Interviews

Robert Jarman on Les Miserables

Maura Bedloe talks with the Director of Tasmania’s latest large scale musical event

What’s your vision for the Tasmanian production of Les Misérables?

Well, there are established ways of doing Les Misérables which many people will be familiar with - and while this approach may fulfil an audience expectation, what doesn’t work is to simply reproduce what someone has done before. If you do that, the play will be
heartless, it won’t be organic, and while the actors may be doing the same moves they do on Broadway or in London, they won’t know or necessarily understand why they’re doing them. So even though the look of this show may resemble the show you see on Broadway or in London, you actually do have to start from scratch.

I took two starting points from the play. Very early on some of the characters sing: ‘it’s a struggle, it’s a war,’ and that’s a key theme
– everyone in this play is struggling and engaged in a kind of war. My second starting point actually occurs in the opening scene with the very first words in the play - ‘look down, look down.’ This is sung by characters on a chain gang - people who are completely earthbound, who are looking down and cannot see the horizon, cannot see a future and in fact have no future. The only escape from this situation is death. It’s an image of Hell, and that’s where the play starts - in a kind of Hell.

Then at the end of the show, three hours later, as the hero Jean Valjean is dying, he’s joined by the ghosts of all those people who have died throughout the show who say ‘hold my hand and I will lead you to salvation’. So we start in Hell and we finish in Heaven, and that’s the arc of the show.

Of course, along the way people find ways of escaping that condition, that hellish condition of being so earthbound and looking down. In one way – and this is something we talked about a lot in rehearsal – you could almost say that the entire show is about people learning to look up. That is what the journey is – people not necessarily finding the great bright hope of the future, but recognising that you have to look for it and it is possible to look for it and that you need to make an effort to find it.

How important is it to you to create something new with this production?

I don’t think you necessarily have to do anything new, but what you do have to do is rediscover the old.

You actually need to work it out again, you can’t just go in and say there’s the pictures of what they do in London, let’s do that, because that’s meaningless. All you end up with is a wax museum or a collection of still life pictures without any real kind of life or understanding.

So presumably that is what you’re trying to draw out of your actors?

Yes, so that even if the look of the show is the same, the actors actually know how they got there and why they’re doing what they’re doing.

You’ve talked about finding these pivot points in the play, and you communicate that with the cast, but as a director how do you draw the performance you want out of your actors?

In early rehearsals we played getting to know you games and did a lot of broad, brushstroke character work – looking at images of the show, discussing the characters. What might the chain gang look like, what might the factory workers look like, do any of the beggars have physical deformities, why are you a beggar…?

Then I put the actors into small groups and set them questions. What’s the most important line in the show? What is the metaphor for this show?’ When I asked the actors to consider what the metaphoric world of the show is, some of the answers were indeed Hell, or a battlefield – so already we were all in the same sort of territory.

What do you see as your main challenges in directing the play?

Technical. I’ve directed a lot of big shows, with much bigger casts but with this one the technical challenge is huge.
For the audience, that may make no sense at all, because for much of the show the stage is basically a big open floor with people standing on it, singing. However, the revolve adds an enormous level of complexity. With many shows that use a revolve there’s a set on one half and another set on the other half and you basically just spin it around to suit the scene. In Les Misérables, we’ve used it rather more creatively. For example, there are whole scenes that take place where the revolve just keeps turning and everyone keeps moving through the whole scene. Keeping the action flowing continually, moving set pieces on and off and plotting positions on a floor that is constantly revolving was quite a technical feat in itself.

And because Les Mis is an opera, or pop-opera, it doesn’t stop. So as a director you can’t just say ‘oh we need to buy a bit of time here for that scene change’. The fact is – this is how much time you’ve got, that’s where it needs to be so that’s what you’ve got to do.

Technically, it’s the most complicated show I’ve ever directed, and yet if it doesn’t look that way, then we’ve succeeded. Ultimately, what you want to do with the theatre is make sure people are not aware of how hard it is. You just want them to enjoy the story.

So do you use any tricks such as having the actors bring on pieces of set to create the scene change and just work it into the action?

