Dear Edgar Wright

Dear Edgar Wright.

What's up?

You once came to the guestlist window of Shepherd's Bush Empire when I worked in the box office there. I was too nervous to say hello. Curses me of 4 years ago! You (tied with Cara Delevingne) were the best celeb I served there.

I saw Baby Driver last night. And I had to write to you.

Oh - I composed most of this in my head this morning whilst walking down Oxford Street, on the way back from tutoring. White iPod headphones in.

I loved Baby Driver. And Abigail loved it too. It's so exciting, and then tender, and then stylish, and then exciting all over again. I think the elderly woman sitting to my left liked it too – she had involuntary vocal reactions to all of the most exciting bits, it was ace.

I used to go to the cinema every weekend – Silver Screen in Folkestone – one big screen and one small screen. I saw everything I could there as an adolescent: Independence Day (3 or 4 times), Jurassic Park, Titanic, even that film in which Arnie gets pregnant. I once saw Notting Hill there and kissed in the back row for the whole thing – that was especially ace and I've never liked that movie more. It was run by a husband and wife team who would sell the tickets, the popcorn and be frustratingly strict on checking ages. My friend Matt Robinson fell for their 'What year were you born?' trick when we tried to see Forrest Gump aged 10 or 11, and nobody forgave him.

Screen 1 had a clock on the wall – above a massive photograph of Harold Lloyd hanging off that big clock in Safety Last (I've never seen the movie but I remember the photograph) - to your left as you looked at the screen. So many times I'd be lost in a movie, then look at that clock and be like 'Oh man! 45 minutes has gone it feels like 10 seconds!' (I didn't know how to swear yet). That sensation dissipated somewhat when I studied film – a Rossellini or Akerman deep cut would feel like FOREVER when you're hungover at 9am on a Friday.

I still and will always love film – I have a 35mm projector tattooed on my forearm – but I had that 'lost time' experience again, for the first time in ages, last night in Baby Driver: Abigail and I boogied in our seats throughout and squeezed each other's hands in the tense bits.  The lady next to us gasped and shrieked.  As the end credits were up, Abigail loudly announced that it was the best film she has ever seen. When making breakfast this morning, we made sure to spread peanut butter all the way to the edge of the toast. I love that these things happen in a cinema and beyond – that it's a place of human interaction and fun.

Edgar, I love how much you love cinema also. I know you love it because you've been campaigning on Twitter for people to go out and see this movie in a cinema. But your car chases tell me you love it also: you love the things that cinema can do that the everyday world can't.  Your cinema is full of impossible adventure and love that burns so intensely that people are prepared to die for it.  All underscored by the best music, because why would they settle for anything less?

And your casting, oh your casting, tells me that you love cinema; Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Ansel Elgort, they all look and act like proper movie stars. They're enormous personalities – so big and imposing that, despite all the car chases and ridic choreography, I now mostly remember them and their faces. Lily James's hair. Jon Hamm's stubble. Eiza Gonzalez's bubble gum. Everything that Jamie Foxx does and will ever do.

I work as a theatre director now, Edgar, so I don't really handle enclosed worlds and car chases. But I do work with individuals – I'm always looking for actors who can command a space, who can make an audience remember their presence and their actions. Actors who are so unique that you can't possibly imagine another person on stage. Baby Driver helped me think about and understand this to be true. And I want the theatre to be as lively and as romantic a place as the cinema – I probably wouldn't even hold it against a couple making out in the back row for the whole show.

Thanks for Baby Driver. Thanks for making me think about things that I love. Films. And music (I hope that this was clear). It was great to, through a film, meet someone who loves the same things.

The fact that you are/seem like a normal bloke from a British seaside town making these beautiful, huge movies with the world's very best movie stars – and making them with such enthusiasm and love - is very inspiring to me.  You make me want to have more fun in work.  You make me want to love those dumb art forms we think about all the time more.  And you make me want to use nothing but the best music.

