My London Life

(Alex Brightman [Posner] and Seth Numrich [Dakin] at the first night party. Photo Ryan Miller)

Before I go on with my current (London) life, a little more on Los Angeles. Well, I bored everyone I've met since about it - why not you too?

This is the office building of Center Theatre Group where we rehearsed. Here work all the many people who made my time out there so enjoyable and productive:

As a farewell treat Erika Sellin organised something really special. Knowing my ER obsession she arranged for its casting director John Levey to take me on personal tour of Warner Brothers Studios, including going onto the set of ER and standing behind the director etc as they shot a scene. This is me in the emergency bay of County General:

(Photo Erika Sellin)

Well, Erika, you are just one of many I have to thank for everything you did for me out there. Adam and Demond, those trips to West Hollywood were amazing. Jimmie and team, I owe you a lot. As for the rest of you, if you read this, I think - I hope - you know how grateful I am.

So...

Back to my London life.

Where its cold, dirty, smelly, small, and mean-spirited. The rudeness was the biggest shock. In the US it has a put on feel. Here people really mean it. The food is awful, the service appalling, the prices extortionate, the atmosphere sour, the politics stagnant, the arrogance about ourselves repugnant. It took me some time to feel at home here again.

The story since? The History Boys opened in LA on Wednesday 14th Nov. I flew on the 15th, getting back on the 16th. I went up to Newcastle on the 17th Nov to see the last performance of the UK cast on tour. They then had a month off before opening at the Wyndham's Theatre. During which I cast the 3 new one hour plays for the Cottesloe which is what I'm now rehearsing.

More on the UK History Boys, and on DNA/Baby Girl/The Miracle very shortly. Its as long a sustained period of work as I've had since starting this blog and at least as busy as the last busiest period in 2003/4. Do I have directing fatigue, or conversely perhaps, do I have enhanced directing muscles through all the workout? I don't yet know. Both seem possible theories. A bit knackered is what I chiefly feel.

I started all this in a state of at that time not un-welcome unemployment. Some stats: in the first five months I clocked up 57 posts here, I'm shocked now to notice; in the last 12 months I have directed 6 productions and am now on my 7th. Yet it is more than three months since I last put something up here. What does it all mean? That I have less to say for myself whilst doing interesting things?

Its just that if you're going to try to avoid just pontificating about this that or the other (as is my wont) and actually describe your life (ie, in my case at any event, your work...) it all gets quite difficult. The theatre is the most public of arts. Yet it relies on there being a 'backstage' which the public don't see. There is no variant of our trade of which this isn't true: stuff done out out of the back of van relies on there being a van. Is it that blogging about it lets daylight in on magic? Surely not. If we re-learnt anything in the 20th century it's that the public don't care if they see the puppeteer's hand - they want to hear the story again. (I am not of course saying that a director is a puppeteer - its a metaphor for theatre in general). So really its rank laziness on my part.

Plus the fact that if you miss one bit of the story it seems all the more arduous to then have to pick it up again the next day. The upshot is that I regret not giving blow by blow accounts of the last three months. But like calling someone when you know you should, it gets harder the longer you leave it.

Quite a lot of the time I've been "re-creating" Nicholas Hytner's production of The History Boys by Alan Bennett - twice. Once for the revival which toured the UK and is now playing at the Wyndham's Theatre and then for Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. It's been a bit of an odyssey and a unique situation for me. Even when I used to assist other directors I never found myself, for instance, directing the understudies. So it has been a very odd sensation, living inside someone else's sensibility for the best part of six months.

I was working at the NT on something else entirely when the play first happened. But I do remember that it did not arrive in the way we know it now - this has been written about by Bennett in his diaries. There was a reading at the Studio (I was then acting Head of the Studio but was away rehearsing something else). He records it as a bureaucratic disaster: the actors all had different drafts. Perhaps if I hadn't been otherwise engaged I would have run the Studio better... It had been sparked by Alan hearing Nick Hytner talk about his own adolescence and singing at the Hallé under Barbirolli in a boys' choir. "When I was writing The History Boys I didn't pay much heed to when it was supposed to be set", he says in the preface. In its genesis it was all quite free-form I think. Its to Nick that we owe quite a lot of the play's present sharp focus. Thus coming to it completely fresh as I did it became clear that this was no ordinary case where the play as written and the director's mise-en-scene could easily be separated. So what does "re-creating" mean?

Thankfully human beings are all utterly different. However hard you might even try to "re-create" something you would never succeed. So with Alastair Coomer at the National and Erika Sellin in LA we put together two new casts for The History Boys. It took some time. In the case of the LA production I met the first people on May 15th - we finally cast it two weeks before starting rehearsals on 6th Oct. I went about it the way I normally would by seeing who seemed right for the play as written rather than by having any mind to the original cast. In the UK we were very fortunate that Des Barrit who had first taken over from Richard Griffiths wanted to do it again.

