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.
It was really interesting to see someone reconstruct my work and these two young actors make it their own. They all brought something new to it, a fresh energy, which was lovely.
For Soho, we've made some tweaks to the script, and there's probably an additional scene. I will make some edits in rehearsal when we go back in January.
Because we started working on this in 2017, every time we've done it, we've been able to add and edit stuff, make changes, and flesh out certain parts.
For example, in 2023 for the fringe, we brought up much more of a queer element to the story. There was a taste of it there at Vault, but it wasn't really fully realised.
The work you do tends to focus on female-centric stories. Is it getting easier or harder to tell these types of stories in theatres?
I don't know if it's getting easier or harder because I think it's more complex than that. The question that I would ask is, what level are female stories getting produced at? Are they in studios and secondary spaces, or the main house? And the answer is often no, they are not [in the main house].
At the emerging up to mid-career level, there are loads of brilliant female directors and writers making female-focused work that's really important to them. But at the next level up, you look at some of these stories, and it's often male directors and male writers.
The reason I started The Thelmas was because I was so frustrated with female artists not getting commissioned to make female-led work. And the female-led work that was out there was just not what I was interested in seeing. It was very tropey.
And the other part of it is the kind of stories that female artists are allowed to tell. I feel like often the big, political, juicy, thriller-type stuff is very rarely by female directors and writers.
It does need to change, and I don't know how to do that. I've always gone out and just made the work I want to make, but I'm possibly a bit unusual in that.
I want to open the door to the backstage area and rehearsal room for those who have never been involved in making theatre. What's one thing that might surprise people about the process?
How much work and how many people are involved in making a piece of theatre versus the amount of time given to rehearsing it and getting it up on its feet, which is very short and intense.
I think they'd be very surprised about quite how much time gets fed into this tiny window of time where everyone goes all out and really pulls together to make something, and then you end up with this sort of product.
And after press night, everyone from the back end filters off, and you end up with the actors and stage management keeping the show running.
I'm going to put you in the audience now. What is your favourite type of theatre to watch, and what would you recommend?
I don't want to be bored. I don't want to sit in a theatre for two hours and be looking at my watch. Being a bit more positive, I really like and appreciate theatre that leans into theatricality, work that could only be a piece of theatre is my thing.
If you're watching something and thinking, this could have been a TED talk, then why are we making theatre - so anything that's very traditional, very naturalistic.
Having said that, I really enjoyed Giant at Royal Court. It's very trad, very naturalistic, but the arguments in it kept me really interested.
I would lean more towards something that feels like they're taking a bit of a risk visually, not necessarily in terms of the subject matter, that they're trying something a bit different, that they're pushing the edges of their practice. Anything that's multi-disciplinary or has multimedia elements, I'm always interested in.
And I like stuff that entertains me but also makes me go away feeling like I've experienced something that is not that easy to articulate, or I have to go away and process it and maybe chat about it in the bar afterwards.
What would I recommend? If you haven't seen My Neighbor Totoro yet, go and see it, because it's so beautiful. And someone I think is super interesting, but she's now working in Europe more than she's in the UK, is Jasmine Woodcock Stewart.
She's a really interesting director, so I would recommend seeking out people like her and the new guard coming through. And obviously, I'd recommend Santi and Naz.
I'll be reviewing Santi and Naz later in January.
Watch the interview here:
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