Writing “Directing the Decades”
“..a brutally honest working-class manifesto which is as tumultuous and bohemian as any theatrical memoir you might have ever read..” George Rodosthenous, University of Leeds, UK
By February 2014 when I walked out of RADA, I had been there, leading the MA courses, for ten years. I was proud of having been the first leader of their new diploma in Directing (I later succeeded in having it converted into an MA) and of founding their only Acting MA, Theatre Lab. But for my final two or three years I had been at odds with the management and especially with the Principal.
Before me lay a vista of re-engaging with the world, particularly the free-lance world, at a late stage in my working life. Through 2014 I travelled, mainly for work, Taipei University and four fascinating months running workshops for businesspeople in Chile. I disliked the workshops but loved Chile and the rest of South America that I was able to explore.
Somewhere along the way the idea of writing a book had filtered through both the disappointment and the joy of leaving RADA. I had been approached by Bloomsbury to write a book on directing for their RADA series, but I managed to persuade the editor to allow me to write a book of my own about directing and my life in it, so that’s what I set about doing.
It took six years, and a change of publisher, for the project to be finished - lockdown was a godsend. It was when I started to review it that I realised how much of my working life had been impacted by my working class roots. The reviewer I quote from above was one of the many who immediately seized upon this. It makes sense, it revealed that my career had been punctuated by battles with creatures from another planet - mainly middle class, middle aged white men.
There was a clear pattern, especially when I was younger, of interview boards being charmed, even attracted, or inspired by me, and then some time later, me finding myself engaged in a battle for my life, or at least my job, with those same people. Had I sold them a fraudulent product - I don’t think so. What charmed them was my passion for theatre, my beliefs about how work should be made and what it should be, and possibly my scorn for “commercial” theatre or television. But perhaps they also believed it was an “act”, a veneer that could be scrapped off to reveal someone desperate to be part of a world that basically they did not want to change. It happens, we can be “persuaded” or bullied into accepting their comfortable “norms”. Yes, I was ambitious, I did want national or international recognition, I wanted “fame” or at least acknowledgement. But I also couldn’t let go of being true to the world I came from and the stories that made me need to tell. It was a need not a pose and despite outside pressure, I had to be true to my roots.
Since the terrible deaths of George Floyd and Sarah Everard we’ve had a renewed and hopefully more effective call for change, for real equality and proper representation. People working in theatre and media are trying hard to respond to these calls, but the major obstacle is a view of the world that sees the English middle-class view of the world as the norm and every other view as “other”, including the experience that comes from growing up working class in this country. There is no innate sense of entitlement, there are no wealthy relatives to fund unemployment or to “invest” in productions, there is no sense of a “career-path” leading upwards, rather often a sense that one should be grateful for work, any work. There is no “cool”, and no knowledge of the importance of “networking”, mum and dad know their next door neighbours, not the producer of the latest west-end hit.
Those are the negatives, but I want to leave you with the positives. There is access to anger and political consciousness and there is the ability to overcome low self-esteem with the ability to fight your corner. There is a knowledge of the world that no middle-class person can have because it’s grown into you as you grow up. It makes you clear-eyed, it forces you to observe and to understand and it makes you more able to read their world than they yours. I always feel it’s better to have a working-class actor playing a character from the upper classes than vice versa because middleclass people can rarely feel what it is to live without any privilege, not truly, not within their beings. And perhaps most importantly, you have most reason to want to change the world through your work, and we are living in a time when there is no doubt that the world needs to change.
Directing the Decades by Sue Dunderdale is published by Routledge
