London Evening Standard Theatre Awards: A director steps into the spotlight

Simon Godwin’s knack for bringing hot-button issues to life on stage earned him the Burberry Award for Emerging Director at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. He likes to keep it personal, he tells Nick Curtis
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28 November 2012

As we part outside the Royal Court bar, Simon Godwin is suddenly overcome with anxiety. Did he thank all the right people for giving him the first ever Burberry Award for Emerging Director at Sunday’s ceremony? Of course he did. Godwin, 35, is as impeccably mannered and solicitous as a prefect on open day: I suspect he grew his beard to make himself look older.

He is associate director to Tom Morris at Bristol Old Vic and to Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court, where over the past 18 months he has directed Anya Reiss’s The Acid Test, Luke Norris’s Goodbye to All That, Vivienne Franzmann’s The Witness, and the theatre’s just-closed hit, Lucy Kirkwood’s NSFW.

The award, he says, “feels like a really thrilling recognition of the year that I have had, and a really strong, encouraging gesture to suggest that I keep going. My plan is to keep emerging as long as possible: that feels easier than having actually emerged”.

As if to set the seal on his emergence, NSFW was his first play on the Court’s main stage, and typically timely. It followed the progress of innocent intern Sam (Sacha Dhawan) from a lads’ mag, where the cover girl he chose turns out to be just 14, to a women’s magazine where objectification and misogyny turns out to be just as much part of the job. The play seemed to hit all sorts of contemporary hot-button issues, from the Leveson Inquiry to the Jimmy Savile scandal.

“The plays here are like lightning conductors,” says Godwin, “and they catch it from many different angles. The more flashes that coincide in one play, the more rich and exciting and effective that play can be.” As someone who utterly immerses himself in his work and always looks for a personal dimension to the plays he directs, Godwin was also interested in the blurring between public and private lives: the “intimate” nude shots sent by girls or their boyfriends to magazines for a readership of strangers; the journalists who strip-mine their private lives for copy.

All the new plays Godwin has directed at the Court have, arguably, turned on questions of identity and the dynamics of relationships between family members and friends. At Bristol, he’s done mostly modern classics — Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Friel’s Faith Healer and Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. Does he see a through-line in his work? “As a director, the challenge is to evolve a style, yet one which is not going to restrict you,” he says. “At the Court, your job is overwhelmingly to deliver a transparent account of the play. Because it is the first production, if it is eccentric or overloaded with egotism, you are already off to a bad start.”

His Bristol productions, he observes, all feature characters trying to fill a void in their lives with fictions, with the idea of the sacred, or with memories. Working on such plays gave him “tools to bring over and share with the writers here who are much more at the beginning of their writing lives”. He also mentions the level of warmth in the Court plays, between the drunken girls of The Acid Test, the war photographer and his adopted African daughter in The Witness, and a boy and his unfaithful grandfather in Goodbye to All That. “I suppose my main job is to unpack emotional nuance, and to find a lack of pretentiousness, a joy in storytelling,” he concludes. “I hope [my productions] are clear, I hope they are lively, and that they are not frightened to let the plays speak for themselves — which is not a get-out clause but a conscious decision.”

Like a fair number of his contemporaries working today, Godwin got into directing at Cambridge, but his route was not exactly a direct or easy one. One of four artistically minded children of a teacher mother and a “maverick publisher” father who ended up establishing a literary agency together, Godwin grew up in St Albans, and thought “books were free” because his father got them on expenses at the local bookshop.

Inspired by Grange Hill to be an actor, he applied and eventually got into the Anna Scher acting school in Islington, which was “terrifying, all these people were so fashionable and trendy, and I was not at all”. A subsequent career as a child actor in Five Children and It was huge fun but even then he was aware he lacked range. He buttonholed Peter Brook at a lecture, “and he said, my advice to you is not to take advice from people like me”. At Cambridge, when a friend nominated him to direct a freshers’ play, he realised the director got to play all the parts, lead the group on a journey, yet didn’t need to learn lines.

After graduating he directed professionally on the fringe (including at Battersea Arts Centre, then run by Tom Morris) and in the regions. This culminated in a stint with Rupert Goold at the Royal and Derngate in Northampton, where Godwin gave Rory Kinnear his stage debut in a production of The Seagull, which Dominic Cooke came to see. Then came a crisis of confidence: Godwin felt his approach was too intellectual, and out of touch with the physical business of acting, and disappeared to spend two years at LISPA, a Lecoq-influenced performance school.

He persevered with the classes in mime and clowning, “things I was actually not good at”, then spent a disastrous-sounding further year trying to make directorless theatre with a collective in the middle of nowhere, “which was very stressful”. These experiences crystallised his ambitions, though, and gave him more rounded skills to take back to directing: “Dominic and Tom were very important in remembering the work I had created before and giving me opportunities when I returned.” They’re an ideal pair of colleagues, Cooke governed by “rigour, intensity and modesty” and Morris by “spectacle … the grand gesture”.

Godwin says he likes “belonging” to a theatre rather than being purely freelance, and would one day like to run one. His next project is a “piercing” new play by Anders Lustgarten about the Occupy movement, which he will direct in a production without décor on the Court’s main stage. He is already deep into research on the history of the theatre’s Brechtian traditions that will inform it.

And yes, this means that the work-life balance he mentioned around NSFW is once again out of whack. “I wrestle with it a lot, and it does take a lot of sacrifices,” he says. “I don’t have a family and I am sometimes really impressed with directors who do. My aim over the next 10 years is to have a family, because I would like to, and find a way of getting all these things juggling, and not make it about work or nothing.”

The London Evening Standard 58th Theatre Awards were presented in association with Burberry. Go to standard.co.uk/theatreawards for a full list of winners and a video of Sunday’s ceremony at The Savoy.

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