Kate: Hello thank you very much for coming and a warm welcome.
I'm Kate Bassett and I'm the literary associate here at Chichester Festival Theatre.
I'm going to be talking this evening to the wonderful director Rachel Kavanagh.
She has obviously staged "Shadowlands".
Just to fill you in - we're going to be talking for about 20 minutes and then
I'm going to open it up to a Q&A for about 10 minutes.
So do be mulling on and saving up your questions for then.
Let me introduce Rachel whom I'm sure many of you already know.
You've had a whole raft of acclaimed productions here already.
I'm thinking of "The Winslow Boy", "Single Spies", Alan Bennett's very intriguing and witty play.
Lots of musicals including the incredibly buoyant "Half a Sixpence" which is unforgettably enjoyable.
You've been artistic director of Birmingham Rep for several years.
You have lots of RSC productions, lots of West End productions and transfers from Chichester as well.
So thank you very much for being here tonight amongst your busy CV.
Rachel:  Pleasure!
Kate: I suppose I was going to ask you a rather fundamental question to start with.
What drew you to "Shadowlands"?
What, in the process of rehearsal have you come to cherish about it in particular?
Rachel: Well, I mean the thing is, the best job is always the one you've just been offered.
I didn't choose the play, Daniel chose the play and asked me to do it.
At which point I was already very keen on it because I've been asked to do it.
I had a kind of distant memory of what it was.
I could talk a bit more later about my history with it.
He asked if I would have a chat with Hugh Bonneville.
Because he was keen to pay CS Lewis that seemed a very exciting and good idea.
I read the play.
I was rehearsing "Christmas Carol" for the RSC and I thought I'll read it on my way in to work.
This turned out to be a foolish decision
as I sat on the G1 bus in floods of tears, thinking OK, right, it's got me the first time.
It's a very wonderful and human story.
Then about a week later I thought I better read the play again before I start talking to the designer.
This time I was on the tube and I thought it'll be absolutely fine this time.
But no, and there I was with mascara down my face again.
I think the easy answer is part of that, in that there's something in it
which touched me very deeply and very suddenly in the play.
I'm always very drawn to theatre which has an emotional story.
I like doing shows about about relationships, about families, about love in all it's forms.
But I like psychology and drama and human relationships.
I particularly like stories where people or a protagonist shifts.
Something like "Christmas Carol" that happens in.  It happens in this play.
The central character has a big shift in his being when he grows to love another human being.
That's a very wonderful story to tell.
Someone who's completely closed up, who allows himself to open up to love.
Then all the risks that come with love.
Kate: It's a really fascinating person actually isn't it?
Like Dickens' "Christmas Carol" there's an opening of the heart.
Rachel: Exactly.  In fact Scrooge is mentioned in Shadowlands.
I won't say the line because it is a bit of a treat.
The actor who says it, Tim Watson, does it a great deal better than I would.
But yes, there is an allusion to "Christmas Carol" in "Shadowlands".
Kate: You're talking about the psychology of the characters.
Is there anything that you find particularly fascinating or touching?
It's basically CS Lewis and his American admirer.
You mostly all know about his American admirer who's also has been a writer, Joy.
She comes to meet him and they have a developing friendship.
Rachel: It's very interesting to chart the journey of a relationship where
one person is quite clear to themselves on what they feel about the other one.
The other one is in a whole range of denials and inabilities to articulate.
Inabilities to express or even feel what he might want to until disaster strikes.
That's quite fun with two very intellectually intelligent characters.
One of whom is emotionally intelligent.
One of whom is is like a child - not like a child that's not fair.
Someone who is closed in emotionally and that's a lovely thing to play with in rehearsals.
To see if we do that in that scene can we go to that in that scene ?
Of course relationships aren't linear.
They can go backwards as well as forwards on that journey.
That's been a really fun thing to do.
Also with the character of Joy who a lot of the other characters, all men,
find to be outrageous and difficult and loud and opinionated.
How do we pitch that?  Is that just their opinion in the 1950s?
She was an extraordinary woman but would we find her presence in a room now that unusual?
They do because they're a load of dons in the 1950s in Oxford who only really liked talking to each other.
That's been a really interesting thing for me and Liz White - who is very brilliant as Joy -  to find.
What is it about her that they are so threatened by?
Would she to us appear to be just a rather bright woman?
Kate: She has some corking lines.
Rachel: She does!  She's not frightened.
