DIRECTOR BLANCHE MCINTYRE: “I’D KICK THE DOOR DOWN TO DIRECT THIS PLAY!”

Olivia Hurton of Plays To See spoke to Blanche McIntyre about directing Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love.

Director Blanche McIntyre has a spring in her step. When we meet at the Hampstead Theatre, she’s a whirlwind of excitement and energy—and that’s after a day of rehearsals for her forthcoming revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love…

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The Invention of Love at Hampstead Theatre was not, however, McIntyre’s idea, but when she caught wind that it was being revived for the first time since its 1997 debut at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre, her steely determination was in full evidence. ‘I said I’d kick the door down and I pretty much did. I saw the script on his [the producer’s] desk and said, who’s directing this? I need to direct this!’ After seeing the original production at a time when she was consuming the classics fervently—Catullus, who features in the play, was coincidentally becoming a personal favourite—she recalls ‘[falling] in love with it sort of comprehensively […] I practically applied to St John’s [College, Oxford] because that’s where they all were’.

Indeed, The Invention of Love is an Oxford play of sorts. Its keynotes are scholarship, poetry, epistemology, and first love. It follows the recently deceased A.E. Housman (played by Simon Russell Beale), the preeminent Oxbridge classics scholar and Victorian poet of unrequited love, as he makes his way through the Stygian gloom of the underworld accompanied by Charon. Here youthful memories swirl back into being, and imaginary encounters are made possible. McIntyre’s affinity with the play is natural—she’s an Oxonian classicist. In fact, she eagerly directed the play as an undergraduate on the very ‘first […] day the rights became available’ and took it up to the Edinburgh Fringe. But as she rightly insists, the ‘point sort of isn’t Oxford’; the play has wider relatability. ‘Everybody knows what it is to be eighteen […] and feel the door to life opening and think I could do something here; I could really make a difference […] I could fall in love with a person and that be the great passion of my life.’

 

To read the full interview visit Plays to See through the button below.

 

The Invention of Love plays on the Main Stage until 1 February.

 

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

BOOK THE INVENTION OF LOVE HERE