Jack O'Brien on His Girl Friday
Jack O'Brien talks to Matt Wolf about His Girl Friday, 6 June 2003
MW I'm delighted to be talking to Jack O'Brien, whose work I have enjoyed over the years, fairly exclusively in the United States. This is his first production at the National and the first time an American director has been invited to direct in this auditorium. Jack is here only until tomorrow morning when he flies home to New York to see whether his Broadway musical Hairspray will clean up at the Tony Awards on Sunday. So how did you come to be the first American director to direct in this theatre?
JO'B It sounds like it was an accident but it was actually a Machiavellian plan of mine. Nick Hytner and I have known each other for a long time; I run the Globe Theatre in San Diego, where I've been for the last 22 years, and I've been trying to get Nick to come over and do a play for us. He was always too busy but he professed interest, so I would call every year and he'd look at his schedule. But eventually there was a message on my service saying “It's Nick, and the boot is on the other foot. I want you to come and direct for me in my first season at the National.” And I thought that sounds like something I don't want to miss, and boy am I glad I didn't.
MW And did he have a play for you?
JO'B He did. Alex Jennings, as an Associate of the National Theatre, had brought the idea of a stage version of His Girl Friday. to Nick. Nick had just worked with John Guare on Sweet Smell of Success in New York and felt that would be a good fit, so this was the project that was proposed to me. I don't think the rights had been all worked out so we didn't really know it would happen.
MW What was your feeling about doing such American work in England with a British company?
JO'B Well, I was thrilled. I mean, come on! British actors are definitely the greatest actors per pound in the world, and yet we are different. It's very interesting. When Americans hear a British company doing an American play it's sometimes as peculiar as when the British hear an American company doing a British play. The Americans can't tell the difference, and the Brits can't tell the difference, but if you cross-pollenate, you can hear things that don't ring. What I really wanted to do was to bring the jazz of the language to these actors, because I knew they could do it. Sometimes we throw the line in a different way from the way you do. We're much more reckless with speech, much ruder, we love to bang stuff up against the wall rather than let it dribble down. You're far more respectful of your language, as well you should be. That's what I wanted to do, to see if I could do that. Everybody had a great attitude about it. I was sort of relentless, but they were brilliant. You cannot imagine what it means for an American to be invited to direct here. It's like going to Lourdes.
MW Basically this is a play of a film which is itself based on a play. What was your way into what this should be?
JO'B Well, I'm in love with actors. I don't fully ever understand the mystery that makes them be visited by this other thing that they do to themselves. I'm also fascinated by how, in film once they turn on the camera, the actor had better turn on a sensational performance, because that record will exist forever. Our work in theatre is evanescent. it goes into your memory and you may remember the evening as being better, or worse, or different from what it actually was. But with film you've got to get it right. I loved the idea that people could be compelled to believe, while the machinery is moving about and the cast is going off and on, so completely in what was going on that those performances would be immortal.
Nick Hytner's idea for this season was that we had to do the plays in rep, which means the sets have to be able to turn around in an hour, so that overnight, effortlessly you can change this set into Henry V. That meant that multiple sets were out. If you know the movie of His Girl Friday, you know that it begins with several scenes – she comes back to the paper, they go to lunch, she goes to the criminal courts building. We couldn't do that, we had to keep it in the original discipline of one place. The play the film is based on, The Front Page, takes place in one room, and John's alchemy was to figure out how to make one evening of a play that began as a play, then became a film, and now we were returning it to its roots. And yet there had to be something simple about it. Bob Crowley and I thought maybe we should just do it in the movie set. This set is in fact a perfect replica of the criminal courts building set for the movie. The mouldings, the doors, the size, the windows, how the windows work - it's exactly the same detail, including the staircase where you see the girls going up and down and the guys trying to see up their skirts. We thought that would be the convention. So in case we're late doing the change-over, we'll do it so that the set is just arriving when the audience comes in, and going away when the evening is over. That was the conceit we started with.
MW And all this was figured out beforehand?
