Laurence Boswell

Laurence Boswell restages his hit London production of Joe Egg.

An interview by John Istel

Director Laurence Boswell’s been house-hunting in New York in preparation for his Broadway debut—Roundabout’s production of Joe Egg. He’s a bit jet-lagged but eager to talk about a show he’s worked on for the past couple of years, mounting it first in London’s West End, then restaging it for a larger theatre, and now preparing a new design and supporting cast for the American Airlines Theatre.

In his early 40s, with respectful tinges of gray in his jet-black hair, Boswell’s black trench coat may be the last outward vestige of his teenage obsession with the punk rock movement. "We’d sit around and talk about Camus and Sartre and the aesthetic implications of The Clash," he remembers. "We were the anti-intellectual French theoretical end of punk." Recently, Boswell’s sassy and smart productions have drawn hip, young audiences into the orchestra seats once occupied by their parents. After starting out as an assistant director at the Royal Shakespeare Company and winning awards for his work on a season of Spanish Golden Age drama at the tiny Gate Theatre, he had his first commercial West End success with Ben Elton’s Popcorn, a murderous comedy about the movie business. The new demographic returned in droves for his high-voltage, rock-and-roll production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck (the show is currently on its fifth cast) and for Up for Grabs, starring Madonna.

Before he flew off to Los Angeles (to woo Calista Flockhart into taking the Katharine Hepburn part in a production of The Philadelphia Story planned for London), he stopped by to talk to Front & Center about Joe Egg.

FRONT & CENTER: You once said that you first became interested in drama when you were ten and played a ventriloquist’s dummy in a school show.

LAURENCE BOSWELL: I always was labeled a chatterbox and a showoff. I didn’t have a happy childhood and maybe I was desperate for attention. So we had to make something up for a school revue. I worked with a friend of mine; he played the ventriloquist and I played the dummy. It was my first performance. And I remember the headmaster said, "Didn’t Laurence do that well!" That little affirmation was like a drop of rain in the desert. I was very short of affirmation as a child. I still tell the jokes to my kids: What do you give a sore pig? Oinkment. Where do you send a sick horse? To horsepital. Those are all old music hall jokes.

Which brings you full circle since Bri and Sheila’s comic routines in Joe Egg seem influenced by that same British music hall tradition.

All through Peter Nichols’ work there’s evidence of his interest in music hall—and in including direct address to the audience, in breaking the standard realistic model, and in introducing comedy from the popular tradition into his plays. I want the same thing: intelligent, rich language and complex themes, but I can’t live without laughs. That’s why Peter loved the idea of Eddie Izzard taking on the role of Bri. He loves comedians and comedy. And it’s lovely to have Eddie because he started out doing "tricks"—oops, that doesn’t mean the same thing here as in England—I mean, he started doing "performances" on the street, in Covent Garden, doing real busking, the pure art of being a clown.

You said that even before you reread Joe Egg, you told the London producer that you’d "give your right arm to direct it." Why?

Victoria Hamilton and Eddie Izzard in Joe Egg

Everybody, when they talk about the play, likes to talk about the issue of disability. And that theme is part of the play. I’m glad the image of a disabled child in a wheelchair is there—it’s a radical image. I’m not dismissing any of that. But the real core of Joe Egg—and why it’s being produced on Broadway for the third time in thirty years—is about a marriage. It deals with one of the central issues of our lives: How do you relate to your significant other? How do you cope with the sacrifices of a relationship? For Bri, there’s the sacrifice of his creativity. He wants to be an artist. Can he just leave and go be a painter? And while he has to put up with Sheila, she has to put up with his depressions. Like most men, he wants to be looked after, and she wants to look after their daughter, Joe, who in her condition intensifies their relationship. It’s more than a lot of us have to deal with, thank God. But there are those times when kids are sick or you don’t have any money—we all deal with big issues in relationships and it’s a big part of our lives. "I can’t stand the way you box me in." Or "I need space." That negotiation is one of the central negotiations of our lives.

But it’s the comedy that breaks your heart. You can watch dozens of soap operas every day that portray relationships under strain, but Nichols uses humor to highlight the pain.

That’s right. There’s often nothing funnier than a frustrated artist. For me that’s what Bri is—he doesn’t know where to put his creativity, so he puts it into his jokes. He expresses all his pain through acting out and playing. Some of the jokes are very cruel because he’s an angry, trapped man.

I’d love you to talk about directing comedy. You’ve done it a lot, and very successfully. Now, I’ve heard all sorts of stupid, easy clichés about directing comedy—just brighten the lights and they’ll laugh more, but it can’t be that easy...

I love to talk about comedy. It’s my obsession. If you have the right actors—actors who have a nose for comedy or a comedic instinct—and you have a comedic script, then you actually must forget it’s a comedy. My favorite line regarding comedy is: Focus on the pain. If you find the pain of the character, the pain of the situation, and the pain of the pay-off, if you focus on that, then it becomes funny.

Another chapter in my book called Comedy would be: "Cut the Titters; Save It for the Woofer." In the reality of the character’s journey, there’ll always be some lovely big moment, which is probably very painful and very funny. A clever comic actor can create four or five laughs along the way to that big moment by just doing something silly or by some witty observation of characterization. Then you get titter, titter, titter. When you get to the woofer, the audience is kind of exhausted. Titters are like fast food, kind of like cheating, letting the tension out. Instead, I try to get actors to keep it in and save it for the woofer. One big woofer is worth a million titters.

The recent revival on the West End was originally the idea of actor Clive Owen (Gosford Park, Bourne Identity) who played Bri. After he left, how did Eddie Izzard work into the production?

Clive had no reason to do theatre. He’s on an incredible roll with his film career. But he took six months out to do it and left because he got a huge film role opposite Angelina Jolie. We all understood it was a crossroads moment in his career. We weren’t happy, but we understood. And I went to go talk to Vicki Hamilton, who plays Sheila, about Clive’s replacement. She was kind of rheumy—it was winter and a lot of illnesses were going around, and she had worked so hard on getting the show right. She was in her dressing room surrounded by medicinal vapors, and she said, "I just can’t go into another rehearsal period. Don’t ask me." I said, "What if it’s Eddie Izzard?" She sighed and said, "When do we start?"

It was literally like that because, totally unbeknownst to me, she was just in love with Eddie. So Vicki and all of us went back into rehearsal. And we never—ever—got through Bri’s comedy sketches. Eddie was just too funny. I’d literally fall off my chair and Vicki would run out of the room, afraid she’d die of laughter. Eddie would just stand there and look around and go, Huh? Eddie is a genius with comedy.

What makes you feel best about your work on this production—either an aspect of the overall accomplishment or a particularly difficult part for which you found a great solution?

I’m very pleased that when we get it right we make the text hilariously funny when it’s supposed to be, in all its twisted, dark ways—and yet we can wrench the audience from there back into the anguish of a relationship falling apart. When I can get a performance that satisfies both of those demands then I’m very proud.

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