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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

It might so easily have gone wrong for Michael Grandage. In 2002 he was appointed to succeed Sam Mendes as boss of the Donmar Warehouse. Mendes would be a hard act for anyone to follow, let alone a director with just seven years’ experience behind him. But if anything Grandage has outshone his luminous pre-decessor, winning acclaim for heavyweight revivals like Schiller’s Don Carlos and taking the Donmar’s reputation overseas with Frost/Nixon, which transferred to Broadway, and his acclaimed version of Guys and Dolls, which had a successful run in Melbourne. His new venture, a year-long residency at the Wyndham’s theatre, is a conscious effort ‘to inject the straight play, straight drama, into the centre of the West End’.

Grandage is 46, the age when men start to look either like crumbling youths or youthful crumblies. He turns out to be neither. A slim, dark-haired chap with an unlined face bounds up to me in an unironed shirt and shakes my hand with an engaging and very forceful sunniness. He’s like a student you might meet on a fruit-picking holiday. Eloquent, and with an agile pleasing voice, he is perhaps not unaware of his charisma, his power to erode your resistance to his personality. He’s a good guy, though, a good thing all round, full of warmth and humour and ideas.

He tells me the Wyndham’s season has two objectives. ‘Accessibility and audience development.’ Then he winces and laughs. ‘Dead, dry words. Absolutely awful phrases.’ But he’s glad to use them because they sum up his desire to bring top-quality drama to large audiences at affordable prices. ‘The cheapest seats are ten quid and the top price is £32.50. There are no royalty pools. It’s being done on a not-for-profit basis. We have a group of actors’ — by which he means a quartet of world-famous stars — ‘who in the commercial environment could command quite substantial fees, and they’re working for a company wage.’ In other words, a few hundred pounds a week. And though he disavows ‘the commercial aspects’ it’s clear that the season has been orchestrated with more than half an eye on the box-office.

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