The Stage

Grandage exit…

Published Friday 25 November 2011 at 15:31 by Mark Shenton

Michael Grandage has spent the last decade in charge of the Donmar Warehouse. As he prepares to step down as the theatre’s artistic director, he talks to Mark Shenton about the legacy he is leaving behind and his plans for the future

Michael Grandage is a man who likes to look forwards, not backwards. And although he is now 49 and on the cusp of entering his 50s, he still cuts a youthful figure. So, as we sit down to talk about the last decade he has spent at the helm of the Donmar, he speaks about Richard II, the play that he will direct as his farewell to the space before handing over to Josie Rourke as the new artistic director, and says of it: “I wanted to go out on a young man’s play, rather than an old man’s play. Richard II is a great play about a young king - and I’ve hired a young design team to do it with me.”

So instead of the regular design team of his partner Christopher Oram doing the sets and Neil Austin the lighting, he has hired Richard Kent (Oram’s assistant) and David Plater (the Donmar’s chief electrician) to do those duties. “I like the idea of going out with a young king and a new team, rather than the team I’ve been with for the last ten years,” he says. And goes on to point out: “Those that know me will know that it is part of my personal philosophy to be a great believer in looking forward, instead of looking back.

“The past is only interesting in terms of where we can learn from mistakes, but on the whole life absolutely has to be lived straight ahead. As a result, I’ve never had a problem with young people coming up on the inside, or youth generally. It’s always been something I want to celebrate, in fact. That’s partly because I came to directing so late, and I had used all my personal ambition on trying to be a good actor so somehow I was able to come to directing in a slightly different way.”

It wasn’t until he was in his 30s that he started directing, but he has now had some 15 years as an artistic director, first at Sheffield Theatres (where he ran the Crucible, its studio and the Lyceum next door), then the Donmar (concurrently with Sheffield for the first two years, then on its own for the last seven), and he is also one of our pre-eminent theatre directors.

For seven of his Donmar shows, he has won one (or more) best director awards, from Olivier and Tony to Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and Drama Desk. But if he has won plenty of personal acclaim at the Donmar to become one of our best directors, he is also unfailingly generous with the talents of others. “One of the best bits of the job of being an artistic director is giving other people work. Someone helped me at a crucial time in my life, and it’s good to be able to do that with other people.”

He duly gathered around him a core group of associates, including another actor and sometime director Douglas Hodge, who is just completing a run at the Donmar starring in Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, and with whom he coincidentally has another link.

“Richard II is a play I’ve known since I was 17. I was in the National Youth Theatre, and we went all around Europe with it. Doug Hodge was Bolingbroke and I was Bagot. And that’s the nub of it all. I said to the cast of this production on the first day of rehearsals, ‘I need a psycho-analysis of why I am where I am now’. It’s all about me standing behind the throne when I was 17 with a dodgy haircut being Bagot, not in the throne where I would love to have been.”

But just as Bagot is one of the favourites to Richard II, so Grandage has had his own at the Donmar, among them his other associates Jamie Lloyd (whose productions there have included Piaf, Passion and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and Broadway choreographer Rob Ashford, with whom Grandage worked on a West End production of Evita in 2006 that is now finally Broadway-bound in the New Year. Ashford got his first opportunities as director of both plays (A Streetcar Named Desire and more recently Anna Christie) and musicals (Parade) at the Donmar.

“They are people who are like-minded to me, but also have their own identity and can contribute to a house style I wanted to establish,” Grandage says.

Lloyd, in fact, is a good example of someone who was specifically his protegee - he assisted him on both Guys and Dolls and Evita - and Grandage says of him now: “He has a real flair as a director, which not everyone has. He understands a theatrical moment and how to land it, which is particularly useful for musicals.”

Grandage had himself demonstrated precisely the same flair and style early on as an associate himself to his Donmar predecessor Sam Mendes, an experience that stood him in good stead when he came to take over. “One of the joys of being an associate first was that for two or three years I was able to see the inside of how it all worked.”

