DRAMA QUEEN
Red meets Mary Queen Of Scots director Josie Rourke
when Josie Rourke was seven years old, she read in a book of Norse mythology that Vikings were buried with their ships. Instead of brushing over this titbit, she convinced every pupil in her infant school that a hill in their playing field contained one such ship. Come lunch hour, 70 kids were digging on the mound. Rourke got in trouble for her prank, but retells the anecdote with glee. ‘They believed me, even though we were 70 miles inland! I think I was just excited by cajoling people into doing stuff.’
I meet Rourke, 42 – now a celebrated director – on a drizzly day in the lounge of a mock-grandiose Kensington hotel where she’s spent the morning being photographed for Red. It’s clear she still enjoys the cajoling, only now she gets to flex her muscles on far greater stages. Understated in jeans and maroon Dr Martens, Rourke is a cultural powerhouse. She’s at the end of an eight-year stint as artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse, where her 2011 appointment made her the first female director to run a major London theatre.
Now she’s directed her first feature film, Mary Queen Of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth I. ‘Go big or go home, right?’ she laughs.
Rourke was approached by Working Title Films after executives saw her work at the Donmar. She was irked by the existing script and preconceptions of Mary as silly, incapable and overemotional, so sought out John Guy’s biography, My Heart Is My Own (‘It takes Mary seriously’), and asked House Of Cards screenwriter Beau Willimon to get to work. With Ronan already attached to play Mary, Rourke set out to cast Elizabeth I with one name in mind: Margot Robbie. ‘I went on a mission,’ she smiles, like a cat who eventually got the cream. She flew to LA to persuade the ‘generous, inquisitive, warm’ Robbie to take the role. Initially, Robbie was sceptical, having seen fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett in 1998’s Elizabeth, but Rourke eventually convinced her. It paid off. Ronan and Robbie’s combined energies are, she says, ‘almost musical’.
The film flits between Scotland, where Ronan’s Mary is attempting to establish her court and claim to the English throne, and Tudor England, where Elizabeth is wrestling with her power. It examines how hard it is to lead as a woman, and what we are expected to sacrifice to lead. Though each woman perpetually measures her decisions against the other, they meet only once in a climactic scene shot in a secret washhouse, which is actually a Chilterns cottage five miles from Rourke’s parents’ home. The hanging sheets and eerie, steam-filled air create a ‘hide and seek’ effect as Ronan and Robbie walk towards each other, a moment Rourke describes as ‘humble and beautiful’. ‘When Saoirse rips the sheet down and sees Margot standing in front of her, tears springing to their eyes, that’s completely real,’ recalls Rourke.
Though not ‘trained’ in cinema, Rourke has worked with actors and crew for decades and knows how to extract dazzling performances. Did she feel daunted? ‘What I felt,’ she muses, sipping her hot water and lemon, ‘and I’ve never not felt this, is gigantic responsibility. A lot of trust has been put in me’. Not to mention a capacious budget, more money than she’s ever had to play with before. She also knows giddiness around actors isn’t an option, though confesses to being ‘starstruck’ after receiving an Mqos-related email from Hilary Mantel, and spent the weekend ‘walking on a pink cloud of Mantel joy’.
Rourke is a cerebral conversationalist, prone to thoughtful monologues. Her first comes when I reference an interview with Gemma Chan, who plays Elizabeth Hardwick, who praised Rourke for casting a Britishchinese woman in a period piece.
‘I will never direct an all-white period drama, and I think it’s time people stopped,’ she fulminates. ‘Until we give everybody access to telling stories from the past, we’ll never start making our present a better place.’
That Rourke’s first film sends the Bechdel test’s mercury sky-high will come as no surprise to those familiar with her work at the Donmar, which she ran alongside executive producer Kate Pakenham, programming groundbreaking political and feminist work. Highlights from her 100-plus Donmar productions include Lloyd’s all-women Shakespeare trilogy, which saw Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest performed by prisoners, and two James Graham plays: the ‘electric’ first performance of Privacy, where the audience’s phones were hacked live during the show, and The Vote, starring Judi Dench, which was broadcast live on TV on the night of the 2015 general election.
When I ask how she knew it was time to leave, Rourke rests her head on the arm of the sofa and runs her ringed fingers through her hair. ‘For me, the question is,’ she muses, ‘what have we developed? Have we done enough? And it felt like a good moment [to go].’ She’s also seen more women ascend to head major theatres: among them, Vicky Featherstone at the Royal Court, Indhu Rubasingham at The Kiln and Lynette Linton at the Bush Theatre. While some ceilings remain ‘unshattered’ and change ‘can never come quickly enough’, she’s positive about the direction of travel, which is also seeing voices of women, disabled people and people of colour being better represented on stages. Rourke is now excited to find ‘new canvases on other stages in other media’ – though this is a diversification, rather than a departure from theatre. ‘Let’s hope I get work,’ she laughs.
