Bertie Carvel: I took a gamble on directing Strife

During our interview, Bertie Carvel recounts an experience soon after he graduated where he auditioned for a musical. He was in front of a panel of people, his song at the ready, when his knees started to involuntarily knock. "It doesn't happen normally when I'm auditioning [for a play]," he explains, which has a particular irony when you remember that Carvel's break-out role was in a musical: as Miss Trunchbull in the RSC and Tim Minchin's Matilda. Since steadying his joints, he has gone on to prove himself as one of the country's best, most watchable actors, demonstrating his sure skills on TV, in the likes of Doctor Foster, and in theatre, most recently at the Old Vic in The Hairy Ape. It's those knee knocking moments, though, that seem to really appeal to Carvel who compares his latest job with that nervy musical audition all those years ago. This time, he's not just trying out a new genre, he's stepping off the stage and into the wings as he makes his directorial debut at Chichester Festival Theatre.

What made you want to direct John Galsworthy's Strife?
I just think it’s a really good play and I’m fortunate that there hasn’t been a major production since 1978 when it was at the National Theatre. I took a gamble 18 months ago when I pitched the play to Jonathan Church in thinking that in our political climate, industrial action would be familiar. The play has some powerful harmonies with our contemporary moment.

How did you come across the piece?
I read the play at drama school and I was lit up by it and by one of the protagonists, who is essentially a revolutionary Marxist. He is one of several characters who make bombastic, brilliantly rhetorical speeches. But I think I had missed Galsworthy's point slightly.

What is his point?
Galsworthy gives an equally strong argument to the hard-line right-winger protagonist and actually paints a very nuanced spectrum of British culture and politics. It’s a play about what happens to people when they think they are right. It is set within an industrial dispute at a tinplate works in Wales in 1909. This industrial dispute is a kind of canvas with which to examine something that is much more universally human which is pride and the difficulty of compromise.

Had you always wanted to try your hand at directing?
I had been keen to try it for a long time. I came to the theatre relatively late, I bumped into it at university, and I’ve loved being an actor. I don’t want to stop that, but it’s another set of tools to achieve the same end which is to make theatre that you want to see. I’ve been really fortunate to work with some of the best directors there are, so it’s probably a deeply hubristic act of me to try and practise some of what I have learnt from them.

What have you loved about directing so far?
It’s the most amazing feeling to come to work with a bunch of people that you have chosen to tell a story with. And to see them start to enact your vision and then to go on a journey of exploration together. I’ve been like a child at Christmas.

You're staging it in Chichester: it's a pretty special place…
We're in the Minerva Theatre, which is possibly my favourite theatre. It's intimate and epic at the same time. But the theatre has the same presence as the main house. Chichester itself has a very loyal and sophisticated audience. Alan [Finch] and Jonathan [Church] have programmed fantastically and I think they have had a huge influence on British theatre.

Is it a good place for your first directing gig?
Incredible, because it’s front-line theatre on a big scale and yet I couldn’t be better supported. I pinch myself. It is a preposterously grand first walk in the park and to be honest I’m spoilt.

Strife runs at Chichester Festival Theatre from 18 August to 10 September with previews from 12 August.

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