Kate Wasserberg

It has been a challenging two years for the award-winning Out of Joint artistic director after company founder Max Stafford-Clark left following inappropriate behaviour allegations. She speaks for the first time about the ensuing turmoil to Tim Bano and looks forward to overseeing a revival of Richard Cameron’s The Glee Club next spring

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It has been a bruising couple of years for Kate Wasserberg. In 2017, she was appointed artistic director of Out of Joint, a company that had earned a formidable reputation for new writing since it was set up in 1993 by director Max Stafford-Clark and producer Sonia Friedman. Wasserberg was supposed to run the company jointly with Stafford-Clark, and they started to work together on directing a revival of Andrea Dunbar’s influential play Rita, Sue and Bob Too.

She joined the company off the back of setting up the Other Room, a 50-seat pub theatre in Cardiff. The difference in scale was huge, and the learning curve steep. And almost instantly it became a lot steeper.

Five months on from her appointment, Stafford-Clark left the company after a member of staff and other women accused him of “inappropriate, sexualised behaviour”. The Royal Court run of Rita, Sue was cancelled. Half the company’s board quit. Wasserberg was left with an organisation tainted by association with its founder; an organisation suddenly unable to rely on its own foundations.

“It was a really, really tough induction,” she says now. “Less like a learning curve and more like running repeatedly into a vertical surface. But what got us up every time was the company should live. This company was founded to take great writing to the nation, and that need has not gone away. I believe in this company and I believe in the legacy of the many, many amazing artists who have populated that vision. That’s what kept us going.”

Learning curve

Wasserberg is perched on a colourful sofa in a sunlit room at Out of Joint’s north London offices. Along one wall is a bookcase piled with plays that the company produced over the years: a big stack of Dunbar, as well as Timberlake Wertenbaker, Caryl Churchill, Richard Bean. The company’s legacy.

It’s a legacy Wasserberg respects, at the same time as she talks volubly and passionately about the future. She firmly believes that the country needs art, and it needs writers to make sense of itself. It’s now about “owning the legacy of all of the artists that made up Out of Joint, not denying Max’s enormous contribution to British theatre, but moving forward. The problematic bit of the legacy is nothing to do with the work that finds the audience. They still need us to go out there with stories.”

There aren’t many people who can credit Alton Towers with influencing their career in theatre, but Wasserberg does. The town she grew up in, Leek in Staffordshire, was a 20-minute drive from the theme park and Wasserberg went there “a lot. An awful lot. It was my favourite place on earth.” She also adds, with a laugh, that the park’s Gothic feel is “largely responsible for my theatrical aesthetics”.

She decided she wanted to be a director after watching her dad, an English teacher, direct a school play. A degree in drama at the University of Exeter followed, then an MA in advanced theatre practice at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, two courses that turned out to be “too devise-y”. Wasserberg realised, “I definitely don’t devise, I definitely direct plays,” and she found work at the Finborough, a pub theatre in London run by Neil McPherson renowned for its new writing and for unearthing lost gems by classic writers. “Really, where I feel like my actual honest-to-God training began was at the Finborough.”

‘At the moment there is this lazy idea that the working class don’t make art, that they don’t own art, that they need it to be brought to them’

Wasserberg directed many of James Graham’s early plays, and also took part in the National Theatre’s Young Directors course which “changed my life. It was unbelievable. It was like getting into Hogwarts. I met a group of young directors – I was there with Polly Findlay and James Grieve – and it felt like a moment of acceptance, like being invited in, which I think is a big deal if you’ve come to theatre by your own funny route.”

It was a strange existence for Wasserberg at that time. She worked at the Finborough most days for free, in the evenings she would tutor kids in wealthy parts of London, then teach drama all weekend. Meanwhile she was living on a boat – “more like a leaky caravan on water” – for £500-a-month all in. “And that’s how I stayed afloat,” she says, pun unintended.

