How to talk about not being able to talk
Sally Cookson's production of Wonder Boy is coming to Stratford East
A while ago, I did a Q&A interview with the director Sally Cookson, who tends to work in devised theatre and did that wonderful, riotous version of Jane Eyre that was at the National Theatre (you can see it on NTLive, here).
I think she’s a super interesting director, and she’s especially celebrated for what you might loosely call family theatre - i.e. stuff that won’t bore children rigid but is also quite likely to thrill the rest of us. She spent a long time working with young people at Bristol Old Vic in her days as an actor, and so her passion for that, and her understanding of what they actually want and can handle, is very strong.
Anyway, I was talking to her because her production of Ross Willis's Wonder Boy is coming to Theatre Royal Stratford East between October 15-19. I haven’t seen the show before, but I’ve read the script, and the reviews, and it sounds genuinely amazing - especially for older kids and teenagers. I’m especially intrigued by its use of creative captioning, which means that subtitles are integrated into the design and action of the show - and is highly appropriate in this context.
It’s about Sonny, a young lad with a stammer (Willis has written movingly about this - the anguish of not being able to say your own name), the teacher who tries to help him through it and other troubles, and the healing power of theatre.
It’s funny and moving and it’s incredibly sweary - though of course, young people all swear at least as much as we do; all my friends with kids swear a lot.
I’m keen to see it, and I really think that if you have kids of about, oh, 11 or over then it’s a great one to get them enthused about going to the theatre. The Q&A, which was commissioned by the production itself, is below.
How did Wonder Boy originally come about?
It was around 2018-19, I think. Bristol Old Vic Theatre School had a new writing festival and Ross Willis's Wonder Boy was shown. I was absolutely enchanted and gripped by the unique style of his writing. I wanted to know who Ross Willis was. And luckily, he lived in Bristol, so I tracked him down.
His play Wolfie was on at that time in London at theatre 503 [in Battersea], so I went and saw Wolfie and caught up with Ross and then I said to Tom Morris [artistic director of Bristol Old Vic], please let me do this play in Bristol! It's got to be performed here. And Tom loved it too and said yes.
And then of course, the pandemic happened…
But actually, what happened during the pandemic was [that] Ross and I got to know each other. We used to spend hours on the phone, imagining the show together and talking about how I was going to do it, and other stuff as well. So it formulated a relationship and I got to understand him a bit better, which was delightful. So that's how it started.
It's quite unusual for you, isn't it, to direct a play where the script is already written?
Yes. But it fitted in very nicely with what was going on in my head. During the pandemic, we were all reflecting on how we worked and the kind of work we made. I felt that I wanted to just step down a little bit from making those big, devised shows, because I felt I was starting to repeat myself.
I wanted to challenge myself in a different area. And so I became very interested in new writing, and I made a decision to focus on that for a bit. Working on Ross’s play fitted into that for me.
Can you talk me through the creation process?
We had a couple of workshops scheduled, and one of them got cancelled, and then the other one, we ended up doing it online which was extremely frustrating. A week's R&D on Zoom! Which was mad, but also, in a way it was quite wonderful.
We got to know each other, we laughed a lot, we realised it was virtually impossible to try anything out, visually, physically, but we had lots of good conversations and discussions. So it wasn't a complete and utter waste of time. But unfortunately, because of what happened during the pandemic, and shortly afterwards, we were never able to get into that room [together] before we went into rehearsals.
Can you talk about the use of creative captioning in the show?
This is something that came out of the R&D on Zoom actually. I felt very strongly that because the whole story is about communication, and how some people communicate differently, it felt very important to show that in another way. So that's when the discussions about creative captioning came in, and how that would provide access to and would communicate the story in a different way to people who were deaf or hard of hearing.
That was a really interesting discovery for me because I've never worked with creative captions before. I knew I wanted to do it but I didn't know much about it. I had no idea how it was going to add to the creative layer of the show.
Creative captioning is when every single word of the text is projected. And not just on a digital strip above the stage, it is projected onto an enormous part of the space. And I had long discussions with Katie Sykes, the designer, and Tom Newell, the video designer, about where those projections were going to be.
We wanted it to be in the primary space, that would give proper access to people in the audience, so they weren't having to look at the left or the right; it was part of the action. And Katie said, well, it's simple. We've got to have those creative captions right in the middle of the space. So I'll provide a big wall and they'll be in the centre, behind the actors.
How do you make them ‘creative’?
It was a beautiful and long and intense process that I worked very hard on with Tom and with Mary Sutherland, the associate director, who is hard of hearing, so she had a lot of experience in what they needed to do.