JO'B. Yes. And what is fabulous is that you learn a play from the inside out. As you start to work on it, it reveals itself to you, and actors change it, and actors' needs change it. One of the things that happens in this play is that doors get slammed. The doors are real characters, as they would be in something that is farcically written – surprise entrances, people falling into and out of the room, that sort of thing. So we had to make absolutely certain that the doors were slammable, because if it shook like a set in a summer stock production, there goes the reality. You wouldn't believe it.
MW This can be a very difficult stage to operate on. Directors have complained about how to fill it. It seems that you've found a way to answer that without having to worry about a proscenium arch.
JO'B I have to say that the Old Globe in San Diego is a teeny version of this auditorium. It's only 581 seats, but it's a partial thrust, like this. So most of the work that I do in my own theatre has the same problem of sound that washes across, so it's difficult to hear. The hardest thing of course is landing a joke. You can't land a joke upstage, you have to see the person's face, their eyes and their mouth. So you have to figure out unselfconscious ways to get people facing in the direction so that they can land the laugh.
MW I was very intrigued by the fact that the film is 93 minutes, and it really plunges right in with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Here the play breathes much more than the film does, it's two and a half hours. What did you feel you you were able to do with that extra hour?
JO'B John felt, and I agreed completely, that we didn't want to truncate it. We wanted to honour the play. The inspired idea of the film came about by accident when Howard Hawks decided to remake The Front Page and did a reading of it. The actor who was supposed to read Hildy didn't show up and he gave his attractive secretary a script and said “Read it,” and this chemistry was suddenly going on. So the infusion of sexual politics into what is basically a very serious scenario was worthy of attention. I didn't want just to replicate the movie. I've done several of these adaptations: The Full MontyHairspray, which was a John Walters cult movie, we've reconstituted as the musical. You can't just take what you saw in the film and put it on stage. In the first place you'll be very disappointed. In the second place, it takes thirty seconds to do a film cut but when you have to have actors lumbering onto the stage and setting themselves up for the same joke, you know what's coming. It has to be constantly reconceived and readdressed. We wanted the ballast, the dimensionality of the reporters and their world not to be sacrificed just for the sake of putting Hildy into a Rosalind Russell dress.
MW What do you tell the actors to do when they're coming to play these parts? To look at the film so they'll be aware of comparisons? Not to look at it?
JO'B Well, we're all adults. They're obviously gonna look at it… Most of them will already have seen it. I think people know whether they're being fed a meal or given a rye-crisp. I think what we were doing was to say, let's start with this experience which we all know and love, and see if we can't bring something else to it. That's where they were all so valuable, because they were all ready and eager to do that.
MW You run a major not-for-profit theatre in America. Did it feel very familiar, being here?
JO'B Yes. It's bigger, but I understand the problems, the budget, the pressure. I get it. There are only so many ways to put on all these plays for you dear sweet people, and we're constantly running ourselves into the same cement walls no matter what country we're in. I'm quite sure they're going through the same problems at the Moscow Art Theatre. Also, it's terribly exciting to be here at the beginning of Nick's period. There is a great exhilaration and sense of community and positivism here and I wanted very much to contribute to that.
MW On Broadway, shows tend to preview for weeks at a time. Here you had just six previews. What was your feeling about that?
JO'B I have five at the Globe. I always take pride in saying to them in San Diego, “We have just as much time as the National Theatre of Great Britain. Get it right! Come on, we're opening!” But, however much time you have, that's what it takes. If you have a week, you do it in a week. It's a little breathless but you do it. It isn't what you could do if you had six weeks, but it's an odd thing, like helium in a balloon, it fills up the space available. It won't be ready one minute before it's ready to go on stage.
MW. I'd like to ask you about the relationship you have developed with the playwright Tom Stoppard. You will be directing the American premiere of The Coast of Utopia, which was on this very stage last summer. How did this relationship come to be and what do you bring to each other?