During those years on the boat, Wasserberg struggled to find much assisting work. “I never really fit anyone’s idea of an assistant,” she says, adding that maybe that was because of interview technique, or maybe it was class prejudice or unconscious bias. After one unsuccessful interview, director Orla O’Loughlin gave her some advice. “She said: ‘Listen Kate, don’t keep applying for bursaries. People like you and me, we need jobs. Go and get a job.’ At the time you’re like: ‘Oh, that’s an easy thing to say.’ But I did it. I just wrote to everyone and I went: ‘I want a job.’ And Terry Hands, he heard me. He said: ‘Come to Clwyd.’ ”

She credits Hands with teaching her how to “get good” as a director, which she describes as “adding experience to instinct”. For Wasserberg, a rehearsal room should be “very loving”. “People said: ‘Grow a thicker skin.’ And Terry said: ‘Why? Your thin skin is why are you good.’ ” She understands why people were telling her to toughen up; they were worried about her.

Continues…

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Q&A Kate Wasserberg

What was your first professional theatre job?
Assisting Mark Rosenblatt on a rehearsed reading of Schiller’s Passion and Politics at the Young Vic in 2005.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
There is no real hierarchy and there is no moment when someone is going to stick a medal on your chest and say: “You’re real now.” And you just have to remember that the reason you wanted to do this was you wanted to make theatre for a living. Don’t get caught up in the race.

Who or what was your biggest influence?
My dad. Brian Friel. Katie Mitchell. JK Rowling. Terry Hands. Ursula LeGuin. Margaret Atwood.

If you hadn’t been a director, what would you have been?
Either a journalist or gone into politics although I don’t think as a politician. I sometimes think I would have been someone’s Peter Mandelson. But I remember a friend saying: “Do you ever think: ‘If I wanted to sell out now, no one would buy me?’”

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
If I’m allowed, I like to have a cup of tea while watching my shows, which means being on a balcony hidden somewhere. I always sit in the audience on press night and previews. It’s really important to be in there with them because that’s how you learn. Even though I find it intensely painful to a point of being almost unbearable. I always have this moment at the beginning of the first preview where the lights will go down and I think: “Oh no, I’ve forgotten the whole thing. How are they going to remember it? And then they do it and I’m like: ‘Oh well done.’ ” I really believe, assuming that everybody is okay with this, in hugging actors both before and after any important show because there’s something about them knowing that you love them no matter what. And it’s unconditional love. So no matter how it’s gone, even if an actor is having a difficult time, even if they’re having a difficult time with me, I will seek them out and attempt to hug them.

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Pub industry

Wasserberg decided to leave Clwyd while it was still enjoyable, and the next step was an unusual one: she set up Cardiff’s first pub theatre. So how did the Other Room happen? “Ha,” she exclaims loudly. “Whenever I go back to this time, it sounds bonkers and at the time everyone was behaving like I was bonkers, but I was a bit amused because I was just absolutely sure.”

The idea took root from Wasserberg’s numerous trips back and forth to Cardiff. She realised a lot of actors and artists in Wales lived in the city. “So I said to my husband: ‘How about we move to Cardiff and set up a pub theatre?’ And he remarkably said: ‘Yeah, okay.’ All we had was the idea. And we had one child and another on the way.”

Someone had once given Wasserberg a very useful piece of advice: ring up all of the big arts organisations and ask them for advice on fundraising. They won’t want to give up their time, so they’ll send you someone junior. And if that person is great, poach them. The person she poached was Bizzy Day. Half an hour into their first meeting Wasserberg asked Day if she wanted to set the theatre up with her.

They came across a former actor, Dan Porter, who owned a pub in Cardiff with producer David Wilson and both loved theatre. They became partners. “Suddenly we were open within a year,” Wasserberg says. They ran the Other Room jointly with Wasserberg and Day, creating a unique business model for pub theatre. Very quickly, the Other Room developed a loyal audience and strong national reputation.

In 2016, it was named fringe theatre of the year at The Stage Awards. Its seasons were carefully curated by Wasserberg, often around a very simple theme. The first one – consisting of Blasted, Howard Barker’s The Dying of Today and a new bilingual play by Welsh writer Alun Saunders – was connected by the fact that Wasserberg “felt a terrible need to collapse the distance between atrocities happening elsewhere and us, because that distance had collapsed for me”.

