JOE MURPHY Q&A
As Rachel O’Riordan steps down as Artistic Director of Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre, there’s no denying she’s a hard act to follow. Enter Joe Murphy, whose first season champions emerging playwrights, celebrates Welsh storytelling and nurtures homegrown talent. He chats to Sam Pryce.
Congratulations on your new job! How have you found your first few months as the new Artistic Director of the Sherman?
I’ve loved it – what an amazing city. I directed at Royal Welsh College Of Music & Drama a few times before, so I knew the city a bit, but it’s great to properly be here. It’s a real privilege to be working here, as a sort of custodian. The community, both of audience and artists, around here is mind-blowing.
You’ve quite big shoes to fill, obviously, with your predecessor Rachel O’Riordan!
Yes! Huge shoes. I prefer to think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants! She’s still there with me somehow.
Is there a specific moment you can pin down as being the point where you realised you wanted to be a theatre director?
When I was about 10 or 11, I had a very active imagination. I was also a bit lonely, I think. My parents sent me to local am-dram and youth clubs. And I found it so thrilling – the idea of belonging somewhere, and sitting with other people, watching other people pretend to be other people. That’s what made me think, “This is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.”
Then, I was an actor (in no way professional!) until I was about 18. Back then, you only had to be loud as a kid – that’s the only requisite of getting a part, if you can be heard. Then you start to meet all the other actors around the country and think, ‘Oh no, I’m not. I’m pretty awful actually.’ And a tutor of mine, on my gap year, very delicately said to me, ‘Maybe there are other things you want to try.’ So, then I went to university at Exeter, tried directing there and fell in love with it.
Was it difficult progressing to a professional level? Do you think it’s hard now for young people to break into the arts industry?
It’s an incredibly oversaturated marketplace. There’s a lot of pressure now on young artists and directors to be really different in order to get their voices heard; some of the best directing is quiet, beautiful, subtle and nuanced, and it can be hard to get that noticed.
I was lucky, really. I did a postgrad directing course, and then the year I graduated I needed to earn some money. A friend of mine was hunking furniture around and asked if I could help out, and it just so happened that we were moving furniture for Josie Rourke [current Artistic Director of Donmar Warehouse], who’d just taken over the Bush Theatre. I said, “Oh! How serendipitous, I’ve just finished training as a director. Here’s my portfolio!” It feels slightly like a raffle ticket if you get that opportunity – you’re trying to be in the right place at the right time as many times as possible.
Is new writing set to be a significant part of your first season at the Sherman?
Definitely. I’m like a new writing animal – that’s what I’ve been my whole career. I really want to put writers at the heart of the Sherman. Hopefully we can be a home for writers, both metaphorically and geographically. They know they can always come here, and they’ve got a place to be listened to. The season we’re about to launch has six writers, all Welsh, and their stories are set in or around Cardiff. It feels like a locally rooted season but reaches for a global resonance. For me, what Sherman does best is capturing the Welsh experience, in all its idiosyncratic beauty, but reaching for this universality beyond that as well… I guess the thing about Welsh writers and the writers I’ve been reading since I got here is, they both have something to say, and they have an amazing way to say it.
Some of the major productions you’ve done before have been reinterpretations of classic plays of the repertoire – Woyzeck reset in 1980s Berlin, an all-female Taming Of The Shrew. Do you have any plans for productions like this?
Absolutely. So, the first show I’m going to direct is a version of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen, that Brad Birch has rewritten. Birch is a fantastic Welsh writer, and I’m really excited to be working with him. And {An Enemy of the People}, for me, really feels like a play of the moment. It was written in the 1800s when Ibsen was around, but it was about a local water spa and the water’s poisoned by the tannery. Essentially a metaphor for business poisoning the environment, right? And I thought that was such an interesting dynamic for what’s going on now – a way of turning climate change into a small-town metaphor. Brad wrote a version of it for RWCMD a few years ago, then Lyndsey Turner directed a version at the Guthrie over in America. I think Brad was always keen to bring it home again. We’ve set it in the Valleys. We’ve gender-flipped the main character to a female. It’s set in 21st-century Wales. It’s really about the locality we’re in, but also that more universal theme which is the erosion of truth within society.
How does your first season ensure that the Sherman maintains a crucial presence in shaping Welsh culture?
There’s a statement of intent in the people that we’re working with. We’re co-producing with Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru Tylwyth [Family], which is a new Welsh-language play by Daf James, which is not a sequel but a next chapter to his play Llwyth [Tribe] he wrote ten years ago. It’s the same characters, same actors returning, and they’re ten years older, talking about their experience of living in Cardiff now. It’s exciting that the first play in the season is a big Welsh-language piece of new writing; it feels like we just get to say, “This is what we’re about.”
We’ve got The Merthyr Stigmatist [co-produced with Theatre Uncut] by Lisa Parry. It’s about a school child in Merthyr. She’s in a room with her science teacher. She has the stigmata, the wounds of the Christ. The teacher’s like, “I think you’re mentally ill.” And the student’s like, “I’m the gift of God, deal with it.” And I suppose, ultimately, it’s a howl of rage about places that are forgotten about and left behind.
Our season shows a lot of different visions of what it is to be Welsh. There’s the gay experience in Tylwyth, and the inner-city experience of being in Cardiff. In An Enemy of the People, it’s set in the Valleys with this viscerally intelligent, but not always nice, lead female scientist. In Ripples, we’re set in a group therapy rehab session in Bridgend. A Christmas Carol, which we’re doing next year, we’re going to set it in Victorian Cardiff. [Gary Owen’s] Romeo & Julie is set in Splott. Across the season, we offer many different perspectives of what it is to be Welsh, ethnically, culturally, in your heritage, in all sorts of different ways.
We want our communities to feel represented here on our stages. Whether you’re coming in for a coffee, or to see a show, or for a workshop, you see yourself in this building. And I think that starts with writers.
Info: 029 2064 6900 / www.shermantheatre.co.uk