Of course when I said that I came to it completely fresh this was a lie. I had just opened The Enchantment in August at the Cottesloe. Press night Thursday, first History Boys rehearsal Monday. Trevor Nunn does it all the time of course and in one way I see the attraction - no post-opening blues, or least something to be doing while you work though it. In this case though I really was very tired after six months of doing French without Tears, Total Eclipse, Elling (including transferring that to the Trafalgar Studios during the evenings after rehearsals of the Cottesloe play) then The Enchantment. So I found the first week of it rather Lewis Carroll. Everyone but me seemed to know what this play was. I felt like resigning (I often do anyway but this was different). Only very gradually did I pick up momentum again and get a grip, in great measure thanks to the then company manager Charles Evans, one of our theatre's great originals. It opened at Plymouth Theatre Royal on the first of its UK tour dates. There'd been an alarming last run through in the charmless rehearsal room at the Oval with the author and Nick H there. Stiff with terror, the actors did well. But the reality of the situation gripped me then and hasn't let off since: when it works its because, well its The History Boys isn't it; when it doesn't, its because I've done something wrong. This is no-one's fault but mine. It's a perception based on the play's extraordinary success. Every now and again the National hits on a new play which has this straight-into-the-vein impact: Amadeus and Pravda are two which spring to mind. This one has penetrated through to the generally non-theatre-going public as very few plays do.

So "re-creating" means what, exactly? I'm still not sure. In this case taking the mise-en-scene as read but re-thinking the casting from scratch. The blocking too - I didn't look at the original stage manager's book until I was in rehearsal in LA (and even then I took no notice - movement in space has to be based on the particular actor and your own sensibility). And here and there fiddling with the scene changes to make them flow a little better.

Then to LA to finish casting there. My LA story can't be summed up here. I love working abroad and definitely become a better director (those reading who know me in LA - and indeed Tokyo - had better get over their incredulity now).

Something perhaps about the length of the casting journey or maybe the cultural leap the company had to make to get to being in a Sheffield Grammar School: I don't know, but that company of actors in Los Angeles were - are - very special to me. There's a promo on YouTube which they were a bit embarrassed about but where you can at least catch the flavour. I like it as an aide memoire:

So two weeks there to finish casting then back here to start casting etc for what I'm now working on: DNA / Baby Girl / The Miracle. Of which more in a minute.

Oct 6th: start of LA rehearsals. As I say, the moment has perhaps passed for me to go into much detail about the six weeks I rehearsed the play in America. I loved LA. I know you're not supposed to. I loved the food, the attitude. The weather. My nice apartment in a converted 20s office building in Downtown. The exchange rate currently makes us millionaires so that helps (thanks, George!). The politics, too. Ignore the soundbites and look at the Democratic candidates manifestos - travelling in quite the opposite direction to the Labour Party here. The one question everyone there wanted to ask me in the Spring: why did he do it? IE, why did Blair go into Iraq with Bush. Well, three (four?) enquiries later and we don't really know if we're honest, do we? We all (or most of us) knew he was going to do it well before he said it was decided (after that first Camp David meeting early in 2002) but we don't really actually know why do we?

(This is my apartment block in LA. I was on the 10th floor)

This is the cast list there:

John Apicella (TV director, u/s Hector)
Adam Armstrong (Lockwood)
Ryder Bach (boy, u/s Posner)
Alex Brightman (Posner)
Charlotte Cornwell (Mrs Lintott)
H. Richard Greene (Headmaster)
Cord Jackman (Rudge)
Sean Marquette (Timms)
Dakin Matthews (Hector)
Andrew McLain (boy, u/s Irwin)
Seth Numrich (Dakin)
Peter Paige (Irwin)
Ammar Ramzi (Akhtar)
Demond Robertson (Crowther)
Brett Ryback (Scripps)
Edward Tournier (boy, u/s Dakin)
Elizabeth West (Make-up Lady, u/s Mrs Lintott)

We started with 'table work' for the best part of a week. Asking questions, addressing the text. Interspersed with me playing snippets of Alan Bennett reading from his diaries on my iPod, broadcast from my portable speakers - slightly surreal. But if you're doing a new play its the sound of the author speaking which will tell you more about the play than anything else...

Then visits from England: estimable colleagues who had worked on the first production came out to oversee the work. The boys had a lot of contact especially with Richard Sisson and Jack Murphy (music and movement respectively) - they were instant and enduring hits. Ben ("Wicked") Taylor came to shoot the video segments as he had done originally. A Californian high school was found for the location which offered the potential to look like a Northern state school. We tried to film the scenes with the palm trees just out of shot. Ben and I loved our Flat Iron Steak with Blue Cheese Fries at Pete's Bar.

(Mr Taylor at work)

Its not called 'The States' for nothing. America is a continent rather than a country. Anything you care to say about it and the opposite is almost certainly true too. Sharp - very sharp, sophisticated, down to earth, warm and intuitive, the people I got to know in LA were as talented and engaging as any I've worked with.

Four weeks of rehearsals, a week of technicals, dresses etc and then a week of previews. The Ahmanson seats 2000 people. All the usual issues of sightlines, audibility, clarity etc were easily sorted. What a great team there is at CTG. The reality was that the audience really got it. To the actors' surprise I think. Should you count things by laughs? Almost certainly not, but if you do, I know that the LA audience got at least as much of it as in England.

(Cord, Demond and Sean while filming at Lakewood High) photo Alex Brightman

Leaving the company there after the first night to come home was one of the more difficult emotional things I've ever encountered.

More tomorrow. But meanwhile Alex Brightman, who played Posner, blogged about the whole thing better than I could ever have done - including many photos. Do have a look.

(The History Boys in Los Angeles: l-r, Ammar Ramzi, Sean Marquette, Adam Armstrong, Alex Brightman, Brett Ryback, Demond Robertson, Seth Numrich, Cord Jackman) photo Craig Schwartz