, likewise adopts it. The production benefited from her input at one rehearsal each week.
Past/Present/Future for … Alan Ayckbourn
February 5, 2009
Alan Ayckbourn will be seventy this April and, although he has physically slowed down since his stroke three years ago, getting about with the aid of a stick and his constant companion and second wife Heather Stoney, he shows no signs of slowing down on the work front. He has a full diary for the next two years, starting with this week’s opening of his own revival from Scarborough of Woman in Mind starring Janie Dee at the Vaudeville, the theatre where the play first opened in London in 1985. Sir Alan retired last year as the artistic director of the “in the round” Stephen Joseph Theatre he has run, in three separate buildings, in his adopted Yorkshire home town, since 1967.
John Godber on Spring Street and Ferensway
February 4, 2009
“I never really expected it to come alive,” John Godber admits. “It’s been an idea in the ether for 30 years and now it’s actually built. We can’t wait to get into it. Using a sporting simile, we’ve been playing in an old tin hut and winning 2-0 against the rain for 30-odd years. Now we have the opportunity to get into a purpose-built theatre that won’t leak and will have all the things that most other renowned theatre companies don’t even think about, like proper rehearsal facilities and showers that don’t give you salmonella poisoning.”