Blanche McIntyre: the stage director who works hard to make it all look easy

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/05/blanche-mcintyre-stage-director-accolade

Version 0 of 1.

“My first paid directing job was in 2012.” The statement from Blanche McIntyre will surprise many who have watched her reputation in British theatre rise fast.

Even so, the 33-year-old has assembled a prolific, well-regarded body of work. By 2012 she had already won the Critics’ Circle award for most promising newcomer, and best director in the Off West End Theatre awards. Her productions were making waves, but she was still funding them herself.

The days of temping while haggling for a £2.50 bedside lamp to light her productions are now behind her. She describes the delight of directing a gorgeously heartfelt Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer, and learning that the props department could supply an octopus to enhance the slapstick.

In the past 18 months, McIntyre has made her name at some of Britain’s sparkiest touring companies, with plays that suggest her generous range of interests: a revelatory production of Chekhov’s The Seagull with Headlong; the premiere of Ciphers, Dawn King’s tricksy spy drama, for Out of Joint; and the delirious nine-play extravaganza that is Coward’s Tonight at 8.30 for English Touring Theatre (ETT). Classics, rarities, new writing: she relishes them all and makes them sing.

Conversation with McIntyre in her top-floor Southwark flat reveals not only a voracious talent, but also a British theatre culture – routinely described as the world’s envy – which beyond the flagship companies survives on ramshackle finances, make-do-and-mend strategies and desperate lunges of serendipity.

When she began directing on the fringe 10 years ago, after leaving Oxford with a double first in Classics, she could stage a production for £4,000 (“half from your student loan and half from ticket sales”); now, she says ruefully, the cost is more like £15,000.

How does a director build a career? With fees for a production outside the National Theatre and West End at around £4,000, a director needs several gigs to make a living. It’s a precarious choice for a smart graduate who, as Rachel Tackley of ETT says of McIntyre, “has a brain the size of a planet”.

Most British directors learn on the job. McIntyre assisted Max Stafford-Clark at Out of Joint, whose unshowy precision she shares, and has developed her craft with each production. Next up is a revival of Tom Stoppard’s multi-layered Arcadia for English Touring Theatre, a cerebral and poignant modern classic. Stoppard himself has praised the “young, visionary” director.

McIntyre’s bookshelves are crammed with secondhand collections of plays – foxed, creased, stained tea-brown by time. She has an eye for a neglected text that speaks to the present moment – “she has very good taste,” says Stafford-Clark – and has unearthed plays by Coward, Christopher Hampton and Sebastian Barry.

Accolade, now moving from the tiny Finborough theatre to the West End, is a 1950s drama of sexual scandal by the Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams. As she explains, Williams was married and bisexual, but parlayed autobiographical tensions into the downfall of a prominent novelist who has slept with an underage girl: “now, post-Savile, a far more alarming topic”. Stafford-Clark marvels at the way she “revealed the strength of the play by allowing it to speak for itself”.

McIntyre claims no particular affinity with the zeitgeist. “What makes a bloody good play,” she says, “is a skill in observing how people behave – which is not always the same as they way you think they behave. If you can get it unsentimentally down in detail, it’s the most extraordinary thing.” This unsparing but compassionate interest makes her a natural fit with Chekhov, the doctor-artist who was forensic about yearning and pettiness. Her version of The Seagull last year was widely praised: “layered, feisty, gorgeously melancholic,” wrote Matt Trueman in the Telegraph, adding: “McIntyre gets bolder and better with each production.”

McIntyre’s directorial approach is quieter than some other talents in their 30s: Carrie Cracknell, Joe Hill-Gibbins and Robert Icke have all made a mark with heightened physicality and assertive design. By contrast, Tackley identifies a “simplicity and clarity” running throughout McIntyre’s work. “It’s very thoughtful, and isn’t lightly achieved – but she works very hard to make it all look easy.”

I also hear a lot about the young director’s warmth. “When you’ve been hugged by Blanche McIntyre, you know about it,” says Tackley. This is more than amiability, it’s also directorial gold dust, forging a collegiate atmosphere that allows actors to share ideas. You might suppose that was standard, but McIntyre recounts with horror a story of a West End director who told his cast: “If I’m quiet it’s because I am thinking – and not because I need any ideas from you.” That’s not her way. “Directing is not rocket science,” Stafford-Clark says. “You need a warmth with the actors – she has that remarkably, and they like working with her.”

McIntyre’s mother is a publisher (formerly managing director at Penguin), so the director is well aware of glass ceilings and the possibility of broaching them. Barring a hit musical that will set her up for life – which doesn’t seem to be McIntyre’s passion – what are her choices? Forging relationships with larger theatres; founding her own company; securing an artistic directorship. Stafford-Clark believes “she’d be a very good leader of a company”: the trouble with freelancing, he says, is that “you end up with projects that other people have passed on”.

The past year has seen a change of leadership at major British companies, including the National, Old Vic and Almeida. At the close of her Observer review of The Seagull, Susannah Clapp declared: “The next time the artistic directorship of a substantial theatre comes round, it should be hers for the taking.” This may seem the logical next step – giving some security and responsibility to a scrabbling freelancer – but, Tackley cautions, “at the moment I wouldn’t inflict a building on her. Bricks and mortar are a huge responsibility; it’s so much about the bars and the toilets. She’s in a lovely place where she can direct what she wants. I think she’d be an incredibly good artistic director, but for now she should have some more fun.”