James Macdonald in conversation with R. Darren Gobert Finding a Physical Language: Directing for the Nineties Generation In the course of his career, James Macdonald has directed a vast array of plays and operas in London, New York, Vienna, and Berlin, but he is perhaps best known for the premiere productions of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Cleansed, and 4.48 Psychosis at the Royal Court Theatre, where he was an Associate Director from 1992 to 2006. His most recent work includes Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other at the National Theatre and the Broadway revival of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. Macdonald met with R. Darren Gobert in London on 23 January 2006 to discuss the challenges of working with spare, difficult plays such as Kane’s, Churchill’s A Number, and Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies. R. Darren Gobert wishes to thank Annabel Rutherford for transcribing the conversation and, for their funding, the Faculty of Arts Committee on Research, Grants, and Scholarships at York University. Darren Gobert I’m interested in how you ing the Lecoq theory to texts; I was quite developed your method as a director. You trained quickly bored with that self-referential Lecoq in Paris, is that right? work. I think Lecoq’s teaching is absolutely brilliant, but he sometimes wanted us to take James Macdonald I went to Lecoq. When I the training, which I always thought he meant was a student at university, I organized a as a means to an end, and use it as an end in theatre festival. There was a company we itself. invited called the Moving Picture Mime It’s quite hard to be specific about the way Show; they were a big Lecoq company in the Lecoq works in pieces that I do now, except late seventies and early eighties. And I fell in that it just makes you very keen – or it made love with their work and heard all about me very keen – that every piece of work Lecoq. I ended up teaching English in Paris should be considered from the ground up, and got to go there in 1981 for about two and from the beginning. Every piece of work has half years: I went to Lecoq, and studied with – and should follow – its own laws. And it’s Philippe Gaulier. your task to discover these laws. Up until that point I had had a rather academic training. So it was great because I When the process begins, though, do you start got to do something that was primarily about with the actors? Do you start with the text or do movement, about the abstract elements of you start with the physicality? theatre really, not text-driven – although it is sometimes quite hard to square that with the Because I’m generally doing plays, I start rather text-driven work that I’ve done since. with the plays. That doesn’t mean I start Then I came back to the UK, and I started a working on the text, but you begin to deduce little company with other people I’d been at what the play would want to be from the Lecoq with, and we toured around. I suppose language. That’s all we have, and you have we did about three years on and off touring. to excavate to see what’s underneath. Very And then I got a scholarship to go to a reper - often with a good play the language is only tory theatre. I was always interested in apply- at the top, the tip of the iceberg. And you ntq 24:2 (may 2008) © cambridge university press doi: 10.1017/s0266464x08000122 141 need to know what that big block of ice notes as we went along. A lot of the basic underneath is. production ideas were generated at that time. So how do you start, for example, with a play like And how long was the rehearsal period for that Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies, which you production? directed in the fall of 2005, in which the text announces ‘Time: blank. Place: blank.’ How do Unless you get down on your knees and beg you move forward from there? and come up with a very good argument as to why you should have longer, it’s four Isn’t that great? It’s so liberating for a direc - weeks. I did have longer when we first did tor. In a way, what you’re trying to do is very Psychosis, and I had some good reasons for precisely define: how do you do blank? What that! But the rehearsal period is generally is blank? And that’s all about taking things four weeks – and that’s very much the British away until they are blanks. How we started way. The thing is done in a very, very swift on that, and increasingly I do this with process. It sort of suits the British tempera - every thing, is that I do a workshop with a ment, I think. There’s a pragmatic thing that group of actors, who may or may not be the we have – a dislike of theory and too much actors around in the final production, in discussion. You can get a long way in four which one’s free to kick the thing around weeks, but it’s quite hard to experiment very very freely and to play with some of the ideas freely with the text, particularly if it’s a text that are in the text. There was the question that needs learning and organizing and so about what shape the production should on. So, that’s why I’ve started doing work - take, which we needed to start to work on shops to make it much freer to discover what before we got anywhere near rehearsal. And the rules of the thing are. to creep up on this question of what the In Martin’s play, for example, the rules writer’s intentions were. seemed to be that you had to see the actors. I wasn’t sure about that initially; I thought Could you describe the workshop process? maybe it would be interesting if you couldn’t see the actors at all, you could just hear them Both Fewer Emergencies and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 discuss – voices – and have them sit in a dark Psychosis are so open as material. In both room or something. But it seemed to be cases it seemed crucial to workshop the play, something to do with seeing them invent the to be sure of basic things like how many ideas that they’re discussing, and you had to actors to use, and equally to have clues so see their faces to see that. A big theme is that as to start working with a designer. There’s they’re all equally complicit and responsible never much time for these things, so after a for the whole story regardless of whether certain amount of reading and chat, the pro- they’re actually inventing that little moment cess was mainly one of riff ing as many dif - of it. So, everybody – this was also some - ferent versions of a scene as anyone could thing we did in Psychosis – had to have res - think of. By seeing the actors trying stuff, I pon sibility for the whole text, and that way could work out, for example, that I wasn’t you had a sense of a collective imagination. interested in seeing the doctor/ lover figure In Fewer Emergencies, that meant that you had in Psychosis. With Fewer Emergen cies we did to see three or four faces and the audience one workshop with the actors and Tom Pye, had to be able to hold them within the same who was designing it, looking at different eyeline. configurations and staging op tions. It was the first time the actors had met and worked Did you choose four simply because that was the together, and I got the impres sion it was minimum number you could have to do it? quite liberating for them that the initial focus wasn’t on performance but rather on prac - Yes, we did. We talked about the number of tical prob lem-solving and design. Tom sat characters with Martin, because one relates sketching everything, and we’d com pare this material to his play Attempts on Her Life, 142 Paul Hickey in Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies, Royal Court Theatre, London, Autumn 2005. Photo: Stephen Cummiskey. which has a lot more people in it. But, to me, these pieces at the same time. In fact the one it’s always more interesting to make fewer he wrote third chronologically, which is the actors work harder, so that’s why we didn’t first one in the text (‘Whole Blue Sky’), he go down that road. It would have felt rather wrote in order to make it into an evening and indulgent, in the end, to do it that way. Also, to fuse together the other two stories. And we felt it was interesting that the same yet there was the problem of one extra people should invent three different stories. person – ‘4’, played by Paul Hickey – in the He set us a small problem. He didn’t write middle story, which we had to justify. 143 Enter stage left! after the truth of what they feel their char - acters to be. In this instance, the character I felt the best way to do that was to have one was a writer with a writer’s imagination.