The accidental director

She’s certainly a class act. But how did she manage it? Nina Raine, the 36-year-old writer-director, has established a formidable position in the British theatre. Her first play, Rabbit, opened at a pub venue in Islington in 2007. It transferred to New York and has since been performed all over the world. Last year she directed April de Angelis’s family comedy Jumpy at the Royal Court and the show has just transferred to the Duke of York’s in the West End. Yet, the way Raine tells it, her career has been nothing but a series of blunders and accidents.

She left Oxford with an English degree and a few drama productions under her belt. ‘I thought about being an academic. For about five minutes. Both my parents are academics.’ Her mother, Ann Pasternak Slater, is a scholar and translator. Her father is the poet Craig Raine. ‘So I had this doom-laden feeling I was going to be an academic.’ Her mother suggested that William Golding was ripe for a postgraduate thesis. ‘So I bought all the William Goldings. And they were just sitting there and — I’ve read a few actually now — but they just sat there and I felt allergic to the whole idea. Then I thought, I’m going to write prose. So I wrote these Hemingway-influenced short stories.’

She took a waitressing job at the River Café and spent a year ‘trying to write and feeling quite crap about it, and thinking, “What the hell am I doing? I can never break into the world of theatre. It seems so impermeable.”’ She still nurtured an ambition to direct plays, too. ‘But someone said to me, quite dismissively, “Nina, you’re not a director. If you were, you’d be putting on a little show at Salisbury Studio Theatre, or whatever, and you’d be doing fringe shows every three months.”