PLAY
Why I believe discipline makes play possible — and why the best work happens when people feel safe enough to take risks.
I've probably always understood the importance of play.
As a child, I watched my father rehearse with his mime company and students. It was work, certainly, but it was also playful. There was experimentation and laughter and a sense that something was being discovered rather than simply executed.
When I was about ten, I discovered the particular happiness of making things up myself. I borrowed Goon Show scripts from the neighbours, recorded my own versions onto a cassette recorder, doing all the voices and sound effects. Then I'd listen back to them, pleased with what I'd managed to make.
That understanding has stayed with me.
Play has been at the heart of my theatre practice for as long as I can remember. But I don't mean play in the sense of simply letting people loose in a room.
Discipline makes play possible.
Shakespeare called actors ‘players’, after all. The idea that acting is a form of play is hardly new.
What interests me is how to create the conditions in which that play can become precise, truthful and surprising.
Before we can play, we need to know what we're playing with.
My rehearsal process is structured. I'm interested in the architecture of a text: who the characters are, what they want, what they need, what they're doing from moment to moment, how the story works, what the structural building blocks are and what the playwright has actually put on the page.
That preparation gives actors something concrete to launch from.
Then we can play.
I might ask a group of actors to work through an improvised character exercise in which they can only use five statements taken directly from the text. Because they don't have to invent dialogue, they can concentrate on everything else: physicality, impulse, attention, the way one character responds to another.
The exercise isn't the performance. It's a way of discovering aspects of the relationships between characters that might eventually become part of the performance.
For me, play means using your imagination. Following an impulse. Trying something ridiculous. Taking each other by surprise. Making each other laugh, or gasp. Finding a choice that nobody expected but which is suddenly completely right.
The best actors are extraordinarily good at this. They can throw away the obvious choice and discover something surprising, strange or funny that is still completely truthful to the character and the text.
But that only happens when people feel safe enough to fail.
When actors don't feel safe, they tend to protect themselves. They fall back on habits and patterns of behaviour that they already know work for them. The result may be competent, but it is rarely surprising.
My role as a director is to create the conditions in which that doesn't happen.
I provide the structure. I watch closely. I notice when an actor is falling back on something familiar. I nudge, prompt and challenge. And when something extraordinary appears, I recognise it.
The best moments in rehearsal are often moments of breakthrough: an actor suddenly finds something they didn't know they could do. They surprise themselves, the other actors and me.
There is usually laughter. Sometimes relief. Sometimes joy.
And something has changed.
Because theatre is made between people.
There is an energy that passes between actors in a scene — through words, through the eyes, through the playing of intentions. One intention meets another and creates conflict, resistance, connection and emotion. That exchange is what carries the story.
You can't manufacture that alone.
The audience feels it too. When actors are genuinely engaged with one another, there is a kind of complicity that extends beyond the stage and into the room. The audience isn't simply watching people perform. They are witnessing something being discovered between people, in real time.
That is what I mean by play.