Between People

One of the most consistently interesting theatre directors working in London at the moment is Rufus Norris. His production of Festen, a stage adaptation of Danish director Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film of the same name, transferred from the Almeida to the Lyric in the West End where its London run ended in April 2005. The play was nominated for five Olivier Awards, and is scheduled to transfer to Broadway later this year. Norris's production of Sleeping Beauty has recently transferred from London's Barbican to Manhattan's New Victory Theatre, and he is about to begin rehearsals with Mexican actor Gael García Bernal on a new verse translation of Lorca's Blood Wedding by Norris's partner of many years, Tanya Ronder, for a production at the Almeida Theatre. Alongside his career as a freelance director, Norris maintains his position as Associate Director at the Young Vic where he works alongside David Lan. Prior to this he worked with Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court (1996–1999) as an assistant director. Since 2001 he has collaborated with companies in Ramallah (Palestine) and Iceland as an extension of his work at the Young Vic. The following interview was taped on February 12, 2005, at Norris's home in West London.*

What always strikes me about your work as what I would call "a theatremaker who directs," is the holistic integration and craft you apply to the many strands that make up the theatrical event, especially the emphasis you place on music—not simply as a constituent element of each production whether you are working with a devised or a pre-written script, but musicality understood more broadly as an architecture that influences your approach to text and collaboration with actors.

Well, I started with an engagement in music when I was young and that continued all through my childhood. I got involved in theatre when I was 15 or 16, but I would say that music has always been my primary artistic . . . not medium exactly, because I was never particularly good at it. I learned classically as well, and there's no text, and you have these things called incidentals or dynamics, little bits of Italian written above the staff.

Like pianoforte?

Yes, or sforzzando or allegro or whatever. And a lot of them, well 95 percent I could safely say, are purely dynamic. They have no explicit emotional connotation at all. That's very important, because what it does inherently is accept that someone who's playing the piano or violin, if you tell them to play loudly or quietly suddenly, can't help but find an emotional reason to do that. I think my grounding as a theatre artist is the same as my grounding as an emotionally expressive person. That's really what my theatremaking is all about—give or take a little bit of craft and a sense of visual this and that—the emotional dynamics between people. As a director I think it's important (as I also think it's important as a writer) to not put in brackets "with tears in your eyes" or say, "I'd really like it if you could make me cry, the way you're doing that"—that isn't generally a great way to direct.

You know, that's interesting to me, something I hear you talk about a lot: often the measure of good work for you is whether or not it made you want to cry, or whether it provoked an emotional response in you. Or perhaps whether it moved you.

Yes, I suppose whether it moved me is better, because movement, again, doesn't have an explicit narrative to it: it's in one direction or another. I suppose it's a cliché, but the physical analogy or metaphor that I like the best in the relationship between the piece on stage (rather than individual actor...