Interview with Director Michael Attenborough & Stockard Channing, who plays Bessie Berger

14 September 2007

Michael Attenborough

Biography

Michael Attenborough graduated from Sussex University in 1972 and subsequently worked as Associate Director at the Mercury Theatre Colchester (1972-4) at the Leeds Playhouse (1974-9 now the West Yorkshire Playhouse) and the Young Vic (1979-80).

He was then appointed Artistic Director of the Palace Theatre Watford (1980-83) which played to an average of 92% during his time, and subsequently Director of the Hampstead Theatre (1984-9) where the theatre produced 33 plays during his regime, five of which transferred to the West End and one to Broadway. The theatre won 23 awards, including one for Attenborough as Best Director in the Time Out Theatre Awards.

In 1989 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Turnstyle Group in the West End and then in 1990, Resident Director and Executive Producer of the Royal Shakespeare Company, becoming Principal Associate Director in 1996. His productions included Peter Whelan’s The Herbal Bed (RSC, West End, Broadway) Pentecost by David Edgar (Evening Standard Award for Best Play) Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Henry IV (South Bank Show Theatre Award). On leaving the company he was invited to become an Honorary Associate Artist.

In July 2002 Michael Attenborough became Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre. His productions have so far included The Mercy Seat, Five Gold Rings, Brighton Rock, The Late Henry Moss, Enemies, There Came A Gypsy Riding and Big White Fog. He recently directed the World Premiere of David Edgar’s Playing With Fire at the National Theatre.

Stockard Channing

Biography

Award-winning American stage, film and television actor Stockard Channing will play Bessie.  Her London theatre credits include The Exonerated at Riverside Studios and Six Degrees of Separation for the Royal Court, which later transferred to the Comedy Theatre.  Her New York theatre work includes Hapgood, Six Degrees of Separation and House of Blue Leaves all for the Lincoln Centre, Love Letters at the Promenade Theater, Women in Mind for Manhattan Theatre Club and Joe Egg for the Longacre Theatre, for which she won a Tony Award. 

On television she is best know for her role as First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the hugely popular US drama series, The West Wing. Her film credits include Six Degrees of Separation for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Up Close and Personal, Moll Flanders, Bright Young Things, Business of Strangers and Grease, in which she played Rizzo.

Michael Attenborough:

If I had to name three of my most favourite authors, Clifford Odets would be one of them and I guess it’s actually a love of language that attracts me to him.  Obviously one of the other two would be Shakespeare, but Odets is one of the major writers of the 20th century who has retained that gorgeous marriage between the relish of language and character – that you can actually read a character off the language that they use.  And for me the excitement of doing a play is actually finding that marriage between character and the words that they speak and finding out who the character is through the words that they speak.

The other interesting thing about Odets is that most of his best work was written at a time of huge political and social stress in the early thirties, or early to mid-thirties really, when the actuality of the Great Depression and the results of the Great Depression really bit and it is interesting that he became a much more self-obsessed writer post-1940, when there was not so much strain in American society. He became much more obsessed with his own responsibility and whether he had sold out to Hollywood and so on. But like a lot of times in the history of drama, it is actually political pressure and social pressure that brought the best out of him.  So the stakes in the play are huge right from the word go, right from the first few lines of hearing the play, you listen to a family grappling with an incredibly hard time to live through. So that richness of almost poetry in the language of the play - a kind of street poetry and the language of the play, and this very extreme social situation, makes for great drama in my view.

I think that what turns me on as a director are what I call hot plays, you know they are plays in which huge things are at stake and so plays that vibrate, if you like, are the ones that I always want to do myself.  Cool, intellectual, smartarse, clever plays I’m not so interested in.  Obviously I use the word “smartarse” rather pejoratively, but the truth is that doesn’t turn me on - I like what I call ‘smelly’ plays, you know ‘sweaty’ plays, plays that drip in humanity, where people are in difficult situations, grappling with them.  And funnily enough, actually, the rawness of a fair amount of American drama, 20th century American drama, brings us closer to that than in a way  a lot of English drama, particularly in the early half of the 20th century, but people like Mamet and Shepard have picked up on that tradition and they again weld a wonderful relish of language with very extreme, very human situations.

