I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
A critic is always serving the theatre when he is hounding out incompetence. If he spends most of his time grumbling, he is almost always right. The appalling difficulty of making theatre must be accepted: it is, or would be, if truly practised, perhaps the hardest medium of all: it is merciless, there is no room for error, or for waste.
In a sense the director is always an imposter, a guide at night who does not know the territory, and yet has no choice – he must guide, learning the route as he goes.
A long time ago when I was very young, a voice hidden deep within me whispered, ‘Don’t take anything for granted. Go and see for yourself.’ This little nagging murmur has led me to so many journeys.
There are moments in a play when we feel that we have all been touched at the same moment. We’ve come in as hundreds of heads, with hundreds of different preoccupations. We’ve come off the street – that busy state of chaos of the world – and now, in a short space of time, through the work of a little group of actors in a play, we’re brought to a point where we sense a moment of truth.
A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, ‘Take your time.’
When I started out, the theatre was still a place of artifice. It was the age of grand design by people like Oliver Messel and Cecil Beaton, of big wigs and heavy makeup. What we see now, partly because of the influence of the camera and smaller stages, is a stripping away of the layers of pretence until the personality of the actor becomes visible.
I’ve always admired the British theatre for its incredible energy and vitality, but I also feel there’s a terror of silence and the power of the invisible.
Every choice I’ve ever made has been dictated by a formless hunch rather than by strict logic.
People have entrusted themselves to you for two hours or more and you have to give them a respect that derives from confidence in what you are doing. At the end of an evening, you may have encouraged what is crude, violent or destructive in them. Or you can help them. By that I mean that an audience can be touched, entranced or – best of all – moved to a silence that vibrates round the theatre.