She continues: “When I had my first child I had to stop watching the news for a while because it felt like every child on the news was my child. My husband had to stop me – and this isn’t a humble brag, it was genuinely problematic – I would just give money to any campaign on telly. It became quite unhealthy. And I still find I wrestle with that. Shouldn’t we all be helping more? And I think for me that season was about that feeling.

“Now I feel like the whole world is ripping itself apart in confrontation, and what I’m looking for is redemptive healing. Not as a sop, but to say: ‘Hey, we might not agree but let’s be together and focus on what we have in common because we have more in common than divides us.’

“There is compassion in this world and there is nobility, and who do we want to be? And it can’t be a rose-tinted, nostalgic view of ourselves. I absolutely reject that. But in all of our complexity, we are both good and bad, but we are together and I think that’s where I am at as an artist. I’m looking for a bit of light.”

Then the Out of Joint job came up. “I loved the Other Room,” Wasserberg says, “but as things started to fall apart politically, I felt like I was having a really lovely time speaking to one group of people. If I was going to justify doing this, I wanted to do it on a national level.”

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Wasserberg on…

Surviving as a young director:
“When I meet young directors now I ask them: ‘How do you do it?’ It’s so much harder because everything costs more. I really struggled and worked incredibly hard, but it was possible.”

Classism and theatre:
“I didn’t understand this very combative, Oxbridgey way of being interviewed. I was attentive, smart and passionate, but I couldn’t give the answers those clever boys I was competing with were giving. One thing we’re passionate about here is unpicking that set of class prejudices around interview technique, because that kind of adversarial interview technique is really class-bound.”

Being a good director:
“Terry Hands said to me: ‘If you want to be a great director, you need to learn to see what you have.’ Not what you’re scared you don’t have, or you thought you’d have, or you wish you had. If you can sit there and go: ‘That doesn’t work’ while not knowing how to fix it, and not worrying that you’re not going to seem like the cleverest person in the room, then you’ll be a great director.”

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Chain of events

Wasserberg joined Out of Joint in April 2017. That October, the Guardian published the article about Stafford-Clark. At that point, Rita, Sue and Bob Too had just started rehearsals. Stafford-Clark had championed Dunbar, a working-class teenager from Bradford, and he directed her first play, The Arbor, helping her become the youngest person to have a play staged at London’s Royal Court, aged 18.

Three years later, Dunbar wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too, a play about two young women who are groomed by an older, married man. Stafford-Clark directed that, too. The play was acclaimed, it became a film, and an emblem of a working-class existence in Thatcher’s Britain.

After the article’s publication, Stafford-Clark was taken off the revival three days into rehearsals, and Wasserberg took over. But then came the issue of the tour including a run at the Royal Court, where the play was originally performed. But the Court had just held a day of action at which 150 women stood on the stage and recounted incidents of sexual harassment.

‘It felt cold out there for me. And not everyone wanted to help, and not everyone has your best interests at heart’

It had published a code of conduct to fight abuses of power and sexual harassment within the theatre industry. Artistic director Vicky Featherstone felt it was the theatre’s role to be a leader in fighting harassment and abuse, and that hosting a play about young women groomed by an older man, who then have sex with him, was “highly conflictual”. She cancelled the run.

The cancellation prompted accusations of censorship by the venue; it’s a play by a working-class woman, drawing on her own experiences, with a working-class cast, now directed by a woman. Cancelling it because of the actions of a man seemed self-defeating. A few days later, Featherstone reinstated it. Wasserberg, whose experience in the public eye had been mostly positive when the Other Room opened, was completely unprepared for the long and messy chain of events. “It was really traumatic,” she says.