Kate: Witty reposts.
Could you say a little bit about it in broader terms?
What do you think William Nicholson was exploring thematically in the play.
Including love and friendship and the borderlines between that but other issues as well.
It was very interesting talking to Bill about the genesis of "Shadowlands".
It was written first as a television drama.
It was made in the religious department of the BBC.
He was asked to write a piece of religious drama.  He said:- I'll write about CS Lewis.
He's very open about this so he won't mind me saying he was finding himself at a moment in his life
where he was trying to gain success
as a writer.
He was having a series of failed relationships, all of which were with women
who said that he was unable to commit to them.  So he was very interested, I think, in what is it
that sometimes allows - in his case and in CS Lewis's case - a man to not be able to
open themselves up to the commitment, the pain, the possible pain the joy,
the kind of loss of control when you fall in love and then embark on a life with another human being.
So that's very much his starting point for it I think.
It's very personal in that way to him.
Then he found this rather great fit
which meant that it could then be produced by the religious department of the BBC
because of CS Lewis's obviously being a very religious man, a committed Christian.
There's the whole the idea of the Narnia books being a kind of allegory.
Also all the many books CS Lewis wrote about Christianity.
At it's heart that's what it's about.  It's about someone who is closed opening up, I think.
But it's also about fear of the other.  It's about loss.
It's ultimately about - for Lewis and Joy - about
is there anything beyond the life that we are experiencing at this moment?
When we are alive, he says right at the beginning of the play
that this life that we're all in at the moment is "The Shadowlands".
The real life comes later.
But what's so brilliant about the writing is that everything Lewis says really,
or everything a lot of the characters say in the first half is shot down,
or changed or questioned by the events of the play in the second half.
Kate: Yes, that's really fascinating.  It's very intriguing that it was commissioned by the religious department.
I was intrigued by how they received it because in a way it's very complex about grief.
Grief and faith and whether that shakes your faith
or your faith brings you through the grief.
Rachel: Exactly, I think that's absolutely right.
When Lewis talks about the death of his mother when he was 8,
and Joy asks him did he believe he'd see her again.
He says:- No, she was gone, that was all. 
 He found faith after that.
He didn't allow himself into that first bit of grief when his mother died.
He found faith later but his faith was never tested
in the way it's tested in the events of the play when he had grown to be incredibly fond of Joy.
At that point he still thought of her as his friend.
I think how he feels when she becomes ill is like a big wake-up call to him.
There's some wonderful stuff but I don't want to talk too much about it.  Have most of you seen it already?
No.  Later on in the play where he is asked about his faith by his brother and by Joy's child,
he questions himself about it and things are really rocked for him.
He finds it hard to answer the questions that he answered very easily before he met her.
Kate: This isn't in the play so it's not a spoiler,
I was just reading a bit about CS Lewis beyond the play and there's a wonderful bit
where he says that he did in real life have waves of faith and loss of faith.
I think Tolkien was another Oxford don who brought him towards Christianity.
They went on a bike ride to Whipsnade Zoo and he said:-
I didn't believe in God at the start but by the time I got to the Zoo I did.  A Damascene moment.
How could you have a conversation on a motorbike on the way to Whipsnade Zoo?
Obviously dons can do that.
Did you also, from your first reading or in the process of rehearsals
come to particularly admire anything about William Nicholson's craft as a writer?
Is there anything that stands out for you?
Rachel: It's partly what I touched on just then in that it's incredibly well constructed.
Ideas are laid out.  Everything has a sort of mirror image of itself
or an answer at some point later in the play.
So the play begins with Lewis giving a lecture in which he makes many statements
about the nature of faith and love and God and suffering.
At various points in the drama all of those are answered or questioned or upheld.
It's in essence quite antithetical, the writings.
Sometimes within itself in a small space of lines
and sometimes an hour later an answer will come back to something that was flagged up early in the play.
I like that very much.  Bill is very keen - which is unusual sometimes in theatre -
on allowing "thinking space" in the story.
Sometimes in life we speak before we think - or as we think.
Often in theatre one is trying to get actors to speak and think at the same time.
He was very interesting about moments in this play
where actually it's quite interesting to watch someone think and then see what they're going to say.
That's a really unusual and lovely thing to hear.
But there are also lovely things that we're just finding now.
I was talking to two of the actors earlier this afternoon, about two lines that answer each other.
There are quite unusual constructions sometimes in the sentences where he'll say:-
something and something and something.
