Stephen Daldry: After the Oscars, it is time for a change of direction

Paul Taylor
Saturday 22 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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Tomorrow night is Oscars night – but, with America at war, it will be a more sombre jamboree than normal in the Kodak Theater. Nonetheless the event will probably unfold in the usual mix of predictability and surprise. One thing, though, that we know for certain is that Stephen Daldry, Britain's brightest hope, will denounce the war if he wins the Best Director award. "I will certainly mention the war in my speech," he has sad. "It would be impossible not to and I suspect most people will. I do not think that the case for war has been made and most of the people I know feel the same." So there's an intriguing prospect: victory speeches at the Oscars that make one stir with passion rather than writhe in embarrassment.

Daldry is nominated for his direction of The Hours, an overrated film (in my opinion) in which Daldry and screenplay writer David Hare delude themselves that they are saying something worthwhile about three generations of women. But no one who has Daldry's best interests at heart would wish him to win. It would confirm him in the wrong course he has taken.

He shouldn't be in films at all. He should be leading British theatre. It's what he was put on the planet to do. But try telling him that and before the words have even left your lips, he will have become bored and want to move on to something even more interesting. The rumours are that my view of The Hours is not a singular one. There were rows on the set, allegedly, with Meryl Streep.

He's in his early 40s. He's bisexual. He's married. He's expecting his first baby. The son of a singer and a bank manager, he participated in youth theatre in Taunton. Recently in this paper, I accused him of being a public schoolboy. This was a libel. He's a grammar school kid and, like his distinguished contemporary, Deborah Warner, he did himself the favour of not taking the Oxbridge route. He went instead to Sheffield where, after gaining his English degree, he served an apprenticeship at the Crucible Theatre. Idiosyncrasy could also be seen in his training to be a clown in Italy. The trainees were all issued with nicknames: his was Olive Oyl.

He shot to our astonished attention when he ran the tiny but seminal Gate Theatre in Notting Hill in the early 1990s. This venue has been the launch pad for many a notable career, but none more notable than Daldry's. The work he did there was sometimes wonderful beyond belief. He woke the English world up to the brilliance of Spanish Golden Age drama. His production of Tirso de Molina's Damned for Despair genuinely deserved to be called (in that overused epithet) "revelatory". His co-staging – with Annie Castledine – of the Ingolstadt Plays by Brecht's much ill-used mistress, Marieluise Fleisser, ranks in my reckoning as one of the top five productions I have ever seen.

Daldry then – to what was beginning to become our routine astonishment – went on to run the Royal Court. This move was a tricky business. The incumbent artistic director, the wholly admirable Max Stafford-Clark, had reapplied for the job and had been turned down by a board that felt it was time for a change. Very peculiarly, though, it elected to institute an overlap period of 18 months in which Daldry had to hang around as artistic director designate. At which point, the fairy godfather in his life flew in on a wire from the National Theatre. Richard Eyre, then the National's numero uno and a man who can spot talent at 20 paces, reached out to Daldry and effectively said come and do something for us rather than linger like a lemon at the Court.

The rest is history and the sound of cash registers ringing with resounding insistence. For what Daldry had up his sleeve was the world-conquering Expressionist refit of the old J B Priestley warhorse An Inspector Calls. It's made him a fortune and although no fortune is precisely deserved, there are many who are sitting on pots of money for far worse reasons. The production is built around an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime perception.

Priestley wrote the play as a kind of wake-up call to the post-war socialist government and he set it in a period just before the First World War. Two colossal upheavals speak to one another in this piece, but it took Daldry to bring that out. I moonlighted for a time as a dramaturge on a different Priestley production and not a day went by when I did not envy the clean, striking audacity of the Daldry approach to An Inspector Calls.

At the Royal Court, he was an inspiring leader. My own fortunes intersect with his at this point. The Court has regular Monday morning script meetings at which all the plays that under discussion are looked at and considered. Each member of the panel has to read closely a couple of plays and report on them to the meeting.

Alongside the regulars, who are salaried Court people, are guests wheeled in to bring a bracing outsider's perspective. It's typical of Daldry's refusal to be boxed in any preordained categories that he decided that it was time to allow a journalist into this set-up – the deal being a feature article after three weeks of full participation in the process. I was lucky enough to get the call and duly went along.

The Independent rightly sat on the resulting piece for about eight weeks so that its publication could coincide with the temporary closure and refurbishment of the historic Sloane Square venue. This delay clearly rattled Daldry. When the piece finally came out, the doorbell rang and it was a delivery service bringing me a parcel that turned out to be a bottle of pink champagne and a note from Daldry saying "This breaks all the rules of engagement but thank you for being sympathetic and discreet". The pinkness of the champagne was a very Daldry touch.

