Mothers and daughters are high on Jemima Levick’s agenda just now. As the sparky young theatre director prepares for the final rehearsals of her production of Tennessee Williams’ Depression era American tragedy, The Glass Menagerie, Levick has her own mother to think about as well.
That the said mother in question is children’s novelist Vivien French is one thing. Scoring a hit with a revival of a script French wrote for her own theatre in education company at The Young Vic in the early 1970s is quite another. Yet it was Levick’s revisiting of French’s Hambledog and the Hopping Clogs that saw a baton effectively passed on via Levick’s own Perissology company, formed while still a student in Edinburgh. Now the alliance has gone a stage further, with Levick co-opting French into writing a stage adaptation of one of her novels for teenagers, Baby, Baby.
“It’s all been a bit weird,” Levick admits of the still ongoing experience. “We’ve only really had one big falling out, but we got over it.”
Such a progressively full and frank exchange of views is worlds apart from The Glass Menagerie, which sees deep-fried Southern belle Amanda attempt to bring her shy and sickly daughter Laura out of her shell and help her relive her own faded youth. Seen through the eyes of Amanda’s son, would-be writer Tom, The Glass Menagerie was Williams’ first big hit, premiering in Chicago on Boxing Day 1944 before transferring to Broadway the following March.
The play was originally adapted from one of Williams’ short stories, Portrait Of A Girl In Glass, and was clearly a romanticised auto-biographical study of his own flight from home. Williams’ subtle experiments with form help make it his most heart-breaking rip through the fragile veneer of a family collapsing in on itself.
“He manages to write incredibly epic stories and completely life-changing events”, says Levick, “but at the same time seemingly nothing happens. Yet he writes very theatrical plays, which is ironic because so many of them were turned into films which have sometimes become definitive, even though The Glass Menagerie in particular had been totally sanitised on film and made all nice and fluffy.”
Levick’s only previous experience of Williams was as assistant director on a production of Suddenly Last Summer while a student. Though not immediately taken with one of the greatest American writers, Levick says now that “He was exploring things then that we still think are modern now. You could argue that The Glass Menagerie is an expressionistic or surrealistic play. The fact that he uses A/V (audio-visual effects), and we’re all so proud of ourselves now for putting A/V into everything we do, and generally not very well, but here he was at the forefront of changing things. Quite often it’s done as a piece of naturalism, and I can understand why people fall into that trap, because it’s probably quite easy to do it that way.”
This will be Levick’s second Lyceum production following 2005’s box-office record breaking look at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which chucked Levick in at the deep end.
“A Christmas Carol was massive”, Levick admits, “and only now while I’m working with just four actors do I realise how enormous it actually was. At the time it was a mixture of naiveté, bravery and big-headedness. I remember getting all the actors and all the kids in the same room and there were twenty two of them, which seems absolutely bonkers now. But this is completely different, and what’s nice is that because I did A Christmas Carol, I know everyone who works at the Lyceum, so I feel supported.”
As they move up the professional ladder, most directors develop a network of working partnerships which they carry with them. This is particularly apparent with Levick, who this season at the Lyceum is by her own admission “the youngest director by a mile. They’ve taken a massive risk on me, opening the door for this jumped-up English girl.”
There are benefits of such a move for all parties. While Levick can take advantage of the resources a large institution can provide, the Lyceum gets some fresh blood in the building, with Levick reeling in actors from a pool who haven’t previously been seen on the Grindlay Street stage.
Levick has developed her network on the freelance circuit working from the bottom up at The Traverse, as well as assisting on shows with the likes of Stellar Quines, Grid Iron and Paines Plough. Levick has also led The Traverse’s Class Act playwriting for schools project, co-ordinated Paines Plough’s smash-hit season of breakfast-time readings of new Mark Ravenhill shorts, Ravenhill For Breakfast, is an associate director of Stellar Quines and is providing temporary maternity cover as Workshop Director at the National Theatre For Scotland. But how did a girl growing up between London and Bristol end up breezing her way into Scotland’s theatre scene?
