Emma Rice ‘Leaving the Globe was devastating’
Ahead of her first show since quitting the Globe, director Emma Rice tells Claire Allfree why sex and love are always messy
In Angela Carter’s 1991 novel Wise Children, about two 75-year-old twin sisters who come from a sprawling family of actors, it is mentioned that something dreadful once happened to one of the twins, Nora Chance. “She went round with a face like a month of Sundays for all of three weeks,” writes Carter of Nora. “Then, whoops! Head over heels again, this time with the man who played the drums.” “I think I want that on my next T-shirt,” grins the theatre director Emma Rice. “‘Whoops! I’m OK!’ Life works itself out.”
Rice, 51, knows a thing or two about bouncing back. In October 2016, her name advanced from the arts section to the news pages when she quit as the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, after less than a year in charge. “Devastating” is the word Rice uses to describe her enforced departure, which, at the time, was blamed on executives’ refusal to accept her use of modern lighting and sound in a venue that is meant to replicate an Elizabethan playhouse. But it became clear, when Rice published an open letter on the Globe’s website, that the board had opposed her vision wholesale, after a string of polarising productions, including a A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which one critic compared to a “school disco”, and an adaptation of Cymbeline which was re-named Imogen, set in a modern-day inner city and featured grime music by the hip-hop star Skepta.
“It was beyond my limits of being able to cope with it at times,” she says, of being forced to step down. “I simply didn’t see it coming.”
Two years on, Rice is back on sparkling form, her trademark quiff now the colour of pewter. She is one of theatre’s most exuberant directors, having produced, with her previous Cornish theatre company Kneehigh, a string of physically muscular and unashamedly romantic hit shows, such as Brief Encounter, recently back in the West End, and the critically adored, circus-inspired Tristan and Yseult.
Now she is putting the final touches to a new adaptation of Wise Children, Carter’s final novel, which opens next week at the Old Vic.
She has staged Carter before, with a 2006 adaptation of Nights at the Circus.
“Carter is magnificently bawdy and rude,” says Rice. “Her novels have this wonderful rallying cry of, ‘So what if life is a mess?’ What gets me is that she wrote Wise Children while she was dying and yet one of the final lines, spoken by the 75-year-old Dora, is: ‘We’d better live another 25 years.’ You think: how potent is that, when you yourself have almost no time left?”
There is something mischievous, as Rice is well aware, about staging as her first piece of work after leaving the Globe an adaptation of a novel that is steeped in Shakespeare: Rice reckons Wise Children references 34 of the Bard’s 37 plays. It was partly Rice’s not remotely reverent attitude to the Bard while at the Globe that got her into so much trouble. When she took the job she announced that Shakespeare sometimes made her “sleepy” and
Rice is not reverential towards Shakespeare. ‘If you can’t mess with a script then what’s the point?’
“want to listen to the Archers”. Today she stands by her comments.
“My attitude to Shakespeare is one of a comprehensive girl who found it difficult,” she says. “My mum, who was a social worker, loves Shakespeare so I was taken to Stratford from a very early age, but I never felt it was my language. I never lied about that, but at the Globe I was in a world in which Shakespeare is the first language, so there was a mismatch. But I clearly don’t have a literature-driven mind. I tend to think in images. And I’m not someone who thinks you can’t mess with what a writer has written. I have to bring something new to it otherwise literally what is the point?”
Her gleefully non-elitist approach (her Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe turned heterosexual Helena into homosexual Helenus) meant that some framed her fallout with the board as a class issue – a Nottingham state school girl thrust into the scholarly milieu of an Oxbridge-educated elite. Rice doesn’t want to “rake over the coals” but it’s clear she’s still a bit bewildered.
“I’m no class warrior. I was brought up in the most magnificently supportive middle-class household with arty parents who were the first in their family to go to university. To me, my family felt very posh. Yet at the Globe I landed in an environment where, in the scheme of things, I was not posh. But I’m nervous of starting any more fights. I’m a lover not a fighter.”
Rice lives in Bristol with her partner, a lighting designer, and his two teenage sons. She remains spiritually attached to the South West: her new theatre company, also called Wise Children, is based there, while Kneehigh, which she joined as an actress in 1994 and maintains a relationship with, operates from a barn on the south Cornish coast.
Yet while she owes her zesty style to the area’s folk culture traditions, she concedes much of her work before she came to London wasn’t very diverse. “Cornwall is an area distinct to itself. But one great thing about working at the Globe is that it gave me access to a huge diversity of artists, which in turn has made me think much more about which stories we’re telling. When we talk about diversity, does it mean simply shoehorning people from different backgrounds into stories that are still ultimately [told through] a white lens? Certainly stories I was thinking about making five years ago I now question: I think, ‘Hang on, that’s still a white lens’.”
Has #Metoo made her think similarly about which stories to tell?
“Me and my female friends – we are all replaying events that have happened in our past with a different lens,” she says with a wry laugh. “Personally speaking, it’s quite a challenge. I’ve had some of the most marvellous, transgressive, dirty, inappropriate things happen to me in my working life and it’s been bloody marvellous. I’ve never once had an unwelcome sexual advance. And I think there is a messiness about that desperate need to be loved or to be a sexual being, but strangely you almost have to keep quiet about that because it feels like you are not being a good sister. But I can’t jump on to some bandwagon. I’ve had fantastic men in my life.
“[But] of course #Metoo has had an impact on the way I work. Not only in getting women on stage so that they can have the same money… but in realising how much of literature portrays women as the tragic victim. When I was in my 20s I was obsessed by Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina – all these bad women that literature loves to watch slowly die. F--- that. I’m really not going to devote any more of my time to killing another tragic woman. Nah. We’re done with that.”
Wise Children opens at the Old Vic on Oct 17. Details: oldvictheatre.com