It's 9.07 on Friday morning, and Rebecca Gatward is already in the
zone. The London-based theatre director has been setting up for
rehearsals of Rona Munro's new play, Pandas, for the last half hour in
the Traverse Theatre's Leith-based rehearsal rooms with nary a cast
member in sight. Not that it in any way feels like an early start for
Gatward. She's used to being up and at things a lot earlier, both from
her work on mainstream TV drama over the last three years, and in her
role as a single mum. All of which in some way seems to trickle down
into Pandas, a contemporary rom-com set in Edinburgh and China and
involving a trio of criss-crossing would-be love stories made even more
pertinent, both by Jonathan Mills' forthcoming Asian-based Edinburgh
International Festival programme, and, in 2012, by the forthcoming real
life arrival of a pair of pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.
Based around three couples and involving a merry-go-round of rare panda
rugs, etymological inquiries and a series of all too human mating games
worthy of a David Attenborough nature documentary, the gentle
fripperies of Pandas suggest that, as with its author and director, it
too might sit just as easily on the small screen as the stage.
“The play is deliciously funny as well as being really truthful,”
Gatward says, “so you've got these great riches to play with. From my
point of view, because it's a romantic comedy it's doing something
really refreshing. Rona's doing a really rather lovely thing, because
she's inviting an audience to come and share the play's love stories
with each other, and, although it's set in Edinburgh, it feels like
there's a little bit of China in there too.”
Gatward previously worked with Munro at the Royal Shakespeare Company
on The Indian Boy, Munro's equally multi-cultural and infinitely more
fanciful response to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Out of this came a
mutual understanding and professional honesty that made the two women
natural collaborators on Pandas.
“The play's not similar to The Indian Boy,” Gatward stresses, “but
there are similar motifs to it, and I'm an emotional director in the
same way that I think Rona is an emotional writer, in that, for me the
work is about play and exploration. I don't make the rehearsal room an
intellectual place. That doesn't mean we don't talk about things
intelligently, but the play is very much something that connects at an
emotional level, and I love that kind of investigation of what happens
between people in relationships, and I think the comedy comes out of
that really deep exploration of that.”
This isn't Munro's first rom-com. Inbetween dovetailing between the
brutalist grit of Ladybird Ladybird for Ken Loach and the equally
serious stage plays Iron and The Last Witch, she adapted Quebecois
writer Evelyne de la Cheneliere's love story Strawberries in January
for the Traverse in 2006. Arriving in the midst of austerity-hit
Britain, however, just how valid is something so soft-centred right now?
“Well, why not?” Gatward shrugs. “My personal feeling about theatre is
that there are so many platforms out there now to engage people in
terms of their entertainment, so if theatre is to survive, it's role is
to entertain, and that we have to speak to people's souls and engage
with them emotionally. We shouldn't be intimidating audiences by
telling them they're going to be lectured or educated in some way.
Theatre is a democratic space, and you don't always want to be tearing
your hair out after watching some epic tragedy. Sometimes you just want
to be uplifted, especially now when we all need cheering up a bit.”
At university, Gatward couldn't decide between acting and painting,
although she always preferred rehearsing to performing, and now likens
her directing to the way an artist might use brush-strokes. During her
year out she directed a production of Fernando Arrabel's absurdist
oddity, Fando and Lis. Back at university she took part in workshops
led by John Rettallack, the Herald Angel winning director who was then
running the Oxford Stage Company. On the strength of the workshops,
Retallack offered Gatward her first professional job, which led via
assorted assistantships at the RSC led in 2000 to an associate
directorship at The Gate, where up to ten productions a year were put
on.
Gatward turned to TV following an epiphany in the supermarket.
“I was directing at the Globe,” she says, “and at the peak of my
career, but I was really really poor.”
Gatward investigated the possibilities of directing for television,
and, when she got behind the camera, “turned to it like a duck to
water.”
Gatward honed her craft on daytime medical soap, Doctors, before moving
into Casualty and, more recently, East Enders.
Beyond TV, one of Gatward's highest profile gigs to date came in 2002,
directing Hollywood A-listers Matt Damon, Casey Affleck and Summer
Phoenix in This Is Our Youth on London's west end. Where Gatward had
previously had to come to terms with the power of low-level speech in
TV close-ups, for a trio sired on screen culture, the reverse was the
case.
