Guest Blog: Director Jack Silver On Staging Tennessee Williams's CONFESSIONAL In A Seaside Pub

"Why were you f***ing talking to him?!" The guy to my right leaned slightly over the table, grabbing the edges, as he interrogated his girlfriend. "He was just asking about Dawn." Old-school cockneys, mid twenties, both of them.

To my left, two sketchy guys, one Scouse, one London, were drinking pints and doing what looked like a small-scale drug deal. The Scouser kept fidgeting and touching his face, like someone who'd done too many pills over the years.

I'm sat there, on a Tuesday afternoon, near the fruit machines in dodgy pub near Old Street, not knowing where to look.

"Don't f***ing lie to me," said the guy to my right, banging his fist firmly on the table.

What do I do, if it kicks off? Step in and risk getting glassed but him or by her? Stay at my table, and let a girl I don't know get slapped about? Should I make a joke now or bump into the table, on the way to the loos, to diffuse things? Start talking about football? Where are my exit routes? Should I just leave? Drug deal to my left, domestic to the right, and here I am stuck in the middle with my lager.

What I did know is that something compelled me to keep looking. Looking out of the corner of my eye. But looking nonetheless. Looking one way, and the other. Partly out of concern. Partly because it was intriguing. Partly for my own safety.

And that's when I came up with Confessional. Or, at least, the idea to stage it in a pub, with the audience there, unable to look away. No fourth wall.

I'd read the play a year before, when I was still at drama school and we were doing American accents. When I left, I started doing one of bar owner Monk's monologues in auditions, but in a London accent, because it's pretty homophobic and one of my main castings is "aggressive cockney".

Confessional isn't considered one of Tennessee Williams's masterpieces, but it spoke to me. It reminded me of the characters I'd known growing up. I spent one summer in my early twenties down in Cornwall working as the arcade manager at a caravan park, and the people Tennessee wrote were the people I met that summer. Driftwood. Flotsam and jetsam.

Broken people, all with flaws, but all with an inner beauty that occasionally shone through. The ageing arcade mechanic, still trading off his looks into his forties, with hair like an Eighties pop star. The lifeguard, sleeping with a different teenager each week, as the tourists turned over. The ex-con security guard. His pregnant daughter. The old men who'd hang round the arcade trying to chat up teenagers and win money. It went on. Characters, but not caricatures. Good people. Messed-up people. Lovely after one pint, horrific after eight.

One night, I remember getting propositioned by three generations of the same family who were on holiday from Preston. The daughter (15), her mum (early thirties) and the gran (fifties). For the record I turned them all down!

And so these strands came together, and the idea of staging Confessional in a rundown seaside pub in Southend-on-Sea came about.

The audience as punters in a busy seaside pub. The regulars, fighting, laughing and drinking in the same space. Moving about like animals in a zoo. Throw in Williams's first openly gay character and you've got a fun and ferocious evening.

It's what I like to call semi-immersive. You're in the pub, there's no fourth wall, but there aren't going to be any nasty surprises. We're not trying to trick people or pull them into the action, but likewise the actors won't pretend you aren't there. You even get to drink if you fancy it.

Also, the play is staged in a semi-improvised way. We haven't blocked it at all, or gone through and given the actors set actions or intentions. The words were written by Tennessee Williams, and we haven't changed them, but the way they're said, where the actors are standing, what they do...that's all invented in the moment. We're literally making it up as we go along. It really will be radically different each night. It's very scary, but very exciting.

Remy Blumenfeld, our producer, saw the play in Edinburgh last year and was so blown away he decided to help us take the play to London. Remy and I spent nearly a year talking to theatres, trying to find a home for Confessional. It was important we found the right space, because the set is so ambitious and it wouldn't work in every theatre. So being offered a run at Southwark Playhouse was incredible - they're such a lovely and supportive bunch of people. I get a great feeling whenever I step in the building.

We've got an ensemble cast rammed with talent. Lizzie Stanton returns as caravan park beautician Leona Dawson, after "absolutely smashing it" in Edinburgh. We've kept four of the original cast and brought in some incredibly exciting new actors, including Rob Ostlere (Game of Thrones and Holby City), Gavin Brocker (Mapp & Lucia), and newcomer Jack Archer, who recently graduated from the Royal Welsh.

I want the audience to feel unsafe, like I did in the pub in Old Street. Unable to look away. Not because they have paid for a ticket. But because something deep within their instinct compels them to look. For their own safety, if nothing else.

Confessional by Tennessee Williams is at Southwark Playhouse 5-29 October

Photo credit: Henryk Hetflaisz

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