Interview with Director: Douglas Hodge

Education dramaturg Ted Sod discusses Old Times with Director Douglas Hodge.

Ted Sod: American audiences know you primarily as an actor, but you're also a director and a composer. How and why did you decide to direct for the theatre?

Douglas Hodge: In England, I've had a more balanced career directing and acting. It can be quite difficult to juggle the two careers. When I left RADA, I was absolutely set on directing, but I kept being offered acting jobs. Michael Grandage had the idea that I should be his first Associate Director at the Donmar, and I continued going between the two. The lead?in time for a director is huge. You have to commit to directing a year's time ahead, with casting and designing, and it's not always easy if you are doing a TV series like "Penny Dreadful." When I did Cyrano for Roundabout, I was originally supposed to direct and play the title role, but I quickly realized that was madness and we called in Jamie Lloyd, who directed me in Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence. When Todd Haimes asked what I wanted to do next at Roundabout, I said, "I want to direct."

TS: Do you prefer directing?

DH: It just tends to be that the grass is always greener. If I'm doing a movie, I suddenly think, Oh God, I wish I could just get a play script I could get my teeth into. If I'm doing eight shows a week in a West End musical, I think, God, how lovely it would be to be in a TV series right now.

TS: Tell us about your history working with Harold Pinter.

DH: We met doing No Man's Land. Nobody had dared to do another production of No Man's Land, because it was done originally by Gielgud and Richardson. It was Lady Antonia Fraser, Harold's wife, who said, "Harold, if you play the part Richardson played, you can finally get that play back on again, and people won't be so frightened of it." Harold, having not written for fifteen, sixteen years-he'd had a block-started acting again. He and I and two others were sharing a dressing room at the Almeida.

We were both nervous. It was a great leveler in some ways because he was more accessible to me than if he'd just been the writer sitting at the back of the theatre. We became firm friends during that run. And he started to write again. He wrote Moonlight. About three quarters through the run of No Man's Land, he said, "Listen, there's this new play I've written, and I want you to have a look at it; there's a part in it for you." I did Moonlight at the Almeida and the West End, and then I did Betrayal, The Lover, The Collection, and The Caretaker. I also directed Victoria Station, Dumb Waiter, and all the sketches.

TS: I've read that you consider Pinter a genius.

DH: There is nobody like him in terms of his exactness, rigorousness of thought, and the volatility of his mind. He certainly was a difficult person to get along with. There was this whole volcano of ruthless and frightening emotions that he lived in. And when you act his parts, you become aware of that. I think in terms of me calling him a genius, which is not a word I use lightly, I would say that he's one of the top three writers of the last 100 years of the theatre ?? unparalleled really.

I think that the nature of his genius was he had this extraordinary ear for the musicality of the East End Jewish area that he grew up in, a neighborhood that had its own sense of humor, rules, violence, aspirations, and political bias. His ear for that was so acute that he heard it as once removed. When you do his work, it can sound just like a piece of music. Other times, you realize it is completely organic. The theatre was his very lifeblood and his absolute soul, really. I'm not sure that anyone of his ilk remains. There will never be another like him. There are many people that he's inspired and who sound like him, but I look around and I don't see anyone with such a devoted idea of what theatre can be and how it can change lives.

TS: What are the acting challenges of Pinter's language?

DH: Essentially you need to fill your storehouse with enormous emotions-murderous, psychotic emotions-to the point of almost breakdown, in the backstory of the character, and then you step on stage and you're as polite as you can possibly be. You manage all those deep feelings with short sentences. There is great feeling underneath it. The language he's using is just literally the tip of an iceberg. He encapsulated a way of communicating that was exactly the way people were speaking at the time, and still are, to some degree. A broken untrusting fractured currency of language. He had an untrammeled access to his subconscious. He was never afraid to allow poetic moments.

Kelly Reilly and Clive Owen in rehearsal for OLD TIMES." height="329" src="http://blog.roundabouttheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/OT06_605x329.jpg" width="605" />

Kelly Reilly and Clive Owen in rehearsal for OLD TIMES.

TS: Why did you choose to direct Old Times?

DH: It was one of the few plays that I'd never seen of his, and I knew that it was a play that is close to Todd Haimes's heart. When Roundabout was in a precarious financial situation, Anthony Hopkins turned up and played Deeley in Old Times and it was a success. Pinter said at one point, "I want to get rid of the doors and windows, and to break out of that." And I think Old Times, which he wrote in three days, is the moment where he started to break new ground and write pieces that were truly experimental, evocative and poetic, works that were different from The Caretaker or The Homecoming.

TS: Do you think audiences will see this as a contemporary play or a period piece?

DH: It was written in 1971 and it will be played in 1971, but the theme is jealousy for your lover's past. And in many a relationship, I know that can surface like a terrible monster. I think it's very relevant - the issues in it about memory and time and the structure, too, are all modern.

TS: I've read at least twenty different interpretations of this play. Did you do any research into those interpretations?

DH: I read all those interpretations, and I don't think any of them are wrong. I think that they all exist as the reverberations of a natural piece of poetry or a dance piece that you might see. You could come away from seeing Old Times and say, "It meant this to me," or "I got that from it." And it wouldn't be a wrong interpretation. What I do feel though, is that academic interpretation, in the end, diminishes the piece. The production that I would love to direct is one where we make very specific choices and the play becomes a launch pad for your own imagination. The audience is able to think, God, this could be me talking to my lover now, or it could be my parents' lover here, or it could be..."

The play is about memory and recollection, so I've done research about memory and how it's perceived. I think Harold himself believed that there is no past, that the past is eternally present, and becomes more present. And the more emotional the moments that we have in the past are, the more present they are. There's a wonderful quote by Mark Twain-and I'm paraphrasing- "I'm old enough now to only remember the things that never actually happened."

TS: What traits did you need from the actors you've cast?

DH: Kelly Reilly is playing Kate, who is a wonderfully sensual being. I think everything comes from her shyness- she has the most immense power and is able to look out the window for a long time and just dream. Kelly has all of those qualities; she has this great, exotic, strange beauty-a real bird of paradise. There's a quietness about her, an almost unknowable quality.

Eve Best has this enormous strength and power, I think. She has a tremendous authority on stage and is equally sexy and wonderful in my eyes. After she had done The Homecoming in New York, Pinter said, "Listen, there's a role you must do in Old Times - Anna - please play it one day." So when we offered to her, she said yes within fifteen minutes.

For Deeley, I knew I needed someone who knows the vernacular and has brave authority. Someone sexy and elegant, but who also has a rough diamond edge of violence and emotion to him. Clive Owen is the first person I talked to. He read the piece and immediately called me up and said, "What does it mean? Do you think it means this? Is it this interpretation or is it that?"

TS: Do you have any advice for a young person who wants to direct?

DH: You're there to let the play out and enable every single department to do the best work they've ever done. That's a thrilling way to direct and to live your life.

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Old Times begins previews September 17 at the American Airlines Theatre. For more information and tickets, please visit our website.