Jude Christian has directed the UK première of I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me Of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole by Rodrigo García (translated by William Gregory) which runs at the Gate Theatre until Saturday 29th March.
The one-man show stars Steffan Rhodri and two real-life piglets! Playwright Rodrigo García (1964) was born in Spain and grew up in the slums of Buenos Aires.
Jude Christian is this year's recipient of the J. P. Morgan Bursary for Emerging Theatre Directors and was Resident Director at the NT Studio in 2013. Previous productions include Balansera (Poole Lighthouse), Sonata Movements (Blue Elephant Theatre), My Romantic History (English Theatre Berlin) and Last Easter (RADA). She is Artistic Director of Concert Theatre, a Creative Associate at the Gate Theatre and an Associate Artist of Diverse City, the Royal Opera House Youth Opera Company and the National Youth Theatre.
Jude chats to West End Frame about diary juggling, why she loves working at the Gate and how she found directing two pigs...
I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole is a very bold name for a play. Does the piece live up to its title?
Yes it does. There’s something about the guy that feels very ordinary. He’s not this wacky, clowny person but a very ordinary bloke. But I like the overall feel and the way he speaks, and the whole story is very matter of fact - there’s nothing that he is saying that doesn’t make sense. He’s saying he’s fed up with how his life is, and he’s fed up with all the ridiculous crap that we invest in and the meaningless of all of it, so he just wants to kick against it and then he starts creating this journey which becomes more and more ridiculous as he adds ideas to it. But at the heart of it he’s very sane.
The playwright, Rodrigo García, has such an incredible story. Is that reflected in the piece?
Yes, I think so, there’s something about the playwright’s life that has made him see that it’s pointless to take the world at face value, not to accept the way that things are because there is more to life than the regimes we get ourselves stuck into. I guess it’s just a logical thing… for me it has the philosophy that if you don’t like your life you can change it. It’s questioning the routines we get ourselves trapped into and saying, “Why? Why not kick against it?”
Let’s discuss the pigs! How has it been directing two piglets?
It’s been interesting! Steffan Rhodri is absolutely brilliant with them which has been really helpful. In the beginning they represent the children and they should be like children - not being able to predict what they are going to do and not being able to control them. Throughout the play the man is trying to bond with his children and reach out to keep them all together as a family and they keep doing that heartbreaking thing that children do when they say, “Daddy I don’t like this situation” and completely undermine everything he does. The pigs are never going to sit there and say, “Great, this is a brilliant plan, well done”. They’re going to look completely disinterested and bored in the way that children often do, but what’s great in the way Steffan works with them is he has that sort of rough and ready relationship you would have with children of your own so he’s not tiptoeing around them.
Have they been well behaved? Any rehearsal disasters?
We had one rehearsal when they had eaten something which wasn’t part of their normal diet. They’d been given some vegetables by their owner’s son and we spent quite an unpleasant rehearsal with a lot of stopping and starting and airing the room out! We found ourselves saying weird things like, “OK, let’s just shove the pigs back in the hole and do it again.” It started to feel really normal and then I would realise I had just said something like, “I was given a note by the Artistic Director to imbue the pigs with intentionality”. So then we said, “We’re in the realm of the weird now!”
You are a Creative Associate at the Gate Theatre. What is it like working there?
For me it’s really exciting because they are very ambitious in terms of subject matter and artistic style. There’s this real desire to explore the world and internationalism and political questions, whether that’s coherent political issues or just thinking in a more general way about how people engage in the world around them. There is also a desire to be theatrically ambitious, particularly in that space which is very small but very flexible - it feels quite different every time you go in there and there is the desire, because the space is small, that everything will be detailed and high impact and as ambitious as possible.
You must have had an amazing time working at the NT Studio?
It was brilliant. My day to day job was casting new workshops that were coming in which meant I got to see an amazing breadth of work in every possible way. I would see more traditional and naturalistic, very researched, intellectual, rigorous theatre through to things which were completely bonkers. I was constantly seeing people who were top of their game and incredibly exciting coming in and trying things out which meant seeing work in its very early and spontaneous stages. It’s exciting because when you are a director, especially when you are younger, you can feel like you have to choose a camp and work out what type of director you are and do the same kind of work with the same kind of people over and over again. So it was brilliant seeing so many different artistes come in and think, ‘wow, I would never have made something like that.’ Getting an invite to the process behind it is really exciting. It feels like an endlessly creative state because they’re not taking work through and putting it on stage, but you’re removing questions such as how will we market this? It becomes less about the business side and more about thinking about how big this could be.
You are the Artistic Director of Concert Theatre, a Creative Associate at the Gate Theatre and an Associate Artist of Diverse City, the Royal Opera House Youth Opera Company and the National Youth Theatre. How do you find time to breathe?
Quite a lot of the time you’re floatingly attached to someone for ages and once a year they call you up and say, “can you come and do this thing”. You have to do a lot of diary juggling and sometimes you have to be quite pragmatic about knowing that if you say yes to one thing that might result in knocking out something else quite fun about two weeks down the line. Sometimes you have to hold your nerve and hold out for the really good job and then, when it doesn’t happen, you’re really screwed for two months. There’s a nice mixture of someone calling to ask me to do this thing now and then something like concert theatre which is a company I run with a concert pianist who’s doing her PHD at the Royal Academy of Music. She and I are planning projects such as one that we are researching between ourselves and then in a month’s time we’ll meet up and spend three days working on it and we probably won’t make the show for over a year. And there are other things where we set a date and do something right now. It means that when I am in between jobs and looking for work I am constantly researching and creating ideas which I know are going to be used somewhere.
Interviewed by Andrew Tomlins
I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me Of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole runs at the Gate Theatre until Saturday 29th March 2014. Please visit www.gatetheatre.co.uk for further information and tickets.
Photo Credit: Ikin Yum
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