They were too expensive, and nobody could afford them.”While securing a more flexible presence in London is the RSC’s key priority, there are other thorny aspects to its negotiations.When the 40-year-old company moves out of the Barbican, theoretically it will be making some 80 technical staff redundant. But the RSC argues that the venue is obliged to re-employ at least 35 of them under TUPE (Transfer of Undertakings in Public Employment) legislation, and is threatening to take the issue to the High Court unless it accepts this.An RSC spokesman said the company had always intended to return to the Barbican for regular seasons, and denied it was backtracking in the face of obstacles to its efforts to find new London venues. He said: “We are not babes in the wood.”A Barbican spokeswoman declined to comment on the current negotiations.. If there’s one subject the theatre loves to tackle, it’s the theatre. But where current West End hits like Star Quality, Noises Off and Kiss Me Kate deliriously play up theatrical glitz, bitching and incompetence, a new play at the Royal Court evokes the passionate commitment that first made the Court’s work famous. And it puts onstage, for perhaps the first time, a largely invisible theatre job, first invented at the Court: the assistant director.
It charts the intense, unlikely relationship that John, a budding director in the Royal Court mould, strikes up with an amateur actor. John has travelled from London to be the assistant director on a production of the Mystery Plays in York; when George, a farmhand and one of the cast, drops out, John determines to bring him back. He has realised that George has boundless natural talent – he is, as Gill puts it, “not a fake.” And John wants his director to have the best.But when a boy in the play asks, “what’s the assistant director do, like?” the only clear answer he gets is “Chase our George up”. Which says a lot about the contradictions of this strange, slightly artificial job, which has become an almost compulsory step on the path to directorial glory. It can involve everything from researching historical background to rehearsing the understudies – or sitting quietly in the corner getting bored.It was created in the late Fifties by the Court’s pedagogical godfather George Devine, as an apprenticeship for young directorial talent.
Gill’s long, successful career as a director and writer began, in 1964, when he became an assistant at the Court – and he remains rooted in the rigorous, pared-down approach he absorbed there “We were given a lot of responsibility,” he says. “We were expected to have views.”Gill has worked with assistants on most of his own productions since, and relishes having someone to share problems with. His assistant director on The York Realist, Josie Rourke, says he has involved her in everything from casting to finding his pen However, Gill and Rourke clearly click. If the relationship doesn’t work, sitting watching someone else do the job you covet can be unbearable.
John Caird, currently transferring his National Theatre production of Humble Boy into the West End, says it’s vital that assistants are actively involved in discussions. “Otherwise,” he warns, “they just sit there nursing a sort of parallel production in their mind.”Not all directors start as assistants – some act first, like the outgoing co-director of the Almeida, Jonathan Kent, and Michael Grandage, Sam Mendes’ heir apparent at the Donmar Warehouse Mendes’ own rise is legendary. Having assisted at Chichester Festival Theatre in 1988, he was made Artistic Director of its studio theatre the following year. But when a director dropped out of a main house show, Mendes took over in style, and his production of the aptly named London Assurance transferred to the West End.Few rise at this speed, and no theatre provides the support the Court gave its early assistants, retaining them through the years it took to make their names. The nearest equivalent today is the one-year bursaries that the Arts Council and various television companies give a few people annually.
