May 2004
An interview with Declan Donnellan
by Dominic Cavendish, deputy theatre critic for the Daily Telegraph
reprinted from On Tour, issue 024, pp 20-3, illust.
also available in audio format on www.theatrevoice.com

'All the work I do is uncompleted and unfinished'
Director Declan Donnellan talks to Dominic Cavendish about his latest production of Othello for Cheek by Jowl, which plays in 14 cities world-wide this year as part of the British Council's 70th anniversary celebrations

DC: Othello is a play you've already tackled with your company Cheek by Jowl back in 1982. Why did you decide to return to it?

DD: That's normally a very difficult question to answer but this time I met Nonso Anozie, who is this mountain of an actor and he was just built to play Othello. So it was a very obvious decision. He was in the RSC Academy production of King Lear I did a few years ago and played Lear fantastically well. And Nick Ormerod, designer and co-Artistic Director of Cheek by Jowl and I said, "This guy's just made to play Othelllo." So that's the reason we did it. Often It's because I'm burning to do the play, but this time the play was completely suggested by the actor.

He was seen, clearly as very young for Lear then and, again, could also be seen as young for Othello now. Did you feel that the time was right for him to take such a major role?

I think so. Lots of people have played parts when they were too young. Paul Schofield was about forty or even less when he played his famous King Lear. Having the right weight matters, and heíll go on playing it Iím sure. But he was absolutely fantastic to work with and it's been a very fulfilling experience these two extraordinary tragic roles with this guy who's so open.

And in terms of the play itself, when you left the staging in 1982-3, were there things that lingered on that you wanted to look at again in Othello, that weren't finished in that first production?

I think all the work that I do is uncompleted and unfinished. You have a group of actors and a script and a series of spaces, and then what you do is you try to tell that story as well as possible with those actors. I do't really think in terms of having something left to do, because there is always something left to do. It's not so much my ideas that develop, it's my work which is all about enabling life to flow through actors. And that's not really a measurable thing and it's not a very intellectual thing. I certainly don't think it's about teaching the audience something. I can't really say how this Othello is different from the one in the past, all I can say is that it's a completely different group of actors. I think a director's job is to keep the actors playing together. The health of the ensemble is something that changes, that's fragile, that needs to be looked after.

And that ensemble force must be affected by being on tour for long periods of time. How much would you expect the experience of the ensemble to have changed by the time this reaches London again?

It must have completely changed. Because all life is in flux, so what's happening on stage is going to change. Now there are two things you can say. One is that if you were to try to change the play or the production we're doing together to accord with the different, local circumstances, it would be total disaster. But, of course, as a human being you are completely changed by the world that you see. I mean, I remember very vividly touring with The Tempest and Philoctetes in the late 80s just before the fall of the Wall and we went to Romania. And we had an extraordinary time — Anne White played the Duke of Milan and was in modern dress and in Britain everyone thought it was a satire on Thatcher. But in Romania, at exactly the same performance, a great gasp went up and it as decided it was a satire on Elena Ceausescu. We got into trouble but we went on with it anyway. But I remember in Romania at that time it suddenly became really clear that The Tempest was written for an audience who lived in a police state. All the imagery of bondage, imprisonment, freedom, suddenly came into sharp focus. But that's quite different from saying we made the play relevant to Romanian politics at the time.

Cheek by Jowl is often seen as being an act of defiance in an age of decline in theatre. You created it at the start of the Thatcher era and fought on while many theatre companies suffered because of funding cuts and because of the general attitude towards the arts in the 1980s. Did that inform any sense of politicisation in your approach to theatre? In practical terms, were you in some way in opposition to the presiding power at the time?

That makes me feel very important and grand. No, we started Cheek by Jowl because we couldn't get a job anywhere else. I was in my late twenties and I couldn't persuade anybody to take me on as an assistant and I would have been an absolutely terrible assistant. I couldn't work in any of the sort of grand institutions that were around then, so we started Cheek by Jowl. One thing I would like to say is that I think an extraordinary sea change is happening in British theatre. It's largely to do with the heads of the national companies changing and I think there is an extraordinary period of perestroika. There's Nick Hytner at the National, Michael Boyd at the RSC ... a whole new generation is taking over with very different agendas and there's an incredible sense of change and renewal and passion. I've never seen British theatre look as healthy as it does at the moment. I'm very, very happy to have seen the day when the shackles of the past seem to have been thrown off. I don't think one should sentimentalise that — you should keep a cold eye on it — but there is a great feeling of hope at the moment in British theatre, one that I've never seen before.

