Elizabeth Newman, the new Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, told David Hennessy why she is starting her tenure with the Brian Friel classic Dancing at Lughnasa as her directorial debut in the role.
Elizabeth Newman is the recently appointed Artistic Director at Sheffield Theatres and her very first production in the role is the Irish classic, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa.
Elizabeth joined Sheffield Theatres from Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where she had been Artistic Director since 2018.
Notable productions there included another Brian Friel classic Faith Healer, for which she won Best Director in The Critic’s Awards for Theatre in Scotland.
Elizabeth also helmed critically acclaimed productions of Footloose, Sunshine On Leith, Shirley Valentine and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
During her tenure the theatre was nominated for Best Theatre in the UK at The Stage Awards and established collaborations with theatre companies including the National Theatre of Scotland, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, HOME Manchester and Capital Theatres.
Prior to Pitlochry, Newman was Artistic Director of Octagon Theatre Bolton, Artistic Director of Shared Property Theatre Company and Acting Artistic Director of London’s Southwark Playhouse.
A multi-award-winning theatre director, Elizabeth has directed over one hundred theatre productions all over the UK.
Elizabeth has also written numerous adaptations for the stage, including nearly thirty for family audiences.
A champion of new writing, her work has been acknowledged by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
She was named Bolton’s Woman of the Year, UnLtd’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year, finalist for the Young Achiever of the Year Award for Arts, the Oguntê Make a Wave Award for Women of Social Leadership and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bolton.
She directs a largely Irish cast in this new production of Dancing at Lughnasa.
The story centres around the five Mundy sisters who, living together on the outskirts of Ballybeg in Donegal, are bound together by responsibilities and social expectations.
None of the sisters are married and Christina is an unmarried mother which adds to their isolation.
When influences from a wider, more modern world creep into their home, the sisters are swept along in a sea of change and suddenly the life they know is gone for good.
Martha Dunlea plays Christina, Rachel O’Connell plays Rose, Siobhán O’Kelly plays Margaret, Laura Pyper plays Agnes and Natalie Radmall- Quirke plays Kate.
Kwaku Fortune plays Michael, the narrator who is a child at the time the story takes place.
Frank Laverty plays Father Jack who has just returned home from the missions in Uganda and causing everyone to be concerned that he has ‘gone native’.
Marcus Rutherford plays Gerry, the mostly absent father to Christina’s son.
The play comes to Sheffield’s Crucible this weekend.
Elizabeth Newman took time out from rehearsals to chat to the Irish World.
How does it feel to be the new Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres?
“It’s great.
“It’s an absolutely brilliant organisation and amazing people and great city.
“It’s a privilege to be in service to Sheffield. It’s brilliant.
“It’s absolutely a city of artists and non-conformists so it suits me down to the ground.”
How are rehearsals going?
“Rehearsals are going brilliantly.
“They’re going really well.
“The company is great and brilliant people.
“A few of them have worked on Friels before.
“Frank, who’s playing Father Jack, has worked with Friel.
“It’s a great room full of great people and it’s a privilege to be making the play with them.
“It’s just the most extraordinary play.
“I’ve directed Faith Healer before.
“I loved that experience and in fact we toured it to the Highlands and islands, to some of the places that Frank even speaks about in the play.
“I had one of the most profound experiences of my life in the back of a van with those three actors going to these different places.
“I just think Brian Friel’s a genius really.
“I think he conjures a kind of magic spell almost on the audience and it’s interesting that Lughnasa is looking at the pagan versus the kind of organised religion, Catholicism, Christianity.
“I guess, for me what he is doing is a bit like a ritual with the audience.
“There is something about it that he makes these offerings to you and then you find yourself being transfixed and taken into this other world, so I think he’s a bit of a genius.”
The five sisters in the play are outsiders, aren’t they?
“They are but each of them has an extraordinary strength as well.
“They each have their own fragilities and their own strengths: Kate’s level of commitment and dedication to God, to what she believes is right and wrong.
“Maggie’s ability to care for people through humour and persistence and an unrelenting energy.
“Agnes’ deep sense of imagination and love for Rose.