His masterminding of the refurbishment of the Royal Court – which is one of the architectural glories of the century (and all credit for that to Steve Tomkys and to Daldry for choosing him) – is his greatest achievement to date. Only he would have had the temerity to leap so flashily on to the lottery bandwagon and then have the nerve to steer the project to completion.

On the other hand, he has a habit of dropping into institutions like a troubleshooter, shaking them up and then leaving them prematurely. He did that at the Gate and he did it at the Court. When Richard Eyre resigned from the National Theatre in 1997, Daldry dithered about whether to apply for the artistic director post. It is said that he decisively threw his hat into the ring only when he discovered that Trevor Nunn was likely to get the job. But by that stage it was too late.

I do not believe that the two films he has made represent Daldry at his best. Billy Elliot makes everybody laugh and cry and it features a wondrously delightful performance from Jamie Bell, whom Daldry went on virtually to adopt – to the great distress of the gutter press which started making insinuations that he was a paedophile. Nothing could be less true than this.

There are those who say that he married in haste to rid himself of this slur. But that is surely an impertinence to him. It is said to be a love match. Odd, because he once muttered to me at a forum on gay theatre that he didn't have a straight bone in his body. This just demonstrates that people develop and discover depths they never suspected. He likes driving fast and I would not particularly want to be in the suicide seat next to him.

The drawback of Billy Elliot is its wilful political naivety. It's a story of the hormonal individualism of talent and of the class solidarity of the mining community. It never brings those two discordant elements into a really thought-provoking relationship. In fact, it chickens out and subsides into rather irksome sentimentality. The Hours is Daldry at his worst. I sat through it with the jaw frankly sagging at its tepidity.

A contrast one might draw is between Daldry and Mark Rylance, the actor and artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe. Like Daldry, Rylance has genius: in fact, he is an outright genius. The great theatrical guru Peter Brook once said that the point of life was to remain a child – but with experience. The difference between Daldry and Rylance is that the latter has really taken responsibility for himself and runs a very difficult theatre with exemplary flair and resource. Daldry is still, in some sense, just a naughty child. He's also an outrageous flirt.

I'm reliably informed that at the Baftas where, inevitably, Nicole Kidman picked up an award for her performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Daldry was going round telling people that film isn't really where it's at and how theatre was the truly sexy thing.Yet, when he was the Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Theatre at Oxford, he treated the undergraduates in his inaugural lecture to the news that he had had a Damascan realisation that theatre was politically impotent while running the Court.

But Daldry is a global force for good. In Moscow last year, I found it hard to keep a straight face because everyone I met referred to Daldry as if talking about a saint. One of the lovable things about him is that he is very far from sanctity. The reason they are all obsessed with him out there is that a couple of years ago he led a series of workshops in Moscow in verbatim theatre. This approach creates plays out of interviews with real people and the particular group he focused on was the homeless in railway stations. It had a fantastically releasing effect on the generation of 20-something playwrights in Russia whom I believe to be the most exciting up-and-coming group in this art form. Daldry helped them (so to speak) to thaw out and realise that their own lives are teeming with stories and opportunities for drama.

One hears tell that he and Richard Eyre toy with the idea of running a theatre together. That would be the dream ticket. But I wish they wouldn't just toy. It's not as if British theatre is so flooded with flair and integrity that we can hang around while they haver and fail to make up their minds.

Life story

Born 2 May 1960, in Dorset.

Family He married Lucy Sexton, a dancer from New York, 18 October 2001. They are expecting their first child and divide their time between their homes in New York City and near Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.

Education Huish Grammar School, Taunton, Somerset; University of Sheffield.

Theatrical career Apprenticeship with the Italian clown Elder Milletti (1984); apprenticeship with Crucible Theatre, Sheffield (1985-1988); artistic director of the Gate Theatre, London (1990-1992); directed An Inspector Calls, National Theatre (1992); artistic director of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, London (1992-1999); associate director of the Royal Court (1999).

Film career Directed: Eight (1998), Billy Elliot (2000), The Hours (2002), Hiding Room (2002).

Awards Tony Award for An Inspector Calls, Academy Award nominations for best director for both Billy Elliot and The Hours.

He says "As soon as I know how to do something, I get bored of it."

They say "He's just a boy who can't say no" – Richard Eyre, film and theatre director.

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