Gabby Vautier Young Vic Theatre
John & Mary: We could start with a short bio...How long have you been working for the Young Vic?
Gabby: I started working at the Young Vic at the beginning of 2002. Before working at the Young Vic I was a dresser on the tour of Joseph (with Phillip Schofield - which was very exciting to me aged 18!), then went to King Alfred's University in Winchester to study Drama, Theatre and Television Studies - focusing on Community Drama and Documentary. After leaving uni I got work experience on The Trisha Show (V high quality TV!!) and then got taken on at Anglia and worked on a number of different programmes - mainly ones about sex for some unknown reason!! Then I left Anglia TV as I had been offered a job setting up the audience department for Open House with Gloria Hunniford and got paid lots of money to find Cliff Richard, Donny Osmond, Daniel O Donnell etc etc fans to fill up the studio audience. However I was always heavily involved in theatre outside of my work and knew that it was theatre that I was really interested in, and inspired by and so when the Young Vic job came up - it sounded exactly like the kind of job for me (despite the very large pay drop) and the rest is history!
J & M: How did you get into directing? Is that what you really want to do?
G: Like I said above, I am always working on something other than my paid job, and so I have done all sorts of things - backstage, costume, lighting, lots of acting, and a bit of directing - but I always had an opinion on the direction of the pieces I was working on. At Uni I was the ultimate geek and was chairperson for the University Theatre Company called KASPA (KASPA stood for King Alfred's Society for Performing Arts), but I do remember someone crossing out Performing Arts and adding Pretentious Arseholes one day - very funny! At Uni I programmed all of the plays we put on in the Theatre or the Arts Centre (it was about 12 shows a year) and I directed and choreographed a large scale musical called Sweet Charity, and also a large devised piece called Sewage (which really was quite literally shit!), but once leaving uni, I ended up doing a lot of acting with various theatre companies. I kept acting in shows that I didn't really think were very good, and so I decided that I would choose something that I thought was interesting to work on. I was asked by a local theatre company to direct something of my choice, whichwas Mojo by Jez Butterworth, and I really enjoyed the experience - in a different and I think more satisfying way to acting and I learnt so much the second time I directed the piece. The Artistic Directors of the Rosemary Branch Theatre came to watch it and really enjoyed it - and invited us to do a three week run of the show.
J & M: How did you come to work with 'Eat the Cake Productions?'
Eat the Cake Productions was created by me for the run at the Rosemary Branch. It costs quite a lot to put on a fringe show, so the actors were asked if they wanted to become part of the company - to put in some cash and then hope to get it back at the end. So Mojo was Eat the Cakes first production, but it definitely won't be the last!! Eat the Cake by the way is a line from the play - but we thought it sounded quite good as the name for our company.
J & M: What made you/them decide to pick Mojo ?
When I was first asked to pick a play to direct I chose a play that I had been wanting to do for ages - Dealers Choice by Patrick Marber. It's an all male play and it focuses mainly on poker - so I spent about seven months working on the script and finding out about poker, and did a massive campaign to find good male actors that would work for free so I could be really on the ball. Then three days before the auditions, the rights got pulled which meant I either had to cancel the directing slot I had been given and give it up, or find another play. I spent those three days reading endless plays waiting for one to grab me and I finally found that when I opened up Mojo, read the first page - didn't understand a word of it but knew that it was my kind of thing - very funny, very dark humour, very quick paced and a beautiful piece of writing where there is no main character and all the parts are brilliant.
J & M: What were the best/worst things that happened during the course of your directing debut? The best things were being able to play so much - we were able to get into the Rosemary Branch more than a week before the show (a real luxury in a fringe venue) and we all took the week off work. It was heaven, though waking up early and spending twelve hours in a black box doesn't automatically sound like fun, but we had so much time to play - get up the set and tweak things. One day we spent four hours with the boys in character for the whole time - inside and outside of the space - and we didn't look at the script once - it was really exciting, but maybe you had to be there. During the run I watched the show every night but one and operated the lights and sound too some nights - that was good because I learnt a new skill. The worst was probably getting a hideous review in The Stage, however in a way, it was also one of the best things. One of my actors rang me to tell me about it and as he was reading it I wanted to go back to bed and hide under the covers for the next three weeks. However, it was a real lesson that was essential to learn - how to react when you get a bad review, and how to recover from it and not take the criticism and change the piece - I directed it, and the actors played their characters in such a way that we felt we were true to the script and it was important that it was consistent- Luckily all of the other reviews we got were glowing, which was really nice - but what was most important of all, I have realised was what I thought of the piece and whether it had lived up to my expectations.
J & M: What have you learned from the experience? Don't read reviews until after the run!
J & M: What would you like to do next? G: I am currently working on something a little barmy actually. I was asked to direct something in March for a theatre in Waterloo and I wanted desperately to do something really fun and really inclusive, so I came up with the idea of the Karaoke Wedding. People write short sketches and songs on the theme of a disaster wedding and send them into me. The best get picked and tacked together to create a short musical which is then workshopped, rehearsed and performed in a three week intensive period. And I'm still looking for pieces and also wanting actors for the final piece - if people are interested they just need to get in touch at gabbyvautier@youngvic.org
J & M: Any dream projects? Is there something you've always wanted to direct, anyone you've always wanted to work with? G: I would love to direct Dealers Choice as I did so much work on it and I would like to see it finally done (I am obsessed with all male plays it seems!) Other than that anything with Brad Pitt, Ralph and Joseph Fiennes and Johnny Depp would be cracking!
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