It happens a few times and then another character will answer:-
I have this to do and this and this.
There are lovely things to dig for in the writing.
It's not an emotional story to manipulate you.  It's very well constructed as an argument always.
The characters are all so clever as well which I think is really helpful.
It's quite funny, some of it.
Kate: It is. I actually really liked that about the Oxford dons as well.
They're people who think.  They're asking big ideas and they're thinking and they're quite witty.
I think this is true of the philosophical period actually.
The mid 20th Century when philosophy was quite playful and banter-y.
I was going to ask you a bit about your methods of preparing,
pre-researching when you're directing something.
Did you watch the TV version or the film version?  Did you do lots of historical research?
Do you always?  Does it vary?
Rachel: It varies a bit.  When you're doing a play which has real historical characters
I think you're honour-bound to do some research.
Along with my brilliant assistant we did do some research on CS Lewis's life and on his works.
I read "A Grief Observed" which is the really beautiful long essay/short book
that he wrote after Joy died about his own journey through grief.
I read the extraordinarily named "Surprised by Joy" which is the autobiographical story of his childhood
which he wrote before he met her and it's called "Surprised by Joy".
Then he met a woman called Joy and fell in love with her.
It's just the most extraordinary coincidence.
That's a wonderful story, some fantastic stuff about his school days
and his relationship with his brother which is very strong in the play I think,
the relationship with Warren, his older brother.
Then we did some research about his life and lots of research about Joy.
Apart from her relationship with Lewis she's not very well known as a writer.
But she was a good poet and a good writer and acclaimed.
She says in the play:- I won a poetry prize which I shared with Robert Frost.
She was up there as a major American poet.
But she's been sort of forgotten in her own right and is remembered as the wife of CS Lewis.
So we found out about her and also in the last 10 years
Douglas, her son wrote an article in "The Guardian" about his experiences of
meeting CS Lewis for the first time and all that stuff was available and good.
Then there's a moment for me where you read it and you absorb it.
You chat about it on the first few days of rehearsal.
Then you kind of have to let it go because we're doing William Nicholson's version of this story.
It's no good if you come up against something in the play and you say:-
"but actually that took three years in real life", because we're not doing real life.
We're doing a play about it.
It's really important, I think, to be very clear about that.  We're not doing a documentary.
We're doing William's account of this relationship.
We can know those things and they can feed into what we do.
But that's not what we're dramatising.
Kate: There's a rather fascinating photo in the program of Hugh looking at a photo on the wall.
He's looking at a photo of C.S. Lewis and I think that's really complex isn't it?
As an actor it's really complex that you're you're trying to find the essence of that person.
Probably these days or these particular circumstances you don't want to do an impersonation.
Rachel: I think sometimes you're trying to find what is it in them that you can bring close to you.
Where do you two meet.
I think there's no sense of trying to be like him.
Or to be like his voice or like his mannerisms.
I think there's a sense of "where do we two meet"?
Kate: What's the common ground there.
Rachel: Exactly
Kate:  The emotional connection. It's probably time to open it up for questions.
Audience Member: I have actually seen the production.  I came a couple of days ago and loved it.
One of the things that surprised me was how funny it was.
You mentioned that it was "quite" funny. I think it's actually "very" funny in places.
Was that something that you also recognised when you were in floods of tears on your bus?
Or did it emerge in rehearsals?
Rachel: It emerged in rehearsals to be completely honest with you.
It emerged even more on Friday evening.
I think sometimes when you rehearse and you live with a script for lots of weeks,
you forget sometimes that things are funny.
You're kind of aware of it and Bill kept saying:- "You know they will laugh?"
We were saying:- "Yes, yes, they will laugh."  Then they really did and that was really lovely.
What was surprising was how long the laughs have been.
It's quite late into the play that people stop laughing and that's a great thing.
It might all be different tonight, who knows?
I think that part of Bill's methods are that if you can laugh
and you're already having a lovely emotional time in the theatre that's laughing
you're more likely to be moved, I think.
I think that true because those two things can come up against each other quite closely.
He's always been very clear that it's very important that the audience are allowed to laugh.
So I'm glad that you did find it very funny
Maybe I was using "quite" in the Elizabethan sense of "absolutely".  No I wasn't.
But thank you, thank you, you're absolutely right.
Audience Member:  Why this story now?
Rachel: That's a very good question.
