Back in June, I attended a memorable production, Bad Nights and Odd Days at the Greenwich Theatre with a friend. This production consisted of four of Caryl Churchill's short plays. I have grown to fully appreciate the eclecticism of Churchill's work over the years. The subject matter is always striking and regularly, stylistically not quite like any other playwright's works. At times, fragmentary and others fully formed. Her ideas regularly preempting or exploring current trends of thought such as the prospect of imminent environmental catastrophe (Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen) or human cloning (A Number). Following the production, I asked James Haddrell if he would let me interview him again, particularly in relation to Churchill's work and his work as a director. He kindly consented to being interviewed. James Haddrell was the director of Bad Nights and Odd Days and he continues to direct many other productions for the Greenwich Theatre. He is also the Artistic and Executive Director of the Greenwich Theatre.
Since the onset of the pandemic, you have actively continued to produce work with the Greenwich Theatre and when the restrictions have changed, you have also staged productions or shows by other performers/companies. What particular challenges have you and your theatre faced during the pandemic?
There have been many challenges, some more obvious than
others. I guess at the outset of the pandemic the biggest challenge was simply
shifting our mindset. We are part of an industry founded on the notion of
people coming together in a room to watch other people, in the same room,
performing. All of a sudden that was impossible, so we had to reimagine how we
engaged with artists and audiences, and how we could ensure a link remained. It
sounds obvious that we presented work online, but that is with the benefit of
hindsight. At the start of the pandemic, nothing was obvious.
Once we had decided that sharing archive recordings of shows
wasn’t enough, and that we wanted to make shows to share in one way or another
(live, recorded etc), directing on Zoom became a particular challenge.
Directing is rarely about one person telling someone else how to do things,
it’s a collaborative process of trial and error with a company of people, with
the director making final decisions. For an actor to try out performances in
their home, a space inescapably related to their own life, not that of a
character, and for a collaborative conversation to take place was not easy.
However, we made it work, releasing two new large cast
productions (The Secret Love Life Of Ophelia by Steven Berkoff and The
After-Dinner Joke by Caryl Churchill) and a host of short plays.
Now we are facing the same challenge that much of the
industry is battling with – the isolation rules. We presented Bad Nights and
Odd Days, our collection of Caryl Churchill short plays, despite losing all
members of the stage management team to isolation at one point or another, and
our summer family rep season has had its opening delayed by over a week having
lost an actor and now our musical director. At no point have any of those
people recorded a positive test result, but they still have to isolate due to
potential contact, which is making life very difficult. We are actually holding
dress rehearsals for the two summer shows with one performer delivering their
lines from home and a wireless Bluetooth speaker being moved around the stage…
Please can you tell me a little more about your directorial work in the past and when you became interested in the act or art of directing? What for you are the prerequisites to becoming an effective and indeed, memorable director?
I first directed a show in 2015 – a revival of John
Retallack’s Hannah and Hanna for CultureClash Theatre, with performances in
London and Edinburgh. At that point I had spent so much time in rehearsal with
the emerging companies that we support at Greenwich, that I thought I should have
a go at it myself. The play is about a refugee teenager who finds herself in
Margate at the height of the Kosovan refugee crisis when run down or quiet
English seaside towns were used to house refugees. Written for a Kosovan and a
White teenager, we reimagined the show, recasting the English teenager as a
black second-generation immigrant, making the point that Britishness is a
construct to which we sign up, and that the face of racism has evolved a great
deal in the past few decades. Since then I have directed a range of shows, from
new writing to pieces by Michael Frayn and Caryl Churchill, professional shows
to student and community productions.
I think an effective director tells a story cleanly, hiding the
mechanics of theatre as much as possible, moving from scene to scene swiftly
and simply, honouring the content of the script. A memorable director develops
a style which fits their sensibility – explosive performances, reimagined
settings, a particular sense of humour or theatricality, an incisive
understanding of dramaturgy which can pick out elements of a script that are
often lost. In many ways though, I think the very best directors are those who
can elicit the most emotionally invested performances from their actors.
