Blasting taboos with Macdonald

10 April 2012

How do you get ahead in theatre? Show off.

For a director, the fastest route to fame is to update, re-think and re-stage a classic with cash and flash.

Why? Because critics and audiences alike will be able to spot your handiwork.

What about doing new writing? Forget it. A director on even the boldest new play has to be far more self-effacing: all your work will be hidden beneath discussions of the script.

If that sounds cynical, look back at Blasted. Thanks to the critics six years ago who alerted their news desks to the play's litany of "atrocities", first-time playwright Sarah Kane, then aged 23, was catapulted to notoriety.

The Today programme covered the play; Newsnight ran a wildly polarised debate and the Daily Express screamed "Rape-play girl goes into hiding". Clearly, someone had managed to stage Kane's trenchant vision to powerful effect, but can anyone outside the profession remember his name?

The man in question was James Macdonald. His most recent productions include Marivaux's 18th century comedy The Triumph of Love at the Almeida and The Tempest for the RSC, but these are exceptions.

His considerable professional reputation rests on his meticulous stagings of new plays, not least three by Kane, who took her own life two years ago and whose complete plays are now being revived by the Royal Court.

A few offstage voices are expressing misgivings about this retrospective. Given that there are dozens of major works by the likes of Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill or Martin Crimp in serious need of revival, isn't this a trifle early?

Macdonald agrees that there are numerous other important back catalogues, but adds: "While writers are still alive, one is always anxious to do their next play - if Sarah were alive, we would be doing hers.

We're left with the five she's given us, and we felt that a number of them have not fully reached an audience."

On Blasted's first run, thanks in part to the brouhaha surrounding the play, every last seat in the 65 - seat Theatre Upstairs was sold. However, that still meant an overall audience of just 1,100. "Sarah has been studied, performed and fêted across Europe," Macdonald adds. "She became a major writer with almost no one seeing the work."

It's a typically measured, calm response. The still prevalent myth of the director as dictator might lead you to expect someone forthright, forceful, even fierce, three adjectives you can't apply to Macdonald. He's one of those tall men who looks slightly embarrassed by his height. Soft-spoken and mild-mannered, he has a habit of hanging his head in mock-doleful fashion, disappearing off into puzzled thought before bouncing back with a wide, boyish grin.

These seemingly deferential characteristics mask a sternly meticulous streak. His outstanding production of 4.48 Psychosis, Kane's extraordinary piece about depression widely mis-read as an extended suicide note, meshed design, direction and drama. Only when the mesmerisingly well-acted performance was over did it occur to you that Macdonald's use of video and live performance amounted to a multimedia experience.

What is most telling about his work is its attention to detail. For example, he offset the present-day teenage feel of Nick Grosso's first play, Peaches, by energising the scene changes with brilliant bursts of Bach's Second English Suite (Grosso is another playwright he has long championed).

Music is close to his heart. He was a choirboy at school and has always loved opera. In 1991, he premiered Caryl Churchill and Orlando Gough's music-theatre piece, Lives of the Great Poisoners, and has since directed works for Almeida Opera; productions of The Magic Flute at Garsington and Rigoletto for Welsh National Opera are still to come.

Macdonald's understanding of musical structure and ideas gives him a head start in Kane's bracingly rigorous world of moral imperatives and exacting theatricality. Initially derided as a naive splatter-fest, Blasted is actually astonishingly well-structured, the result of 16 painstaking drafts.

Its imagery, moving from hell on earth to hope, is densely inter-woven in a way that leaves every other playwright of her generation standing. Its taboo subject - an examination of violence without the comforts or support of entertainment, fantasy or psychological realism - points to a linking theme.

"Sarah was drawn to taboos like a magnet, not because she wanted to shock but because she knew instinctively that the place where we don't want to go is the place that will tell us something important about ourselves. 4.48 Psychosis is an incredibly moving and accessible play about another hugely important taboo. It's fantastically accurate and imaginative about serious depression, a condition that 50 per cent of women and 25 of men suffer from at some point in their lives."

The success of 4.48 Psychosis last year made him realise it would be interesting to revisit Blasted, especially with designer Hildegard Bechtler and the resources of the Royal Court's main stage. He beams: "If everybody who said to me they wished they'd seen it turns up, we'll have a very full theatre."

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