SAM PRITCHARD ON INHERITED STORIES AND MYTHS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN

LUKE: Where does one begin, or how does one approach, a play of this scale and in this form as a director? It seems to me that this is a text that opens further the more time that you spend with it. I noticed, for instance, in Part II an allusion to Eliot and the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock when Jack first encounters the Arctic ice – 

I am Overwhelmed – it stretches itself out like a body on a slab – the sky gapes above

This recalled, for me, Eliot’s evening spread out against the sky “like a patient etherised upon a table”. As I flick through the text now, I notice that a character from Part II is called Prufrock. Jack’s wife, Clarissa, perhaps an allusion to Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady.

SAM: I think at the beginning it’s always a combination of things. Thinking about some of the things the play is asking for most loudly in terms of how the staging needs to work. Thinking about the relationship between the play and the space at the Almeida. Thinking about how the acting company needs to operate – what the language of performance needs to be in each part, how doubling works and what it means, how to build an ensemble. This play is also caught between two art forms – it’s a play but it also makes various attempts to ‘be’ a novel in different ways or to explore the kinds of stories we’ve told in novels over the last 150 years. So I spent time with the creative team thinking about how a play can be a novel, the qualities of novels from the five different periods the play inhabits.

LUKE: I was really interested to see how the staging would be done for a play with such an ambitious temporal and spatial scope – Victorian boarding school to contemporary podcast studio. I thought it was excellently done and notice that the inclusion of the revolving stage is suggested in the notes to the text at the start of Part II. 

How did your vision of the staging and choreography on the stage evolve from first reading the text through to rehearsals and ultimately the previews and press night? In particular, the use of the revolver, but also the filming and projection through Part III.

SAM: Hugely. The Almeida is a very specific space, it’s close but also epic and it also doesn’t have natural wing space or flies, which shapes how a play can move in there quite significantly. Alice’s play gives us quite a strong steer in terms of the form of each part and then there were layers of work with Merle, the set designer, Hannes who choreographed the show with me, Lee who lit it and Ben and Jasmin who did sound and music. Working out which elements of the design could carry what layer of detail. We had the idea of the cyclorama that would hold a different form in each part quite early on – something that would move from 19th century landscape painting through colour, video and then start to deteriorate. Then of course the biggest evolution is starting to work things out together with the acting company who were brilliant at rationalising quite quickly whether an idea could work.

LUKE: I was lucky enough to attend a Q&A with Stuart Thompson, Agnes O’Casey, Adelle Leonce, Jerry Killick, and Neetu Singh following the performance. Something that came across from listening to the actors was the importance of following the words and the rhythm of the text no matter what, on the advice of Adelle and her experience working on Anatomy of a Suicide. 

Part IV, and to a lesser extent Part II, involve complex, overlapping narratives and exchanges, were these parts of the play the most challenging from your perspective as director? How did you help establish the flow of these parts?

SAM: This company were brilliant at excavating the language of the play and treating it like a musical score. They’re so specific and so exacting – in the way cast member Adelle Leonce described. The challenge with something like Part II, which is continuously revolving and contains lots of characters, or Part IV, which has a section of densely overlapping action, is that you have to keep chipping away at it. Piecing it together bit by bit, layer by layer. You can’t see whether the overall effect of each part is going to work immediately, you have to construct it first.

LUKE: In a year that has seen the release of Adolescence and Inter Alia at the National Theatre, Romans, for me, is a part of this dialogue. For me the play was as much about brotherhood and a search for familial belonging as it is about masculinity – Edmund writes to his brothers, longing for kinship but lost in their shadows; Marlow fathers a small clan; and Jack becomes a quasi-father to his followers in Part III. I found Jack’s lines at the plays conclusion to be really profoundly moving, perhaps, in part, because I am the eldest of three brothers.

I wish. 

I wish we had some Shared Memory. Just one.

 Some game or mischief or even that we had had the opportunity to Be together in grief but. 

I do not know either of you. And I am sorry for it.

When you first read, or discussed, the play, was there a theme or an idea that you found particularly arresting?

SAM: I think that’s right. Alice has written a play that’s about lots of different things – yes masculinity but also what a set of brothers share or inherit, what the stories we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine say about us. It’s a story that’s as much about the women who’ve lived with these men as it is about the men. I always think that if you could summarise it in a neat logline it wouldn’t need to be a play. I don’t really think a play is a thing that has a point or a message. At its best it’s a whole universe.

ONE MINUTE WITH MELODRAMA

FAVOURITE PERFORMING ARTS VENUE IN LONDON?
I love the main house at the Young Vic, I watched a lot of shows there as a young director.

FIRST PLAY YOU EVER SAW?
I don’t really remember – I saw A Number by Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court when I was 14, that was quite formative for me.

FAVOURITE PLAY?
Woyzeck.

MOST RECENTLY?
I loved 1536 at the Almeida, I thought it was so confident with brilliant writing for actors.

YOUR PRE-OR-POST THEATRE DRINK/DINNER?
There’s a small pub behind the Royal Court called the Fox and Hounds which is tiny and full of character.

A DIRECTOR WHO INSPIRED YOU EARLY IN YOUR CAREER?
I saw a lot of Katie Mitchell and Richard Jones shows early in my career. The level of craft and singularity of vision in their work is extraordinary.

BEST REHEARSAL ROOM MEMORY?
I made a show at the Royal Court called Grimly Handsome where we rehearsed in the building where we made the show and the design took shape around us. That was pretty special with an amazing group of people.