Directing at its best isn’t about where people stand on the stage or finding a
new historical moment for a story or establishing a new theatrical style – it’s
about facilitating actors to find and develop characters that are often as far
from their own nature as you can imagine.
You recently produced a Caryl Churchill play for online consumption, The After-Dinner Joke. This was a very funny and rarely produced play about the charity sector, public relations and the myth of 'making a difference' when large amounts of money enter the equation. What inspired you to produce the play at this time and can you talk a bit about the challenges and also advantages of producing shows for the internet and streaming media?
This was the second large cast piece that I produced and
directed during the pandemic. At the root of it all, I was painfully aware of
the number of early career performers who were faced with an utterly bleak
situation where not only would they not work during lockdown, but when
restrictions eased all of the shows that had unceremoniously closed would
reopen and they would have to wait even longer to be seen doing what they do. I
wanted a script with a large cast to showcase a lot of people. However, I fell
in love with this script in particular as it speaks so articulately (and
hilariously) about the politics of charity – and at a time when every pound
that we donate has to be linked to a social media post to share the news of our
generosity and promote further giving, Churchill’s acerbic view of the
mechanics of managing giving seems even more potent today.
When did you become interested in Caryl Churchill and her work? Does she actively contribute in the making of productions of her work as playwrights such as Harold Pinter were known to do?
I’ve been aware of Churchill’s work since I was a teenager
but like most people I was aware of the big titles – Top Girls at the top of
the list – and certainly didn’t know her short plays. She is known for spending
time in the rehearsal room for new work, but in this case she just came to the
show as an audience member. It must have been a strange experience for her, to
see work on stage that she wrote half a century ago for radio. Still, she was
very complimentary which was a fantastic boost for the cast and company.
Bad Nights and Odd Days is a unique and powerful blend of four of Churchill's short plays. Did you come up with the title as it perfectly encapsulates the content of the plays, multiple relationships in a state of fluctuation or disintegration? Also why did you choose this particular combination of plays?
Funnily enough this wasn’t my first title idea for the
collection, but in consultation with Churchill this is the title she settled on
and I think you’re right – it’s perfect. As for the choice of titles, I wanted
an evening of work that would show the diversity of Churchill’s writing, from
the microscopic to the global, and I think these pieces do that. Seagulls is
highly personal to Churchill, presenting an allegory for her own fear (at the
time of writing) that she could lose her ‘powers’. Three More Sleepless Nights
and Abortive feature very different characters but both explore those moments
in the night when we are tired, ragged, where pretenses unravel, where truths
slip through, where exhaustion makes the mundane become potent and the potent
become toxic. Finally, Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen reveals Churchill’s
astonishing ability to glimpse the future. Ecological meltdown may have been
inevitable for a long time, but the play is set in an era of fake news, of
state-sponsored propaganda about terrorism, of manufactured celebrity and
artificial dream-making. It seems to me that Churchill got it just about right,
and she wrote that play 50 years ago.
How do you work with the actors to help them to develop the characters that live on stage in the moment yet do not appear to have fully developed back stories (although, they are hinted at)? Do you feel that any particular acting technique helps to bring out the lives of Churchill's characters?
I think different actors work in different ways, so a good
director works with the strengths on offer. There are actors who build
meticulous back stories and use that to access the characters, and I certainly
collaborate with that. There are others who find their own truths in the words
given by the playwright, and others that settle into the world of the play and
the mood or tone of a scene before finding their character’s place in it. I
always try to find equivalent events that the actors could have experienced, to
give an emotional starting point. I interrogate the way they move or speak, as
breaking down and then rebuilding an actor’s physicality or speech pattern can
help them to lose their own default mannerisms and build a new character. I
also rely a lot on improvisation when working on a show like this one as it
always helps to develop relationships between characters. It effectively builds
the store of memories that real people carry around with them, which the actors
can then access to find the resonance in things being said to one another.