Stockard Channing:

As Michael said, the stakes are extremely high and in a very compressed situation, I mean literally physically compressed.  These people are thrown together at very close proximity, closer than most families ever would be now, and their families.  So that’s the other thing, so you have three generations of family drama going in and with you know……and people that you know are quite verbal, quite able to duke it out with each other.  I mean that’s another thing, there’s a lot of blood coursing through this play.  It’s not a resentful play, people attack each other, patch it up, move on and one critic, I believe it was Walter Carr, wrote that it’s not about people drowning it’s about people trying to stop drowning which gives a tremendous vitality and humour and you know just verve to the whole proceedings. 

And also one of the aspects of it that was commented on at the time was that the language of the play is a strange combination of what we call Odets' ease and real street patter of the time and these people speak in a very idiosyncratic way, which you have to get on top of rhythmically and then it’s almost like speaking a language of its own and it’s fascinating and because he has such an amazing gift for language – Odets - you don’t realise until you see it on the page, because it sounds almost like natural speech, but it doesn’t – it’s like a couple of frames off at times, which makes the audience think and then steps into almost poetical imagery, the way that some street speech can have and so it has that tremendous vitality about it, of that combination.

Michael Attenborough:
I think the play’s universality, the reason why the play will awake an audience and sing to them is that it is about a family and we all have families.  Family is a very, very powerful structure in the play and it’s a structure that Stockard’s character desperately works to hold together and it’s a structure which the two younger kids in the play desperately try to break free from.  And in that sense, you know, if you were writing a social examination of the play, you would say that the family is like an emblem of the social structure and indeed the character, which is a character that is Stockard’s dad in the play, is doing everything he can to revolutionise the situation and indeed to smash the nuclear family - he is trying to get and persuade the kids to break free from the structure.  And anybody who’s had strong parents will know that the struggle to break free is a difficult and indeed often very painful one, and we watch the daughter and the son in the play wrestle with that like mad and particularly you know wrestle with mum, who is a strong character.

Stockard Channing:

Any time you talk about a family you have got something to say and any time you talk about inter personal relationships there’s something to say.  It just transcends all that and that never goes out of style, that’s it, it’s going on as we speak you know. In this room right down the block there are families duking it out and you know people having babies when they shouldn’t and marrying the wrong person, wanting the right person (laughs), and thinking they love the person they hate and hate the person they love. I mean it’s just all in there. Very much like a basket ball game – it’s triple triple pass pass, it’s like a team effort.  It’s not like baseball when somebody gets up to bat and goes (makes noise of bat hitting ball) and everything going great – it’s not that at all.  It moves constantly and you just you know pass the ball one to the other and go on and you know that’s the way it has to be, so it has an athletic aspect to it as Michael said the way you learn a game, like when you learn to run and learn to move your body, it has to be second nature.  And it also has a sense of being in a band……there’s a musical aspect to it because all these actors and characters they are like instruments in a band and we have to listen to each other because no one is out there doing a solo – it just isn’t that kind of piece at all.  So we have to get on top of the material but it’s a combination of an athletic and also a musical endeavour as well as being, you know, a drama.

Michael Attenborough:
I mean for us of course there is an extra about this, I mean it’s Stockard’s world you know and she has it for free in her environment and we are sort of cultural tourists a bit, the rest of the actors and myself.  We’re having a great time entering an arguably more alien world to us.

Stockard Channing:

I do get the odd question about what is this? what is that? And there’s a phrase in the play that my husband in the play says, which happened to be one of my mother’s favourite pejorative terms, so I say, “excuse me I know how to say that one!” (chuckles).  But I think really the task is that we should all be speaking like a family, like each other – I mean that’s the other thing as well and we are moving towards that and I think we know where we want to get to at that end of things, and you know we are swirling into a good mix now - we’re blending, and you know we are all trying to do it, whatever, and I think we are really doing a good job so far – don’t you?

Michael Attenborough:

Yeah, I do.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the interviewees and are not necessarily shared by Coutts & Co.

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