I'd love it if you came to see one of my shows – there's nothing on for a while but I'll invite you in future, if you like. This time, I'll try to say more than just, 'Your seats are on level 1 they're reserved here's a wristband thank you very much'.

All best,

Tom.

Teaching

I saw a really fucking good film last week. Divines. Written and directed by Houda Benyamina. It takes beyond the Paris banlieues (a familiar landscape from La Haine) to the Roma camps on the outskirts of the outskirts, and it finds a story about teenage girls chasing a dream to get rich quick. It's sparky and it's stylish.

DIVINES (2016) directed by Houda Benyamina

After digging into Houda Benyamina and her practice, I quickly discovered that, shortly after the 2005 French riots, Benyamina had set up 1000 Visages – an initiative to teach filmmaking and acting to 'those excluded from the cultural mainstream'. In a crucial connection between education and resistance, she says, “In 68, the anger was understood and translated by an intelligentsia: authors, intellectuals, artists, who then formulated demands, and so made progress. In 2005, that same anger didn’t find an echo; it just got worse. There was no intelligentsia who took it up, no one created anything out of it, so we ended up with the Roma camps and more misery and poverty than we started with.” Benyamina's political convictions led this world-class filmmaker to commit to developing a future generation of artists.

Theatre director Sebastian Nübling's practice demonstrates a comparable dynamic. Alongside the acclaimed plays that he makes with Germany, Switzerland and Austria's leading state theatres, Nübling makes about one show a year with the Junges Theater Basel – a youth theatre based in his home town of Basel. During a visit to the Junges Theater, Ashley Scott-Layton wrote that Nübling's “productions might often be violent and challenging but, in this environment at least he has a gentle and kind presence. The girls seek hugs from him when they are tired the boys seek to impress him with stories and their latest musical treasures.” It's no secret that Nübling's work is one of my main influences as an artist, and so it's major for me that this inspirational director keeps a regular appointment with young people.

ZUCKEN (2017) directed by Sebastian Nübling for Junges Theater Basel

Something that Benyamina's work and Nübling's work have in common Is an affinity with and an authenticity in relation to youth. American artist Sister Corita Kent produced a much-shared list of 10 Rules for Students and Teachers (often mistakenly attributed to John Cage, as it quotes him directly, but Cage and Merce Cunningham reportedly kept copies in their studios). I like them all, but especially Rule 3 - “General duties of a teacher. Pull everything out of your students.” This, to me, has a double meaning. It means to pull all the talent and potential out of your students (the more traditional teacher/coach side) but also to pull out of them all the things that they know that you don't (the vampire side). I always try to find out about new music and new TV shows from the young people I work with, but also to get a sense of what their lives are like.

The 10 Rules for Students and Teachers

Between directing shows and text projects for East 15 and working as Associate Director for NT Connections, I've done a fair bit of teaching and working with young people over the past 12 months. And I take it every bit as seriously as I do when making work with professional actors for a public audience. Of course it's important to develop a future generation of artists, but there's a more selfish side: it's also an opportunity to shape a future generation of artists. It's a chance to act on the question what do I want the next generation of actors to act like?

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (2017) directed by myself, photo credit Gemma Mount

To me, Tim Etchells takes the same opportunity in his remarkable video for companies performing his Connections play Status Update when he says “The thing that I would say, advice-wise, about performing this piece or indeed any other is about taking time. This moment that you're in is more exciting than any other moment. It's got to be now.” (emphasis mine).

STATUS UPDATE (2017) directed by Denny Smith for Rotherham College, photo credit National Theatre

When you teach, when you work with young people, not only are you making great work, not only are you making all your work more authentic in the short-term, but you're also working to ensure that the collaborators you want in the future will be there.

Place

“You may not ever really see them all [the details], but you've got to feel that they're there, somehow, to feel that it's a real place, a real world.” - David Lynch

In a meeting this past month, I said I wanted to make work that is rooted in place. Performances that reflect a community. At the time it felt like a woolly statement, but I've thought a lot more about it.