I was intrigued by the mise-en-scene of this production. The ruined section of roller coaster serving as a particularly potent metaphor for the lives of the characters and the fairground sounds during the scene changes. Where did the idea for the roller coaster come from and indeed, the fairground motif?
I can’t take any credit for that! The rollercoaster came
from our designer, Cleo Pettitt, but I think she did a brilliant job. We were
always aware that there couldn’t be a single naturalistic setting that could
take us from a country fete to a series of bedrooms to a futuristic bedsit, so
we’d need something suggestive. She suggested the life-long rollercoaster that
we are all on, and the way that these almost grotesque glimpses of the moments
in people’s lives that are usually hidden had a carnival feeling – almost, at
times, like a peep show, throwing open the doors on a series of secret moments.
Bad Nights and Odd Days consists of a couple of plays that were originally written for radio. Do the play texts give any guidance as to how they should be produced on stage or as a director does it give you a degree of freedom? Indeed, how prescriptive are Caryl Churchill's works? As a director do you face the same restrictions and constraints as you may face staging Samuel Beckett's plays?
The two pieces written for radio – Abortive and Not Not Not
Not Not Enough Oxygen – do have stage directions in the published scripts that
give you a starting point for a stage production but they are limited. It was
also interesting to see the small differences between a piece written to be
heard or to be seen. Some of the dialogue was more descriptive than you really
need for theatre, as you can see what’s happening, but we found ways to
integrate that. The text was more prescriptive – the overlapping dialogue that
Churchill is known for now, the pauses or silences (in the same vein as Pinter,
where the playwright clearly has a very clear view of how long those should
be), that was where we felt we really had to follow the script as written.
For me, Three More Sleepless Nights is the astounding centrepiece of Bad Nights and Odd Days. The bed becomes both a place of sanctuary and a battleground. Words are uttered or half spoken that won't be unsaid. What particular challenges do you face as a director staging a play that uses a bed as the focal point of attention? How do the actors work around the enforced restraints of bed sheets and the opportunity for limited movement?
The bed was a really interesting playground for the actors. As you can imagine, as soon as you lie on a bed together you are in intimate territory, whatever the script dictates, so it had to be a very safe environment in rehearsal. Once we were happy with that, it had two key impacts on the production I think. Firstly, it’s one of the few places where you have a conversation with someone very close to you but without necessarily looking at them. We compared it to a conversation in the front seats of a car when one person is driving. With a physical dynamic that allows conversation without eye contact, uncomfortable things can be said more easily. Secondly, the bed, and the time of night at which the three chapters of the play is set, makes everything incredibly focused. When you are that close together, in the dark, at a time when you are both tired and sometimes with children asleep in an adjacent room, however angry or impassioned you become you still channel your emotions in a very narrow way. For the first chapter in particular, which could all be high energy argument, the bed setting forced us to make moments much closer and even intimate, even though the characters were furious with each other.
What are your future projects and are you enjoying the experience of directing at the moment?
I love directing – I have always loved stories and storytelling, and this is such an exciting way of telling a story. I am currently in rehearsal for our summer rep season which has its own challenges – a company of seven actors performing two different shows on alternate days. Pinocchio has a lot of puppetry and music but just enough reminders of how dark the original story was, whereas The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase is a traditional adventure story which unravels, with a few modern theatrical devices added in. I am also about to start development on a new family show concept, blending live performance with community radio broadcast and the distribution of a graphic novel – and then of course, I’ll have to work out what to present next for our adult audience. I have a large pile of plays to read…
Thanks to James Haddrell for agreeing to being interviewed again during a busy time and I thank him for his insights and openness concerning the art of theatre production.
Images
Gracy Goldman and Kerrie Taylor in Bad Nights and Odd Days. 
James Haddrell at work.
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| Promotional image for Bad Nights and Odd Days. |
