site.btaDirector Declan Donnellan: Only Technology Evolves but not Human Nature

We can just deceive ourselves: there's no substitute to being in a room with somebody, and the theatre is very important because it celebrates that connection, world-famous film and theatre director Declan Donnellan told BTA.

“I never choose a play to make a point and then get the actors to help me make my point. I'm not in the habit of preaching to the audience. I think what is for me there is a very human relationship and that we share things with each other. And sometimes they're very uncomfortable,” he said of his choice of Medea to stage at the National Theatre in Sofia. He believes that classics is not to be looked up or down to. “And my thing is this thing of horizontality that you have to see them with a very horizontal level eye and then they are alive. It's not for me to make them alive.”

Declan Donnellan believes that the great threat to the theatre is also a threat to our lives: that is when people start to prefer the fake to the real. 

He says that only technology evolves but not human nature.

He calls Brexit “a complete nightmare” and says that people have lost friends and families were split up. “It's like a civil war really. And civil wars tend not to be ever fully resolved. Yes a treaty can be imposed but the divisions remain and grow. What is more sinister is that Brexit seems to be merely English but in fact all over the world we see the same tectonic clash - a move away from the feeling that internationalism is a good thing in itself to the feeling that nationalism is a good thing. We see that in  many different countries that we go to. And that's very worrying,” says the founder of the British theatre company Cheek by Jowl.

Declan Donnellan speaks to BTA‘s Dahnyelle Dymytrov about Medea at the National Theatre in Sofia, his love for classics, his work with Bulgarian actors in general and Radina Rardzhilova in particular, the absurd as a useful instrument and logic as being always needed by in a minor capacity. 

Mr. Donnellan, in a interview in 2017 you said that one of the reasons you love the Greeks, our neighbors to the south, is that they understand the absurd. Is there anything to love about us, the Bulgarians? 

Oh every generalization we can make about a group of human beings is always untrue. And there is plenty to love in Bulgaria! Plus we have been performing here since the time of state socialism so we have seen many changes! We are often asked questions about what is the difference between this audience and that audience. But the differences are not as interesting as the similarities. It's very interesting to find out that people will laugh at something in Russia and they laugh at the same thing in Kathmandu. It's very moving to discover how much we have in common. And I've always kind of like to think of that, of those big principles that keep me alive. 

Why is it important for people to understand the absurd?

Nobody can “understand” the absurd. We can laugh together at the absurd, but the problem is it can't be explained away always. So it can be a very useful tool sometimes. 

Nick and I have slowly discovered over years on the road, going from often one continent to another, from one culture to another, how much people have in common. The surface is often what seems so different, but underneath that surface, patterns emerge. And those patterns are often identical. But you have to see below the surface. And that's what has been a growing surprise. And that is very moving actually. 

My first meeting with you was in Sofia, when in 2008 the play Andromache was staged. Now, 16 years later, can we say that the director's eye sees the stage differently?

Yes, of course. The way I see the stage has changed. It's impossible to see the same thing twice because everything changes. So that there's three things that change. There's the world changes, the way I have seen things changes and I change. And for every human being it's the same thing that you can never go into the same room twice because your experience of it is going to be slightly different every time. And that's one of the problems with nostalgia that we'd like to go back to the past. We'd like to go back to something, but we'll never be able to do that because not only has the world changed, but we ourselves have changed as well.

You say that a classic endures through time and invariably speaks to the present, and you keep bringing it up because it shares insights about life, explores our delusions and our greatness, our relationships and our systems, helps us discover what it takes to be yourself. Why did you choose Medea for the Bulgarian National Theatre?

It's incredibly simple. Actually, I met actors from the National Theatre here and I found them very inspiring and in particular Radina [Kardzhilova] I thought was just wonderful. And actually I think I, as I said to her, I said, you know, if we did Medea, would she be happy to play it? And she seemed quite amazed when I said that. I always try to build the plays that I do around the actors that I know. 

I never choose a play to make a point and then get the actors to help me make my point. I'm not in the habit of preaching to the audience. I think for me there is a very human relationship and we share things with each other. And sometimes they're very uncomfortable.

When is it impossible to breathe new life into the stage life of a classic?

