How many directors does it take to make a theatre company? Around 250 and we?re still counting, writes David Lan. Since 2000, when I became Artistic Director, the Young Vic has pioneered a unique approach to training young directors. The scheme is new but the principles behind it are rooted in the origins of the company.
The first Young Vic, now pretty well forgotten, was established by George Devine just after the war. It was part of the Old Vic Theatre School; set up to train theatre artists and the first company in Britain to produce the great classics specifically for young people. Devine, of course, went on to found the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and to champion new playwriting. The second Young Vic was founded by Laurence Olivier in 1969 with Frank Dunlop as artistic director. Their aim was to give the younger actors in Olivier?s National Theatre Company the chance to play leading classic parts before a young audience ? and to be provocative, classless, welcoming and cheap.
What we do today unites the practical, craft-orientated focus of the first Young Vic Company with the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of the second. The result, I hope, is almost a new kind of theatre school, developing the craft and careers of a diverse network of younger directors by giving them opportunities to work alongside some of the world?s great directors on plays of substance and stature.
The Royal Court?s commitment to new writing and to the primacy of the writer has been one of the most powerful influences in modern world theatre. All the same, it?s not the only way to think about theatre-making. Directing is also a primary act of the imagination. When directors get the chance to work on the classics, it frees them from the limitations imposed by working with new writers who often are not yet quite in command of their craft. It allows them to wander about in the minds of geniuses and measure themselves against them. I adore new playwrights ? I?ve spent most of my life in the theatre as one myself ? but they can have no life in theatre without directors who have audacity, wit, sparky visual and aural imaginations and the courage to respond to their own deep artistic instincts.
So how do directors develop the confidence and skill to unearth a play?s deep meaning? Is talent innate, or can the ability to work in four dimensions ? creating moving, speaking images in time ? be taught and nurtured, as Devine believed? We are determined to find out.
All theatres have a training remit. It?s crucial for theatres, like any other institution, to draw new people in to astonish and unsettle. We make the passing on of skills central to our thinking and planning ? not just our own skills, such as they are, but those of the great directors who we are lucky enough to have working with us.
With the aid of a tremendously generous grant from the Genesis Foundation (£1.25m over 5 years) we have set up the Genesis Directors Project, an ever-evolving system of training and directing opportunities for younger directors. This consists of the Young Directors Network (an association of some 250 directors who meet informally to share ideas and information and to take part in workshops, master classes and mentoring schemes), studio productions and training sessions for emerging directors, our ?Direct Action? co-productions with the National Theatre Studio and others, opportunities to lead schools and college workshops through the company?s Teaching, Participation and Research Programme, and the establishment of creative partnerships between directors and designers. As well as all this, our now well-known and much prized Jerwood Young Directors Award enables three directors each year to work for five weeks with professional actors on a play of their choice, without the pressure of having to place it before an audience.
John Studzinski, Chair of the Genesis Foundation, believes the Young Vic is ?one of the most exciting performance spaces in the world. The thought of directors being able to develop and thrive in this atmosphere is thrilling.? We?re convinced that this project will make the theatre as a whole a more ambitious, idiosyncratic, individual and ultimately more profound terrain for our deepest ideas and emotions to be shared. Which is what, I think, Devine, Olivier and Dunlop were after in the first place.
David Lan is Artistic Director of the Young Vic e: davidlan@youngvic.org