Vicky Featherstone: ‘Caryl Churchill persuaded me to reinstate Rita, Sue and Bob Too’

How much warning did she get? “We were inside it, so in terms of the Guardian article, Gina [Abolins, Out of Joint’s education manager at the time who made a formal complaint about Stafford-Clark in 2017 and was quoted in the article] was a staff member, so we were aware of it, although it was absolutely her decision and it was very important that we not interfere. So we supported her pastorally as a company, in terms of her well-being, but in terms of that narrative, that’s her narrative, her story.

“In terms of the Royal Court, they were our partners and our co-producers, and we had a long and detailed conversation. And we disagreed, but they certainly didn’t do anything without our knowledge or consent. I did always feel that Andrea’s voice was being lost in all of this, but I also completely understand that the Royal Court were in a very particular and extraordinarily strange moment and they listened and responded in a way that felt morally right to them. And then when the situation changed, they responded again.”

For Wasserberg herself, what she remembers strongly is the people who supported her. “Some people just step out for you. I felt so alone and sort of, I don’t know, like I was wearing the disgrace of someone else’s story. And that I was meant to feel bad.” Theatr Clwyd artistic director Tamara Harvey, Royal and Derngate Theatres’ James Dacre, Indhu Rubasingham of the Kiln, the Almeida’s Rupert Goold and Emma Rice all offered support. Rob Hastie, artistic director of Sheffield Theatres, didn’t know Wasserberg but he rang her up and said: “I am here.”

“It meant everything at the time. It mattered because I needed validation and friends. It felt cold out there for me. And not everyone wanted to help, and not everyone has your best interests at heart. It’s a lot more political than I thought.

“Erica Whyman, when I was so under pressure that I didn’t know if I could carry on, I will never forget, stayed on the phone to me on her own press night while she cooked dinner for her daughter. And I just, I don’t know if I would have got through that week without her. We didn’t know each other very well before. We’d only met each other twice. It was just pure sisterhood. She didn’t want anything from me. She just wanted me to be okay.”

Tipping points

So the last two years – amid another tour of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, as well as a production of Remains of the Day, and a new play about women on the frontline called Close Quarters – have been about looking forward and about identity. And the outcome? “We are a touring company that takes great plays in the mid-scale to audiences all around the country. Look at those three plays: you’re looking at three Englands, all about: ‘Who are we as a nation?’ ”

With characteristic excitement, Wasserberg reveals Out of Joint’s next big production – a revival of Richard Cameron’s 2002 play The Glee Club, which “I firmly believe is one of the greatest plays in the English language”. It’s being produced with Cast in Doncaster and London’s Kiln.

The play looks at a group of miners just outside Doncaster in 1962. They’re in a glee club, and their musical director is being blackmailed because he’s gay. “And it is a play for now because it’s absolutely about a nation at a tipping point. What are the things we hang on to and what are the things we let go?

“But, also, it tells a story about a working-class community that makes its own art for itself. They know that art is redemptive. At the moment there is this lazy idea that the working class don’t make art, that they don’t own art, that they need it to be brought to them, that they are fundamentally helpless and feckless. I wanted to push back on that. Having done two plays that were enormously centred on the female experience, it feels like a moment to talk about men, for us as a company.”

Wasserberg also promises a major adaptation by “one of our country’s greatest living playwrights” and an exciting take on a Shakespeare play, as well as the return of the Andrea Project, which helps teenagers write for theatre.

Through all the turmoil, Wasserberg has never stopped loving theatre. “I need it,” she says, “because the world’s too rough. I need to be able to shape and mould the world so that it makes sense, and there’s compassion in it and there’s redemption in it. Or I can’t survive.”

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CV Kate Wasserberg

Born: 1980, Leek, Staffordshire
Training: Drama, University of Exeter; MA in Advanced Theatre Practice, Royal Central School of Speech
and Drama
Landmark productions:
• Dancing at Lughnasa, Theatr Clwyd (2010)
• Blasted, The Other Room (2015)
• Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Out of Joint UK tour (2017)
Awards:
• The Stage Award for fringe theatre of the year, The Other Room, 2016
Agent: Lisa Richards Creatives

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Tamara Harvey: ‘I want Theatr Clwyd to become a home for writers’