Oscar Toeman wants to stage smart plays.
The emerging director on his inspirations, his ambitions, and new show The Misfortune of the English.
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Director Oscar Toeman has been lucky enough to learn from his heroes.
Between 2010 and 2017, he regularly worked as an assistant alongside the directors Tim Carroll, Blanche McIntyre, Lucy Bailey, Polly Findlay, Roger Michell, and more. Now, as he begins to build up his own CV, he can see how much his directing style has been shaped by those experiences.
“Working on a Roger Michell show felt like being in a Rolls Royce,” Toeman remembers. “Everything felt very effortless. Polly and Blanche were both incredibly smart in very different ways, while ensuring their rehearsal rooms remained playful places to be. Lucy was visionary and visceral, and everything was about bodies and texture. Tim deployed different games and exercises, which somehow allowed a production to take shape without ever feeling like anything was imposed.”
“In my early career, everything I did was basically a rip-off of something I had seen one of them do,” he continues. “As you get older and a bit more confident, though, you get more of an idea about what works for you and what doesn’t. You hold on to some things and you let other things go. Figuring out your taste and voice as a director is all trial and error, really.”
Toeman is currently in rehearsals for The Misfortune of the English, a new play by Pamela Carter, which first opened in Germany last year and which is receiving its UK premiere at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre next week. It all came about, Toeman explains, because of an article in The Guardian.
“In April 1936, 27 kids from a public school in London set off on a walking tour of the Black Forest in Germany, and got lost in a blizzard,” he says. “I won’t spoil it by saying what happened, but it ended up being used as propaganda by Hitler at a time when Anglo-German relations were very fraught. Pamela read a 2016 long-read by Kate Connolly about it, and thought it would make a great play. I read it, and I thought it was sensational.”
The Misfortune of the English is not a straight retelling of the Black Forest incident, though. It’s more than that, says Toeman. It jumps through time to explore the historiography of the event, the ways it has been twisted to suit different agendas, and what it says about Englishness, about truth and about memory. It’s “slippery”, it’s “murky”, and it is exactly the kind of show that he wants to be staging.
“I like smart plays, and this is a really smart play,” Toeman says. “There is so much going on underneath the surface. Every line has two or three meanings, and that’s so exciting when you are a director because you get to make a choice as to the most interesting way of presenting those meanings to an audience. It’s like a puzzle to be solved.”
“There’s something so exciting about being in the centre of things and facilitating other people to do their best work…”
Born in the late 1980s, Toeman grew up in London, and went to school in the shadow of Shakespeare’s Globe. He would bunk off in the afternoons to catch shows, and it was seeing Lucy Bailey’s notoriously graphic 2006 production of Titus Andronicus there that first ignited his love of theatre.
“I really hated school, but I wasn’t a massive rule-breaker,” Toeman remembers. “I think I thought that if I was caught, then at least I was doing something relevant-ish, or whatever. That production of Titus Andronicus was sensational. I found it incredibly intoxicating. I knew at that point that I wanted to work in theatre.”
Toeman studied English at Cambridge University and got involved in directing student drama there. After graduating, he assisted more experienced directors – including Bailey – at major theatres, while simultaneously staging his own shows at drama schools, pub theatres, fringe festivals, and studio spaces. His 2016 production of Rodney Ackland’s After October was nominated for three Offie Awards, and in 2019 he staged Anna Ziegler’s Actually at Trafalgar Studios to critical acclaim.
In 2017, he received a Michael Grandage Company Futures Bursary and used it to participate in the Lincoln Center’s prestigious Directors Lab programme in New York. In 2018, he was a finalist for the Sir Peter Hall Award, and in 2019, he was runner-up for the JMK Award with designer Rebecca Brower. Their second-place-winning pitch – a revival of Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome – was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2020, sparking Toeman’s continuing relationship with the venue.
“It’s about being the central spoke in the wheel,” Toeman says, when asked why he is drawn to directing. “There’s something so exciting about being in the centre of things and facilitating other people to do their best work. I think that is ultimately what directing is. It is bringing the right people together in the right room at the right time. It is steering them and giving them the space to flourish. And I think I am quite good at that.”
What do you want to do?
I would love to keep making work that is provocative and challenging and audacious, and doing that with collaborators who excite me, and ideally doing it ultimately in larger spaces.
I have a really special place in my heart for The Globe, so I’d love to work there. I’m also excited by the bubbling ideas in the shows the Almeida produce, and the humanity of the work at the Hampstead. I’m a dual national, too, with German citizenship, and I would love to start working in Europe at some point.
What support do you need to get there?
It would be great if a series of artistic directors rung me up and said they loved my show, and would I like to come and work in their theatres.
Seriously, though, it is just conversations. I have got lots of ideas. What I would love is the chance to discuss those ideas with the people that make decisions, and I’d then love to not fuck up those conversations when I have them!
How can people find out more about you?
They can find my CV via my page on United Agents, and they can find me on Twitter, too. Oh, and please see The Misfortune of the English at the Orange Tree, which runs until May 28th.
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Fergus Morgan