I think it's not particularly a story for now. I think it's a story for always.
We are always going to be human beings who are in a universe
where we might want to cling on to each other.  Then we are going to experience grief and loss.
As I said at the beginning, I like telling stories of relationship and emotion.
It has big questions in it about love and loss and faith and grief.
It also has detail of relationship in it which is entertaining.
Also it has a very precise world to create so that's a lovely contrast to do.
But I think it's always going to be a play worth doing
because it's about something which at some point will affect everybody who comes to see it.
That's a lovely thing.
Kate: I think that's really interesting that in a way those plays like that are more timeless.
Rachel: Yes.
Kate:  Because they continue to be about human relationships.
I did also think, not in any sort of crass way, about what you were saying about her as a woman
within an exclusively male set of dons
did slightly reverberate with things like #metoo in that she stood up for herself.
It was a moment of pre-feminist sparkiness in a way but with humour.
That resonated a bit.
Rachel: There's a wonderful moment in the first scene where one of the dons who's trying to be liberal says:-
"Some women are very clever you know". (Laughter)
Exactly!  That gets a kind of response now that it may or may not have got twenty years ago.
We have a kind of hyper-awareness at the moment about gender politics which is fantastic.
You all laughed even with me saying it.
There's a deliciousness in all of that stuff in the play.
I'm always nervous of words like "current" and "relevant".
It's not that kind of play.
But because it's a very good play and it's about something - to use the dreaded word "Universal",
it's shifting with the time it's being produced in.  Does that make sense?
We receive it with slightly different ears than when it was last done, whenever that was.
Kate: There's something fascinating to see a piece set in period and to see what the difference is.
It's fascinating to think:- "Gosh that's what the thinking was or what normal social behaviour was.
I think that's also true about the religious themes actually.
Had it been very hot topical play it would have been about fundamentalist Christianity
or fundamentalist religion now.
Whereas it's this very subtle ambiguous exploration of Christian faith.
Rachel: Exactly, about man and your own relationship with God.
Kate:  Another question?
Audience member:  Has the author been involved with the rehearsal process?
Has the play changed, with his agreement, from when it was produced 20 years ago?
Rachel: When I was first sent the script and was meeting Peter McKintosh the designer,
we obviously both know this stage very well
and this theatre and it's very apparent when you read it that it had origins on the screen.
There are a lot of short scenes in lots of different locations.
We've had to find our own way of creating a theatrical language to tell that story.
There was one bit where they were downstairs, then they were upstairs in the house
then they came back down then they went to sleep and then they were magically downstairs again.
I said to Bill:- "I don't see how we can do this on the Chichester stage without lots of architecture."
"I don't want lots of architecture, I want to tell the story in a really simple way."
He rewrote that section for us.
The script that we are using -  it was a TV play, then it was done on stage, then it was a movie.
Some elements of the movie are in the script that is the basis of our production.
So it's not exactly the same script that Nigel Hawthorne used when it was originally done on stage.
It's got Bill's favourite bits from the film in.
They travel to Hereford rather than Greece in our story.
I had one meeting with Bill and a lot of phone calls before rehearsals.
Then he came to see the model before we started.
He came to the read-through and he's come a couple of times to rehearsals.
He's always been incredibly generous and supportive.
He works a lot in movies now and I think he likes being in a theatre environment
because we're much nicer to writers than they are in Hollywood.
Kate: One more quick question.
Audience member: When I came to see "Half a Sixpence" which you produced here
the night that I saw it you were actually sitting in the audience taking notes throughout the whole production.
How long do you actually keep on tweaking the play that you're producing?
Rachel: We started previewing on Friday last week so it was two previews last week
Then we open to the press on Thursday of this week.
So I will be in tonight, tomorrow and Thursday.
Then I'm kind of done.  Except I will come back and see it during the run and note it.
My everyday presence finishes on Thursday with the opening night.
That's fairly standard for freelance directors.  You're contracted to to be full-time on the show
through rehearsals, technical rehearsals, previews and up to and including Press Night.
"Half a Sixpence" was a very, very extended preview period.
Usually on a musical that whole process is longer.
They're often technically more complicated.
If it was a big musical here the previews might go into the beginning of the following week.
Kate: Sadly I think it's time to wind up because the floor has to be polished.
Thank you very much for those very thought-provoking questions.
Thank you enormously to Rachel Kavanaugh, for being brilliantly illuminating. (Applause).