Everything that's become a classic has been through a filtering process. There were thousands of plays written during Shakespeare's lifetime, but the vast majority of them were never preserved, probably because they weren't very good. I don't really like the expression of bringing life into classics. The important thing is not to kill the classic by making it somehow old-fashioned or portentous, or being superior to it by chopping it up so that it makes a point. Or inferior to it by worshipping it, because it's a great classic. We have to be horizontal with the classic. I think it's Spinoza who said we have to treat the great writers with all the respect that we give to our contemporaries. We shouldn't be looking up to them or looking down to them. And my thing is this thing of horizontality that you have to see them with a very horizontal level eye and then they are alive. It's not for me to make them alive. 

For the production of Medea, is it important that the actors are from the same troupe?

I love that and it's impossible to do that in the West, in England and America - or France either. What I like to do is to meet, work with a group of actors, meet them, and then I kind of fall in love with them and choose plays to do with them. That's that's why I do It. It's a sort of an emotional relationship really. Yes, so that's why I'm really very keen on working with these permanent groups of actors that you have in Sofia or they have in Romania. And of course in Russia. 

In fact, the whole business of making theatre in the West is really unnecessarily exhausting because, whenever you do a play, you have to choose 14 people that you've never seen before. You have a casting. It goes on for ever. Nick and I try and cast people that we've worked with before. That's becoming more and more difficult. Because, you know, television has grown so much that there's a lot of demands being put on the actors’ time. So we jump at the opportunity to work with a stable group of actors so that we don't have to go through some awful casting process. Because I can say: I was doing Hamlet in London and I have to see hundreds of actors. And by the time that rehearsals began, I'd be completely exhausted. I mean, there was a time when I was used to have two weeks and go away after casting till I am flat on a beach somewhere to get my head back. I haven't the time to do that anymore. But what I'm saying is the process of casting is very strange. 

It's also quite strange doing a great play that's about intimate things like love and sex and power. To me it just seems very natural to do these things with a group of actors who already know each other and whom I already know. 

Of course, in England we tried to work with the same actors over and over again and that used to be possible. 

But now with the expansion of television in England, the whole ecosystem of theatre has changed. And it's really not possible to keep that quality of actors on stage together for a very long time. The agents don't like it. 

You said some time ago, “It's dangerous when actors think it's all about their feelings”. Do you often have to avoid "danger"? How do you work with Bulgarian actors?

Yeah, I think I stick by that. […] Actually, the Bulgarian actors I've met and worked with have been very well trained and getting lost in your feelings isn't a problem. I was talking about other theatre cultures there. 

Will you have a next Bulgarian project?

Well, I have a next Bulgarian project. I'd love to work with these actors again. You know, Nick and I really like them. And we seem to be working very well together. 

“Logic is a good servant and a bad master,” are also your words. Do these words only apply to work? When is logic not needed?

Logic is sort of always needed, but it's needed in a minor capacity. It can't be the only basis for the choices and decisions that we make. And a lot of the great tragedis are about what happens when we abandoned ourselves to logic. Logic is very important, but it's got to be kept in its place. 

In 2009, you said the theater will survive our best attempts to destroy it. Do you still think so, 15 years later? What is the greatest threat to the theater?

Theatre will survive our best attempts to destroy it. Yes, I still think so. I think that the great threat to the theatre is also a threat to our civil lives, really, which is funny enough. 

I think there's a real problem when we start to prefer the fake to the real. In other words, I watch a lot of television, I'm afraid. I kind of relax myself in the evening but it's not the same as theatre. 

When being at the theatre with somebody or you're listening to people breathing or smelling them, all the different things that we get from being physically with each other, we get ready in the theatre. And yes, film is great for some things. Great, but it isn't a substitute for theatre. 

But it's not just about theatre and television. Now that whole virtual world rewrites the rules of reality or so we think. Of course, we can't. We can just deceive ourselves more. There's no substitute to being in a room with somebody. We are very conscious of how their bodies move in respect of us. And we can do all sorts of things. We can smell other people. We can hear their breathing. We are aware of how deeply they're breathing and so on. We don't even know that we notice these things, but I think we do. 

It sounds sort of like high tech, but really it's only old fashioned, it's how we learn to be with each other before we learn to speak that we just rely on the information we pick up from other people's bodies.

Anyway, I think that the theatre is very important because it celebrates that connection. And the danger is this, I think. 

