sans straitjacket

Backstage: Donnellan brings 'Three Sisters,' 'Twelfth Night' to Kennedy Center

By Jane Horwitz
Wednesday, October 13, 2010; C02


Many directors start rehearsals of the play they're about to stage with an interpretation in mind. The actors sit around a table and do a first read-through, and often the designers present models and sketches of sets and costumes already conceived.


Many directors may work that way, but Declan Donnellan emphatically does not. Nearly 30 years ago, he co-founded the celebrated Cheek by Jowl theater troupe in London with his partner, designer Nick Ormerod. They developed a different way of working, one they also draw upon when they undertake projects abroad in French and Russian.


Donnellan is president of the Russia-based Chekhov International Theatre Festival Foundation. His stagings for the festival (with Ormerod's designs) of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" (Oct. 19, 20) and Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" (Oct. 22, 23) are about to land at the Kennedy Center ever so briefly. The Moscow-based cast will perform in Russian with English surtitles.

When he starts rehearsals, Donnellan explains by phone from London, "we put absolutely nothing in front of [the actors]. . . . Everything slowly arises from the rehearsal period," including Ormerod's designs. There is much improvisation early on with the Russian performers, and exercises that Donnellan calls "etudes," as the actors dig into their characters.


"We work in such a way that we tailor the play to the actors we have," Donnellan says. "We try not to straitjacket what we're doing into a concept that's preconceived." The actors "sort of invent things, and then I ask them to do things in very different ways . . . and bit by bit, how we do it emerges. . . . We always do that, before we begin the rehearsal period, to see what's alive."
Donnellan remembers that when he staged "Sweeney Todd" at the Royal National Theatre in London, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim asked him when he would "freeze" the show -- a common term for when the tinkering stops. Donnellan jokes that he "wasn't properly brought up," and was unfamiliar with the concept.


"The two plays that are coming [to Washington], 'Twelfth Night' and 'Three Sisters,' are very, very unfrozen. So they do vary, minutely, from night to night. . . . Some things must be the same every night, and some things must be different. . . . It's a balance."

When he works with Russian actors, he says, he has an interpreter by his side, but language seems to matter less and less. "The linguistics are just a tiny percentage of communication, and I communicate with my Russian actors probably better than I communicate with anybody else. . . . One of the things a director has to do is to be able to say to the actor when he thinks they're lying, you know. And, actually, you can tell that very easily."