At today’s press briefing to announce the Old Vic’s second season that kicks off next week with Trevor Nunn directing artistic director Kevin Spacey in the title role of Richard II, Spacey walked into the dress circle bar where the event was held and before taking his seat worked the entire room first, shaking the hands of every journalist present.
It was an immediately inclusive act that, as The Stage’s news editor Jeremy Austin remarked to me, is a very New Labour kind of way to go about things: unlike the notably adversarial relationship that Nunn, for instance, has always had with the press, the new generation of artistic director like Nicholas Hytner at the National, Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse or Spacey clearly view the press as part of the process.
Indeed, Spacey went on to say during the proceedings that hadn’t been affected by criticisms of his first season, and indeed said, “I went into this job fully expecting criticism” but going on, “I’m in this for the long haul, and I’m more concerned with our primary task to turn audiences that come into loyal patrons, so we attract a broader, younger, more diverse audience.”
Expressing no regrets at all about any of his choices in his first season (which executive producer David Liddiment was on hand to say had recouped its investment and attracted audiences averaging 70%), he went on to announce the productions beyond the Christmas return of last year’s hit production of Aladdin, with Ian McKellen and Roger Allam returning in a new company that will also include Frances Barber replacing Maureen Lipman as Dim Sum.
A joint British and Iraqi company will collaborate on a brief run on The Soldier’s Tale in January that will subsequently go to New York, to be followed by the British premiere of one of Arthur Miller’s last plays, Resurrection Blues, previously only produced at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2002, where The Guardian’s Michael Billingon reviewed it and called it “a funny, pertinent and sharp-toothed satire aimed at the materialist maladies of modern America.” The veteran American film director Robert Altman, whom Spacey – who has never had the privilege of working with on film – called “one of the most legendary film directors of all time”, will direct it.
While the fourth play for the 2005-6 season is yet to fall into place from a choice of three that they are considering, Spacey also announced his own return to the Old Vic stage a year from now to star in the opening production of the 2006-7 season, reuniting him with director Howard Davies with whom he worked on O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (at the Almeida and subsequently bringing him to the Old Vic for the first time when it transferred there), to work on another O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten.
But first there’s Richard II, for which technical rehearsals began straight after today’s press conference: while he told us that at Julliard they were schooled in what was called a ‘mid Atlantic’ accent, here he promises to be employing RP – and hopes that if he mispronounces any words, we’ll be too involved in the action to notice.
