Five thoughts from five female directors, award-winning actor-writer Nathan Queeley-Dennis, and three shows to see...
Five extracts from critic Rosemary Waugh's new book of interviews with female directors. Plus: the writer-performer of hit show Bullring Makeout Techno Jamz, three shows to see, and more.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Below, you will find five short extracts from critic and journalist Rosemary Waugh’s new book Running The Room: Conversations With Women Theatre Directors, which was published by Nick Hern Books yesterday. Below that, there is an interview with actor and Bruntwood Prize-winning playwright Nathan Queeley-Dennis, whose one-man play Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz runs at the Royal Court later this month, and your regular three show recommendations.
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Critic and journalist Rosemary Waugh’s new book is a goldmine of insight on the multifarious art of directing, the skill of leadership, and the joys and challenges of constructing a career in theatre as a woman.
Entitled Running The Room: Conversations With Women Theatre Directors, it features 24 interviews with female/non-binary theatre directors, conducted by Waugh over two years, and it brims with fascinating discussions of creative practice, illuminating discourse on running buildings and companies, and thought-provoking comments on contemporary theatre. The list of interviewees reads like a who’s who of influential directors in contemporary theatre, too: Carrie Cracknell, Katie Mitchell, Rebecca Frecknall, Marianne Elliott, Emma Rice, Vicky Featherstone, and many, many more.
The book is, as Waugh writes in her introduction, “a multicoloured patchwork of insights gleaned from Britain’s most ferocious, fearless, and creative female directors.” Here are five extracts, selected by Waugh for readers of The Crush Bar. You can order a copy of her book via publisher Nick Hern Books’ website using the button below.
Debbie Hannan on the erasure of people with disabilities working in theatre:
“19% of the working age population in Britain is disabled, which equates to one-in-five people. Placed in that context, you realise that the conversation should be about more than ‘representation’, it’s actually about erasure. Because the one-in-five statistic means that, if you have a cast of five, one person should have a disability. Or, in a creative team of five, one should have a disability – and if they don’t, then you are erasing a type of person from the world by not having them present. There are fewer disabled people working in the theatre industry because of all the obstacles and the relentless issues around establishing a career in this line of work, but I’m a fan of the ‘no excuses’ approach. So, while it can be true that it’s hard to find people working in the industry with disabilities, it’s still unacceptable to only have people on your team who aren’t disabled – both things can be true at the same time.”
Milli Bhatia on directing theatre and political action:
“I'm interested in artists who consider how their politics intersect with form and who they choose to tell stories about, and who understand that the act of theatre making, a communal imaginative space and an invitation to another perspective all have the ability to change us. Theatre enlists imagination and can invite us not just to look at our reality, but to search for alternatives.
I approach the process of directing a play by asking similar questions to those one might when organising political action, and I came to both directing and political organising around the same time in my late teens. ‘Why this and why now?’; ‘Who is it for?’; ‘Who is the audience?’; ‘How do we consider spectacle and theatricality?’; ‘Who will it speak to?’ and ‘Who do we want to empower within the process of creating and staging this event?’ are some examples. I consider how I can be clear and precise about what my work wants to do, and how I can practice resistance, responsibility and solidarity in the process.”
Emma Frankland on lived experience versus fiction on stage:
“I believe there is space for the craft of theatre and acting, and for the truth to come through that. I’m personally at a point where I’m interested in returning to fiction, partly because I’m fed up – to put it mildly – of only telling my own story. I want to support other people being on stage and, moreover, I want to give other trans performers the chance to be expansive and explorative without having to mine their own traumas. With Galatea, we’ve got a play that speaks about the migrant experience, acceptance of outsiders, the right to protest and other hugely relevant topics. We don't have to be hurting ourselves to get those messages across.”
Nancy Medina on mental health toolkits in the rehearsal space:
“I created a rehearsal process which begins with talking about a mental-health toolkit. The question is: ‘If there were three things in your mental-health toolkit, what would they be? Would you want a breakout space? Would you want to set up a signal with me for when you need to leave the room? Would you want to say, actually, with a hard scene, I only want to do it once and not over and over again?’
In one rehearsal room, an actor asked to have their drawing pad present. Then, on breaks, they would doodle and do some drawing. That was great, because the rest of the cast then did it as well – it became the art corner! I’ve found that by asking about mental-health toolkits on day one of the read-through, far fewer things come up throughout the rehearsal period because people feel more secure… It's when you don't put these things in place that things can go awry.”
Katie Mitchell on theatre and the climate crisis:
“I started making productions about climate change in 2012 after meeting a scientist who – Cassandra-like – forecast all the issues we are now facing, like mass migration, food and water supply concerns, extreme weather events and so on.
Until relatively recently, I could choose whether I wanted to make a show about the environmental catastrophe or not. Now, as climate change so clearly envelops us (with recent wildfires and flooding in Europe being two of many global catastrophes), there is no longer any choice. All our practice in theatre needs to have a conversation with the reality of climate change, in terms of the content of productions, their form, and the ways we source, use, and build any materials we use.”
Running The Room: Conversations With Women Theatre Directors is out now, published by Nick Hern Books.
At 8.20pm every evening this August, the Paines Plough Roundabout – the 168-seat auditorium that pops up in the Summerhall courtyard during the Edinburgh Fringe – rocked with laughter for an hour. One man was at the heart of it, conducting the audience like a virtuoso: actor and writer Nathan Queeley-Dennis, performing his one-man play Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz.