A little, but we’ve even tried to avoid that and just keep the action flowing as smoothly as possible. There are one or two points, I admit where all of our ingenuity has been defeated and we’ve said, ‘okay at this point someone’s just going to have to walk on stage and take it off, there’s no other way around it’. For example, just the other night in rehearsal, having tortured myself and everyone else over how to deal with the very last bit of set that has to happen in the entire show I finally gave up and said…’well, we’re just going to have a blackout, and someone’s going to run on and put it there!’

Can you talk about the set design; how much input you’ve had as the director what you’re trying to achieve with the set?

It’s partly about getting the look and feel of the international production, but the need to use the revolve is a major determining factor in the design.

Keeping it simple, keeping it affordable, and keeping it practical are major considerations. For example, there’s only about a metre of space in the wings of the Theatre Royal –– so you can’t have enormous pieces of set and machinery coming on and off. So a major part of how you design for the Theatre Royal is determined by the space itself.

Are there any other major ways in which the venue affects the production?

As classic thing to do in Les Misérables occurs at the end of Act One when all the characters are on stage singing a fantastic interweaving number and Thenardier and his wife pop up through a trapdoor in the stage floor. Well, we can’t have a trapdoor in the Theatre Royal because it’s a heritage-listed building, and even if we were allowed to, it would cost a lot of money to do. So that’s a traditional thing you do in Les Mis that’s impossible for this production and that’s determined purely by the fabric of the theatre.

Does staging the production at the Theatre Royal enhance the production in any way?

The great thing about the Theatre Royal is the intimacy it gives you as an actor. Because of the size of the auditorium, when you stand on the stage you’re almost on eye level with the dress circle and it honestly feels like you’re acting in your living room.

It makes it an incredible joy to perform there because you can engage the audience so easily – it’s a beautiful dynamic. And of course that’s why Lawrence Olivier once said the Theatre Royal was one of the best theatres in the world – the audience-actor relationship is so intimate.

Let’s talk a little more about your vision for the costuming and lighting.

Well costuming is big because we have 30 people, who are playing multiple characters. We have factory workers, sailors, beggars, revolutionaries, prostitutes, general crowds people, and each of those require changes of some kind – so it’s a big job, pulling all that together.

I’m very fortunate in having a lighting designer to work with. We’ve set aside 30 hours, once we get into the theatre, to do the lighting plot of the show, and even now I can quite confidently say that will not be nearly enough.

I think that would shock a lot of people who wonder what on earth would take you so long to just point a few lights, stick a gel in them and turn it on.

Oh yes, people think that lighting just happens. They don’t even realise it’s there! But I know the lighting for this show will be complex and will be very time consuming and I know that, three or four shows in, we’ll still be tweaking.

Can you describe some of your ideas for the lighting in terms of how you’re using it to enhance the performance?

There are a couple of key moments in the play where the plot really turns. At the beginning for example, Valjean, who has spent 19 years in prison and has been dehumanised by that experience, is released. He is treated very badly by the people he encounters until he meets a bishop who shows him great kindness, invites him home and feeds him. However, Valjean steals his silverware and tries to escape but is caught by the police. The bishop defends him, insisting that he gave the silverware to Valjean as a gift, then later tells Valjean that the price of the kindness he has shown him is that his soul has been bought for God. So Valjean now belongs to God and must therefore do good.

That happens in the first 10 minutes of the show and is a critical turning point - it’s a moment when light actually penetrates the gloom. So we highlight that moment very literally with what I call a ‘white light moment’ where we basically hit it with a beam of white light. The breaking through of light like this at critical moments is designed to give a sense of there being another way, another world.

Another key, uplifting moment is the death of Fantine, when Valjean makes a promise for the future – to take care of Fantine’s child Cosette. These moments when Valjean’s life changes enormously, when he makes a commitment to living a new and better way and when the light of heaven kind of breaks through – we’ve interpreted quite literally in the lighting.

Can you describe your directorial approach?

I listen really carefully to the words. And if I’m doing a musical I also listen really carefully to the music!
If a musical is well written, the music tells you what to do and you just have to listen. Very often in a rehearsal, without giving much direction at all, I ask the actors to just get up and do something and then, we’ll start to shape it. I hate sitting around and talking endlessly - I much prefer to get people to do something and then we have something to work with. Even if what they do is completely wrong, you still have something solid to work with - and without that it’s like trying to make a sculpture out of air. So that would be the basis of my approach.

And I worry a lot. I walk along the street and think and worry a lot.