30 May 1995
Interview with Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod
by Paul Heritage at The Coliseum, London
reprinted from In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre
eds. Maria M. Delgado & Paul Heritage

Heritage: You work on plays that are linguistically complex and then take them to non-English speaking audiences. What's important about that, for the actors and for you?

Donnellan: There are some very irritating things about the plays that we chose: they're incredibly old, many of them are written by dead people, and they're full of words. I am not particularly wedded to any of these things. It's just that they happen to be very great plays that you can decide to tour for a long period of time, because they give a wonderful array of parts that deal with apparently modern subjects — politics, sex, love, the supernatural. All of those things seem to be explored well at the heart of those plays that we present. But we are slaves to the word in so far as our job is to make it appear that those words are spontaneously born. What happens on stage has to make the text appear inevitable so the audience should not be aware that they're watching something which is linguistically dense...

What is it that the audience is connecting to? I've watched your productions with audiences abroad who are absolutely absorbed, yet don't understand a word.

Donnellan: But what's essential is not the word. The word is only the surface of something. What's really important is what makes the word happen, which is the imagination and the belief that make the word inevitable. The actors need to see Shakespeare's words as the pretext and accept that what the audience is going to see is something other than the text, because actually they can read the text in the library. The audience is not really going to see the text. In a curious way the text is a catalyst for something else, that's one way to look at it. It's not the only way because some people do go to see the text and that has to be taen into consideration as well. But the moving nature of theatre is that thing which is born in the actor and the audience which makes the text appear inevitable — the specificness. The text is a generalisation; the actor's belief and imagination must be specific. That's why it's pointless saying "That's not Hamlet" because thee are as many different Hamlets as there are actors multiplied by the days of the week. It's seeing how the actor has made those words specific which is moving.

You've forged a very collaborative project over the years: collaborative with the actors, with Paddy Cunneen, the company's musical director, with Barbara Matthews... and Jane Gibson, the company's choreographer. But at the centre of all the work is your collaboration as director and designer.

Ormerod: The essence of Cheek by Jowl is our work together. I'm involved in choosing the play, in casting the actors, and making the company, in being in as many rehearsals as I can and creating it on the floor. That's the process we go through. Hopefully the complete team is present, which is Paddy, who's our musician, and Jane Gibson who does the movement. There are so many unpredictable things in the theatre that it's best to work from a permanent team, or as permanent as possible in this changing world; in which case tou remove some of the variables, and you can start from step one. We believe that's the simplest way of approaching the plays.

Is that simplicity, which is characteristic of all your designs for Cheek by Jowl, related to what Declan says about how to make the word happen?

Ormerod: It's a cliché to say that Shakespeare paints his own scenes and that he doesn't require scenery, but it is true that the word does it in most of the plays we deal with. Nothing more is needed really than the actor, say, something to sit on — not even that sometimes. So you start off with an advantage that you don't actually need anything. The essence of theatre is paring down to the essentials of what you actually need: cutting it back until you discover what you need, and maybe that one thing serves many different functions, which is theatrical in itself. The visual side springs out of those essentials, which is similar to what Declan's been saying about refining down to the essence of performance.