theartsdesk Q&A: Director Mike Leigh

There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of clandestine development in the now time-honoured fashion. Nothing and everything changes in the work of Mike Leigh (b 1943). However, consumers of his vast oeuvre stretching back to the 1960s will this year have had the chance to do something extremely rare: see a pair of works by Leigh in the theatre.

Ecstasy opened at Hampstead Theatre in 1979 and returned there to great acclaim earlier this year before migrating to the West End. Now Grief is coming to the National Theatre (pictured below, David Horovitch and Sam Kelly. Photo by Charlotte MacMillan), where he last worked on Two Thousand Years, an examination of the warping impact of religious fundamentalism on a North London Jewish family. He is so closely associated in the public perception with his work for television and latterly film that there will be many who are less aware of how deeply his roots are embedded in theatre. He trained as an actor at RADA and in the 1960s went on to work as an assistant director at the RSC. Indeed Ecstasy, which prefigures the sexual nihilism of Naked and the portrait of searing loneliness in Another Year, also owed a great deal to Leigh’s early enthusiasm for Pinter and Beckett.

Leigh’s hangdog expression is familiar from many an awards ceremony in London and Los Angeles. It is offset by a disposition almost as bouncy as Sally Hawkins’ in Happy-Go-Lucky. He next comes before judging panels and cinema audiences with a project he is not planning to shoot until 2013. Its ambitious subject is JMW Turner. But on this occasion he talks to theartsdesk as much about theatre as film.

JASPER REES: I’m wary of asking about the Leigh method, but for your play at the National will you and all of the cast and sit in a room and say, “So what’s this play all about?”

MIKE LEIGH: Never. That never happens. We have a meet and greet and that will involve the cast and absolutely anybody in the building at the National who’s got anything to do with it. But I start to work individually with each actor separately to create a character gradually and the characters come together and all that.

How do the time parameters vary?

It’s always defined by what is available or affordable. So that the length of rehearsal time before we shoot a film is defined by the budget or by the decision to have more actors and less time or less actors and more time. At the National as with Two Thousand Years exactly the same formula repeats. Nick Hytner said, “Have three six-week rehearsal slots.” That’s 18 weeks. Actually that’s less time than for a film, because in 18 weeks one has to deliver a completely finished play that’s up and running all its details, whereas on film we can rehearse for six months and then go on location and make the whole thing up. But it’s all about cutting your cloth and all of that. In fact I know Abigail’s Party had a 10-week rehearsal.

I have a regular tendency to deliver something different from that which went before

What in that first meeting gets talked about?

Nothing to do with the play. There’ll be no talk of the play because the play doesn’t exist. It’ll be an “aren’t we all lovely” discussion. It is about embarking on a journey with actor and designer and others to discover a play. And one of the elements that makes it all happen, work, is that the actors never know anything about anything except what their characters know so that they can explore relationships and all that.