People have mulled over the reason why Cheek by Jowl was put on ice. Did the suspension of Cheek by Jowl after Much Ado About Nothing (1998) relate to your feeling that the unexpected was desirable or was there a particular point where you thought you should call it a day?

Well there were a lot of things I'd been asked to do over the years that I couldn't do — establish a company of Russian actors; do an academy at the RSC; do Falstaff at Salzburg; do a production of Le Cid at Avignon; a ballet at the Bolshoi. I never would have had time to do all of those things if I'd been devoting my life to Cheek by Jowl, which was a very intensive thing. So it was really to give me a breathing space. I think also there was a slight element in making sure I wouldn't repeat myself. But no, I think on the whole, it was just to let me do other things and I'm very, very glad that I have done those other things. But we only sort of went into slow motion with Cheek by Jowl — we did Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner a couple of years ago, so it has always been there. And I will always want to have Cheek by Jowl because there will always be projects that I want to do that I passionately believe in.

So you don't have the sentimental view of some people when they see Othello coming to London that in some way this Shakespeare production represents a reconnecting with Much Ado and that earlier body of work?

Oh yes, well I do have that, but I mean I'm suspicious of all sentimentality. Cheek by Jowl will always be the centre of my life. And we have plans. We don't know what the plays are yet but over the next four years we will be doing three plays for Cheek by Jowl.

Did you begin to tour so much because this was the way to make Cheek by Jowl viable or is there a much greater kind of wanderlust in you?

I don't know about that. We started off by making virtue of necessity. But then afterwards I realised that it's very weird the synchronicity of fate, because it's something that I and Nick naturally took to. Nick largely because of his aesthetic and me, partially I think, because I have a weird Irish wanderlust gene. I don't know what it is about the Irish, but we just sort of always have to go, you know. And that's come out in me and I'm sort of happy travelling, although at the moment I find it quite tiring. It was easier when I was younger. We've always resisted settling in a theatre, although it think it's probably driven Nick mad. I suspect I'd have felt claustrophobic, having to check in at ten in the morning and sitting down and sharpening my pencils. The touring nature of our work has allowed us to have tremendous flexibility and that flexibility has meant that we could be very alert and attentive to artistic impulses, which we wouldn't have had if we'd had to run a building. What's happened for us is that we've developed a pattern of places, of different homes, like in Moscow for example, and in Brooklyn, and in Paris. These are homes where we go, so it's less promiscuous than when we were starting and we were going everywhere.

It was the British Council who initially set up a working relationship between you and the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg in 1994 and also facilitated the first commissioned production there, The Winter's Tale (1997) That led to a string of other collaboration in Russia, including Boris Godunov for the Russian Theater Confederation and Romeo and Juliet at the Bolshoi, the first time a theatre director has staged a ballet there in living memory.

Yes, there was an extraordinary man in St Petersburg at the time called Michael Bird, and he set it up. I'd known the director Lev Dodin since 1986. But I mean, you know, in the 90s it was quite a big thing to set up a piece of work like that and Michael had to fight, not the Maly who were very keen for it to happen, but it was a very big thing to organise for us an it would certainly not have happened without the British Council's intervention.

You've been given awards in Russia, where you're honoured with a unique kind of reverence it seems. How come you were one of the first directors to be able to create these links and to work in that way? Is there an affinity in the way you look at theatre that has created this bridge?

One of my underlying shames is that I don't speak Russian. I'm learning it and I speak it very badly. But what is weird in Russia is that it's like going home artistically. Comparisons are odious, you know, but I don't have to explain my priorities at the beginning of Russian rehearsals. Although a certain amount of time is lost for interpretation, an enormous amount of time is gained because we actually start from the same outlook. One thing that is really exciting is that Romeo and Juliet, which I did for Bolshoi is going to come to Covent Garden at the end of July.

So you've done a ballet, you've already tackled opera, you clearly like going into unknown territory ...

It's fantastic to stretch yourself. I would love to direct a horror film, I would love to do a thriller. I'd love to put on a circus. There are lots of things that are enriching to do once or to do occasionally because they do feed back into your work. It's fantastic to do a ballet because there are no words in it and, of course, as soon as there are no words, it becomes all about words. I quite like being able to take these kind of sabbaticals.

Well on the tantalising thought of you perhaps running away and setting up a circusÖ

No, no, it wouldn't be to do it permanently, it might be to do it once and then come back to doing what I do!