Ian Rickson Talks About His Background

Voices of the Royal Court

Interview by Mel Cooper, October 2001

Ian Rickson, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre in London, tells us in his own words about his training and how he got the job.

I'm not a traditional English director. I've never done a Shakespeare play. I've only ever done new plays. In the early 1990s when I began, all the energy was perceived to be in the auteurs who created versions of classics with idiosyncratic.

I took an English degree at Essex University. I trained as a teacher, got a job as an assistant director after a while and gradually worked my way up. I worked on the fringe, first, directing new plays for profit share work with the playwrights. I was totally committed to the contemporary. I feel that if you examine the different artistic media, paintings, photographs, novels - it would be the plays that would tell us most about what has happened in this country over the last 50 years.

When Stephen Daldry joined the Royal Court he took me on as an Associate, before my being appointed Artistic Director in 1998. You don't really train in this country to be a director, not as they do in the States. You just have to, as Peter Brook says, call yourself a director and convince everyone else that this fact is true.

To be currently working as the Artistic Director at the Royal Court, engaging with the best contemporary playwrights and what they're saying and seeing, is incredibly enriching. I feel lucky; very lucky.

For more information, email internationalroyalcourttheatre [dot] com