Carrie Cracknell: erasing Blurred Lines

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jan/14/carrie-cracknell-blurred-lines-misogyny-show

Version 0 of 1.

Summer 2013, and controversy is raging. Robin Thicke's supremely catchy song Blurred Lines – in which a man in a nightclub tries to persuade a beautiful woman to stop being a "good girl" and do what he knows she really wants – is being banned from student unions up and down the country, condemned in social and mainstream media for encouraging non-consensual sex, and topping pop charts across the globe. The debate is charged by the song's video, in which women wearing nothing but G-strings and clompy shoes cavort around three men in suits who clearly can't believe their luck.

For theatre director Carrie Cracknell, whose new show takes its title from the song, Blurred Lines is a red rag. When I wonder whether it's prudishness that makes people recoil from it, she argues: "It's really easy for women to be accused of being prudish, but there is an absolute line about sexual consent that cannot be blurred. The rage I feel in relation to that song is about the idea of strong men, fully dressed, animalising and brutalising a group of scantily clad women.

"Of course sex is part of our life, but rape is not sex, and non-consensual sex for young women is a massive problem. A whole generation are growing up with their first sexual experiences being pornography, which is hateful and misogynistic, and this song is the tip of that iceberg. Anyway, rant over." And she stops, suddenly sheepish.

It seems odd that the 33-year-old should feel the need to apologise for expressing herself strongly, but it turns out this has been a running theme in the Blurred Lines rehearsal room. "That anxiety about being strident or pushy comes back to the socially constructed idea of gender," she suggests, "and how women feel they have to find a feminine version of power to get what they want."For Blurred Lines, which opens at the National Theatre Shed this week, she's working with eight female actors – including Sinead Matthews, Ruth Sheen, Claire Skinner and Michaela Coel – and a male writer, Nick Payne, to devise a show that tackles the representation of women across film, television, theatre and pop. It's useful, Cracknell says, to have a male writer taking part: Payne describes himself as a feminist, and argues that the issues with which they're grappling – casual misogyny, the normalisation of the sex industry, rape culture, and on-going problems to do with work and parenting – are not exclusively women's. "Nick said in rehearsal one day: a lot of this is a male problem. Rape is a male problem. Men are not taught that they have to take responsibility for whether a girl says yes or no. Of course we could argue that it should be a female playwright, but his perspective and questioning have been as relevant as mine."

Apart from Thicke's song, Blurred Lines has its roots in the work that pulled Cracknell into the mainstream: her 2012 production of A Doll's House, the Ibsen play championed by feminists because it depicts a woman walking out on her husband and children in an attempt to discover her real self. The production, starring Hattie Morahan as a fluttering, manipulative Nora, had two successful runs at the Young Vic in London before transferring to the West End; it moves to New York in February.

"The first question we asked when we started making A Doll's House was: what does the play look like now? What's the relationship between the gender politics of the 1890s and the world we live in? The thing that Hattie drew out was this idea that Nora's power is seated in her sexuality. That really struck me, because of this idea that women are more sexualised now than they've ever been, or trying to move towards an ever-narrowing ideal of what it means to be beautiful and therefore powerful."

Are things really worse now, or is it more that we expect decades of feminism to have improved the situation? "Women have always been objectified more than men," Cracknell says. "What happens now is a pernicious, deep-rooted connection between global capitalism and an unobtainable physical ideal that feels overwhelming."

To coincide with the production, Cracknell made a short film for the Young Vic and the Guardian, in which Nora is updated to a modern working mother, falling to pieces as she struggles with her impossible juggling act. Payne co-wrote it with her, and had a strong influence on her thinking about both Noras when he handed her a copy of Kat Banyard's wakeup call to a generation of women, The Equality Illusion. Reading it, Cracknell says, "I had a feminist awakening. I'm of a generation that, to some extent, have been told that we're equal, that women have every opportunity men have. But I believe Kat's thesis: the equality we'd been sold was an illusion. Women are still disproportionately disempowered in public life and being paid less than men, while sexual harassment and violence are endemic."

None of this occurred to Cracknell as a teenager. "I was raised with the idea that it was irrelevant that I was a woman: you just had to get on with being funny, being kind and working hard." Back then, theatre was a hobby; her real ambition was to be a politician. She had a "strong leftwing upbringing": her mother was a primary-school headteacher; her father a businessman who taught at Oxford Brookes University and became a local councillor. "The first time I voted was for my dad," Cracknell recalls. She studied history at Nottingham with full intentions of becoming an MP, but fell into theatre in her first year. Now she pins her socialist hopes on her nephew, who is also studying history and politics at Nottingham and wants to run the Labour party. "I've asked if I can be in his cabinet on gender and culture," she laughs.

She spent a few years assisting directors including Dominic Dromgoole and Katie Mitchell, then at 26 became the youngest artistic director in the country, co-running the Gate in London with Natalie Abrahami. "It felt like this punk little venue," she says. "Natalie and I were interested in experimenting with what theatre and dance look like when they're together, and we had a brilliant five years where we got to make loads of joyful, public fuck-ups."

She managed to combine that with having two children, now aged two and four. Cracknell won't talk about work and motherhood, but does admit that she finds balancing her own ambitions complex. "My desire to parent is as strong as my desire to move forward. But I feel calm about making a bit less work, and enjoy having more time to develop it. A Doll's House was born out of a year of preparation because I was on maternity leave; I probably couldn't have made that work without that space to cook it in my mind."

So far, she says, being a woman hasn't diminished her opportunities. Alongside her West End debut with A Doll's House, last year she directed her first opera, a well-received Wozzeck for ENO. But she feels a general frustration with theatre culture: "It's still a male-dominated world, because the stories we tell are inherited from a culture in which women weren't allowed to do those things. We're only in the second generation in which women have been able to take full control in public life; and we still predominately think the stories of men are more important and interesting than the stories of women."

Recently, she was invited to direct a play for the National's biggest space, the Olivier, and struggled to find a female character with the "scale or scope of emotional depth" to fill the room. Somewhat predictably, the play she's going to direct is a Greek tragedy, Medea.

That's in June; before that she'll be at the Royal Court directing a new play by Simon Stephens dissecting rock'n'roll celebrity, and contributing to the life of the theatre as associate director. One of her key tasks is dealing with gender imbalance. "An American actress brilliantly suggested that you could take every screenplay and change half the male character names to female ones. Why can't the doctor or the policeman just be women?"

Despite that early ambition to become an MP, Cracknell is constantly surprised by the extent to which politics, gender or otherwise, now govern her theatre-making. "I used to call my work 'political with a small p': it was about the human experience. As I get older, I understand that the human experience is at the heart of a bigger experience. Rather than my work always being about the story, it's about the context for the story as well."

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.