“They were extraordinarily dedicated,” Gatward recalls, “and just
happened to be famous all over the world. They hasn't done any theatre
for a long time, so we had to spend a lot of time convincing them that
they could play in a bigger style than they were used to. The way they
handled props was wonderful, but getting them to be heard beyond the
third row was really difficult. But they got there, and afterwards they
were shocked that the audience had been laughing, because they're not
used to having one.”
If there's any whiff of big-screen celebrity in Pandas, it comes in the
form of actress Crystal Yu, who worked with Gatward on television, as
well as in the 1940s-set thriller, Shanghai, which starred John Cusack
and Chow-Yun Fat, and an appearance alongside Madonna in a TV ad for
the pop music icon's fashion line for H&M. Yu's appearance on stage,
however, is still a rare thing in the UK.
“It's incredible to be working on a play with two Chinese actors
playing the leads,” Gatward enthuses, “simply because it doesn't happen
very often, and we still don't see Chinese actors much in this country.”
Gatward arrives at the Traverse just as current artistic director
Dominic Hill has announced his move to the Citizens in Glasgow. As
ambitious directors across the country start jockeying for position to
move into Hill's chair, would the forthcoming vacancy, one wonders be
of any interest to Gatward? It's just Munro, after all, who provides
her with a Traverse connection. During Gatward's time at the Gate, the
theatre's Literary Manager was current Traverse literary head Katherine
Mendelsohn, who was then dividing her week between the two theatres.
With such connections Gatward might be an obvious candidate.
“It's the sort of thing I would be really interested in,” she says,
“but practically I don't know whether I can. I love it up here, but I
have to think of my little girl as well.”
Such domestic restraints notwithstanding, as a calling card, Pandas
promises to leave much in the way of food for thought for its audience.
“I think that they'll all recognise some of the behaviour that they
going on,” Gatward observes, “and the play will possibly bring up lots
of things about relationships that we all know about. But I hope people
will leave the theatre uplifted, and maybe, just maybe, they'll also
talk to their partners a little bit more.”
Pandas, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews April 15th-17th, then
April 19th-May 7th
www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, April 12th 2011
ends
zone. The London-based theatre director has been setting up for
rehearsals of Rona Munro's new play, Pandas, for the last half hour in
the Traverse Theatre's Leith-based rehearsal rooms with nary a cast
member in sight. Not that it in any way feels like an early start for
Gatward. She's used to being up and at things a lot earlier, both from
her work on mainstream TV drama over the last three years, and in her
role as a single mum. All of which in some way seems to trickle down
into Pandas, a contemporary rom-com set in Edinburgh and China and
involving a trio of criss-crossing would-be love stories made even more
pertinent, both by Jonathan Mills' forthcoming Asian-based Edinburgh
International Festival programme, and, in 2012, by the forthcoming real
life arrival of a pair of pandas to Edinburgh Zoo.
Based around three couples and involving a merry-go-round of rare panda
rugs, etymological inquiries and a series of all too human mating games
worthy of a David Attenborough nature documentary, the gentle
fripperies of Pandas suggest that, as with its author and director, it
too might sit just as easily on the small screen as the stage.
“The play is deliciously funny as well as being really truthful,”
Gatward says, “so you've got these great riches to play with. From my
point of view, because it's a romantic comedy it's doing something
really refreshing. Rona's doing a really rather lovely thing, because
she's inviting an audience to come and share the play's love stories
with each other, and, although it's set in Edinburgh, it feels like
there's a little bit of China in there too.”
Gatward previously worked with Munro at the Royal Shakespeare Company
on The Indian Boy, Munro's equally multi-cultural and infinitely more
fanciful response to A Midsummer Night's Dream. Out of this came a
mutual understanding and professional honesty that made the two women
natural collaborators on Pandas.
“The play's not similar to The Indian Boy,” Gatward stresses, “but
there are similar motifs to it, and I'm an emotional director in the
same way that I think Rona is an emotional writer, in that, for me the
work is about play and exploration. I don't make the rehearsal room an
intellectual place. That doesn't mean we don't talk about things
intelligently, but the play is very much something that connects at an
emotional level, and I love that kind of investigation of what happens
between people in relationships, and I think the comedy comes out of
that really deep exploration of that.”
