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Richard Jones on Tales from the Vienna Woods
Richard Jones talks to Rose English about Tales from the Vienna Woods, Olivier Theatre, 22 October 2003. RE Richard Jones' work is perceived in quite diverse ways, here in London particularly. There is an interesting juxtaposition of notoriety, controversy, success and failure, and yet his work has three times won Olivier awards, and twice Evening Standard awards, significantly once during the year he presented The Ring at the Royal Opera House. His work has this curious reputation and is by turns praised and slated. In my opinion there is a very particular consistency to his work, that is marked by a thoughtfulness and consummate understanding of the role of visual culture in the theatre, a deep knowledge and love of music, a profound interest in movement, and a very compassionate reading of the texts of the plays, musicals and operas that I've seen him direct.I came to see Tales from the Vienna Woods the other night, and I think my experience of seeing the play alerted me to the prescience of it, as a play. The way you have chosen to present it seems to me attentive to absolutely every detail in it. It invites us to notice, but does not instruct us what to do or offer judgement. It is not redemptive, nor does it let anyone off the hook. We as an audience and they as characters are caught in the same liquid tide that they are not even noticing, let alone attempting to turn. It lets us recognise how we as audience might also be implicated in our moment in history, and lets us reflect on the consequences of not being so. That leads me to the first question, which is What are those times? What is this cultural moment, particularly visually, and what were the choices you have made in deciding how to stage this play here and now?
RJ The first choice was to set it in 1931. I'm not so interested in historical realism on stage; I think film or television do that better. But it is set in Vienna in 1931. It's about a type of behaviour which is very much with us today. The play is about people who suffer a series of terrible financial crashes, but are still very self-regarding and self-awarding. They have no morality and nothing to peg their morality onto. Their behaviour is rather unctuous towards each other, very lazy verbally. Horváth found particularly egregious the way people use language very sloppily, as often characters in this play do. It's quite a chilling play. I would describe it as the blackest of black comedies, but there are not that many laughs in it. RE I think it is in fact a very funny play, though it's a very complex laugh that's being asked of you. One of the ways you have chosen to explore the humour in it is through the vocabulary of music you deploy, and that seems to be something you are profoundly interested in. From your early work, in which you made overt use of dancers and chorus, the movement has become more character-based and has involved close collaboration with Linda Dobell. RJ I like ballet and opera as much as I like spoken theatre. I go to a lot of dance and my work is informed by stuff I have been watching since I was a small boy – the work of Balanchine for example. I like using large spaces very choreographically. I like physicality in actors. In this play, Marianne is very interested in eurythmics, which she sees as a possible way out of the society that she lives in. RE It has often surprised me, when your work is written about, that certain key images become iconic. I know that for instance front pages of newspapers worldwide carried a picture of your production of A Masked Ball, and of the way you chose to portray the Rhine Maidens in The Ring. RJ Those are the pictures the press pick up on, aren't they? I did a production of The Queen of Spades in Wales about three years ago in which a man was in bed with a skeleton, and that seemed to appear in every newspaper in the country, I think because people found the image alluring. They didn't necessarily talk about the production. RE It seems that you do invite a very open gaze at your productions, you make these visual statements, but they are not necessarily the main event. You seem to have a great love of the visual culture of theatre, which in some cases seems to induce a state of anxiety or even hostility. RJ Yes. This production isn't excessively visual. The thing some of you may not know is that Tales from the Vienna Woods, as part of the £10 Season, is the fourth in a series of plays which are being done on very low budgets. The budget for this was £70,000. We spent the lion's share of that money on costumes. The setting consists of two large postcards, so I wouldn't describe it as excessively visual. RE But you have chosen a sculptural option in your use of the space. It's almost as if you chose to reveal the bare bones. Was that a deliberate decision? RJ Yes, absolutely. I like this space very much. RE Could you talk about the nature of your preparation for a play? RJ If it's an opera, I listen to the music compulsively, if it's a play I read the text over and over and over again. I draw a lot of pictures, keep notebooks, and draw what happens from scene to scene. I tend to present the designer with a drawing of the set, and that enrages some designers. I suppose I've got used to working with ones who can accept that. I don't show actors or singers or dancers these drawings, but I do refer to them in the mornings before I go to rehearsal. I make lots of dramaturgical notes in the script before I come to rehearsal. But then I hand it over to a collaboration with the actors and ask what they think. RE Do you retain the drawings you make? RJ Yes I do, in files at home. I think it goes back to childhood, when I drew shows I saw when I was very young – things like The Sooty Show or Peter Pan or Charlie Drake in Old King Cole at the Palladium – I immediately went home and drew them. I'm very unashamed that I do that now in my work. RE Drawing is a great way of memorising and of thinking. RJ I'm not an expert drawer, although I had a drawing lesson last night, which I really enjoyed. RE Was it your first drawing lesson? RJ No, but my drawing should be improved. RE I think you also early on took dance lessons. RJ I did. I was very keen on ballet. RE Do you think there's a correlation between drawing and ballet? RJ Oh yes. I was very keen on all the theatre arts. And I also worked as a musician, after