Grandage’s successor in turn has had past Donmar form. Josie Rourke spent a year there as a resident assistant director, and has since directed there on a freelance basis. But just as she is leaving the Bush on a high of finally securing them their own permanent home, so Rourke is also, thanks to Grandage, inheriting real estate, too.

“It’s one thing handing on a theatre that is in good artistic health, but nowadays in the place we’re in you’ve got to hand over in other ways, too. When I took over, we didn’t own anything, we didn’t own our building or offices. So I made it part of a ten-year plan that I presented to the board that we should look at certainly owning the lease of our building to guarantee our security, but in time it should also be a bigger aspiration to have our own offices, education space and, most importantly, our own rehearsal space.”

In 2008, the Donmar duly purchased its theatre site, and is working with its current landlord Ambassador Theatre Group for the remaining five years of ATG’s lease on the theatre before it takes sole possession. And Grandage’s parting legacy, in every sense, is to have now secured premises in Dryden Street, Covent Garden, in a four-storey former warehouse, that has been purchased and will be converted into offices and rehearsal space.

The Donmar has been able to do so largely by its own efforts. “There were two ways of doing it - we could have either launched a huge capital campaign to try to raise millions of pounds, like other theatres do, or we could do what we did, which was to make sure that if ever we transferred our work, the Donmar would get an income and that is what it would go towards,” Grandage says.

“So for Guys and Dolls, we set up a designated capital fund, and over the years, as we transferred anything that was successful, like Frost/Nixon, Red or Mary Stuart, we put the money into that pot. When one of our board members, Peter Williams, helped us locate the property in Dryden Street, our capital reserve was by then in quite a healthy place.”

They have received additional funding from individuals and other funders, including Barclays Capital.

But, he hastens to add, transfers have never been a priority or indeed an intention prior to the Donmar run itself. “I have never put on a single play at the Donmar where we’ve talked to the actors in advance of hiring them to ask them if they would be available after its run here.

“Somewhere in doing that something happens. I don’t know what it is, but it makes people think you are thinking about something else, instead of it being about doing a show at the Donmar, and it distorts why you are there in the first place.

“If you are a house that is always set up to transfer, it make you a different kind of place. It means there is a slightly cynical exercise at the centre of what you are doing.”

Although he does not say it himself, he could be talking about places like the Menier Chocolate Factory. “What we’re there to do, and what Josie is now doing and Sam did before me, is to put on a play in a space and hope that people will want to come, and to make it work between the audience and that space. If it turns out to work very, very well indeed, and there is a demand beyond the 250 seats we’ve got a night, you should at least investigate what the possibilities are for a future life.”

These have included, for instance, a Radio 3 broadcast of its production of The Chalk Garden. “I was really happy to do that - it meant it went to thousands more people. At least it had a life in some form. And when we did a live cinema broadcast of King Lear, it reached huge numbers of people around the world. Between the ten-week run at the Donmar, an eight-week UK tour, the broadcast and then six weeks in Brooklyn at BAM, that production played to more people than any other play in the Donmar’s history, including all the Broadway runs we’ve had.”

For Grandage, one of the big tests of his regime, and one of his greatest successes, was to see whether the brand could be expanded beyond the Donmar’s own premises. “Is what we do to do with the building, or the way we produce in it? I was convinced and still am that the theatre first of all is a relationship between an audience and the actors, and not about the four walls. So if your style is at the centre of what they are engaging with, then that relationship can be taken to other venues in the same way.”

Grandage duly took the Donmar approach on walkabout, not just in launching an annual touring programme that tours one of its six productions a year around the UK, but also in establishing a year-long residency at the West End’s Wyndham’s Theatre.

“One of the keys to why I have tried to go bigger is to let more people see the work,” he says. “If you wanted it to be a criticism, it is that people couldn’t get into the Donmar; except that as artistic director that is what you are paid to do - to fill the theatre with work that people want to see.”

