Willis’s first play, Wolfie, opens with this unusual steer: “Just a typical day for the twins floating and chilling in the womb.” In Wonder Boy, directed this year at Bristol Old Vic by Sally Cookson, a child with a stammer struggles to speak in public. It’s all about holding your nerve.”īennett will soon be directing a new play, Grim Brenda, written by Ross Willis – a playwright who isn’t afraid to chuck in a challenging stage direction or two. A scissor lift was discussed, but there wasn’t the budget: “Eventually we got around to the idea of using giant helium balloons with confetti hidden in them.” For Bennett, this tussle is one of the best parts of the job: “You’re throwing lots of ideas at the wall and seeing how they stick. It took a lot of playful and practical conversations to figure out how to cut down that tree. Later on in the play, the tree is cut down: “I definitely didn’t know how to do that – but I got incredibly excited with the prospect of trying.”įloating and chilling … Erin Doherty and Sophie Melville in Wolfie by Ross Willis at Theatre 503, London, in 2019. When working on Josh Azouz’s Buggy Baby, he had to find a way to make a tree grow out of the living room floor. “He was literally saying: maybe you set the theatre on fire?”įor Bennett, the very best stage directions come from a place of emotional honesty or structural integrity. He’s literally throwing down the gauntlet to the creative team.” It was glorious, reflects Bennett. One of the most challenging and enjoyable experiences of his career so far has been working on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon, which relishes ripping up the theatrical rule book: “The way that Jenkins writes the stage directions, I see them as a provocation. Ned Bennett is another director who thrives on staging the seemingly un-stageable (horses! demons! fire!). Once you say the normal things aren’t necessary – maybe you leave a room by closing your eyes – then you can be as expressive and metaphorical and poetic as you like.” “Why would you walk out of a door when you could leap out of a window? They invented their own rules of the universe on stage so entirely. “The staging language,” he remembers, a bit breathless in admiration. Longhurst has also become increasingly experimental, partly inspired by a mind-blowing production of Simon Stephens’s Three Kingdoms at the Lyric in 2012. Inventing their own rules … Three Kingdoms by Simon Stephens at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, in 2012. I’d moved from Equus, when I wanted to learn how to make total theatre, to realising I wanted to say a different thing with Amadeus.” You’ll upstage it.” At this point, Longhurst had already booked in an orchestra and six opera singers for a production that would make Mozart’s music the star of the show: “But by that stage in my career I was ready to challenge. “He basically says: don’t let too much of the music into the play. After securing the gig of directing Shaffer’s Amadeus at the National Theatre, he snuck into the theatre bookshop and read Sir Peter Hall’s account of staging it. When Longhurst worked on Peter Shaffer’s Equus, he found them to be “an amazing bible of theatre-making”. The laws of gravity are no longer working!”Įarly on in his career, he gleaned a lot from honouring the original stage directions. You go to put a wine glass down and it immediately falls over. Metaphorically, it worked brilliantly: the perfect visualisation of mankind’s hopeless attempt to control the uncontrollable. With Tim Price’s Force Majeure, which sees an avalanche decimate a man’s sense of self, the creative team decided to stage the entire show on an incline. Longhurst considers the trickiest stage directions to be a valuable source of inspiration (“They really sharpen what you’re trying to say with your production.”) However, they can also create tension in the rehearsal room. ‘Can a chair jump a universe?’ … Michael Longhurst.
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