JO'B I guess we're a sort of theatrical Odd Couple. We met over a series of almost accidents over the years. When Hapgood was originally to be done in the States, they thought it would be good to put it into a regional theatre, and ours was the theatre they came to. Then suddenly it was not going to be done there. It was no fault of Tom's but he felt somewhat embarrassed by the fact that it had slipped away. Then when Stockard Channing came over to London to do John Guare's great play, Six Degrees of Separation, Tom gave her the script saying it would be a good part for her. She and I are friends, and she said “What would you say to Jack doing it?” So I sort of backed into it. Hapgood is about quantum physics, and about eighteen other things, so you don't just say “Oh sure, no problem, I know how to do that.” Then in the middle of our preparation, Stockard got a movie and the production was delayed for a valuable six months while Tom patiently explained to me what was going on in the play. What I had to figure out was what I could bring to this that would make it not only easier for an audience to understand, but palliative as well. What I inevitably try to do with everything I do – here's my secret: I think it's sex, don't you? Well, you giggled. Right there, I got your interest. I think the idea of what happens to us when we place ourselves emotionally at risk is endlessly fascinating. No matter if it's Shakespeare or Euripides, right on to Guare and Stoppard, that is where the page becomes three dimensional. When you endow those people with three dimensions, one of those dimensions is love. You can deny it, suppress it, ignore it, it can explode, it can hurt you. But that isn't on the page, that's what the actor and director will bring to it. So I didn't worry about the physics, I concentrated on the sex.
MW And then, The Invention of Love, much the same.
JO'B Exactly the same. I remember vividly what it was like to be in college at twenty, where even the unattractive people are beautiful. You're away from home for the first time, you're on your own, and the sky's the limit and all these feathers get unfurled that you've never flexed before. All these cute people are saying “Oh, look at your feathers!” It's dangerous. And of course danger is what this play is about. It's dangerous because you can't turn it off and you frankly don't want to.
MW What are your thoughts about The Coast of Utopia in terms of making it work in America?
JO'B I'm currently mulling it over. I have a great advantage because Richard Eyre had famously done The Invention of Love and Trevor did a dazzling job on The Coast of Utopia. I have been able to go to school with the best directors in the world working on these pieces and when they come to me, they come resonant with that experience. I am able to do the next version. It'll have a very different effect in America in so far as the bizarre and wonderfully ironic slant that all those revolutionaries ended up in Primrose Hill, which is immediately witty to a British audience, will be completely lost in America. They have no idea what that means. One of the great arcing ironies of the play itself has to be re-voiced. We don't know how to do it yet but Tom and I are good friends and we have a lot of talking ahead of us.
MW It seems you have the most charmed experience any director could have: you work on musicals from their embryonic state, to works by Tom Stoppard and John Guare, to the classics – you're about to do both parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV in New York. Is this exactly how you would wish it to be?
JO'B If I could have dreamed this life, I wouldn't have figured this out. I had the greatest advantage because right out of university I was in the embryonic APA repertory theatre company in America, which Ellis Rabb, who was married to Rosemary Harris, had for ten years. They were a small, passionate, itinerant group of actors who turned out to be fabulous. They went all over the country doing pretty much what they wanted to, and I was the only assistant. I was the little guy that took everybody's notes and got the coffee and walked the dogs and did the flat work and cooked the meals. It was thrilling. But when it was over I was the repository of a lot of disparate information. I've been very lucky. And it's very thrilling because, for 22 years I've been running one of the pre-eminent classical companies in America, and New York has never seen my classical work. So I can't wait to take Henry IV there! They don't know what's going to hit them. Our country is so big that you can have different careers in different places. I had ten years of opera because my debut piece was Porgy and Bess – the first full staging of Porgy and Bess ever done, when I was 29 years old. I'm very lucky.
MW But in the last five or six years, it seems as though your career just kicked up to another level...
JO'B I'm hot again! It's amazing. You just don't expect it.
MW The Full Monty, when it came to Britain wasn't as great a success as it was in New York. Is that inevitable?
JO'B I say this with great fondness, but on some deep-seated level I think London and our beloved British cousins are fed up with us, our yattering, our Starbucks coffee, the irritation of our McDonalds. It's total embarrassment to every thinking American walking around to see the proliferation of all our worst culture. I think it was just one more thing: “We have this lovely movie about Sheffield called The Full Monty and they're doing what to it?” We got better reviews here than we did in New York. I thought the press would turn on us with fire hoses but they loved it, and the audiences didn't come. I loved the show here. We did it with a predominately British company and they were great. It's going back on the road in the fall and I feel it may do very well in the provinces. I'm wondering how long it will be before we bring Hairspray over. I'm telling them to relax.