“Rose’s abundance of inner joy and love.
“And then Chris who, bless her, is trying her best to get through her life in a time when the hand that she has been dealt is not an easy one.
“But this is what I love about the play, there is never any suggestion in the play that they don’t love Michael or they resent Michael.
“They love Michael.
“Each of the sisters loves him and cares for him.
“And when Father Jack says, ‘Oh, you have a love child’, he is a love child and all five of those women are loving him and caring for him and raising him.
“I just think it’s such a testament to Friel not doing the easy, convenient drama route of, ‘Oh, there’s resentment’.
“He’s not saying that.
“Confronted with Chris having a baby out of wedlock they all went, ‘Right, okay, we’re a family. We’re going to get through this. We’re going to stick our heads up, we’re going to love our Michael and we’re going to crack on’.
“And I think that’s such a important story to tell about women, and women’s ability to do that.
“Yeah, I love them.”
Father Jack comes home but the sisters are taken aback by how he has changed..
“Jack puts a fox amongst the old hens.
“Jack’s just arguing for to embrace other cultures, isn’t he?
“He’s just saying maybe the way that we were taught isn’t the only way.
“Maybe to embrace your surroundings and those around you and their ways and customs for what of a better word is a good thing.
“And he’s not really wrong, is he?
“And he sounds like he was pretty happy in Ryanga.
“But he’s deeply sad to be sent back, to lose his chosen family there, to not be in amongst the people that had become his family.
“He’s sad and he wants to go home.
“And Gerry is the wanderer who can’t settle, doesn’t know how to have a home.
“And Michael is carrying a guilt because he wanted to leave.
“When he’s the narrator, he shares with us that, as he grew up, he did want to go.
“When Rose and Agnes left in the middle of the night after whatever happened to Rose on the back hills and they lost their jobs knitting gloves the house was miserable and he wanted to go.
“Obviously it is based on his life so you can’t entirely separate Friel from Michael and the sisters from his aunts, and Michael’s carrying guilt for that.”
It was based on aunts of Friel’s who left home and died in poverty in London..
“They were called Rose and Agnes and they died, as it is written in the play.
“He did have an aunt called Kate who was absolutely as written.
“They are his aunts which is why it’s dedicated to the ‘brave five Glenties’.”
Although there is a palpable tragedy, there is also so much joy in the play..
“There is, there’s so much joy, so much humour.
“It’s very funny but then family dramas are full of that. “They’re laugh, laugh, cry, aren’t they?”
Jack being a priest saves the sisters in a way, doesn’t it?
“They were given massive, massive get out and that’s why it’s so panicking when he comes back and he’s strange and his brain’s been affected and he doesn’t want to do mass, because it’s like he was their protection and now their protection is gone.
“The ‘Father’ thing is the key thing, because he did join the priesthood, because he did go away and do that, because they did cover him helping the lepers in the Donegal Inquirer, that assisted them to get through Chris and Michael and not being married to Gerry.
“It’s a great play.”
For you to have chosen this as your first play as the new AD, it obviously speaks to you very deeply..
“It does.
“And it’s because I wanted to begin with a great play, which it is, by a great writer, which he is, with a drama that has the resonance of what happens to us every day.
“It’s a family drama but within that, it’s also talking about the big things in life, does God exist? What is love? What is duty? Family? Generational pain? Politics?
“It has a real sense of what it means to be connected to one another through time.
“And what is memory and the reliability of memory?
“And I guess for me the other thing as well, the reason why it resonates so profoundly with me personally is for me to dance has such an important place in my life.
“I wasn’t very well when I was younger and before being not very well I was a dancer at the Royal Academy, then I became very ill and I couldn’t dance anymore.
“That feeling of that desire to move and to dance, to express yourself in that way really speaks to me on quite a profound level and for me, the not being able to dance, the not being able to go to the dance, is a metaphor for not being free and not being able to live the life that you want to live.
“What Friel expresses is that that’s because of circumstance, it’s because of external pressure put onto us but also that we choose that for ourselves as well.
“So it sort of became the play that I had to do first.
“It wasn’t really a choice.
“It was like, ‘Well, I have to do it’.