It’s not only the text written up on the screen behind the actors, [the words] interact with the actors, they're connected to the actors. So each character has a colour - the character of Wainwright has an orange blouse, her text is always orange and has a sort of angular [form] to compliment her character. And the text comes alive, it moves around the space, it's very illustrative. It's almost a character in itself.
One of the things I was concerned about is that it would detract from what the actors were doing, but it was such a revelation that it didn't detract, it enhanced and helped tell the story.
What response did you have to that and the inclusion of signing from audiences?
Nothing but positive. And not just from Deaf and hard of hearing, but from people who are hearing as well. They enjoy seeing the words have a language of their own. Most of it is also very fast-paced spoken, so actually, it's useful, because you might have just missed one word - you can catch it on the screen and not miss it. It's really helpful, actually.
Ross Willis has written movingly about stuttering and the pain of not being able to say your own name. Can you talk a bit about how you brought that frustration and shame into the structure of the show?
That is at the heart of the piece. I love how Ross described that, he calls it the great inner operatic pain that comes from not being able to be seen or express yourself. When I'm directing something, I'm always searching for what is at the heart of the story, and how are we going to convey that.
I rely on all the elements, all the tools: the design, the lighting and the music especially is hugely helpful for showing that. We set up this atmosphere of loneliness, of isolation, through the visual storytelling, through the lighting, through the creative captioning, through the colour of the text that belongs to Sonny, through the way he moves through the space. There's a lot of visual storytelling.
And also working very hard with the actor, because a lot of how we convey that happens not in the text; it's under the text and it happens between scenes. It's very difficult, when a character is holding on to trauma, to show that without doing lots of expression or gesticulating. Holding that inside is a very important part of making it work, so I do a lot of improvising about what it’s like to feel pushed down into the earth with a heavy burden on top of you.
But I hope that all the layers in the show are trying to highlight that because it's at the centre of the piece.
Wonder Boy deals with quite extreme mental health issues, including suicide; can theatre do that particularly well?
My experience is that it's a wonderful place to interrogate the stuff that frightens us, as humans. And to ask those questions safely in a rehearsal room, and to share that with an audience, is what the theatre does best. It's where we need to connect and collect to explore those big, painful issues in our lives that bring us all together and hopefully help us understand that a little bit more.
When you've adapted novels, such as Jane Eyre, for example, they very often include the internal voice of the leading character. Is that visualisation of the internal something you're especially interested in?
I've never thought about that. But yes, I think it is. I'm always interested in what is under the surface, and finding ways of showing that without telling the audience. I'm not a big fan of loads of narration, just saying this is what a character is feeling. I'm always trying to find ways of how can we do that without narrating.
So yes, I think I am. Because we never actually say what we feel, do we? And that's the joy of theatre actually, and good playwrights understand that. I'm thinking of Chekhov or a playwright who uses loads of subtext - they say one thing but actually they're feeling something completely different. So to explore what's going on under the surface is a big part of my job, I really enjoy that. That is a big part of what makes me excited about being a director.
A lot of your work, the stories you tell, are concerned with imagination.
I am drawn to the imaginative world. Maybe that's why I was so drawn to Ross. Because his imagination is like no one else's. And he not only makes me howl with laughter - and I'm not just talking about his writing - because he sees the world through the eyes, not just of a child, but of someone who has never, never, never stopped playing in their head.
That's very important to me. I think that's the power of theatre, being able to take an audience on an imaginative journey; not staying in the real world, because we're dreaming all the time. I think that's what makes us human, that power to imagine.
How much did you grapple with the sweariness?
Oh, we had so many discussions about the sweariness of it. And they've taken us around, about and back to where we started, which is that we're not going to change any of it. I mean, we have actually got rid of a few swear words, because I think Ross agreed that if you've got so many, it becomes a little bit monotonous. They lose their weight. But Ross is quite right - young people swear a lot. It's become part of the way they communicate.
But it is interesting. Some adults get quite upset about it; no young people get upset about it. And the play really is for teenagers. That very difficult audience. Getting teenagers and adolescents into the theatre is very difficult, and I think Ross has absolutely found a way of engaging them. And I think the language and the swearing is very much part of that. I think that if you eliminated all the swearing, it would lose some of its raw and naive energy that makes it so powerful.
This show illustrates rather beautifully the impact that art, and theatre in particular, can have on young people, especially those who are finding things quite difficult. That's very important to you isn't it?
