Blanche McIntyre has been directing theatre since she was 15, but she still can't wait for the curtain to rise, she tells TARA BRADY
IT’S TWO WEEKS before opening night and director Blanche McIntyre could not be more eager for the curtain to rise. “There’s nothing like the moment when the thing jumps from the page and becomes a fully 3D experience,” she gushes. “And when you suddenly see the actors joining in and saying ‘I’m going to bring this’, it’s like conducting a symphony. It’s incredibly exciting. It’s addictive. I can’t get enough of it.”
At 30, the energetic McIntyre is a veteran of London stagecraft. The winner of the inaugural Leverhulme Bursary for Emerging Theatre Directors has been positioning actors around the boards since she was 15. By 23, she was doing it for a living.
"I was quite a shy teenager and a bit of an eccentric," she smiles. "My schoolmates tended to give me the wary eye – you know, one of the kids who eats by themselves at lunch. I went and saw Katie Mitchell's Henry VI, Part 3at the RSC. It knocked my socks off. So I became obsessed. I just wanted to recreate the buzz of seeing that production. So I went and directed Everyman, which is a ridiculous play for a 15-year-old to direct. It's all about death and reckonings and serious things. But I did indeed get this huge buzz from working on a play. And for a shy teen, it's an instant way of making friends. Everybody gets bonded together by the experience. For me, theatre was a way of getting into a world where teenagers were hanging out at movies and experimenting with eye pencils."
McIntyre puts her precocious successes down to her artistic upbringing. Her father, a sculptor, and her mother, who once ran Penguin books, started taking their daughter to Shakespeare productions when she was six. It was the sort of family “who dragged you around old churches and buildings until you were bored and complaining. It was a house full of books. And we were always at plays. So I was lucky enough to grow up thinking of theatre as a pastime and enjoyment as opposed to thinking of something heavy and serious. When the recession hit, my mother cheerfully suggested that at least it wouldn’t make any difference to me; theatre directors are always poor.”
Last year, McIntyre was snapped up to write a screenplay based on Stephen Fry's The Hippopotamus. Pinching for my Soul, the latest play from dramatist Elizabeth Moynihan, marks McIntyre's first engagement in Dublin. A triptych of twisty monologues mostly characterised by very precise Leinster rhythms, it was a major linguistic challenge.
“My actresses Geraldine Plunkett and Emma Colohan have been extraordinarily generous and patient,” says the director. “They’ve supplied the impressions and background. Elizabeth has an amazing gift with idiosyncrasies. The play is very concretely detailed. They’re highly individualised characters with their own sense of humour, their own way of thinking, and their own patterns of speech. But she combines this with this extraordinary ambition to tackle huge subjects. It’s that mix between the tiny and the specific that makes a play great.”
The audience should, she reckons, prepare for a punch line. “They’re monologues but they’re not,” says McIntyre. “They feed off each other and get tangled up and have a very dirty twist to them. [The play] requires my imagination and it requires the audience’s imagination. If you ask an audience to use their imagination they’ll do it and if you set everything out for them they’ll get bored.”
If McIntyre has a trade secret, it’s letting the actors get on with it. “The idea that you’re trying to create the entire thing yourself seems to me to take away from the skills of the actor. These people have incredible skills and techniques they’ve honed over many years. It works best when there’s a collective effort and collective energy. Also, when I turned professional, I still looked about 12 so bossing people about wouldn’t have suited me as a style.”
Pinching for My Soulis at the Focus Theatre, Dublin from June 29th
