Top drama at bargain prices

Lloyd Evans talks to the Donmar’s artistic director Michael Grandage about his Wyndham’s venture

It might so easily have gone wrong for Michael Grandage. In 2002 he was appointed to succeed Sam Mendes as boss of the Donmar Warehouse. Mendes would be a hard act for anyone to follow, let alone a director with just seven years’ experience behind him. But if anything Grandage has outshone his luminous pre-decessor, winning acclaim for heavyweight revivals like Schiller’s Don Carlos and taking the Donmar’s reputation overseas with Frost/Nixon, which transferred to Broadway, and his acclaimed version of Guys and Dolls, which had a successful run in Melbourne. His new venture, a year-long residency at the Wyndham’s theatre, is a conscious effort ‘to inject the straight play, straight drama, into the centre of the West End’.

Grandage is 46, the age when men start to look either like crumbling youths or youthful crumblies. He turns out to be neither.