Our Media and Communications Manager Mike Barnett speaks to Amy Leach about directing Arabian Nights
MB: Let’s start at the beginning. You’re from Darwen, near Blackburn. How did you get into the theatre? Is it in the family?
AL: Me and my sister are the first generation of our family to work in the arts (she’s an illustrator), but we were brought up on a healthy diet of culture. My mum is a prolific theatre-goer and took us to see plays from an early age. Places like Manchester, Bolton, Liverpool, Lancaster, Oldham and Leeds were within reach and mum would drive us across the North West to see all kinds of productions which fired my imagination. Sometimes we’d take the train to see plays in Stratford and London too. We were very lucky to have that early experience of live performance.
MB: You’re a director now of course, but did you ever consider acting?
AL: I wanted to be an actor until I left university and it was something I’d wanted to do since I was a little girl. From the age of three, I took dance classes in Blackburn, and then when I started at secondary school, I swapped dancing for acting, getting involved in school plays and joining the Youth Theatre at the Octagon Theatre in Bolton. I continued acting in university productions and formed my own little theatre company when I graduated, and it’s through this that I discovered that I preferred being on the other side of things. I was surprised to find that I didn’t miss acting and actually it was always the story I was more interested in; how to tell a story to an audience in an exciting way, how to make them laugh or cry or exclaim with delight.
MB: Let’s talk about this production. How did it all come about you directing the piece?
AL: In 2008, I was very lucky to direct a beautiful play called Dr Korczak’s Example at the Royal Exchange. Chris Honer, the Artistic Director of the Library Theatre Company, came to see that play and a few other productions I’ve directed since then. He got in touch and after a few chats about theatre over coffee, he asked me if I’d be interested in directing Arabian Nights. It was a play I already had on my ‘plays I’d like to direct’ bookshelf and I said yes in a flash.
MB: Unusually for the Quays Theatre at The Lowry, this production is being presented in-the-round. What was the motivation for that?
AL: Long before any of them were written down, the tales of the Arabian Nights were passed on through oral storytelling, told by market traders who travelled across the Middle East, Northern Africa and India. After a hard day at work, sat round a fire under a canopy of stars, the tales would be traded in the same way as the spices and silks during the day. Juicy details would be kept, boring bits would be changed or omitted, and thus the stories were passed on for hundreds of years. We wanted to capture for the audience a sense of being sat in a circle under the stars and hearing the tales for the first time, and so staging the play in-the-round felt natural.
MB: Does it pose any particular technical or challenges for you, the production, or the audience?
AL: I love watching plays staged in-the-round as I always feel it brings an extra special intimacy and connection to the actors and the story. For the right play, it breaks down the barrier between the stage and the audience and becomes a very shared experience. Staging a play in-the-round has its challenges because you have to keep the action moving and fluid so that everyone gets a good view. It also means that design-wise, you can’t have any walls and the floor becomes much more important, so you have to be creative with how to open up the images so that they can be enjoyed by everyone.
MB: You’re presenting seven stories altogether. Do you have a particular favourite, and if so why?
AL: We’re staging all of the stories in Dominic Cooke’s adaptation. In the play, Shahrazad must tell a story every evening in order to save her life and the lives of thousands of women. So each tale must entertain the King, but it must also teach him something about himself so that his heart will soften and he will learn the error of his ways. This adaptation is fantastic because Dominic has very carefully selected which tales should come in which order. I’m not sure that I have a favourite story as they are all so different and so magical, although I can’t help but laugh every time Abu Hassan lets out his giant fart!
MB: Can you outline the relevance of Arabian Nights to today’s society?
AL: The tales are wonderful because they are a magical melting pot of cultures, ethnicities and beliefs. They celebrate diversity, and no matter who you are – young or old, male or female, poor or rich, Christian or Muslim – you can be the evil wrong-doer or the heroic saviour. So I think it feels absolutely right that we are staging Arabian Nights at Christmas in 2012 in Greater Manchester, and we hope that the production also celebrates all that is wonderful about our multi-cultural country.
MB: The production asks a lot of the cast, with a great many costume and scene changes, not to mention there being no fewer than 55 performances! Can you talk me through your casting process, and also the rehearsal process?
AL: The most important thing in terms of finding the right actors for Arabian Nights was that they needed to be playful, ensemble members. This play has around 100 characters played by nine actors and a musician, so we needed fun actors with versatility who could work well as a team to bring the stories to life. So in the auditions, I asked all the actors to tell me a story from the play and to tell it in as imaginative way as they could. Some used physical clowning, others used items of costume, fabric and props. And I found nine wonderfully talented actors who were happy to throw themselves around the room and to play. Play will be a key word in the rehearsal room too. Hayley Grindle (the Designer( and I have got lots of ideas for how we might stage the tales, but we’ll also spend a lot of time in the rehearsals playing, much like children do, creating the make-believe world with the actors and the objects from the set.
MB: There’s live music in the production, performed by Arun Ghosh. Why did you choose to have live music in the production, rather than use a soundtrack?
AL: This decision goes back to the choices we made to stage the play in-the-round and to try to capture the essence of a group of storytellers, sitting round making up the tales together. The tales will be conjured up magically by the cast, and so it felt right that Arun should also be a part of this, conjuring up the music right in front of us.
MB: This is a Christmas production of course, which means that the chances are some children may be seeing their first-ever live performance, and at what is a special time of the year. No pressure, then?!
AL: Almost all of the plays I direct are for a family audience. I love creating theatre that will be watched by a mix of generations and I love the honesty of responses that can come from children. They won’t sit politely like an adult audience and endure something that they find boring or disengaging. I think it goes back to your first question, and how I came to the theatre in the first place. I was so lucky to have a mum who opened up my eyes to a world of artistic possibility. I can still remember many of the productions I saw growing up, some of which were here with the Library Theatre Company, and I want to create a magical experience that audiences young and old will never forget.
Arabian Nights opens at The Lowry in Salford on Friday 30 November. To book tickets “ here