“It was so much fun,” Queeley-Dennis says about the show’s month-long run in Edinburgh. “So, so, so much fun. The show is quite conversational by nature. It is like a chat with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. That meant I could play off the audience reactions and use it to energise the story. It sounds weird because I was performing my own writing, but I have never had more fun on stage.”
Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz follows a young, Birmingham man called Nathaniel on a romantic odyssey spanning several days, incorporating disastrous dates, hilarious trips to the barber, and ridiculous WhatsApp exchanges. Underneath the abundant humour, though, runs a more serious story of a disillusioned young man’s search for fulfilment. The play is not autobiographical at all, Queeley-Dennis insists, but some elements of it – the protagonist’s British-Caribbean background and his affection for the city of Birmingham, in particular – are inspired by his own life.
“People ask me all the time if it is autobiographical,” Queeley-Dennis says. “My biggest regret is calling the character Nathaniel. It was just a placeholder, but then I got too far in to change it. I always say that it is not autobiographical, but that the feelings and emotions of the play are autobiographical. The search for something bigger than yourself, and the feeling that you are applying all your energy in the wrong direction – those are both things that I relate to.”
Born in 1995, Queeley-Dennis grew up in Birmingham. He was a natural performer from a young age – his love of theatre sparked by seeing Birmingham Rep’s 2005 production of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play Elmina’s Kitchen – and was encouraged by his teachers to follow his passion from school productions and youth groups to an acting course at Birmingham Ormiston Academy, then to a three-year degree at East 15 Acting School. In the years after his graduation, though, he “floated.”
“I worked at a summer camp in America for a bit,” Queeley-Dennis remembers. “I did a tour of Austria and Germany with Vienna’s English Theatre. I went back to Birmingham and worked in a pub called The Parson and Clerk, where I’d worked since I was sixteen. I stagnated a bit.”
Suddenly, in 2019, everything started happening at once for Queeley-Dennis. He got an acting job in Rebel Music, a co-production between Middle Child Theatre and Birmingham Rep, then landed roles in Phoebe Eclair-Powell’s Really Big And Really Loud with Paines Plough, the West End transfer of the National Theatre’s touring production of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey, Chinonyerem Odimba’s musical Black Love with Paines Plough again, and Josie Rourke’s West End staging of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at @sohoplace. Simultaneously, he had started writing something.
“At the pub in Birmingham, I would have to go in early and clean the cellar and sort the barrels,” Queeley-Dennis says. “I had two hours, but I could do it in about thirty minutes. The rest of the time I just sat on a barrel and started writing this monologue on my phone. My laptop was broken.”
That script, via a host of scratch performances and success at a national monologue competition, eventually became Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz. Throughout 2022, Queeley-Dennis kept meaning to submit it to playwriting prizes but kept missing deadlines to do so, until only one competition remained: the biggest of them all, the prestigious £16,000 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting.
“I sent it off thinking that it would be good to get a bit of feedback,” Queeley-Dennis remembers. “That’s all I was hoping for. Then, one day I got this phone call telling me I’d been shortlisted.” A few weeks later, at a ceremony at Manchester Royal Exchange last November, Queeley-Dennis won. Within nine months, he was performing his play to packed audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe. Now, Bullring Makeout Techno Jamz is transferring to London’s Royal Court for a three-week run.
“It’s been a crazy year,” Queeley-Dennis. “It’s been a pretty wild ride. It’s been pretty intense. I’m developing the show for television at the moment. I’m working on a couple of other TV ideas. I’m going to start working on my next play soon, too. And I want to keep acting in other stuff as well.”
And what did he do with his £16,000 prize? “It’s mental,” Queeley-Dennis says. “They just transfer it straight to your bank account. Some of it went on tax. I put a bit of it away. I gave some to my mum. Then I used the rest of it on stuff that I thought would help me as a writer. Like a new laptop.”
Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz is at the Royal Court Theatre from November 28 until December 20. For more information and tickets, click here.
Three shows to see next week
Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York) - Kiln Theatre, until January 20
This new musical opened at Kilburn’s Kiln Theatre this week to a raft of glowing reviews. Written by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, designed by Soutra Gilmour, and directed by Tim Jackson, it follows a 25-year-old British bloke on a whirlwind tour of New York City led by is soon-to-be sister-in-law. Sam Tutty - star of Dear Evan Hansen - and Dujonna Gift play the leads in an intelligent show that both celebrates and satirises festive romcom films. Its run has already extended until late January, and that might not be the last we see of it. You can get tickets via the button below.
Infinite Life - National Theatre, until January 13
Infinite Life is the new play from Annie Baker, the extremely cool American playwright whose previous work includes The Antipodes, John, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick, all of which have been staged to acclaim in the National Theatre’s Dorfman auditorium. Infinite Life arrives in London after premiering at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. Directed by James Macdonald, it follows five women staying at a mysterious California health retreat and, like most of Baker’s work, trades in a compelling atmosphere that is both banal and disconcerting, both mundane and thoroughly weird, at the same time. You can get tickets via the button below.
If All Else Fails - various, until November 29
This latest show from legendary experimental ensemble Forced Entertainment involves two performers - Cathy Naden and Seke Chimutengwende - exchanging simple phrases in a hypnotic exercise in repetition, deviation and improvisation. Devised by the company and directed by Tim Etchells, it is another instance of Forced Entertainment pushing the boundaries of performance to their limits, and beyond. Audiences will either love it or hate it. There are only a few British dates left for now, in Lancaster and Brighton. You can get tickets to both via the button below.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this newsletter or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk. Or you can find me on Twitter/X, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you next Friday.
Fergus