This isn't Munro's first rom-com. Inbetween dovetailing between the
brutalist grit of Ladybird Ladybird for Ken Loach and the equally
serious stage plays Iron and The Last Witch, she adapted Quebecois
writer Evelyne de la Cheneliere's love story Strawberries in January
for the Traverse in 2006. Arriving in the midst of austerity-hit
Britain, however, just how valid is something so soft-centred right now?
“Well, why not?” Gatward shrugs. “My personal feeling about theatre is
that there are so many platforms out there now to engage people in
terms of their entertainment, so if theatre is to survive, it's role is
to entertain, and that we have to speak to people's souls and engage
with them emotionally. We shouldn't be intimidating audiences by
telling them they're going to be lectured or educated in some way.
Theatre is a democratic space, and you don't always want to be tearing
your hair out after watching some epic tragedy. Sometimes you just want
to be uplifted, especially now when we all need cheering up a bit.”
At university, Gatward couldn't decide between acting and painting,
although she always preferred rehearsing to performing, and now likens
her directing to the way an artist might use brush-strokes. During her
year out she directed a production of Fernando Arrabel's absurdist
oddity, Fando and Lis. Back at university she took part in workshops
led by John Rettallack, the Herald Angel winning director who was then
running the Oxford Stage Company. On the strength of the workshops,
Retallack offered Gatward her first professional job, which led via
assorted assistantships at the RSC led in 2000 to an associate
directorship at The Gate, where up to ten productions a year were put
on.
Gatward turned to TV following an epiphany in the supermarket.
“I was directing at the Globe,” she says, “and at the peak of my
career, but I was really really poor.”
Gatward investigated the possibilities of directing for television,
and, when she got behind the camera, “turned to it like a duck to
water.”
Gatward honed her craft on daytime medical soap, Doctors, before moving
into Casualty and, more recently, East Enders.
Beyond TV, one of Gatward's highest profile gigs to date came in 2002,
directing Hollywood A-listers Matt Damon, Casey Affleck and Summer
Phoenix in This Is Our Youth on London's west end. Where Gatward had
previously had to come to terms with the power of low-level speech in
TV close-ups, for a trio sired on screen culture, the reverse was the
case.
“They were extraordinarily dedicated,” Gatward recalls, “and just
happened to be famous all over the world. They hasn't done any theatre
for a long time, so we had to spend a lot of time convincing them that
they could play in a bigger style than they were used to. The way they
handled props was wonderful, but getting them to be heard beyond the
third row was really difficult. But they got there, and afterwards they
were shocked that the audience had been laughing, because they're not
used to having one.”
If there's any whiff of big-screen celebrity in Pandas, it comes in the
form of actress Crystal Yu, who worked with Gatward on television, as
well as in the 1940s-set thriller, Shanghai, which starred John Cusack
and Chow-Yun Fat, and an appearance alongside Madonna in a TV ad for
the pop music icon's fashion line for H&M. Yu's appearance on stage,
however, is still a rare thing in the UK.
“It's incredible to be working on a play with two Chinese actors
playing the leads,” Gatward enthuses, “simply because it doesn't happen
very often, and we still don't see Chinese actors much in this country.”
Gatward arrives at the Traverse just as current artistic director
Dominic Hill has announced his move to the Citizens in Glasgow. As
ambitious directors across the country start jockeying for position to
move into Hill's chair, would the forthcoming vacancy, one wonders be
of any interest to Gatward? It's just Munro, after all, who provides
her with a Traverse connection. During Gatward's time at the Gate, the
theatre's Literary Manager was current Traverse literary head Katherine
Mendelsohn, who was then dividing her week between the two theatres.
With such connections Gatward might be an obvious candidate.
“It's the sort of thing I would be really interested in,” she says,
“but practically I don't know whether I can. I love it up here, but I
have to think of my little girl as well.”
Such domestic restraints notwithstanding, as a calling card, Pandas
promises to leave much in the way of food for thought for its audience.
“I think that they'll all recognise some of the behaviour that they
going on,” Gatward observes, “and the play will possibly bring up lots
of things about relationships that we all know about. But I hope people
will leave the theatre uplifted, and maybe, just maybe, they'll also
talk to their partners a little bit more.”
Pandas, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews April 15th-17th, then
April 19th-May 7th
www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, April 12th 2011
ends
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