Guildhall Questions: John Haidar answers

From 3-10 March, four Guildhall actors present a rare chance to experience The Drowned World – Gary Owen's vicious tale of love, revolt and beauty – in an online production recorded from their homes and directed remotely by John Haidar. Premiered at the Traverse Theatre and winner of the George Devine Award 2002, this devastating play explores how far humans will go to save themselves and what we are capable of when faced with the most brutal of dystopias.

In this Q&A, director John Haidar tells us more about the production, working with Guildhall students remotely in lockdown, and his advice for young theatre makers.

Could you tell us about The Drowned World, and what made you want to do this play now?

This project came into view very quickly after we went into the third lockdown in January. We needed to find a piece that we felt spoke to the times we were, and still are, in and which could conceivably be performed by four actors, remotely, from their own homes. There were all sorts of plays that Andy McNamee [Creative Associate] and I read. Gary Owen’s play, however, struck us as particularly prescient, written almost 20 years before the onset of the pandemic, but somehow reaching into our own time and – through the prism of these characters – revealing a series of anxieties and concerns that feel extremely close to the surface.

How have you approached this production, what ideas did you have in mind?

The short lead-in time meant we had to make bold decisions quickly, in terms of how to present the play. There’s a reduced creative team – no set designer, costume designer, lighting designer – so these roles, out of necessity, become absorbed by those already working on the production. That’s challenging, but it forces you to be creative when faced with one problem or another.

I knew we weren’t going to attempt any sort of realistic detail – in terms of props or set – so that meant focusing on a few elements and trying to showcase them as best we could. In the online production, each character inhabits a void-like space, inviting a viewer into their consciousness, which hopefully creates complicity with the audience. Then it’s actually, predominantly, about very small gestures, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming on film. We’ve experimented with different perspectives and positions, which suggest different modes of address, depending on whether a character is engaged in dialogue or soliloquy.

The other pieces of the puzzle are music and video, on which I’ve worked closely with James Allen [Composer] and Charlie Vince-Crowhurst [Video Designer] and the video design team. Until these elements are introduced, we only have the actors playing their characters – and we want them to be at the heart of the production, absolutely – so I was looking for an expressionistic resonance, to give a sense of their interior conflict and of the dying world they’re living in, which I believe these multi-sensory elements deliver.

Is this the first time you’ve directed a play remotely? How has the experience been?

Yes, absolutely, so my instinct was to approach it with a degree of healthy scepticism as a result. It’s an exercise in restraint, I suppose, since we’re not looking to create a piece of theatre, but a hybrid that sits somewhere between it and film. It’s neither one, nor the other. This is the first time any of us have worked on something like this, so all you can do is embrace the possibilities it offers you, I think, and accept its limitations, while continuing to be creatively ambitious and to find solutions to problems you might not have anticipated. We certainly came up against a few technical difficulties – chiefly, lighting actors so they appear within a Stranger Things-esque black void, all the while filming on iPhones in their bedrooms, which is not a simple thing to do! At the start of the day’s filming, you might not know if everything you have planned is going to work – despite storyboarding, endlessly – so you have to be prepared to change your approach or, at least, to make mistakes and learn from them. There’s that brilliant Samuel Beckett quote, isn’t there? ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ I think that sums up what being an artist is. Occasionally, the creative process reminds you of that.

What are you most enjoying about working with Guildhall actors and production artists?

It’s my third time directing at Guildhall – after Saved and Mercury Fur – and, for sure, this online experience presents different challenges to those staged productions. Having said that, what has remained consistent across all three of the projects is the level of commitment and dedication of the team, whose focus is to make the show the best it can be, in spite of the restrictions we’re up against. I’ve never worked with the Audio-Visual department or the VDLP [Video Design for Live Performance] course before, which is very exciting, and collaborating with Izziiee Jewell and Mimi Hemchaoui, on editing has been great. I think the thing I enjoy most is the variety of conversations we have across all the departments, whether it’s looking at the animated microscopy or photogrammetry design or listening to early renditions of the music or building the costumes or dissecting the script with the cast. It’s a bit like we’re piecing together a stained-glass window, a composite of colours and shapes, which is being added to until it resembles something greater than the sum of its parts.

What would be your top tips for young theatre-makers?

I’m not sure there are absolute rules that theatre-makers, young or old, should adhere to, really. I can only speak about my own experience and to say that, for me, it was helpful to see as much theatre as I could afford to. (It is, of course, one of the reasons why this pandemic has been so destructive for the performing arts – because of the necessary distance it puts between us and the live medium of theatre.) I didn’t live in London until I moved here to go to drama school, though. So, on an even more fundamental level, I suppose, it’s about identifying creative outlets wherever you can, especially if theatre isn’t easily accessible to you, as it hadn’t been for me. In my case, that meant immersing myself in storytelling in the form of books, film and TV, which I know were the foundations for other practitioners too. I remember a wise theatre director once saying to me I should visit more art galleries, go to Sadler’s Wells or the Royal Albert Hall, not because painting, dance or classical music would have an obvious influence on my work, but because the experience of being in those rooms might well broaden my horizons and make me question what it may be possible to achieve. In that sense, increasingly, I wouldn’t define myself as a theatre-maker only. I’m definitely interested to explore work across different disciplines, though directing for theatre is primarily what I’ve done professionally so far.

The Drowned World will be streaming via Guildhall School's website from Wednesday 3 March (7.30pm) to Wednesday 10 March 2021. It is free to watch, but registration is required.