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This interview took place in London on June 5, 2003, in Nicholas Hytners office at the Royal National Theatre. Jack OBrien had directed John Guares adaptation of His Girl Friday, which had opened the night before.
John Guare: His Girl Friday is about rough- and-tumble newspaper life in 1939 Chicago. Next youre back to America to do the road company of Hairspray, which, as the universe knows, is set in 1960s Baltimore. And then you go directly from that to Lincoln Center Theater and Henry IV, not just Part I, not just Part II, but Part I and II. What adjustments will you have to make to get into the world of Henry IV?
Jack OBrien: Im not aware that Ill adjust at all. Quite frankly, I think of myself as a kind of receiver, and I just tune the channel to another station. Having been running the Old Globe theater in San Diego for the last twenty-two years, where the as-signments are so varied and numerous and swift, I have very often found Ive had to pick things up at the last minute, so that in addition to the assignments Ive given myself, I find I suddenly might have to pick up another one. Someone defaults, and you just find a way.
JG: How often does that happen in your theater?
JOB: To an artistic director, it probably happens every season when youre doing, as we are, fourteen pieces of work a year. In the old days, I was doing at least three of those a year, of my own. Now Ive stopped doing that, because my workload is more spread out.
JG: Margaret Tyzack, whos in our production here, told me that, when she graduated from drama school in 1950, she spent two years in a rep somewhere in England where she did fifty productions a year, one a week with a two-week break. And they had to supply all their costumes. She said she just learned to do it.
JOB: Thats right. You have to be the kid who lifted the calf in the barnyard all these years. You have to be ready for anything. After a while, you dont even think about it. I mean, I think about it when I get into a situation, as I am now the day after an opening, when Im clearly exhausted and I really should stop and lie down for a while. It never occurs to me that this is a lot of work to do, or a lot of pressure. I just dont feel that way. Im having a wonderful time.
JG: Its fascinating, watching you work as a director. You have what seems to be a rare gift among directors
JOB: Which is?
JG: Dont be warywhich is a very strong sense of narrative. You dont operate mom-ent to moment; you operate in the narrative of the piece and are always working in terms of that. And whats interesting, watching you work, is how you supply, for every character onstage, the part of the narrative that theyre in at that moment. No matter why theyre mopping the floor, what their life is like mopping the floor. And not in any Stanislavsky way, but just why the narrative needs them to be mopping the floor at this minute, what it is theyre trying to clean up, why theyre bringing sandwiches now. What the stakes as set down in the script are. And you give that narrative always in the spirit of the text. Did you always supply a narrative for the actors that comes not out of a directorial concept but out of the text itself?
JOB: Yes. I grew up with an inordinate respect for the writer. In the seventies, I had a sort of ten-year apprenticeship with classical work. Craig Noel invited me out almost every year to direct a Shakespeare. And I was basically a musical-comedy baby. And so, at the end of ten years, I had probably done more classical work than almost any American director of my generation, at that time. I began to understand the unbelievable potency of Shakespeares narrative. As with all great plays written by great playwrights, they write from that source. In other words, theyre not just flinging paint at a canvas or letting the chips fall where they may. There is some design. You may not see it right away: why these particular characters are in this particular room, or in this particular situation or on this particular journey. Its my job, then, to go back and find and follow the stream, make sure that its all going in the same direction. An audience may follow different parts of the continuum. I, interpreting for the audience, need to make sure its still moving. My job is to think about whats happening to the characters when the scene isnt about them, when theyre not onstage. What justifies Shakespeares interest in them, to keep them a part of the play. I guess its like a writing exercise. You think to yourself, What does the author think is going on here that would be useful to the actor? An actor has to go from here to there. Thats his assignment. And I think a director is a storyteller, first of all. His medium happens to be people talking on-stage. So directors and authors have similar purposes.
JG: Peter Hall said somewhereI hope Im quoting him rightthat in every one of Shakespeares large speeches there will be a sentence buried that tells you exactly what the speech is about.
JOB: These are the kinds of things that you learn when you spend a decade or so working on these plays. In whose characters mouth does Shakespeare put the name, to begin with? Or the idea that the king in Hamlet is named Claudius, and yet no one ever refers to him as Claudius in the play. So why does Shakespeare give a character a name and never use it? No one ever refers to him as anything but the King in the play. No one. Its never written. And yet in the dramatis personae, its Claudius. Why does Shakespeare have dances at the end of certain plays and not others? What does that mean? Well, you learn after a period of time, after youve done enough study, that he uses music to heal. And that, very often, when theres nothing else to say, he wants you to wrap it up, as it were, in a dance. But you dont just do steps. When you dance with somebody, the drama goes on to do the work of words.
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