Ramin Gray, in his own words: Ramin Gray: Pushing Up

Voices of the Royal Court

Interview by Mel Cooper, October 2001

Being a Theatre Director

I'm a theatre director pure and simple. I've wanted to do it since the age of 10. When I was that age, I would put on shows in the garden and all over the house. I also did lots of acting at school.

For University, I went to Oxford where I directed lots of plays and, on leaving, I directed more plays on the fringe and so forth. When I then went to Liverpool, I worked at the Playhouse for four years, doing more plays - starting with A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller.

In London I worked with Paine's Plough - several people from the Royal Court, have worked with that company. It's a small company dedicated to new writing; and it still exists today. (The founders had been drinking a pint of Paine's bitter at a pub called the Plough in the 1970s when they decided to start this company, so that's the reason for the name). It was a very important little new writing company; and that was really when I discovered there were people who were writing plays today.

This was very exciting. Arthur Miller was alive, but he was a classic even by then; by the time I did A View from the Bridge it was 40 years old.

Working from the Typed Script

I remember vividly the first time that the literary manager at Paine's Plough, Robin Hooper, gave me a script and told me READ THIS. It was on A4 and typed. I'd never seen that before. You only expect to get the book in print out of the shop. That was really a turning point for me.

Of course, I discovered that most of the new plays are not as good as Arthur Miller or Shakespeare.

And then I met a playwright named Gregory Motton whom I really liked. I realized this was a guy I could learn from. There is an almost juvenile idea that the playwright is an intellectual or great light or inspiring person who leads us to new things; and I'd never met anybody like that.

I thought this person was like that, exactly what I thought he should be. He articulated things for me. He expressed things that were inchoate within me and expressed them very beautifully. And this made me feel very good about devoting myself to having a career as a director.

The Director as Important Facilitator: Not Artist

I had always had this sense that being a director is a secondary activity. It is not a primary creative role. I liken it to conducting in music. The primary source is always the notes on the page or the words on the page, for sure; and I would agree that we can, as directors, be very important in interpreting and recreating and embodying what was in the mind of the creator.

But I would not say that I am an artist. I would disagree with that concept of a director vehemently. For me that is broadening the definition of an artist too much.

Directors in general are not artists; they are interpreters. There are directors like Robert Wilson who are the prime artistic force in a new production. I don't see myself that way and I doubt that most directors working at the Royal Court see themselves as that way either.

A lot of weight and importance has been heaped on that word: Director.

Actors are the ones who get up and actually do it; and I give them a lot of credit for that. In a way, they are much more artists than directors are. A lot of the mystique of directors comes from cinema.

Perhaps I am overstating it. But I think the contemporary idea of directing comes from cinema. When you meet lay people who don't know that much about it and you tell them you are a director, they often assume you wrote it as well and don't really distinguish between what you do and the person who writes the actual script or play. They think the director really is God and manipulates and does everything. And that is simply not the truth. That's why I liken it much more to conducting; that is my model and that's how I love to work - to get the rhythms right, the tones right, the shapes right and get everything I can out of the play.

That's my particular thing and that's why I've ended up here, at the Royal Court, really; because this is the theatre that respects that in its aesthetic.

The Playwright is the Thing (Playwright Power)

What got me focused, as I said, is that I worked with Gregory Motton, who was a Royal Court playwright. He's had two or three plays done here. But he's also very big in Europe and because I speak French we ended up being in France doing a lot of his work. I also did some work in Italy.

I first started working at the Royal Court through the International Residency Programme, working initially with a Serbian playwright and then a Ugandan playwright. Then this job came up as International Associate. So that's how I came into the building. And all the work we do is geared to developing and supporting plays and developing new playwrighting cultures all around the world.

My job within the International Department is to keep tabs on plays, know what is going on all over the world, get involved in the workshops in various ways, keeping up with the plays, and the development we do in various countries. I'm directing the German play in our new international season with great relish. I think it is a terrific play; and I love the fact that we are introducing a new German playwright to our audiences.

The Royal Court is undoubtedly a pivotal centre for the way things are developing in theatre internationally. As far as I can see, there is no theatre in the world today producing as many new plays as we do. There is no other organization on the same scale as us doing our work anywhere else, or with our commitment and continuity. And there are very few sponsors as enlightened as Genesis which understands about working in a real partnership and in giving us a commitment that enables us to think and work on long-term developments that can often be very slow but always yield the best and richest results.