MW Hairspray in New York has been winning awards, and you've been over here missing it.
JO'B Yeah, it's great. It's damaging to the soul, all that stuff. I'd rather be in the rehearsal room with the actors, solving problems.
MW How do you think Hairspray will translate over here? It's very American...
JO'B Oh, I think it will be fine. You all know the sixties. You know what happened. It was just when the Beatles grew up. All that bubble-headed hair and naivete. That's universal. And the music is so irresistible, it just makes you feel good. We put this sort of belljar of belief over the whole evening, which could have been very camp, but instead it has a lot of integrity. I'm very proud of it.
MW That production will travel all over the world and will presumably take over your life for the next few years. How do you cope with that?
JO'B I don't know. I've never had the problem before. This is what you wait for all your life. One of those big, expensive musicals that everyone wants to see. People like us, who come from a classical regional background never expect that. So when it happens you just say OK, this is part of the plan and I'll try to accommodate it as best I can without hurting anybody. I'm only really worried about raising expectations I can't fulfil. If I'm very honest about it and everybody knows up front what's going on, we should be able to get through.
Audience question
How has the absence of censorship affected the way you approached His Girl Friday? The fact that they had to be careful when the film was made, and you don't...
JO'B Well, Charles Lederer, who wrote the screenplay, and Hecht and MacArthur were brilliant at getting round censorship in the 30s. As a matter of fact, I wonder if movies were ever sexier. The double-entendre and the dropped shoulder strap became so unbelievably articulate. We've tried to honour that. We have not violated the language or tried to “update” it. I think John did a brilliant job by trying to infuse it with the world politics of 1939, which is not when the play was written (1928) but when the film was made. And what a year that was! I mean the films made that year alone – The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind. And I was born that year, so I feel I speak for an entire generation! What was going on with Hitler and American isolationism was such a hot potato. And here we are again, again, as Beckett would say. There are incredible resonances that we were aware of and were trying to filter in a little bit.
Audience question
Does the fact that this is part of the £10 season affect your budget in any way?
JO'B Yeah! And it frees up yours! You should be able to see three times the plays you usually do. Yes, what we can spend is very responsibly done, very honourably and brilliantly put together. Bob Crowley and I are very proud of the fact that we are a teeny little bit under budget. And I don't think that's happened to the two of us for fifteen or twenty years. But we did it for Nick because we thought it was important. I don't feel I've been compromised in the least. Thirty lavish British actors – that's where the money is, and they're not making anything either. But the richness of performance, that's what we're selling here. I'm tired of special effects, of the scenery eating the audience. When I fell in love with the theatre, it was because actors thrilled me. I want to see them. I want to see performances.
Audience question
Do you always see a play in musical terms?
JO'B Because I have had several careers going in different parts of the country, I had the ability to be with different sets of creative people almost simultaneously and I began to realise that the most important thing about actors is that there are areas you must never go near. There are a lot of things you can tell them, a lot of things they want to know from you, but there are aspects of language you must not touch, because if they don't discover it, it becomes something they're doing for a reason that isn't organic. So I began to speak to actors as if they were musicians, and musicians as if they were actors because I found that the parallel universes freed my ability to communicate. If I'm doing an opera I talk completely in terms of theatre, stage and motivation. I never discuss the music.
MW Did you find a difference between directing an English company and an American one?
JO'B There's one great problem here. You don't have the sound of “awe” – you don't say as Americans do “cough, dog, off, office”. It isn't a vowel sound you actually have. But I think the quoted differences are wildly over-discussed. I think it probably was true when we didn't have so much proximity, but we have films and the internet now. Our cultures are very mixed up now. You look at the news and you see people in Finland and Africa and they're all wearing Nike. You think, “when did that happen?” Why aren't they in little dirndls and things? Oh, for a great pair of lederhosen! You used to be able to recognise people culturally by the way they dress. So whether we like it or not, and I think we'd better learn to like it, we are one world. And that world is much more fragile than it was fifty years ago. Those of us who don't attend to that are going to be very shocked and guilty if we don't get over it quickly. I prefer to see the similarities rather than the differences.
