Briefly: a family crisis has taken my attention away from posting for the last few days. More on recalls, casting, design, future plans, current disasters and even possibly a theatre round up, shortly…

Meanwhile, a short cliché: the NHS and all working in it are amazing.

Recalls on Tuesday were encouraging. There may be a shape emerging. We saw more people in combinations of twos and threes and tried to get a sense of what the group might feel like. At times it was a new Olympic sport: the Rattigan relay, as actors came and went from the room in bewildering succession. Recalls are interesting. Actors respond differently: some don’t yield anything new, some reveal potential. Also it’s always more fascinating and exciting seeing young actors who you’ve never seen before (5 of these parts are for people in their early 20s). There’s a feeling that nothing will be the same again once they start. I think we’ll see some more people on Friday and/or Monday and then go from there.

I have a feeling that the play may turn out more interesting than in previous times, but perhaps less of a laughter marathon. More human and emotionally real; less hilarious. Yet more actually amusing than when it’s just a series of gags (“Elle a des idées au-dessus de sa gare”…) Both the design and the casting seem to be leading this way and I find that interesting. Concealment and the social mask; the lack of cool, the sheer vulgarity, in displaying your actual thoughts – all this is the stuff of the play. The emotional contours of an all male environment, especially when a female sexual predator lands, are especially well etched.

Otherwise I bump along. The Guardian Arts Blog seems very lively (eg this and this) but I can’t seem to get worked up too much about it all. Only because of exhaustion, I think. Undoubtedly there seems a glut of musicals at the moment and we may well be heading to the Broadway template. Always the same problem in these discussions: theatre as popular entertainment vs theatre as art. We are unusual as a European culture, as I may well have said before, in that we don’t separate our boulevard theatre from our art theatre; or haven’t traditionally. Perhaps this is now happening, making us more European rather than more American. On the whole we are still stuck in the if-Beckett-can’t-fill-eight-shows-a-week-there-must-be-something-wrong-with-it mentality. But frankly the musicals world passes me by. Who’s really interested, except in the good stuff? And I have no problem either in having actors in plays who the public want to see. But the thing getting in the way of the theatre artists and the public in Britain at the moment is the perverted ideas of the theatre managers as to who is or isn’t a ’star’. Or a ‘name’. Or a ‘draw’. Or who isn’t a name but is a ‘face’. Or who isn’t a name or a face or even a draw, but will get ‘coverage’. Hence Summer and Smoke. And don’t think there’s some sort of difference between the commercial and the subsidised theatre on this: all are now unashamedly involved in these discussions: subsidy is no longer seen to be there to insulate us from all that. The 1956 so-called revolution was supposed to lead us away from both a purely commercial theatre and an art theatre and towards a serious theatre. So many battles were won along the way that it’s easy to take them for granted. But the war hasn’t been won.

Meanwhile I still have a cold and I’ve finished Series 6 of ER. Rats.

Last seven days: a busy week of auditions, meetings with a couple of Artistic Directors and design meetings about the Rattigan (real French windows!) staggered to a close in a mess of collapsed plans for next year, optimism thwarted and confusing re-call auditions on Friday. Chaos, disappointment, financial disaster and finally, over the weekend and still today, a bad cold. Only Series 6 of ER on DVD to sustain me, though on an average four episodes a day that won’t last long. More re-calls tomorrow; more design decisions. I hope I feel better by then…

In the last ten days I’ve auditioned 58 people for the nine parts in French Without Tears. Tomorrow we see about 16 more and after that we’ll start to re-call some people whilst still seeing new ones. It’s been tiring yet inspiriting.

The play holds up very well in the readings and transcends its previous reputation for being about nothing. It’s amazing that what was once one of the most famous plays in the language has become practically unknown amongst actors under about 40. I bumped into Michael Grandage and told him this. He was horrified since as a young actor he was always going up for parts in it. I think it bodes quite well since the people who do know it are looking forward to the chance to see it again, and the ones to whom it’s new seem delighted by it. It certainly feels more like a play than the bit of froth which Rattigan left behind when he got serious, which is the received notion.

I enjoy directing new plays and having the writer there, usually. But it’s nice from time to time to do a play where the author is either in another country (like the two shows I did in Tokyo) or dead, as here. The daft stuff one makes up to say about the play and the people in it doesn’t feel quite so embarrassing if the person who wrote the thing isn’t sitting there. It’s only the poor actors (and Ginny Schiller, the casting director) who have to smile and affect interest.

French Without Tears

Tomorrow I start auditions for a new production of Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears for English Touring Theatre. This is something which I’m directing for a tour which starts in mid February next year. It’s the quintessential 30s light comedy: young men in a villa on the west coast of France learning French to get into “the Diplomatic”; a beautiful siren messes with their heads, but is she really in love too? Rattigan’s first play, it ran forever in the West End and made stars of Rex Harrison, Robert Flemyng, Trevor Howard and Kay Hammond. It wasn’t til after the war that Rattigan shook off his reputation for sunny froth with The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version. It has a lot to say about men together and about hidden feeling; it has something of the Hockney ‘Bigger Splash’ paintings about it and the same undertow of melancholy. Very good jokes, too, but not quotable or epigrammatic like Wilde: they’re character and situation based. It’s better than Coward: much more real, much less arch and irritating.

Actors and actresses (I know the last word is un-PC but there are two sets of Spotlight books – Actors and Actresses) are understandably anxious about auditions. But the popular cliché of the director with at least the attitude of someone with a cigarette holder (if not one in reality) is ludicrous. It’s not a talent parade where you give marks out of ten. There’s a chemistry between actor and part which only becomes evident in a reading. The qualities of both start to become clear and shed unexpected light one on the other. Also you’re begging for the person just to be the part, not to fail. As well as all that, it’s where you find out about the play, the way it’s written, whether your barmy notions of it hold water.

Auditions are where it all starts.