In Europe, no country has as flourishing a playwriting culture as we do anyway. We've always had one, all the way back to the era of Shakespeare, when there was a huge outbreak of playwriting - just think of Marlowe and Kyd and Ben Johnson and the others.

Differences in Playwriting Cultures

Even in France, a bit later, it was much more specialized already; and rarefied. If you take France, right from the beginning there is a history of patronage that was much more developed than here. In France for stage left and stage right they say Côte Court and Côte Jardin. Courtyard Side and Garden Side. Because French theatre really began at Versailles where there was a courtyard and a garden.

British theatre began in Southwark where there was a slum with prostitutes and pickpockets right outside the door. If Racine went outside the theatre he was in the gardens at Versailles. Molière was a bit different and did spend a lot of time touring around the country; but he performed at court much more than Shakespeare ever did. Shakespeare's company had royal patronage, but appeared in court rarely, maybe once or twice a year for a Command Performance. They were called the King's Men much more for reasons of censorship. Also they made huge amounts of money down at the Globe, much more than Racine or Molière ever did.

Today, in a world dominated by globalization and global media, it's very complex to have the kind of job I do. Working as I do throws up difficult issues, to do with things like Culture Imperialism. You have to be careful of that.

The Danger of Cultural Imperialism

You go to Uganda and there is an utterly remarkable tradition of improvised theatre. But there is also the fact that a generation of playwrights and writers of all kind was wiped out by Amin. I've done a lot of work with Ugandan playwrights here. When you introduce playwriting tools in these workshops you are starting from a very particular base, your own European base. If you go to Russia, obviously everything is totally different - they have Chekov and hosts of others and a long tradition. If you're working in Palestine you're dealing with an Arabic culture that has no particular tradition of theatre at all.

Another crucial point is the governments in the places where you work. I justify my work by saying that it contributes to the development of a civil society. Having a free press and a free culture is really crucial. Then you get somewhere like India, and I found it is so complex and so long standing and so regional. I could not even begin to embrace the regional differences. I was aware that these are people who had playwriting 2000 years ago with its long and unbroken traditions. You come in talking about playwriting in a European way and there are all sorts of assumptions there that are not necessarily relevant.

My Indian experience was one where I was having to reassess what I was saying and expecting at every turn. For instance, why does this character in this Indian play take two pages to get to an important nugget of information? And they'd tell me calmly, that's just the way it is here and what the audience expects. In the two pages that I thought at first was just guff, there were all kinds of subtle things going on that I was misreading. And I pride myself on being very culturally sensitive: yet I was consistently coming unstuck on these Indian plays.

Obscenities

Playwriting goes right to the essence of a culture. How you portray your culture is to do with what your culture actually is. It is difficult. You can be a bull in a china shop saying you have to restructure this and redo that and do something else that way. I found that often suggestions that came to my mind would seem almost obscene to them.

Remember, the word Obscene is from Greek and means off stage - something that is too shocking to be seen on stage and can only be reported, that has to happen offstage for that reason. Oedipus blinding himself is obscene, is done offstage. The process of Western theatre has been about importing more and more of this offstage stuff and showing it or putting it onstage. By the time you get to Sarah Kane's Blasted you have everything happening on stage - and the Royal Court is, after all, one of the places this happened a lot; right down to the famous scene of the baby being stoned to death on stage in Edward Bond's Saved.

In India and other places you are often coming up against that line and having to accept and understand where it is in those cultures. I often found I would say very knee-jerk things and they would think of these things as obscene.

So I often found the plays more veiled and oblique to my taste as a man who worked in Western European theatre and was brought up in that tradition. To their taste it was very clear and they could see what was going on. I was really surprised.

So that makes me reassess my own culture. I don't know if that is a good thing, though people often tell me it has to be.

And that is the problem when you are trying to help things emerge - or re-emerge as in the case of Uganda - because you mustn't interfere too much or you end up writing about Uganda, say, or getting people from there to feel they have to write in the way Arthur Miller would write about it and not as a Ugandan. This is true too of writing in Germany - though our traditions and expectations are much closer. But that difference is still there.

It's very complex and when we go to these countries we have to go and see what is going on there, get a real feeling for it; and pick the people we are collaborating with very carefully. But we do, in every case, start by trying to embrace the local form.

A Ugandan play, for instance, will tend to have many more characters than an English play. And they will tend to hang around a lot more. An English aesthetic will ask: what is the function of this character; why isn't this person doing something? But that's the structure of the society also. You'll see a lot of people hanging around and getting involved in group and communal things. Our plays tend to be much more aetiolated in that way.

For more information, email internationalroyalcourttheatre [dot] com