CityLife

Justin Moorhouse’s return heralds exciting times for Royal Exchange

Justin Moorhouse

One of the highlights of last year at the Royal Exchange was Toby Frow directing Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – and their Autumn/Winter season kicks off on September 7 with another Marlowe classic directed by Toby, this time the epic state of the nation tale Edward II.

“I think we were all very impressed and excited by Toby’s debut at the Royal Exchange with Faustus,” says artistic director Greg Hersov. “It was a really intelligent, vivid and exciting piece of theatre that made a great play accessible and relevant. Toby really wanted to have a go at Edward II and was very clear about why he was interested in it. So we thought, ‘okay, it’s a great play, so let’s do it!’

“I’m deep into As You Like it at the moment and there are a couple of hidden references to Marlowe in there because you know that Marlowe was the writer Shakespeare really did think of as his competition. It’s a very exciting play but it’s got that amazing Marlowe language and it’s very open to how the director and the creative team put it together. So I’m sure it will be a piece of exciting and epic theatre.”

It runs until October 8 and is followed, from October 12, by Good, set in Thirties Germany. Professor Halder is struggling with an elderly mother and a needy wife as he finds himself increasingly caught up in the Nazi propaganda machine. C. P. Taylor’s modern classic explores how personal morality can be twisted, and drawn to a diabolical cause. Polly Findlay makes her debut as a director with this production but, as Greg points out, “she’s known to Royal Exchange audiences as an actor from Sarah Frankcom’s production of The Three Sisters. But she’s directed a lot of really interesting stuff over the last few years and, in fact, she’s making her debut at the National Theatre just before she comes to us.

“Good was Polly’s idea and immediately I thought it was interesting because it’s the sort of play we haven’t done really. It’s a very powerful play and an interesting story about what happens to reasonably good people in the face of a totalitarian experience.

“But the other fascinating thing is that the character imagines his life done to music so it’s got this great theatrical language to it, with live music.

That combination of theatricality with the ideas it explores is a very powerful combination, like ‘Cabaret meets 1984’, you could say”. Good runs until November 5.

Then artistic director Sarah Frankcom, whose recent successes include Punk Rock and Winterlong, returns with Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing (November 9-December 3).

“Sarah saw the very first production of the play and since then, of course, it’s one of those plays that’s been all around the world,” says Greg. “I just think it is what it says it is, ‘a beautiful thing’. It’s a lovely play and it’s a good time to revive it, which I think Jonathan is very excited about.
 
“To me, it’s absolutely connected to A Taste Of Honey, it’s got that kind of originality and joie-de-vivre about it. It’s very funny and touching but also eloquent about important things.”

It’s a very appropriate slot for that particular play, just before Christmas, believes Greg, although their actual Christmas production this year (December 7-January 14, 2012) will be a revival of the 1930’s Broadway hit You Can’t Take It With You. Directed by Paul Hunter, it’s a collaboration with Told By An Idiot.

“They’ve been to our Studio many times and we’ve been talking to them for some time about the right kind of project to work in together,” Greg reveals. “They said, we want to do something with fantastic text but that we can really do something with.

“So they suggested You Can’t Take It With You, which I thought was an absolutely brilliant idea, doing this Thirties screwball anarchic classic by Kaufman and Hart, who are like The Bible for the whole of American comedy.”

Comedian and actor Justin Moorhouse returns to the Royal Exchange, after triumphing last year in Zak, to star in Jim Cartwright’s two-hander Two, from January 18-February 25 and Greg will be directing.

“I really wanted to work with Justin again,” he says. “Zak was a really impressive stage debut, it was a great success, and Justin’s such a great bloke that I started thinking about something else we could do straightaway.

“I think it’ll be great for Justin because part of the thing about being such a good stand up is observational powers.

“There’s also something about Justin and Jim. When Jim came to see him in Zak, I thought, ‘God, they look like brothers in some other life!’ I just have to find the other person now!”