‘I want people to re-engage with the world’
The Royal Court’s new season will tackle society’s most burning issues. Boss Vicky Featherstone talks to Ben Lawrence
For more than 60 years, the Royal Court has held up a mirror to society. In the Fifties, it pre-empted the erosion of class boundaries by staging John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. In the Eighties, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls showed the shift in gender equality and questioned its attendant problems. More recently, Lucy Prebble’s ENRON somehow got to the nub of smoke-and-mirror financial practices with startling clarity. Now, with the planet in turmoil, it rests on the Royal Court’s artistic director Vicky Featherstone to make sure that what’s happening in the outside world is represented accurately in her 455-seat Sloane Square theatre. It’s a tough job.
“People like me who live in leafy, lovely west London, we need to be constantly reminded of disparity in society,” she says. “We have empathy, of course, but we don’t think about such things on a daily basis because you live your life as an individual, not as a community. I think my job, and theatre’s job in general, is to remind people of what’s happening in the world, to re-engage with it.”
The Royal Court receives 3,500 scripts a year and Featherstone says that, recently, there have been recurring themes in the submissions. “There is anger, of course there is always anger, but what I think is new is displacement, fears about normal life being disrupted and our fear of the other and what that means.”
As Featherstone announces the Royal Court’s autumn season, she draws on a new play, Gundog, by Simon Longman, as indicative of the sort of play that young writers are producing. “It’s set in rural England and it’s about two sisters holding together the family farm. There is no money left, all the men in the family have had breakdowns and the girls are forced to rustle sheep so that they can make a living.”
Featherstone is fascinated by British rural life and believes that here perhaps lies the heart of those who felt their voice had been denied too long, who voted with their feet to come out of the European Union.
Featherstone took over as artistic director from Dominic Cooke in 2013, and initially her tenure felt like a hard slog. Plays came and went without making an impression, and the clever but populist sparkle which had marked Cooke’s time there seemed to have evaporated. However, in the past two years, Featherstone has started to turn things round – nurturing several very promising playwrights, including
‘A lot of the scripts we’ve been getting deal with the fear that normal life is being disrupted’
Alice Birch and Charlene James, and having proper hits including Martin Mcdonagh’s black comedy Hangmen, Penelope Skinner’s Linda (a sort of female King Lear for the baby boomer generation) and, most recently, Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, which is set during Northern Ireland’s Troubles and has been the theatrical event of the year so far.
Now that the play has transferred to the West End, Featherstone has faced criticism for agreeing to an abnormally short run at her own, subsidised theatre, and thus forcing keen audiences to pay top dollar on Shaftesbury Avenue. There was, however, a practical reason for this unusual move.
“Don’t you think I would have run The Ferryman for three months if I could have done?” she laughs. “We did it for entirely pragmatic reasons. Sam Mendes [the director] was only available for a particular slot and so we moved two plays to the autumn and put The Ferryman into the short space.”
Featherstone is, however, painfully aware of the fact that when a play is a success but doesn’t transfer, not everyone can get to see it.
“When we have a hit, it’s really frustrating because we max out [in terms of seating] and we can’t earn money on it.” She offers Cypress Avenue, which ran at the tiny Upstairs theatre last year, as a prime example. “I really felt that not enough people got to see it,” she says. Featherstone is pleasant, voluble company, but there is an air of toughness. I ask her what sort of boss she thinks she is.
“I would say I am tough, and I would say that I am demanding of my
staff because I insist on working collegiately.” Does the business side bother her? “If you look at the structure at the Globe, well that works for their business and you have to respect that, but if you look at the shape of that organisation in terms of where the artistic director and the chief executive lie and then you look at what happened to Emma Rice... I could never run an organisation where I wasn’t the chief executive. I love taking responsibility for art and business side by side.”
Featherstone was born 50 years ago and, thanks to her father’s job as a chemical engineer, she grew up around the world. By the age of 13, she had attended nine different schools. I wonder if that peripatetic childhood prepared her for a life in theatre.
“I am good at making new friends very quickly,” she says. “What I am not very good at is keeping old connections alive. I am always looking forward and I get bored really quickly. I hate the thought of becoming stagnant.”
That makes it sound like she is ready to leave. She laughs. “Never. The thing about the Royal Court is that it always renews itself, there are always new plays being put on. It’s not like I’m looking at a bookshelf of existing plays. I would literally go mad if that was my job.”
Contrary to previous reports, Featherstone doesn’t hate the classics, but rather sees them as a stepping
stone to understanding new works and engaging with new writers. And one highlight of the new season looks to the Royal Court’s past. Rita, Sue and Bob Too is a revival of Andrea Dunbar’s ribald, sexually frank 1982 play about two impoverished teenagers in the north of England who become involved with their wealthy employer. Its restaging is not, she insists, a reflection on past glories. “It’s rare for us to revive classic plays,” she says, “and when we do we really put them under scrutiny.”
For now, she says, her aim is to keep finding new voices, to keep the Royal Court afloat, and to find a commercial balance to help with subsidy. That is easier said than done.
“It is the right of a healthy country to invest in the arts,” she says, “but obviously some governments put arts funding more at the forefront of their agendas than others.”
I sense that she is choosing her words carefully. Where do arts sit in the English psyche compared to Scotland, where Featherstone ran the National Theatre for several years?
“When I left, the Scottish National Party were on the rise and talking about culture as being vital to the success of the nation. I think it’s pretty much the same in Ireland. In an essentially working-class country, the arts form part of their vocabulary. In England, I think we take our culture for granted because we haven’t had to fight for it.”