02 Aug A Sense of Direction – Blanche McIntyre

Born in London in 1980, Blanche McIntyre fell in love with theatre as a teenager after seeing a Katie Mitchell production of Henry IV Part III at the Royal Shakespeare Company – “I know that sounds insanely geeky, but I found it electrically exciting,” she laughs – then started staging shows herself as a student at the University of Oxford.

Her first professional production was an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita at Greenwich Playhouse in 2004, but it was her award-winning stagings of Emlyn Williams’ Accolade and Dawn King’s Foxfinder at the Finborough Theatre seven years later that established her as an innovative, interrogatory director of classics and new plays alike. In recent years, she has worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe, where her next production – a bilingual version of Antony and Cleopatra incorporating British Sign Language – opens in early August.

How did you become a director?

After seeing that Katie Mitchell production in Stratford, I felt like I had been plugged into the mains. I thought at first that I wanted to be a historian specialising in the Wars of the Roses, but that didn’t fill me with much excitement. After a year, I thought I’d put on a medieval play of my own. I got a group of students my age together and said: ‘We’re going to do Everyman.’ Someone said: ‘Who is the director?’ I said: ‘I don’t know what a director is.’ They said: ‘Well, there has to be one. It was your idea. You do it.’

That was that. I continued directing shows through school and through university. It made sense. I had no acting talent whatsoever but a powerful desire to be part of that experience of creating a world on stage. After I graduated, I thought I’d give it a go professionally for a few years before I went and got a proper job. And I’m still going. I would say I have a slightly better understanding of how the theatre industry works now, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that I know what I am doing.

Who or what was the biggest help along the way?

I’ve got three answers to that. Rob Forknall runs Changeling Theatre, which tours Shakespeare around Kent in the summer. He took me on as an assistant director and educated me enormously. I was also insanely lucky that I got a Leverhulme Bursary, which covered a six-month period at the National Theatre Studio and a show at the Finborough Theatre. That led to Accolade and Foxfinder, which were my big breaks.

What work are you most proud of?

There’s too many to name, sorry. All I would say is that it is not always the shows that get the best reviews. Sometimes, you are most proud of the jobs that do not come off exactly as you thought they might, but that teach you so much along the way.

What work are you least proud of?

There have been a handful of times where I knew when I took the job that the script was not that good. I used to wonder why I was feeling so depressed in rehearsals, why I would walk into the room with this sinking feeling in my stomach. After a while, I realised that it was because I was lying to everybody. As a director, you have to have faith in the project, otherwise you are lying, and that feels awful.

Is there a show that you really want to stage?

There are about a thousand. What I would say, though, is that the shows I have loved most in my life have not been the ones that were on my bucket list. I did a production of The Seagull with Headlong that I adored, but I had never even considered Chekhov. It is often the shows that sneak up on you from behind that mean the most.

What is your financial situation?

Freelancing is a struggle. I did not get a paid job until I was 32. Even in 2023, I suddenly found myself without work for a year and without any kind of income. I really had to scrabble to find work to fall back on. I just about managed. My finances are precarious. I don’t have a pension. Perhaps precarity is the cost of the vocational job, though.

What do you enjoy most about directing?

There are three bits. I love it when you are reading a script and the ideas start to form in your mind. I love it when everybody comes together and brings their own ideas and the world starts to become three-dimensional. And then I love it when everybody is in costume, the lights are on, the audience are there, and the whole thing comes to life.

What are your frustrations with directing?

The hardest thing is learning how to communicate with actors. All actors think differently because of their history, their personality, their mood. A certain word will mean different things to different actors. You have to learn how they think. That takes time. Sometimes I get frustrated as I don’t get to that point as quickly as I would like to.

What fills you with dread about the future of theatre?

Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have really hurt the theatre industry and I think we are still in a precarious situation. Audiences could no longer afford to come. I worry about how we can continue to make theatre accessible in those circumstances.

What gives you hope for the future of theatre?

Lisa Nandy’s first speech as culture secretary gave me hope. It was brilliant, because she talked about theatre being something that should be available to everybody. It felt like, for the first time in a while, we had a culture secretary and a government that valued the arts. Hopefully they will put some money where their mouth is.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am directing Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare’s Globe. All of the Egyptians are actors whose first language is BSL and all the Romans use English as their first language. It is a hugely exciting and fruitful way into the play because it makes it all about communication, plus it gives some lovely parts to some superb deaf actors. Daryl Jackson is our BSL consultant and Charlotte Arrowsmith is our associate director. It is an inspiring experience. I am right at the frontiers of my theatrical understanding.

I am also going to be directing Tom Stoppard’s The Invention Of Love with Simon Russell Beale at the Hampstead Theatre soon. I actually directed it once before at university, badly, and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe, badly. Now I get to do it again for real.

Written by: Fergus Morgan, SDUK’s resident blogger.