‘Strap in, lads.” The Scottish playwright Stef Smith is giving the cast some new lines for her contemporary version of Antigone. People sharpen their pencils, grab their rehearsal scripts. For most of the actors it’s their first experience of working with a living writer. These final-year students at Guildhall School are preparing the ambitious new text, one of several big shows designed to flex their performance muscles, often with prominent directors. For Antigone it’s Orla O’Loughlin, who after leading Edinburgh’s Traverse is now director of drama at Guildhall. Bright-eyed, hoop earrings shimmying, she’s among the directors whose student productions may not be reviewed or widely seen but will nonetheless influence future British theatre. What are the artistic rewards? How is it different from a professional show?
By their third and final year, students form a tight mesh. “They’ve lived and worked together at close quarters,” O’Loughlin tells me. “They’ve grown up together” but “they’re very vulnerable, they’re still young. I feel remarkably tiger mum about it! I want to protect them as well as prepare them for the industry.”
“I like to work under the radar,” says Jade Lewis. At the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda), she directs a play she knows inside out – as assistant director, she followed Nine Night by Natasha Gordon from National Theatre to West End. “Now it’s less about discovering what the play means, and more about what our version will mean,” she says. “This is an actor’s play and they’ll have to create their own journeys. My plan is to treat them as if they were professionals – I want them to have that experience.”
So what’s different? Casting, for a start. Roles are allotted by staff, not visiting directors, and most of these actors are yet to know the midlife frets of Nine Night, let alone Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. Where a professional show is “ultimately about the finished product”, O’Loughlin explains, with “seats to fill, tickets to sell”, here the process is as crucial as the product. “We must be ambitious for students,” she says, “but not expect them to know what they don’t know yet.”
“I’m not here to represent the profession, but I am here to work as a professional,” proposes Neil Bartlett, directing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada). “These are brilliant young people full of inquiry and courage, and I use the same rehearsal techniques I’d use with anyone.” Grace Venning’s design rejects walls and doors so Bartlett taught the cast “how to make an entrance when there isn’t a door. These guys didn’t know how to do that trick until half past 10 this morning. That’s why I’m here.”
Might awed students be too intimidated to question established directors? “I obsess about commas, I wear pearls in rehearsals, I am embarrassingly passionate about my work,” Bartlett states, that rope of pearls peeking beneath his red plaid shirt. “Of course they find me enormously intimidating. That’s why it’s important for me to talk about what I don’t know.” A playful costume session melted their reserve. “It was like being in the parrot house in the zoo,” Bartlett reports. “They just erupted into the primal joy and silliness of dressing up.”
These shows are student exercises, but also directorial passion projects. When O’Loughlin invited Smith to reimagine Antigone, “it was for me as well as for the students, if I’m honest”. Drama schools enable pieces that are too tricky – massive, costly, weird – for professional contexts. For emerging directors, it’s a godsend. Oscar Toeman could tackle a gleefully messy all-female Richard III in Cumbria (“We were throwing a pig’s heart around”) or the Weimar epic Mephisto at East 15. The scale is exciting (and as Toeman notes, the pay trumps fringe rates).
The Importance continues Bartlett’s lifelong Wildean obsession. “I’ve always said I’d do it when I’m old enough – my husband tactfully said, ‘Darling you’re 61, I think you should crack on.’” He’s invigorated by young actors who ask why they should take this old play seriously. Learning isn’t confined to the students. “Drama schools are definitely a training ground for young directors,” Toeman declares. “You can work out your aesthetic. And the most important thing is learning to run the room. What is the ethos of your rehearsal room? Hopefully it’s generous and open, where everyone feels valued. As a director you create a mini-utopia.”
I see utopia take shape during the Antigone rehearsal: everyone shares their preferred pronouns before hearing a statement about responsibility, respect and how to respond if they feel unsafe. (All Guildhall directors undergo an induction, signing up to a code of conduct addressing nudity, smoking and violence.) Young actor Shaka Kalokoh reminds me that these shows are pragmatic springboards into the profession. With agents and casting directors watching (the general public can come too), students need a chance to shine. “Everyone gets their moment,” O’Loughlin confirms; she also hopes that “if you’re an actor of colour you get to play a character of colour”. Lewis agrees that “it’s a gift to give students the opportunity to play within their culture”. Values shared in the crucible of a student show will follow them into the profession. “I want them to be the pioneers,” says O’Loughlin, “the change we all want to see.”
The Importance of Being Earnest is at Rada, London, 12-21 March. Antigone is at Guildhall, London, 23-26 March. Nine Night is at Lamda, London, 4-8 April.
