Carrie Cracknell: 'Some of the directing pathways that were there for me aren't there anymore'

Director Carrie Cracknell is busy. Her new production of Bizet’s Carmen will open at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the new year, before she hops back across the Atlantic to direct an as-yet-unannounced show at the National Theatre. At the moment, though, she is working at her local theatre, the Almeida, for the first time since 2016, staging a revival of Irish writer Marina Carr’s 1996 play Portia Coughlan.

“It’s a play I’ve loved for a long time,” Cracknell says. “I’m always interested in plays that focus on familial complexity and inherited behaviour, and that have female protagonists. Those things go together. We don’t have an enormous number of plays about women in positions of power. The canon of plays about women tends much more towards the psychological, so my feminist impulses have always led me towards that discourse. A lot of my work explores the interior life of women.”

Born in 1980, Cracknell grew up in Oxford, and became seriously involved in theatre while studying history at the University of Nottingham, forming a company with fellow students Ruth Wilson, Michael Longhurst and James Erskine, whose first show transferred from Edinburgh to London to New York. She went on to study directing at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), and was appointed co-artistic director of Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre, alongside Natalie Abrahami, in 2007 aged just 26.

Associateships at London’s Young Vic and Royal Court followed, as did jobs at the National Theatre and the Almeida. Cracknell staged acclaimed revivals of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Young Vic in 2012, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck with the English National Opera in 2013 and Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre in 2016. Her 2019 Broadway double bill of Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall and Nick Payne’s A Life, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge, earned four Tony award nominations, and her debut film, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, came out on Netflix last year.

“I’m lucky because I do have quite a free rein in the work that I make,” Cracknell says. “I always come back to the same thing when deciding what to do next. I ask myself: ‘Do I have an emotional and visual relationship to the material? Will my perspective open up the play, or the opera, or the film? Can I feel the story under my skin?’ I try to stick to that, rather than getting too caught up in thinking about other things, like the size of the venue or whatever. I do have a bit of a career plan in the back of my mind, though. I’m hungry to make more films. I’d like to do something more independent.”

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