I remember once we were with our company of actors and we went in New York and we decided to go up the Twin Towers. So that was obviously before September 11. But not long time before. And at the top of the Twin Towers there was a display area called Window on the world. And it was basically huge glass windows at the very top of one of the Twin Towers, and you had this extraordinary view of the rivers surrounding Manhattan and off to the Atlantic. […] 

But also in the room behind, as it were in the middle of the room, was a a large model of the West of the Manhattan skyline, with labels attached, saying this is the Eiffel Tower, this is the Empire State etc. And I was going out the window and I noticed something else and that was that everybody in the room was looking at the model. They weren't looking at the skyline, it was like the skyline was so overpowering and so made you feel so small, and the view in general just made you feel so small. It was more comfortable looking at the model. 

We're more comfortable living with the fake than with the real thing. That reality is different from what we think. 

Whereas it's quite good to have the audience sitting in a theatre seat.[…] And you have to make an effort to do something, you can't just have it live streamed into your house all the time. 

But the thing is that every time we get a new efficiency, we think, oh, that's a great new efficiency. I can get food delivered, I can get my entertainment delivered. I can get everything delivered. But was it great? But there is a rule and the rule is that every new efficiency makes a loss. There will be a loss. The rule is you can have whatever you like in life, but you have to pay for it. 

And this world where we get things served up so quickly does involve the loss and the loss is, I think some of our connections to reality. 

For me the important thing in theatre is that the actor comes out at the beginning of the evening, looks at the audience and says in one way or another – “I have nothing”. I have nothing. That's the important thing that we never acknowledge that we have nothing or have very, very little. But you are going to use your imagination and I'm going to use mine. And between us, they are going to build something and imagine what it's like. And I think that's absolutely beautiful and very humble really. […]I think those principles are very important in the theatre. 

Has Brexit affected the theater and you as a theater and film director and as an author, and does it continue to affect you?

Yes, Brexit is a complete nightmare. People have lost friends and it's divided a lot of families. It's like a civil war really. And civil wars tend not to be ever fully resolved. Yes, a treaty can be imposed but the divisions remain and grow. 

What is more sinister is that Brexit seems to be merely an English thing but in fact all over the world we see the same tectonic clash - a move away from the feeling that internationalism is a good thing in itself to the feeling that nationalism is a good thing. We see that in in many different countries that we go to. And that's very worrying.  

Is there a word that best describes you as a person?

Well, I try not to think about myself too much.

How would you continue the sentence "I am a person who loves..."?

In a way I love walking across bridges. And I also love building them. bridges between the classics and today. Sometimes the classics are frozen in a bubble of sentimentality, and we don't see that the classics are wonderful because they're about us. They're classics simply because they continue to be about us. A classic does not age. 

The rule seems to be that human nature does not evolve. Only technology evolves, but human nature doesn't evolve.  

The world-renowned theatre duo, director Declan Donnellan and set designer Nick Ormerod, founded the legendary British theatre company Cheek by Jowl in 1981 and remain its artistic directors to this day. In 2012, they also made their feature film debut with Bel Ami, which they co-directed. It stars actors Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci and Robert Pattison.

Cheek by Jowl has toured Bulgaria twice. The first time was in 1987 with the play Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, then in 1994 with As You Like It, performed on the stage of the National Theatre. In 2008, the Varna Summer International Theatre Festival and the World Theatre in Sofia platform presented the French production of Andromache by Racine, created by Declan Donnellan a year earlier at Peter Brook's theatre des Bouffe du Nord in Paris.

As a theatre director, Declan Donnellan often stages Shakespeare, but he was also the author of the first English performances of texts by European writers and playwrights such as Racine, Corneille, Lessing and Ostrovsky. In addition to Cheek by Jowl, he has created shows for theatre festivals around the world such as those in Avignon and Salzburg. He has worked with the Mali Drama Theater in St. Petersburg and the Piccolo Theater in Milan. He also staged the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet - at the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow.

Donnellan is the winner of four Laurence Olivier Awards, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, the International Stanislavsky Prize. Together with Nick Ormerod, they were awarded the honorary Order of the British Empire. Nick Ormerod has designed the sets for numerous Cheek By Jowl productions, as well as for productions at the National Theatre of Great Britain, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, English National Opera, and Piccolo Theatre.