A director speaks….

One of the best theatre blogs in the business is that of Paul Miller, a young(ish) director who has worked regularly at places like the Bush, Hampstead, Royal Court and National, and whose blog provides as personal and revealing a look into the backstage processes of a director as you’ll ever read. He’s free, frank and ruthlessly honest about his life and work. He’s not Trevor Nunn, rushing from one job to the next, but as he recently put it, finds himself carrying on “in this weird half-working, half-not kind of way”. Indeed, it was to reflect this that he orgiinally started his blog: “One of the original purposes of this blog was to show that directors are in just the same position essentially as everyone else in the theatre: bobbing along on a sea controlled (apparently) by some other force. We are not the inspired masters of destiny which popular myth depicts. Well I’m not anyway. On the one hand expected to clamour for attention like a mixture of the dockhands in On the Waterfront and Max Bialystock, on the other to be these discriminating, scrupulous and sensitive artists, no wonder most are hopeless.”

And here’s a real gem I found looking over some recent entries — he mentions Toby Young’s new play (A Right Royal Farce), and wrote back in July, “I will break with convention here and say that I turned it down - I’m damned sure I wasn’t the first and quite likely not the last: you’ve never read anything like it. Well, at least Paul proves himself discriminating, scrupulous and sensitive! He also had a very lucky escape, as I’ve blogged about already last week….

I should declare an interest here: when I started this blog, Paul found it early on and we started exchanging e-mails, then met for a convivial lunch. So you could call this a mutual admiration society. But it’s also wonderful proof of the power of blogging: though I knew his directorial work (I was a big fan of his production of Jonathan Harvey’s Hushabye Mountain at Hampstead Theatre, that i actually saw twice, and ditto Roy WIlliams’ Sing Yer Heart out for the Lads at the National), we only connected personally through our blogs.