Theatre director Jamie Lloyd was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1980. His first major production was Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in 2006, and he has become Britain’s foremost Pinter interpreter, recently staging a four-month West End season of all Pinter’s short plays. In 2015, he founded the Jamie Lloyd Company. His production of Betrayal, starring Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox, is currently on Broadway, and his recent Evita transfers to the West End next year. Next, he directs a new adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), translated by Martin Crimp and starring James McAvoy, at London’s Playhouse theatre (3 Dec to 23 Feb). Lloyd lives in Hastings.
Tell us about your new production of Cyrano…
There’s a certain approach people expect: Cyrano is going to have a big prosthetic nose, a big hat, they’re going to swordfight… Trying to banish all of that, and get to the very essence of what the play is about, is really the aim.
And what do you think that essence is?
Cyrano has developed this carapace of exhibitionism, aggression, wit – which clearly masks something deeply painful and lonely. The reason the play has endured is that we all have an insecurity, something we’re battling with. It’s trying to understand that, rather than just delivering on the swash and buckle!
This is your fourth play starring James McAvoy. What’s so special about that relationship?
It’s definitely the most significant working relationship of my career. He really comes alive in a rehearsal room: it’s a director’s gift.
You’re offering 15,000 free tickets to first-time theatregoers…
Being the son of a truck driver and a cleaner, I didn’t go to the theatre when I was a kid. We want everyone to experience it. We’re being very careful about targeting particular community groups and state secondary schools: I worry sometimes that accessibility is a box-ticking exercise, whereas it’s got to be a very considered approach.
Your production of Doctor Faustus starring Kit Harrington attracted criticism of the behaviour of young audiences.
All this belittling you read – normally written by middle-aged white men – it’s just nonsense. My experience of younger audiences is they’re incredibly disciplined, engaged and passionate. It makes me really upset and angry that anyone would want to diminish that. It’s just another example of someone trying to keep theatre as the reserve of the elite.
Your production of Betrayal is now on Broadway. Does Pinter’s work land differently in the US?
Audiences are ready to laugh more. Charlie [Cox]’s character says “How are you?” and Zawe [Ashton] says “Oh, not too bad” – and for some reason it gets a big laugh. Maybe it’s Downton Abbey syndrome: Americans are so intrigued by English repression.
Chemistry is so important for that play. How do you know when you’ve found the right actors?
It’s purely instinct: you just know. It’s like putting together the ultimate rock band. Betrayal was beyond anything I’d imagined – but can you imagine doing that play if you hated each other, or the men were trying to out-alpha each other. It would be awful. Actually, they’re incredibly close: Zawe calls them “the thrupple”, because they do hang out all the time.
What did you learn from spending so long immersed in Pinter’s work?
Awful loneliness unites all of the characters. They’re frequently horrible to each other because, actually, they want to connect. That yearning was a surprising and amazing thing to discover. Also, stripping things back and intervening less as a director was a really significant lesson for me. I guess I’ve been terrified of being boring – and maybe trying too hard to combat that, throwing everything at it.
Are you done with Pinter now?
No: he really obsesses me. I want to make sure I do all of the plays.
Next year you’ll be staging Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, starring Jessica Chastain. What can we expect?
She’s an incredibly powerful artist, and really up for challenging expectations. She’s certainly not going to be doing a middle-of-the-road production.
The Jamie Lloyd Company has yet to stage any plays by women. As a commercial company, do you feel absolved from the need to consider representation?
No, not at all. It’s incredibly important to me. It’s really tricky: what gives us the freedom to offer cheaper or free tickets is [high-profile] casting. It’s not necessarily that those actors have not been sent plays by women; it just so happens that they’ve responded to plays written by men. But we do have a play by a woman coming up.
All the work we do around casting is about putting together the most exciting, diverse group of people. But what is also very important – and what we need to do more work on – is representation in terms of writers, and who makes the work, including unseen roles like stage management and crew.
We’ve become accustomed to bold versions of classic plays – but is it harder to rework popular musicals, as you did recently with Evita?
We had to reinvent every moment: everyone knows what Evita is. But we’re used to seeing Shakespeare and classical texts reinvented – so why not reinvent Andrew Lloyd Webber?