MW Were you given this cast, or did you come over and cast the play?
JO'B I was given the idea of Alex and Zoë, which I was thrilled about. Then two things happened. I came over and met a lot of people, and there was a reading for John Guare, because we hadn't heard the play and we knew it was too long. Some really lovely people showed up that I don't think had planned necessarily to come and read for me, and we had the best time. It was like this net of charm was spread over them and I sucked in a lot of minnows that way. It was a combination of knowing certain people, auditioning others. Margaret Tyzack did us the favour of coming to read Mrs Baldwin, and she was so hilarious I said to her “We'll write it up for you!” and boy, did we!
MW There are so many things about the play that are a gift, given the current climate. As the audience may know, the top two editors at the New York Times resigned yesterday in response to a series of scandals, one of which was a sustained series of fabrications. It must feel as if this play were written five seconds ago.
JO'B You do wonder what extraordinary farcical plan we seem to be part of when those things erupt around you. This couldn't be more fortuitous. It's very different in the States from here, particularly because we have so few papers, the presumed tyranny of the New York Times being the most powerful example.
MW In the longer version of the script John Guare wrote, were there subplots that had to go?
JO'B We just went on a diet, really. Here's an interesting thing: normal stage speech is 110-130 words per minute. That's what you're used to hearing. His Girl Friday was famously clocked at 260 words per minute – twice what you normally can hear. So one of the problems we were having was to pitch it up at that buzz-saw level and not exhaust the audience so that they stop listening. You have to have breaks, rests, it has to tip into different voices, because it does not stop. That became for me the ultimate, practical solution of how much I could retain. A lot of what we began to excise was to do with knowing where we had to get to by the end of the play. I bet you don't all recall the denouement of the movie? Well, Hildy capitulates, bursts into tears, Walter hardly kisses her, and she schleps her own luggage out of the door. You think Euch, this is distasteful. It was fine in the 30s but we've come a long way. If people are going back into a relationship with any knowledge of what they've learnt, you don't want to go back to the same problems. John wrote this wonderfully warm, witty, almost Frank Capra ending. So we needed to save some space for that.
MW What about the wonderful business with Margaret Tyzack and her fantastic tirade against women writers?
JO'B What is delicious is that somebody rather well known said to John Guare the other night that he was so happy we had retained that from the screenplay. John, to his great credit, nodded and said “Well, you couldn't lose that”. In fact that doesn't happen in the screenplay. But as I said, if Maggie was going to do the play, we had to make it worth her time.
MW Do you think Walter and Hildy will make a go of it?
JO'B I said to Zoë last night at dinner, I don't think they're going to have an easy time at all. I think there are going to be a lot of areas of misery in that marriage, but they're even more miserable without each other. Sometimes that's the trade-off. Sometimes the reality is that it isn't stasis. You just exchange one set of problems for another. You just have to decide which set of problems you can live with, and then shut up about it.
MW The Tonys are on Sunday night. Tell us a bit about what Tony weekend is like...
JO'B It's like e-coli bacteria sweeping through the city. There are people throwing up all over Manhattan as we speak! OK, I'll just tell you the truth. My first nomination was in 1977 for Porgy and Bess. It's still one of the greatest achievements of my life and I loved it. It won, and I was nominated as its director, and I thought to myself in my sweet naivete, Well, if you're looking for direction, there it is! And I lost, of course. I've lost for 26 years. I've never won a Tony. After a while you realise that it's nothing to do with you or achievement, it's to do with politics, or all sorts of things, buses going by! Who knows? But you can't take it seriously. There was a time in my life when I have to say to you in all honesty, it would have been nifty to win a Tony. But not now. I mean, it would be lovely to win, but if I lose, don't feel sorry for me.
Audience question
When you die and go to heaven, you can be anything you like. What would you be?
JO'B To be perfectly honest I cannot imagine that it is not our job to make heaven on earth. I am really concentrating on trying to do that. If I have to look forward to a reward someplace else, this will do just fine.
© National Theatre
Matt Wolf is London theatre critic for Variety
