My Gurus

Jack Bradley
Jack gave me my first job, in the literary office at the National Theatre, and he taught me almost everything I know about plays, writers, and how theatres work. It was a huge learning curve. I was pretty green, and he helped me see how a playwright might feel when confronted with an over-keen 23-year-old’s criticism of her or his script. Jack instilled in me a respect for the writer’s endeavor and their right to be taken seriously, no matter how successful or unsuccessful the play. He was kind about everyone, and also said the two funniest things I have ever heard a person say, but as they’re not even slightly printable, I won’t repeat them here.

Stewart Laing
Stewart is a Director based in Glasgow and we often saw shows together at Tramway, which at that time presented a staggering range of different kinds of performance from all over the world. Talking to Stewart afterwards helped me (late-starter) develop my taste, and he also opened up the idea of visual language, which I’d never been encouraged to think about before. In my brief time as his producer, I had the pleasure of watching him bring apparently ridiculous ideas to clear and often heartbreaking fruition. Stewart’s work is meticulous, surprising and always supremely relevant – he’s able to take an anecdote from any time and place and find the thing within it that has meaning today. He prepares like nobody else, and he also knows it’s always and only ever about the work, never about yourself, which is a rare thing in this business.

Alain Platel
This famous Belgian founded ‘Les Ballets C de la B’, a company whose work is always about things that are too big to deal with in words. For me, there is nobody who is better at moving bodies around a stage, and all young Directors should go and see the worlds he creates. I also love that he wasn’t always a theatre-maker – he used to be an educationalist. Hurrah for the auto-didact!

E.V. Crowe
I can hear playwright E. V. Crowe thinking, “oh good, I’m the token woman,” but actually I’ve chosen her because she once said something that I’ve often repeated since, namely: “if you’re a young artist, the worst thing you can do is go and assist someone who has more experience than you. You should be working with people of your own generation, figuring it out for yourselves.” It reminded me of the Ontroerend Goed motto, “everything has been done, but not by us and not now”, and I think this is an attitude we could use more of in the world today. We’re living in a society most of us know is broken, our so-called leaders have run out of ideas and almost everyone I know is afraid of teenagers. We should call time on this and admit we know nothing – E.V.Crowe knows our only hope lies in properly talking to young people and liberating them to throw out our tired suggestions and start again.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
The first time I went to the opera, I heard her sing Irene, ‘As with Rosy Steps the Morn’, in Peter Sellars’ production of ‘Theodora’. There’s a thing you don’t forget.