On these long trains back and forth to work with my Connections companies (one in Rotherham, one in Bideford – these places are not near one another), I have been watching Twin Peaks for the very first time. One of the most immediately remarkable things is Twin Peaks' topography: there's the mill in the middle of town, the diner with the great cherry pie further and, if you cross the river, there's One Eyed Jacks. David Lynch says that, “Every story has its own world, and its own feel, and its own mood”, and he creates that very efficiently.

One Eyed Jacks in TWIN PEAKS

Two of my favourite TV shows of recent years – Joe Swanberg's Easy and David Simon's The Wire – are rooted in real cities (Chicago & Baltimore respectively). Easy captures Chicago's culture in its craft beer, its local art and the parallel stories that reflect the city's different neighbourhoods & communities. Joe Swanberg said “I didn't want the show to be locked into a worldview of what I think is good-looking. I wanted it to be much more all-encompassing, in terms of what Chicago actually looks like.”, and so there was a process of scouting & discovering the parts he didn't already know.

The title card for one episode of EASY by Chicago artist Don't Fret (who is also fictionalised in the episode as an artist who designs labels for an illegal home brewing operation)

As is well-documented David Simon worked as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, and the practice of careful listening he developed in this profession is crucial to The Wire's aesthetic. Scriptwriter Dennis Lehane said “When you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, that’s David, or Ed Burns. Anything that’s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogue—that’s them.”

One of my favourite scenes from THE WIRE

These last two examples helped me think about how we can create place in a theatre, as opposed to taking a camera out on to the streets. Part is in the writing, like with David Simon's listening, in which you can discover that every place has its own poetry. And part could be in collaboration with local artists – as a nomad director, I want to look to local art, local musicians, and consider how these influences can integrate with the performance.

And then we come, finally but crucially, to actors. I want to work with local actors and local participants, and encourage them to be themselves rather than imitate something else. I've currently sworn off using faux accents in shows (my main note from Sebastian Nübling after he saw punkplay was that he genuinely couldn't understand why the company were imitating Americans) and, working with an international ensemble for Cuckoo's Nest..., this bore fascinating results.

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Frank Castorf

About Frank Castorf's work, Joachim Fiebach said “Castorf lets the actors speak and act largely as in 'normal life'. They show their own personality as individuals on the stage, often out of the role. As performers, they comment on what they play and / or on important sociopolitical and cultural topics, sometimes on themselves as performers.” I would suggest that a lot of performers feel that they have to, perhaps from training, aspire to an 'ideal' of an actor (which probably translates to middle-class RP). To me, I want actors to speak & move as they would outside the theatre – to bring the outside to the inside. They grapple a text on to their own terms, and the performance is the product of that wrestling match.

That's what I meant in the meeting.

Castorf

(all quotations are by castorf and are my own translations, put together from my understanding of german sentence structure, liberal use of dict.cc and google translate, and a lot of ‘i think i know what he means’.  take with a massive grain of salt.) 

(Siegfried, dir. Castorf, des. Aleksandar Denić, light. Rainer Casper)

I have been studying the work of German-born director Frank Castorf over the past month.  Last November, Abigail, Cécile and I went to see his production of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ at the Volksbühne.  It went on for around six and a half hours and finished somewhere close to 1am; the whole theatre became the set (projected into the main space by two roaming camera crews), and the actors, with complete disregard for health and safety, climbed all over the space, shouted and screamed at each other with incredible pace, and clambered through the audience all seated on super comfy beanbags.  A six-and-a-half-hour Dostoevsky adaptation sounds dry af but it was sexy, hilarious, ridiculous and violent.

“In the theatre, before the dog begins to bite, all possible victims are warned ‘Caution, I’ll bite!’  When it begins, everyone is safe for a long time.  I no longer find this to be truthful; there can be no comedy and no sadness under these circumstances because everything that happens on the stage has been calculated.” (Castorf)

(Die Brüder Karamasow, dir. Castorf, des. Bert Neumann, light. Lothar Baumgarte)

Two things stick out from this study which characterise, for me, how Castorf sees the world.  