He has also made it a cornerstone of his policy both at the Donmar and elsewhere that prices remain affordable. “Among the things I presented to the board was that I wanted to keep prices, throughout my tenure and however long it lasted, really low - I believed that’s how you would have access to the work. And I wanted that even when we went outside the Donmar.”

Tickets at Wyndham’s duly had the same price structure as a show at the Donmar. But if the prices have been distinctive, so, even more importantly, is the work. Grandage, who set out his stall to use the space for a largely European repertoire, as opposed to an American-centred one that Mendes often specialised in, has distinguished himself particularly with the classics, from Ibsen and Schiller to Shakespeare. He says of directing the latter: “Every single time I have directed him, I have learnt more about me. If you are going to do the job I am doing, you want to keep a continuing learning curve going. He’s such a revelatory writer that I find every time I come to him that the process of working with actors and designers on it is about discovering something of yourself. Not just about your own person, but also about you as a director. You have to constantly come up with really difficult things to solve, and I love it.”

Yet paradoxically, though the Donmar is, in Grandage’s own words, “a self-confessed non-new writing theatre”, two of his biggest successes there have been with new plays, Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon and John Logan’s Red, both of which transferred to Broadway. “Our new writing policy is very simple - if we find a new play we like, we’ll do it. We have never had the resources to have a literary department or do dramaturgical work.”

Now he is seeking fresh opportunities, and possibly investigating new mediums, elsewhere. “After running theatres for 15 years, I feel I am now ready to go to a place where I can make my own work but maybe without a building. It also coincides with me coming to the end of my 40s, and I understand from people that your 50s can be rather exciting. So I’d like to take with me the same company ethos we created at the Donmar, and see if I can recreate it outside, both in the theatre and extending it to other opportunities.

“I’m increasing the opera work I’m doing, and I’m loving it, even in spite of that slightly difficult experience we had in New York at the Met recently,” he says, referring to his debut there earlier this year with a new production of Don Giovanni that was more than a little fraught, particularly on the casting front when he lost the singer playing the title character during the dress rehearsal, who then wasn’t able to return until a couple of weeks after the first night. “But I still love the idea of doing these huge things on a bigger scale,” he says.

He is also tempted by the idea of doing film, and maybe to see “if I have a television piece in me. I also want to be able to do plays in New York and London. But I can’t do any of those things if I’m running a theatre”.

Frost/Nixon, of course, was made into a feature film by director Ron Howard. Is he sorry he never did it himself? He answers that he thinks he ruled himself out, by telling the playwright Peter Morgan: “This is a total piece of theatre, and it’s interesting that a piece written about filming is more alive as a theatre piece. I could tell that he wanted it to be a film as well, and I have to concede that when I saw the film, the first half worked better than the play - but the second half, when they sit down to do the interviews, was nowhere near as interesting as the play, because watching them live in the theatre was theatrical, but rather inert on film.”

But Grandage did at least do a big part of the job for the film director: it retained his stage casting of Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. “Ron Howard has always acknowledged that, and it’s one of the reasons there has been no rancour over it. If somebody had come and did it on film and said it was all their doing, I would have been slightly pissed off,” he says.

And now he is off on his own, together with his former Donmar executive director James Bierman he has set up a production company, which will act as a conduit to facilitate his work. They already have offices - it is perhaps an auspicious sign that they are renting the former premises of HM Tennent above the Gielgud Theatre.

It will not spring into action until 2013, though, as Grandage is fully committed until then. After he leaves the Donmar, he will be directing Evita for a Broadway opening in early April, then coming back to direct The Marriage of Figaro at Glydebourne, then restaging Red in Los Angeles.

“What we’re doing is talking to and meeting people, and buying rights and getting stuff together for 2013.” And purchasing a photo- copier: “James went the other day to Argos to buy a printer. We have to remember that we don’t have a £500,000 subsidy from the arts council, or sponsorship or a membership - we have to account for every penny as we start this company up,” he points out.