23 Aug A Sense of Direction – Emma Callander

Emma Callander is the director of one of the hit shows at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe: Julia Grogan’s Playfight, a compelling three-hander about adolescent female sexuality that is running in the Paines Plough Roundabout at Summerhall all August. It is a co-production from Grace Dickson Productions and Theatre Uncut, the company Callander helped found in 2011, and which she has been artistic director of since 2021.

Directing shows with Theatre Uncut is just one part of Callander’s career, though. The Somerset-based director also stages shows as a freelancer, teaches at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and Guildhall, and works in outreach for Arcadia Spectacular, a Bristol-based company that builds bold, sculptural stages for arts festivals around the world.

How did you become a director?

I grew up in Bristol. The first show I directed was Into The Woods, which I did at Cotham Grammar School with Hector Harkness, who is now an associate director of Punchdrunk. I was dead set on being an actor at first, though. I went to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and worked as an actor for about seven years.

I wrote and performed a one-woman show about Gertrude Stein at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2003. It ended up transferring to London. After that, I joined a Polish Theatre Company, and it was through making work with them that I realised I wanted to direct.

Who or what was the biggest help along the way?

I loved Daniel Kramer’s production of Angels In America, so I set my sights on him. He took me under his wing and I was his assistant for a while. Then I did the Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme with the National Theatre of Scotland. John Tiffany was an inspiration. David MacLennan at A Play, A Pie, and A Pint and Orla O’Loughlin at the Traverse Theatre, where I was an associate director, taught me so much, too.

What work are you most proud of?

B!RTH Festival at the Manchester Royal Exchange in 2016. It was this big project where we commissioned seven playwrights from all over the world to write about birth practice, then brought all their plays together into a wildly ambitious festival with talks and debates and galleries. That felt like a particularly important moment in my career.

What work are you least proud of?

There are a few shows that I did early in my career when my heart wasn’t really in them. They did fine, but I didn’t really enjoy the process. I realised that your time on this earth is so precious and you should not fritter away your career doing things you don’t want to do. Now, I don’t actually direct very often, but when I do, I really believe in the work.

More recently, I was involved in developing a play for quite a while, but when we got close to production, there was this realisation that the playwright and me were not on the same track at all. It was quite upsetting. There had been so much chaos in my life and I had not been honest about how much it was impacting my work. If I had been, I probably would have had time to do more prep and have more conversations with the playwright, and we might have realised that I was not the right person to direct the play sooner. It is so important to be honest with yourself about your capacity.

Is there a show that you really want to stage?

No. I love new plays. I love collaborating with playwrights. I always want to be the first person to pick a play apart and put it back together again on stage.

What is your financial situation?

I am privileged in many ways, but not financially. My partner and I have carved out a life in the middle of nowhere in Somerset that involves very few bills and overheads. My partner has a flexible job, too, which makes parenting a lot easier. My income is roughly a third professional directing, a third working in drama schools, and a third working for Arcadia Spectacular. As a director, unless you have a huge hit that brings in a lot of royalties or you get a job in a building, you cannot make a living just through directing.

What do you enjoy most about directing?

The collaboration with playwrights. I love working with writers, digging down into their work, figuring out what story they want to tell and how best to tell it, and helping them crystallize that. If I could assist one director now, it would be James McDonald. I am never going to be an auteur like Jamie Lloyd or Emma Rice. It is directors that honour playwrights like James MacDonald and Vicky Featherstone that are my guiding stars.

What are your frustrations with directing?

The constant stress of the job, which fundamentally comes down to money.

What fills you with dread about the future of theatre?

The fact that theatre is not valued in the way that it should be. We have been forced to scrabble around for scraps of funding, and it is just crap and awful. The arts should be respected by the government, and with that respect should come financial investment.

What give you hope for the future of theatre?

Well, we have a government now that is at least making all the right noises about the arts, so I am hopeful that they will do something to back that up. And I am hopefully about all the incredible, exciting artists that are just starting their careers.

What are you working on at the moment?

Playfight is running in the Paines Plough Roundabout at Summerhall for the rest of the Edinburgh Fringe. It is Julia Grogan’s debut play, although people might already know her from Gunter, the show she made with the theatre company Dirty Hare last year.

It is basically three teenagers, standing underneath a tree, talking about sex, but it is also a brutal, heartbreaking, funny, honest account of growing up as a girl. It has been going well so far. We have been getting full houses and standing ovations every night.

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