Here’s a picture book that triumphantly exceeds the narrow bounds of the coffee-table genre. At £50 it’s hardly an impulse buy, but the photographs, covering Michael Grandage’s ten years in charge of the Donmar Warehouse, are sumptuously reproduced. And Grandage’s text is a revelation. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the mentality of a man who has established himself as London’s leading creator of Mercedes-class theatre. And it’s crammed with juicy gossip too.
Every Grandage production is rooted in two disciplines: performance and design. He aims to create a ‘forensic, beat-by-beat examination of a play’. The qualities he most prizes in performers are ‘honesty and depth’, and the ability to transmit ‘multiple thoughts in a single line or a single look’. He seems to relish actors with a volatile streak as well. One of his earliest Donmar productions, Caligula by Albert Camus, starred Michael Sheen as the psychotic Roman tyrant. While rehearsing with Peter Gayle, who was playing a court poet, Sheen suddenly ‘leapt high into the air across a table and wrestled him to the ground in a frenzied attack’.
An outstanding example of superior design was the 2009 production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Rachel Weisz. Grandage praises the show’s style in unusual terms. It was ‘so assured in its execution and so breathtaking in its visual identity that it was barely commented on’. But of course. The final goal of design is not to look designed, and to disappear into the subject matter. ‘The audience watched the play as if for the first time, voyeuristically witnessing the sexual heat immediately in front of them.’
Grandage is big enough to admit his failures. Madame de Sade, an impenetrable French whiplash drama written by the Japanese suicidalist, Yukio Mishima, was greeted with indifference by the critics.
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