“I thought about doing a new play because it felt very important to do something for the Crucible but Brian Friel went to the (Tyrone) Guthrie and was the observer there and he credits it with the moment that he sort of moved into becoming a dramatist.
“The Guthrie architects are the same architects that built the Crucible so I feel like he learned to be the playwright that he is by being in that space at the Guthrie and for me, that makes it spiritually connected to here and the Crucible.”
So it is coming full circle in that way?
“Yeah. Because it was after being at the Guthrie that he wrote Philadelphia, Here I Come and for me, that was the turning point where he moved into being the dramatist.”
You just mentioned Philadelphia, Here I Come but what was the first Brian Friel play you saw? Have you seen previous versions of Dancing at Lughnasa even?
“I’ve never seen Dancing at Lughnasa before.”
Have you not?
“No, and I think that gives me a real gift because I don’t have any influence other than him.
“All I have is him and the page and for me, that’s my happy place.
“I just want to be with the writer.
“I’m not an auteur myself, I’m in service to the writer and the actor so I don’t really want to have an image in my mind of what someone else did really.
“The first Friel that I saw was Translations.
“And also interestingly, the first Friel that I read was a couple of his Chekhovs.
“In Friel’s Chekhovs, there is as much Friel as there is Chekhov.
“He’s not done a total translation, he really has done ‘a play of..’”
Although it’s more than 35 years and set in Ireland’s past, this is a play that remains fresh, isn’t it?
“It is totally relevant now.
“It’s a family drama. Family never runs out, does it? Grief, loss, pain.
“These are all the things that unite us throughout our generations.
“And actually because it opened in 1990 but it’s set in the early 60s and in the mid 30s, because obviously Michael’s looking back, he was writing about the past so it sort of doesn’t age in the way that I think other plays can.
“Some of the plays that I remember seeing in the early noughties I recently reread.
“My partner said, because he didn’t work in theatre, ‘Oh, give me a couple of plays to read’.
“I won’t name the play that I gave him but I gave him a play from the early noughties and he was like, ‘What a load of crap’.
“He said, ‘That’s just a terrible play’.
“And I gave him Waiting for Godot, he had never heard of it and he was like, ‘That is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever read. Is that a really famous play? Do people really like that play?’
“And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s a go to, I’d say’.
“But I think that tells you something.
“Those great plays by those great playwrights, they didn’t write them to be Zeitgeist or in fashion or en vogue or whatever the term is, they just wrote a great drama and it’s not about a great story, it’s about a great drama.
“That’s why I say Friel’s a dramatist and that’s why it doesn’t age.”
The funny thing is some didn’t appreciate Waiting for Godot when it was first staged but I bet that noughties play you were just talking about was very well received at the time..
“It went down a storm.
“It was like Zeitgeist-y.
“Everyone was like, ‘This is speaking to our generation’.
“And actually it was a load of plot and quite a lot of expletives which was fine for the time but it stays in that moment but the likes of Beckett, Friel, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, they will transcend their own generation and it’s a great privilege to be in rooms working on plays by those playwrights.”
What other Irish playwrights speak to you?
“I could list out everything that an A level student would probably write but I’m also really interested in new Irish plays.
“Alongside Lughnasa, we’re producing the premiere of Karis Kelly’s debut play Consumed (a play that was featured in the Irish World not so long ago): Set now-ish actually looking again at four generations of an Irish family.
“That really interests me, the new.
“And that’s sitting alongside the established playwrights so as well as my A level list, I also like sort of looking around in who’s about now and making sure we are giving those opportunities to those playwrights as well.”
Another play that I see is on the programme is Suzy Crothers’s Troubled, a one woman play looking back on Northern Ireland’s troubles..
“Yes, that’s right.
“I think there’s no denying that theatres are flooded with Irish plays because Irish dramatists are extraordinary and speak to the very heart of politics and what I would call the human heart.
“They judge that balance brilliantly and they do it through characters that you care about and you believe in.”
Dancing at Lughnasa is at the Crucible, Sheffield Saturday 13 September- 4 October and then at Royal Exchange, Manchester 10 October- 8 November.