Oh, gosh, yes. That's what helped me. I hated school. I was really miserable. And my mum sent me to the local youth theatre. That's where my journey into the arts started. And it's where I suddenly felt valued, and where I had a voice, so I feel very strongly about it.
And now more than ever - I mean, let's see where we are with the [new] government and what they're going to do for the arts - but at the moment the curriculum is starved of the arts. It's very hard for teachers to introduce the arts because it gets in the way of all the other core subjects that they’ve got to teach.
So in theatre, to show how art can change our lives and make us feel and give us a voice, is essential. It's a really important theme that I would love to explore more.
What can theatre give to a young person who is struggling to be heard or find a voice?
So many things. It's not just about encouraging young people to work in the arts. By joining a youth theatre, being part of an audience regularly, partaking in drama, it can make you feel more confidence; it can help your imagination; it can make you think bigger, think differently; it can help you understand why other people behave like they do; it will give you empathy.
It can encourage listening. It can make you feel not so alone. It can tap into your own artistic talents, you can find things about yourself that you never knew you had. I mean, the list is endless.
I remember that feeling of being part of an acting group when I was about 14 and suddenly feeling I had a tribe. I didn't know I wanted to go into the arts or be an actor, it was somewhere I just felt safe and loved to be once a week. I felt part of a group and that sense of collaboration and connectedness, of actually feeling connected to the people around me, made me feel good to be alive.
One of the biggest struggles right now for the arts is funding. You’ve had first hand experience of funding cuts at Bristol Old Vic haven’t you?
The funding was cut when I was an actor there. When the funding got cut, the department for education was removed. That wouldn't happen now, but then I think there were two people who ran it and there was a tiny little youth theatre. And that all stopped.
So my friend Heather Williams and myself, we were working there at the time, and we just thought, this can't happen, let's try and do something. So we set up a summer course. We'd never done anything like in our lives, but we had a ball, loved it, and realised that we were quite good at it. And then slowly we reinstated an education department and got funding, and that's how I started my directing.
What are your feelings about the funding situation now?
Well, I don't run a building but I can’t imagine what it must be like trying to keep everything going. Organisations are being guided and encouraged to find wealthy people, organisations, businesses to help support and invest in the work. And there are a few wealthy people in Bristol, in London there are a lot more, but it's harder for the regional theatres in the rest of the country to do that.
Speaking of regional, this is a big regional tour, starting in Bristol, and you've worked extensively in regional theatres. How have you seen the landscape change for those theatres and arts outside the capital during that time?
The big thing that's really hit me in the last 12 months is that their hands are tied, because the funding has been taken away. It's been stripped from these organisations. And the biggest thing it means is they're less able to take risks. They're having to play much safer.
And that's very, very sad and actually quite dangerous. Because I would have no career if I hadn't had someone behind me taking big risks. It frightens me how many creatives are not being given opportunities, because their work is too risky. People are too frightened about taking a chance on someone. They don't know how that work is going to be successful. That's the big thing that I've noticed.
Have you seen any evidence of levelling up?
No, I haven't. And theatre needs to be invested in. It’s as simple as that. And without it, it's not going to be innovative, exciting work. It's just not. I know it sounds really bleak, but it is bleak.
There are still brilliant people out there and I have a lot of discussions and I mentor quite a lot of young, emerging artists. They're still passionate. They're still trying to find ways of getting their creative voices heard. But it's all without money. And so a lot of brilliant artists are working in hospitality, working in pubs, and then trying to rehearse for no money and get it on, you know, wherever they can.
But it doesn't feel fair, and the opportunities I had as an actor, as an emerging director, were huge in comparison to what artists have got now.
You were an actor for about 10 years before you started directing, weren't you? What made you make the switch?
It was effortless. It was when I started working with the young company that I realised that I really enjoyed that. It gave me a sense of meaning and purpose that I hadn't had as an actor. I was fed up with the rejection and not knowing where the next job was, and playing parts I didn't really want to play. I think I worked with one female director in my whole time as an actress. And often I was one of two women in a cast of 12 men.
Does your time as an actor influence the way you work as a director?
It absolutely does. It's always the bad experiences that kind of inspire you most in a way. And I had one particularly challenging rehearsal process, the only time I worked at the National as an actor, where I had a very, very challenging time. It was so misogynistic and bullying that I made a decision, when I started directing, that I would never run a room that made people feel terrified.
Which is why I collaborate in the way we do and try and give equal voice to everyone, and don't make anyone feel insignificant or stupid, as I was made to feel when I was very young.
Wonder Boy is at Theatre Royal Stratford East from October 15-19