Interview: 5 questions with theatre director Madelaine Moore
30/12/2024
Madelaine Moore is a freelance theatre director and artistic director of female-focused theatre company The Thelmas with Guleraana Mir. Here, she answers five questions about their new production, Santi & Naz at the Soho Theatre, gender equality in theatre, what she likes to watch and what making theatre is like behind the scenes.
Watch the full chat (11 mins) here.
Santi & Naz debuted at the Vault Festival in 2020; what initially drew you to the play?
It came out of a conversation [with Guleraana] around the time of the 70th anniversary of Partition.
There were a few Partition-set plays on at around that time. The stories were really focused on the trauma and awfulness, which, obviously, is the biggest part of it but was there space for another way of telling this story?
When you read the testimonies around Partition, a lot of women's voices just didn't get heard because, to be blunt, they didn't survive. It's really awful when you hear about what happened to women and girls during that period.
At the same time, I'd been thinking about really intense teenage friendships that girls tend to have, that burn really bright and then fizzle. So, we thought about combining those two ideas.
How do we tell this story that's about Partition but isn't really about Partition? It's about two young women experiencing a huge historical and political event in a tiny village right next to the border of the partition.
We brought in Afshan d’Souza-Lodhi, who co-wrote it with Guleraana, who brought another brilliant perspective that enriched the original story, the rough plot we'd come up with. They fleshed out these characters to make them feel relatable and fun.
Even though it's not a fun period of history, there's a lot of fun in the story. We don't want it to be a history lesson; that's not our job, but we want to ignite interest in the period through these two young girls.
The play's been touring the UK with a new cast and is set to open at the Soho Theatre on 21 January 2025. Is your approach to directing it any different this time around?
It's very different because, by the time the tour was booked, I wasn't available for the first two weeks of rehearsal, so we had to get in associate [director] Vikesh Godhwani, who was involved in the Vault version. I handed it over to him, which I've never done before, I'm a control freak, so that was quite scary for me.
We also didn't realise until quite late that the two actors who'd been in it in Edinburgh in 2023 were not available either. I got casting director Polly Jarrold involved. I came back from Edinburgh halfway through the festival to London, did a casting for it without Vikesh, and then handed it over to him via Zoom for two weeks while I was rehearsing something else.
Continue reading "Interview: 5 questions with theatre director Madelaine Moore" »