“I thought I wanted to be an actress to begin with”, Levick admits now, “because I didn’t realise there was anything else to do, really. My mum was an actress when I was very little, and I used to spend my entire time on Saturday afternoons absolutely mortified at the back of the auditorium watching her dressed up as a marshmallow.”
This may have held Levick in good stead for her recent work on Elf Analysis, Morna Pearson’s manic little lunchtime fantasy at Oran Mor.
“I think she must have an incredible monologue going on in her mind”, Levick says of Pearson, “and sometimes she chooses to share it with the rest of us.”
Levick flirted with a Media Studies course before switching to Drama. A placement at The Traverse under the new writing theatre’s then Literary Director Roxana Silbert’s wing saw Levick explore the full gamut of theatrical experience by working a stint in every department.
For her final year show at Queen Margaret University, Levick insisted on using professional actors. By this time, Perissology, which means an abundance of words, or “verbal diarrhoea, which isn’t very nice,” as Levick puts it, was already a going concern. With her mum letting her do one of her old box of plays for free, Hambledog and the Hopping Clogs transferred to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
While Levick was preparing the show, French wrote to one of the actors who’d appeared in the original production, and who was currently appearing at The Globe, to let him know that her daughter was reviving their old TIE show. A card duly appeared by return to say that he’d been thinking of French recently as he’d seen a woman in The Globe who looked just like her. Levick, of course, had been seeing friends in a show at The Globe a few weeks earlier. Perissology was clearly meant to be.
Baby, Baby is about two teenage mums, one of whom is a Goth and one a Chav, and is being developed by the company in association with Shetland Arts Trust and Stellar Quines. With development ongoing while she concentrates on The Glass Menagerie, Levick also has projects pending with Stellar Quines and Grid Iron.
“I’m interested in plays that are less naturalistic,” she says, “and that don’t necessarily give you the full picture, but still speak to people. If I wasn’t a theatre director I’d probably end up doing something mad like become an explorer or something, but I like plays that don’t spell out all the answers for you and aren’t necessarily how they should be.”
The Glass Menagerie, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Friday-February 9
The Herald, January 8th 2008
ends
That the said mother in question is children’s novelist Vivien French is one thing. Scoring a hit with a revival of a script French wrote for her own theatre in education company at The Young Vic in the early 1970s is quite another. Yet it was Levick’s revisiting of French’s Hambledog and the Hopping Clogs that saw a baton effectively passed on via Levick’s own Perissology company, formed while still a student in Edinburgh. Now the alliance has gone a stage further, with Levick co-opting French into writing a stage adaptation of one of her novels for teenagers, Baby, Baby.
“It’s all been a bit weird,” Levick admits of the still ongoing experience. “We’ve only really had one big falling out, but we got over it.”
Such a progressively full and frank exchange of views is worlds apart from The Glass Menagerie, which sees deep-fried Southern belle Amanda attempt to bring her shy and sickly daughter Laura out of her shell and help her relive her own faded youth. Seen through the eyes of Amanda’s son, would-be writer Tom, The Glass Menagerie was Williams’ first big hit, premiering in Chicago on Boxing Day 1944 before transferring to Broadway the following March.
The play was originally adapted from one of Williams’ short stories, Portrait Of A Girl In Glass, and was clearly a romanticised auto-biographical study of his own flight from home. Williams’ subtle experiments with form help make it his most heart-breaking rip through the fragile veneer of a family collapsing in on itself.
“He manages to write incredibly epic stories and completely life-changing events”, says Levick, “but at the same time seemingly nothing happens. Yet he writes very theatrical plays, which is ironic because so many of them were turned into films which have sometimes become definitive, even though The Glass Menagerie in particular had been totally sanitised on film and made all nice and fluffy.”