I left university, I played in a variety of shows and in bars. But then became rather despairing about knowing that it was not what I wanted to do, which was make theatre. So I changed course. RE You've worked with a range of performers – singers, dancers, and actors. What do you think the differences are between those disciplines? RJ I don't think there are great differences, particularly these days. If you are astute about sniffing out where you work in the opera, you can work with fantastic performers and I would treat them in no way differently from the way I treat an actor. An opera singer might say “I don't want to sing that note upstage”, but they are often incredibly versatile. I wouldn't treat them differently. I think there's a very different thing surrounding acting. Pretty well anyone can tell if somebody can't sing or can't dance – they sing out of tune or they fall over. There are so many different ways of going about the art of acting. You can work with people who say “I can't do that till the technical, then I'll perform it out,” and there's lots of mumbling over scripts. And that kind of actor can work alongside someone who really wants to practise performing out. So in a large play like this there can be a number of different approaches to how people say words. RE Would you say there was a difference between language in a play which is spoken and language in a play which is sung? RJ No. I think if you work with an astute conducter or with astute singers, there could be an infinite number of ways of saying a line. In a play like this or in a Shakespeare play there is an infinite number of ways of phrasing or conducting that line. That can lead to a very intriguing collaboration between a conductor, a director and a performer. I have very much enjoyed those collaborations in the last six or seven years. When I started, some singers could be tricky with this. RE In what way? RJ Narcissism, “No, I do it this way”. But like I said, you sniff out the circumstances and find out where you can work. There are certain places where I really like working in opera because of the calibre of artists, who are in every way as rich and able as actors are. RE What is it you feel you've learnt by working with dancers and choreographers? RJ They are very diligent and they hold an encyclopaedic memory of what happened in the last rehearsal, and they build and build and build. RE Do you think the presence of that memory would help those who have a different sort of memory, a memory for text? RJ I think it could work technically with text, but there are many amazing actors I've worked with who simply wouldn't work like that. RE Tell me a bit about working with actors. RJ It depends which country you work in. If you work in Britain, actors here have much more claim on collaboration. They want to have much more ownership of the production. For instance, Frances Barber, in this production, she's a great terrier and a great detective, therefore she can only contribute positively to the representation of a text like this. Jane Bertish suffered agony through devising the part of Alfred's mother; she approached it very responsibly and didn't do what an actress in Europe might do which is to ask “What do you want? What is your concept, and I'll get on with it.” English actors are more collaborative. It's a very different experience in Europe. RE How many composers have you worked with on new works? RJ Quite a lot. Recently with a piece by David Sawyer called From Morning Till Midnight, and it was particularly fantastic to stand in his tone, or his mind, his creativity. We're doing another piece which is an operetta about plastic surgery. A while ago, I did a musical called The Titanic on Broadway, which was before the film Titanic. The film actually scuppered the show, which ran on Broadway for about three years and won five Tony awards. It was one of those things where a lot of people in London said, “Don't go and do that, you'd be mad, it's a risible idea”. It did turn into quite an odyssey, and quite a successful show. But it's a whole different world, there. It does tend to get directed by committee. You get a lot of “My wife doesn't like those shoes.” There were six weeks of previews, when every night I would get taken to a hotel on the other side of Time Square and people would suggest what I should do, and sometimes I would get very enraged and say, “Why did you want me to do it in the first place?” and sometimes I'd go “Yes, you're probably right.” The point of those shows is to please as many people as possible for as much time as it will run. RE What is it like coming off a very large production like The Titanic or one of the big operas, to a production like this where the music is placed intermittently. Do you miss the music or does it assume a different presence? RJ The music in this has quite a sinister presence. The situations are incrementally immoral, vicious and cruel, and you are invited just to watch these situations, but at the end of every scene there is a bit of Johann Strauss played, in this production, by a town band. The Strauss tends to have the effect of aerosol-ing away the unpleasant situation, but as it evolves throughout the evening, that gets more and more tricky or ambiguous. The title is of course a Johann Strauss waltz, and it's an ironic title. Audience memberMy feeling was that this play should have been produced in a much smaller space. RJ I could certainly see a studio production of this play, and if I were to put my money where my mouth is, I think it probably needs a medium sized space. But where the play does work is, I think, in the very large scenes – the scenes in the Vienna Woods, in the Maxim club, and in the tavern – then you can see a whole society, all in one go. I was quite pleased with the use of space, particularly in the large social scenes. Audience member
How did you come to do this play, and what were the major challenges of working within what I'm sure must have been a very tight budget? RJ There was a desire for a revival of Tales from the Vienna Woods here, and I like this play very much. I was very sceptical as to whether it would work as part of this £10 Season, with a small budget, but you just chip away. I started designing it back in the spring, working with the designer Nicky Gillibrand. There was much gnashing of teeth, and “It's not possible”. It was arrived at through editing, chucking stuff out, and trying to devise a way of doing it very simply and eloquently. Audience member
