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Top drama at bargain prices

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

Lloyd Evans talks to the Donmar’s artistic director Michael Grandage about his Wyndham’s venture

Is he exercised by the debate about the West End’s subjugation to the all-powerful musical? ‘It’s cyclical,’ he shrugs. ‘Every year, in the third week of June usually, a journalist rings up and says he’s doing an article on the death of the West End. I can set my watch by it. And every autumn on 1 October a different journalist rings up and says he’s doing an article on the renaissance of the West End.’

At the Donmar, Grandage has specialised in rediscovering neglected works. His 2003 revival of Caligula, a play written by Albert Camus in his early twenties, attracted high praise, and this year he won plaudits for a scintillating production of The Chalk Garden, a forgotten gem by Enid Bagnold. Is he hoping to repeat this feat with Ivanov and promote it into the standard Chekhov repertoire? ‘Yeah,’ he grins enthusiastically. ‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Everyone’s got to re-evaluate Ivanov.’

As a director he still has the zeal of a novice, perhaps because he came to it relatively late at the age of 33, having spent 12 years as an actor. ‘I was quite an interfering actor. I had a view on everything — on lights, on sound, on everybody else’s performance. Somebody advised me to put my money where my mouth is and, when I had a go at it, it was so invigorating I never wanted to act again.’ His productions are noted for their clarity, high production values and their refusal to flirt with experimentalism. Is that deliberate? ‘I guess I’m haunted by the days when I was an actor and I would turn up on the first day of rehearsal, in good faith, to be shown a model that I knew would screw us for the rest of the run. Someone had come up with “an idea” that was going to be no help at all except to a conception in the director and the designer’s head. We were left as the victims, us actors. And when you’ve got a story as extraordinary as, say, Othello, you need a bed in act five, but outside that you just need the actors and a space. It’s about the story-telling. That’s what excites me most.’

His production of Othello last year, featuring Ewan McGregor as Iago, proved so popular that tickets were rumoured to be changing hands for £2,000 on the black market. When I mention this his face flashes with amused indignation. ‘That’s one of the reasons the Wyndham’s is happening. People got angry, rightly, because they couldn’t see it. Now we’re bringing prices so low that it’s not going to be touted. Why get a ticket from a tout when the box office will sell you one for a tenner?’ And were the £2,000 rumours true? ‘Course not!’ he laughs. ‘It was all a great big story.’