The first is a focus on politics and history – especially world politics and the relationship between a social mainstream & people who live outside that mainstream.  Reading his interviews often feel like reading something published by Verso Books; there was as much, if not more, in his interviews about reunification Germany, the Balkans, the relationship between the West and Africa, than there was about art and theatre.  He speaks with a cutting, bitter edge.  This is a primary food for his work:

“The movement of history, which is in part the history of class struggle, revolution and violent transformation, seems to be lost. This is part of our own complacency; we do not communicate processes which take place all over the world. We exclude, for example, Africa, so that we do not have to communicate with it anymore. You can see how a whole continent can be forgotten, because nobody can get to grips with it in medical, humanitarian, military or economic terms. It is placed outside of our communication system. The fact that we have not yet broken off contact with Belgrade or Iraq means that we have not yet given up hope there, that perhaps it is still possible to teach people the use of fork and knife.”  

Obvs this isn’t a unique characteristic, but to hear about politics - beyond the most up-to-date hot-take 'political’ discourse – with an outward-looking focus out of the mouth of a theatre director is inspiring.

(Faust, dir. Castorf, des. Aleksandar Denić, light. Lothar Baumgarte)

The other, related aspect that stuck out for me is Castorf’s focus on destruction : this is particularly acute in his relationship with the classic source material with which he works.  A text is stripped for scenes and situations – like individual tracks on a record – and are put together in a new formation.  

“Too much literature tries to model the world’s compehensibility and controllability. For me, there is something ridiculous about explaining things. Clarity is crushing. Because it’s a lie. That is why I am suspicious of traditional narrative structures… Therefore I very quickly pick up a screwdriver and saw. But we do not stop at the destruction.  Something is put back together again, something is built up; it is related to the old but it is a new construction. Suddenly, a completely different, negating and irrational state is created.”

A classic text is stripped for parts, and placed into a new dramaturgy alongside contemporary music, theoretical texts, text from other plays, and improvised dialogue between performers (talking either as themselves or as their characters).  There are in-jokes that run between the ensemble from performance to performance (apparently there was a cycle of shows in which actors would prepare a meal from scratch on stage, and they’re still making jokes about it).

I love all of this because I feel that it re-organises what an audience receive from an evening at the theatre.  It’s not a self-contained drama – comparable in the way it thinks of itself to a narrative drama movie – but more like a cabaret, with storytelling, song and other types of performance.  It’s self-awareness also locates it as a performance by this particular company of people based at this particular theatre in this particular city.  The fact that these shows are only presented a couple of times a month, and that they are so long, help to create the feeling of an 'event’. 

Now – try explaining this to even the most forward-thinking theatres and arts organisations in Britain.  'A classic’ sets off an inexorable train of associations - ideas of historical dress, lots of large-scale static images, long speeches that the audience sort-of follow.  And 'a new version of..’ sets off another train of associations - similar to the above but with swearing, maybe some actors in a glass box.  It turns a whole load of people off (those who specialise in new writing or devised new work), and it leads a whole other set of people (those who produce well-made new versions of classics) to expect something different.

There’s not a lot of room for a show to be a production of a classic text, but to have a jagged, elliptical and contemporary performance dramaturgy.  Peter Boenisch wrote somewhere that the presence of a devising process does not guarantee a forward-thinking dramaturgy in performance.  Yet it’s much, much more difficult to receive funding for a show that does not produce a ‘new piece of writing’ - you’ve just gotta call it something else.  

Castorf, for me, exemplifies the possibility of making contemporary work from old text: all his recent work is based on 19th century novels or Ibsen plays, but the shows’ radical dramaturgy of excess and carnage feels like the most contemporary theatre I’ve thought about in ages.   

(Baumeister Solness, dir. Castorf, des. Bert Neumann, light. Lothar Baumgarte)