Rourke’s career also segues two industries under the spotlight over #Metoo – it’s been ‘an intense time’, but the important thing about #Metoo for Rourke, is that it reminds people that sexual harassment ‘has been occurring and continues to occur. It’s not as though there’s been a sudden outbreak.’ Rather poetically, she says, we’ve ‘re-angled the beam of light’, illuminating unacceptable behaviour that has been going on for decades.
When I ask if she’s ever experienced gender prejudice, she reminds me, not unkindly, of Sharon Stone’s response to the same question, which was ‘to laugh her head off’ because, ‘Of course, yes, yes [I have], absolutely.’ She pivots to a ‘vivid moment’ from her ‘fairly repressive’ catholic schooling, which inducted her into the ways in which women’s bodies are co-opted by others. Aged 13, Rourke and her peers returned from lunch to find ‘a tiny plastic foetus at the size at which it could legally be aborted’ sitting on their desks. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ she says. ‘I’ve spent my entire adult life thinking about women’s bodies, their rights to their bodies and that struggle between the ideas of an institution and my sense of self as it was forming.’ In making MQOS, Rourke wanted to ‘tell the truth’ about women’s bodies and ‘make the case for being allowed to do that’. It’s a case she’s made for some time: like when someone asked if she
‘I WILL NEVER DIRECT AN ALLWHITE PERIOD DRAMA’
would now make Mary ‘King’ Of Scots (‘I said, ‘You’ve had 2,000 years, how about you give us 20 minutes?’); and when, after introducing herself to an older man at a
‘fancy’ fundraising dinner, he said, ‘I know who you are and what you’re doing. Can I ask you not to go too far?’ When I hear things like that, I think, ‘You’re afraid. Good – that means it’s changing.’ MQOS has been deemed by some as a #Metoo film, to which Rourke guffaws,
‘Ha! This is the work I’ve been making my whole career!’
Rourke’s biggest, brightest beam is saved for talk of her ‘close, funny, loving’ family. She grew up in Salford with her English teacher mother, accountant father and lawyer brother. They were, she says, ‘Relatively normal, except, like everybody’s family, they’re not normal, they’re brilliant and hilarious.’ She talks to her parents daily and says they are a ‘gigantic’ influence on her work.
Her eureka moment came when she was in sixth form and starring in her first play, Twelfth Night. On stage, she was struck by a bolt of realisation. ‘I thought, “I’m awful, he’s really bad, she’s standing in the wrong place and that light shouldn’t be green.”’ That moment set Rourke on a path, but not before she became the first in her family to go to university when she was accepted into Cambridge. After directing student plays there, she went on to direct across London. She worked under Sam Mendes at the Donmar and became artistic director at The Bush in 2008, before returning to the Donmar in the top job. Rourke’s measured, metronomic speech belies a career spent telling people what to do and where to be. Being able to command a room, she says, isn’t about domination, but noticing ‘what everyone is doing and thinking’.
Currently single, children are ‘somewhere hovering on the to-do list,’ Rourke admits. Becoming an aunt has been ‘joyful’ and she adoringly shows me iphone snaps of her niece. Nevertheless, I sense she’s actively grappling with the motherhood question – she describes conversations she’s had over the years with women who’ve had myriad experiences. One, a stepmother, told her she loved the place she’d found within her family; another said she only realised she’d never had a maternal instinct when she turned down the noise of everybody else. ‘Women can be made to feel abnormal if their ovaries aren’t jangling,’ Rourke points out. ‘But the more we talk honestly about it, the more we can help inform other people’s choices. I’m still working it out, but I’m lucky to have women in my life who speak with great wisdom about it.’ Because, after all, there’s no template for womanhood. ‘Definitely not.’
In some ways, too, MQOS is a conduit for Rourke to ‘[Examine] what it feels like to make that choice’. It’s about ‘a woman who has a child and a woman who decides not to [Mary the former, Elizabeth the latter].
It’s about their process of working it out. There’s something very personal in that film for me’.
Seeing more of her friends is another reason to hang up the artistic director hat. ‘The greatest compliment my mother can give is if she calls someone a “bag o’sense,” explains Rourke. ‘My friends are definite bags of sense!’ Over the years, she’s realised friendship requires discipline, adding, ‘As I get older, steadiness in friendships is becoming as important as intensity. Favouriting someone’s Instagram post is not the same as seeing them.’
In the future, she wants to bring a George Eliot novel to screen and work with ‘incredible’ Julianne Moore and Killing Eve’s Sandra Oh, but her broader plans are of the ‘blue sky’ variety: effecting political change by helping more young people experience and learn about art (‘It teaches confidence, expression, empathy… I can’t think of a time where those skills have been more necessary’). As we depart, she orders an Uber home, where she’ll pack before flying to LA to kick off promotional duties for MQOS. If she’s feeling the pressure, it doesn’t show. But then, she’s got a lucky charm: when Rourke’s best friend got a ‘big job’ at the same time she got the MQOS gig, the pair swapped matching Le Labo solid perfumes in silver cases. Her friend’s case was engraved with ‘DF’, Rourke’s says ‘TU’. Together, they stand for ‘Don’t Fuck This Up’
Reader, she hasn’t.