Stage wars
Theatre Ellen McDougall is about to take over as artistic director of the Gate but the push for women to get top jobs in theatre must go on, she tells Fiona Mountford
AHANDFUL of names are consistently bandied about as being the great future hopes of British theatre directing. One of these is Ellen McDougall and, waiting in a meeting room at the Globe for her to arrive after a day’s rehearsal, I wonder what this future might be like. If McDougall, soon to take over from Christopher Haydon as artistic director of Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre, is anything to go by, it will be thoughtful, softly spoken and wonderfully curious about everything.
It will also, it appears, to have a witty distrust of the process of interviews. “The bare fact of having to write down a series of sentences that sum up who that person is is just mental,” says McDougall with a smile, wryly talking of “the dreaded Europe” as she speaks warmly of a production she has seen recently in Berlin. Despite these misgivings she’s eloquent company, with much of interest to say, first on Othello, with which she is about to make her Shakespeare’s Globe debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
What was the first thought that came to her at the mention of the word “Othello”? “I thought about the experience of prejudice and how that affects your relationship with the world and your sense of who you are,” says McDougall, 33, firmly. “I was shocked by the experience of the women in the story as well. The prejudice doesn’t just affect Othello.”
With each new production, I say, I long for Desdemona to shout, ‘I’m not guilty!’ “Even if she does she won’t be heard,” says McDougall. “The play makes that incredibly clear. Emilia speaks up and gets killed for it.”
She’s looking forward to working in the bijou space of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. “You can do a production that has that intimacy and closeness to the psychology of those characters and the emotional experience. It’s about getting inside worlds, rather than looking objectively at the world from a distance, as we might imagine doing in a proscenium arch,” she says, always a director to try and see things a little differently.
Another benefit of working at the Globe has been the opportunity to observe at close hand the supportive working methods of artistic director Emma Rice (who, let us not forget, will be leaving there at the end of this season due to the board’s bewildering lack of faith in her bold vision).
A mere four days after Othello opens, McDougall lays aside her burgeoning freelance career, which includes a recent stripped-down take on The Glass Menagerie for Headlong, to start as the boss of that experimental powerhouse, the Gate Theatre. Her predecessors at the venue are a highachieving bunch that includes Stephen Daldry, RSC deputy artistic director Erica Whyman and Carrie Cracknell, one of the brightest lights in contemporary directing.
Yet the doomy question — and McDougall will soon get tired of having to answer this — must be asked: why are there still too few female artistic directors? She laughs, sighs and sticks her nose deep in her teacup. “I think there are default ways of thinking about what power looks like, that are hardwired, that means you just have to work harder to appoint someone who doesn’t look like the typical [person for that job].” She pauses. “It’s not just the women who have to talk about it, as it’s a problem for everybody. It means the culture we live in gives us very specific gender roles and no one’s winning.” She burrows in her rucksack to get out the book she’s reading at the moment, The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry, which has lots to say on this very subject. “As theatre-makers it’s important that we are really conscious of the perspective we have, isn’t it? The male gaze is a very specific way of looking at the world and as a woman you go, ‘It’s normal for me that the dead woman’s body in the detective story is totally fetishised and I don’t question it, that’s just how these stories work’. And then you have a moment of going, ‘Hang on. Why should that be?’”
What does it mean to her to run a building? “It’s that brilliant thing of being able to give artists you believe in a space to make work. That’s the thing I’m most enjoying at the moment,” she says enthusiastically. She’s unswervingly clear about the appeal of the Gate. “I fell in love with that space when I first came back to London after doing my degree and I went to see these bonkers shows in there. Bonkers is such a s**t word, please don’t quote that! Adventurous shows! Shows that were unlike anything I saw anywhere else and were also unlike each other. Each time I came into that space I didn’t recognise it to be the same theatre and I loved that. [The Gate is] A magic kaleidoscope at the top of that little dusty staircase behind a bus stop!” It’s a beautiful, not to mention accurate, description.
McDougall’s association with the Gate stretches back; it was there that she gained her first creative footing in theatre, as a script reader, and she also previously served as the venue’s associate director (when she spent several Sundays repainting the foyer, she notes). Her programming, she says, will continue in the Gate’s trailblazing mode. “I am drawn to plays that in some way respond to a question about ‘Why do this now?’” She pauses to