The Stage

Joe Hill-Gibbins: The next challenge

Published Friday 3 February 2012 at 17:52

As Joe Hill-Gibbins’ version of The Changeling runs at the Young Vic Theatre in London, the deputy artistic director of the venue chats to Matt Trueman about how he approaches projects and why he is enchanted by his latest adaptation

In terms of direction, bold and distinctive generally go hand in hand. Joe Hill-Gibbins, then, is something of a curiosity. His productions manage to be routinely bold without being recognisably his. You feel the presence of a director without being able to put your finger on who. His touch is part peacock and part chameleon - always colourful, but, strangely, both conspicuous and unobtrusive at the same time.

There’s barely a trace of ego about him. Genial and gentle - but with a wickedly wry laugh - Hill-Gibbins isn’t one to filter a play through a conceptual framework of his own invention.

“For me, what’s interesting is to try and engage with the form of the play as written,” he says, over coffee at the Young Vic, where he has been deputy artistic director to David Lan for two years, during which time, he’s directed several critically-acclaimed productions, including The Glass Menagerie and The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

“The pleasure for me is looking at the original form and then finding a way of expressing that on the stage, in performance.”

If his self-effacement explains the variety in his work, the boldness comes from his project selection. He is drawn to texts that have “certain formal challenges provided by the writer”. He adds: “It’s good when things are not at first sight standard or formulaic, when they’re unusual.

“What’s boring is picking up a play and going, ‘I know exactly what this is and I know how to do it’. The only problem is that, when you start, you don’t know how the hell to do it.”

With that in mind, his next project at the Young Vic - Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s unruly Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling - makes perfect sense. Not only is it the oldest text he’s worked on, usurping Brecht’s 1919 short play A Respectable Wedding (“I’m 400 years out of my comfort zone.”), it is full of directorial dilemmas.

A shape-shifter of a play, The Changeling flicks between contrasting forms, tones and theatrical conventions. The fourth act opens with a dumbshow, everyone talks in asides and, at one point, the narrative seems to pause for a dance break. Hill-Gibbins believes that Jacobean theatre contained elements of a variety show, an idea he picked up from director Sean Foley.

However, as if that wasn’t enough, its parallel plot lines - the serious marital conundrums of Beatrice-Joanna and the madcap, madhouse that houses Isabella - look almost entirely unrelated and disjointed. It is widely held that Middleton wrote one, and Rowley the other.

At first, Hill-Gibbins found their apparent distinctness perplexing. “Even though they’re set in the same city and overlap, they feel like they’re in separate universe. But the more I worked on the play, the more I began to feel that, actually - and I didn’t anticipate this at all - they’re the same story told in two completely different ways.”

In fact, the whole process has proved surprising. Hill-Gibbins admits The Changeling is “one of those plays I’ve long since pretended to have read”, so when he finally did so, he was gobsmacked by its ending. “I just thought it was totally mad and perverse,” he says. “This guy [Alsemero] catches his wife-to-be cheating with a servant, puts them in a box and tells them to have sex with each other. The rest is just as crazy.”

In fact, he had a similar reaction on reading The Glass Menagerie for the first time: “It’s bonkers. You go, ‘Wow. This is The Glass Menagerie. It’s wild’. I had no idea.”

Hill-Gibbins has a knack for light-hearted straight-talking. It’s not hard to see why actors enjoy working with him. Harry Lloyd, who appeared in his production of The Family Plays at the Royal Court, described the director’s “infectious energy, which made for the most free and creative rehearsal room you could ask for”, while Nick Burns spoke of “the meticulous research” that went into The Village Bike last year.

Although they seem to conflict, the statements chime with Hill-Gibbins’ ideal actor. “You want actors who work hard and play hard,” he says. “People who can move between playing something really intensely and full-blooded, to doing something playful. That range of attitudes is key.”

He clearly places play and experiment at the heart of his process. These days, he likes a rehearsal room to be full of potential material - costume racks, props, lights. I suspect that his rehearsal rooms are more fun than most.

After all, he speaks of The Changeling in terms of “shagging” and “copping off”. In fact, he was originally convinced he’d found “a really blokey, misogynistic play - a Man play,” only to discover that “it’s actually all about women. Again”.

This, it turns out, is the connecting thread through his work - though he only realised in hindsight and would “never sit at home and try to find the next one in the sequence”. From The Village Bike to The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Glass Menagerie and now this, he says: “They all centre on a woman battling to assert the way she wants to live romantically, to establish a relationship with a particular man, be it Alsemero, Pat O’Dooley, Oliver Hardcastle [The Village Bike] or Jim O’Connor.”

So, there you have it - Hill-Gibbins’s work might have distinguishing features after all.

• The Changeling runs at London’s Young Vic until February 25