Levick’s only previous experience of Williams was as assistant director on a production of Suddenly Last Summer while a student. Though not immediately taken with one of the greatest American writers, Levick says now that “He was exploring things then that we still think are modern now. You could argue that The Glass Menagerie is an expressionistic or surrealistic play. The fact that he uses A/V (audio-visual effects), and we’re all so proud of ourselves now for putting A/V into everything we do, and generally not very well, but here he was at the forefront of changing things. Quite often it’s done as a piece of naturalism, and I can understand why people fall into that trap, because it’s probably quite easy to do it that way.”
This will be Levick’s second Lyceum production following 2005’s box-office record breaking look at Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which chucked Levick in at the deep end.
“A Christmas Carol was massive”, Levick admits, “and only now while I’m working with just four actors do I realise how enormous it actually was. At the time it was a mixture of naiveté, bravery and big-headedness. I remember getting all the actors and all the kids in the same room and there were twenty two of them, which seems absolutely bonkers now. But this is completely different, and what’s nice is that because I did A Christmas Carol, I know everyone who works at the Lyceum, so I feel supported.”
As they move up the professional ladder, most directors develop a network of working partnerships which they carry with them. This is particularly apparent with Levick, who this season at the Lyceum is by her own admission “the youngest director by a mile. They’ve taken a massive risk on me, opening the door for this jumped-up English girl.”
There are benefits of such a move for all parties. While Levick can take advantage of the resources a large institution can provide, the Lyceum gets some fresh blood in the building, with Levick reeling in actors from a pool who haven’t previously been seen on the Grindlay Street stage.
Levick has developed her network on the freelance circuit working from the bottom up at The Traverse, as well as assisting on shows with the likes of Stellar Quines, Grid Iron and Paines Plough. Levick has also led The Traverse’s Class Act playwriting for schools project, co-ordinated Paines Plough’s smash-hit season of breakfast-time readings of new Mark Ravenhill shorts, Ravenhill For Breakfast, is an associate director of Stellar Quines and is providing temporary maternity cover as Workshop Director at the National Theatre For Scotland. But how did a girl growing up between London and Bristol end up breezing her way into Scotland’s theatre scene?
“I thought I wanted to be an actress to begin with”, Levick admits now, “because I didn’t realise there was anything else to do, really. My mum was an actress when I was very little, and I used to spend my entire time on Saturday afternoons absolutely mortified at the back of the auditorium watching her dressed up as a marshmallow.”
This may have held Levick in good stead for her recent work on Elf Analysis, Morna Pearson’s manic little lunchtime fantasy at Oran Mor.
“I think she must have an incredible monologue going on in her mind”, Levick says of Pearson, “and sometimes she chooses to share it with the rest of us.”
Levick flirted with a Media Studies course before switching to Drama. A placement at The Traverse under the new writing theatre’s then Literary Director Roxana Silbert’s wing saw Levick explore the full gamut of theatrical experience by working a stint in every department.
For her final year show at Queen Margaret University, Levick insisted on using professional actors. By this time, Perissology, which means an abundance of words, or “verbal diarrhoea, which isn’t very nice,” as Levick puts it, was already a going concern. With her mum letting her do one of her old box of plays for free, Hambledog and the Hopping Clogs transferred to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
While Levick was preparing the show, French wrote to one of the actors who’d appeared in the original production, and who was currently appearing at The Globe, to let him know that her daughter was reviving their old TIE show. A card duly appeared by return to say that he’d been thinking of French recently as he’d seen a woman in The Globe who looked just like her. Levick, of course, had been seeing friends in a show at The Globe a few weeks earlier. Perissology was clearly meant to be.
Baby, Baby is about two teenage mums, one of whom is a Goth and one a Chav, and is being developed by the company in association with Shetland Arts Trust and Stellar Quines. With development ongoing while she concentrates on The Glass Menagerie, Levick also has projects pending with Stellar Quines and Grid Iron.
“I’m interested in plays that are less naturalistic,” she says, “and that don’t necessarily give you the full picture, but still speak to people. If I wasn’t a theatre director I’d probably end up doing something mad like become an explorer or something, but I like plays that don’t spell out all the answers for you and aren’t necessarily how they should be.”
The Glass Menagerie, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Friday-February 9
The Herald, January 8th 2008
ends
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