Why was it necessary to have a new translation of the play? RJ The Christopher Hampton version was a very distinguished translation, but there was a feeling that it suited the agit-prop or left wing atmosphere of a lot of theatre in Britain in the 1970s. We thought it would be better to depart from that. This translation is sparer, and it doesn't have so much explanation about things like inflation. It's more as the original play is. Audience member
The newspaper critics are so negative, I wonder if you had to do it over, would you have done it differently? RJ No. Absolutely not. After two decades of working, I've gone through one or two occasions when I've been ashamed of a production which has been absolutely lauded to the skies, and I've done things I'm very proud of where the opposite has happened. Look, I'm not fighting my corner here, but this hasn't been entirely negatively received, there have been exceptions who have spoken up for it. But no, I wouldn't have changed how it's spoken, how objectively it's played, or the economy of the design. After a while you become rather sceptical about the critical response. When they're bad it's embarrassing. When they're good, it's embarrassing. That's all there is to say. Audience member
Do you like to read your reviews? RJ If they're bad I read them at the time, if they're good I read them six months later. Audience member
Would you say something about the difference in working on opera, in collaboration with a conductor and other musicians. RJ You don't usually work with the orchestral musicians. You do work alongside conductors and I think you have to be very astute about how you sniff out who you work with. There are four or five conductors now with whom I've had very successful collaborations and really enjoy working with, and who have really enhanced the theatrical product of the opera. I can think of other conductors I've had appalling relationships with, punitive times in the rehearsal room with them. Audience member
Do you have to discuss your ideas with the conductor? RJ Oh yes, and they have to discuss their musical ideas with you, and how the two could meet. But these days I tend to try and work with the same ones, or approach a new conductor very cautiously because it can topple a show. Last November in Paris I worked with a conductor I hadn't worked with before and had a fantastic time. Audience member
How did you make that transition from theatre to opera? RJ I was interested in opera from quite a young age. In 1982, before the Thatcher idea of self-help, they used to have these things called Trainee Directors Bursaries, and if you were awarded one you got sent to a town with a repertory theatre. I was sent to Glasgow where I worked with Scottish Opera, but also with Glasgow Citizens', an incredibly influential theatre. I've pretty much managed to work equally in both throughout my life but I don't make much distinction between them. I know of a few theatre directors who have tried to direct an opera and have come away clutching their heads saying, “Never again, I can't do that, it was a disgusting experience, I couldn't work with them like I do with actors, I didn't understand the music”. But I think increasingly theatre directors work in opera. Audience member
Would you speak a bit about your production of Hobson's Choice earlier this year, which was a joy. RJ The idea of doing it in a modern Asian context wasn't mine, it was Nicholas Wright's, who did the recent adaptation of Three Sisters for the National and is at the moment adapting Philip Pullman's novels His Dark Materials. I've always liked Hobson's Choice, and we asked Tanika Gupta to do a new adaptation. It was a very enjoyable time. Audience member
You talked about enjoying the physicality of working with actors on stage. Were you talking about choreographing their movements, or merely the one-to-one relationship? RJ I think I've done it less on this production than almost anything I've done. That's to do with the extreme trickiness of this text and the difficulty of establishing an accurate tone for it. Audience member
Could you talk about what it means to you as a director to work at the National Theatre as an institution? RJ It's a very tricky institution. For actors it's the sort of place they can tell their parents they are working at.… That's all I'm going to say about that. Audience member
Have you looked at the designs that were used for the production of Tales from the Vienna Woods in the Olivier in the 1970s? RJ Yes, I saw some photographs. It's a vocabulary that I could never work in, or have any interest in working in. Or indeed have a budget to work in. Audience member
On this production, what is the relevance of the postcard design? RJ It's a postcard from a beautiful place – Vienna. Is it such a beautiful place? Audience member
I remember your production of Too Clever By Half, during Jonathan Miller's time as Director of the Old Vic, with great affection. It's the first production you admit to in your biography. How did the transition from being a musician to being a director happen? RJ I worked largely as a musician before I went to Glasgow. I did direct other things as well, but mostly for no money. I was very well paid as a musician, and in London in the late 70s and early 80s you could pick up quite a lot of work as a session musician, or playing in shows or in bars, and that generally financed directing. Audience member
Did Jonathan Miller spot you? RJ I assisted Jonathan Miller on a production of The Magic Flute in Glasgow. I got a phone call from him to ask if I'd direct a play in his first season. Audience member
You've directed at least one Sondheim musical; would you like to do more? RJ I'd like to do Gypsy, but it doesn't come up very often. Audience member
What did you learn from Jonathan Miller? RJ Something which I think I should work harder at, which is to create a company. He's very very good at making a group of actors feel part of one journey and one ship and one style. He's fantastic at that. He's fatherly, loving, and so encyclopaedic. RE What still sends you wild with delight about the theatre? RJ Balanchine's Les Noces. It's a perfect piece of theatre. It's beautifully lit and danced; its language is unique to itself, its choreography is unique. It's very primitive and red-blooded. It's perfect.
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