Roy Sargeant, one of South Africa's most celebrated and prolific theatre personalities, most recently directed The Merchant of Venice at the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre. Daniel Dercksen spoke to him about his craft.

What excites you about theatre?
It's the only thing I know how to do. I've been in it for forty-two years. I think the rehearsal process is very exciting. When you have a powerful, extraordinary complex play like 'The Merchant of Venice', together with an extraordinarily bright, inventive and beautiful cast, the whole encounter, challenge and response of rehearsal is so thrilling, so mind-blowing that every day becomes a new adventure. What else do we need in our life, but lots of adventure?

You are comfortable working in all mediums - stage, television, film and radio - do you have any preference?
No. I'm gladly out of all the other forms now because especially film and television are for the young people, not for me, because I'm heading towards seventy. I did my stint there, it was very challenging and wonderful, but no, I am happy to be back in theatre where it's calmer. Making a movie is like fighting a battle everyday of your life. So I am glad to be away from that now. If I was asked to go back I wouldn't. It was very stimulating and thrilling, but theatre is very stimulating and thrilling too.

Where did it all start? Your interest in theatre?
It started when I was about seven. I was cast as Ali Baba in the a prep school production directed by our Speech and Drama teacher, so I had the starring role. Then one of the ordinary teachers did another production later that year, some ghastly fairy tale and I was in the back row in the chorus as a gnome or something, which I found very demeaning and I was extremely difficult, badly behaved and unpleasant towards this teacher. Unforgiveable. But then, having been flung out of the woodwork class being a danger to the other boys, with saws and things, I went home and built myself a model theatre. That is almost kind of traditional and I became more and more fixated with the whole idea of theatre. In high school we had a lot of Gilbert and Sullivan productions and plays. This was at Rondebosch Boys' High. In fact, I was singing along to a Gilbert and Sullivan disc this morning, coming into town, and I was arrested in the army for singing Gilbert and Sullivan while I was on guard duty - I was bored so I began singing it when a bloody NCO came past and I was put on a charge.  Anyway, the thing is, Rondebosch is a marvellous school for theatre, many, many theatre people come out of Rondebosch.

Is this what you have always wanted to do?
Yes, I think so. Yes, it was. I wanted to be in the theatre and I was very lucky to begin my career as a radio drama producer and was able to work with many professional actors, getting to know the business, and then two wonderful opportunities came along. Firstly, Pieter-Dirk Uys, who was Chairman of the UCT Dramatic Society - I was in radio at that stage after graduating - he asked me to direct a play for them. We did Volpone, that marvellous comedy by Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary. Secondly, the Artistic Director of CAPAB saw that production and he asked me to do my first professional theatre production, The Beaux' Stratagem.

Shifting the focus from Shakespeare to Artscape's New Writing Program, and looking at the new voices, which emerged during the 3^rd  Spring Drama Season, up and coming voices, are you optimistic and confident about the future of theatre in South Africa?
I have to be optimistic because no country in the world can live without drama. But, that does not say I'm not worried. I am worried about the devastation that the 1994 Revolution brought with it to the theatre, in which the acting companies were summarily and stupidly disbanded; so much expertise built up during the many years the Arts Councils had existed, accepting that they were unacceptable apartheid theatre companies, but there was tremendous expertise there. Unplug the bath and down went the baby gurgling! That is the stupidest thing that has ever happened, and it is hard to build back now, bringing theatre and drama away from hundreds of thousands of little projects going on all over the place, 80% of which are inexpert and are damaging to the business, to get back to the acting ensembles again, which could make South Africa very proud, as does, for example,  Cape Town Opera make people of that profession and the people who love opera very, very proud indeed. This is a battle I am worried about. I am also worried about the audiences because drama is so fragmented, and there is so little focus on excellence, that the audiences have largely disappeared, and it is quite a battle to get them back to see a play. Those musicals, cabarets and celebrations of ghastly American musical things dissipate things, and to get the audiences to come and apply their minds to the word, the play is difficult now, but we go on!

What do you think are the attributes of a great director?
That he should be a great listener. The director needs to know how he sees the play and needs to articulate how he sees the play. He has to create a physical environment, sets, costumes, props that make sense. All that is pre-rehearsal preparation. He needs to know how the play is going to be staged, he must trust the company of actors and he must create an inventive rehearsal room, a happy rehearsal room. He's got to have ideas because if he has no ideas he is lost, because there will come moments where the actors don't have any ideas either, and then there comes a dark, solemn silence. Nobody knows where to go from there so he needs to be able to revive it all; he's got to be super prepared. Above all, he's got to make sense of the play's meaning, sub-textually. He also has to provide his actors with authority on stage. By that I mean he has to have them in the right positions on stage, give the actor the authority to play the moment, if he's in a wrong position focus goes and meaning goes with it. If it becomes a free-for-all in the rehearsal process you're in trouble. So those are the important things a director has to understand. He must also be vaguely intelligent, I suppose.

You have an obsession with the written word?
Yes, I do. I love words. William Haqzlitt said it, `Words are the only things that last for ever.' I love their ambiguity. I love the way they dazzle me when I am working on a text like one by Shakespeare. They are like diamonds, they reflect, refract all sorts of qualities of light, enlightenment. I have been in love with my language since I was a small boy. When I was a thirteen-year-old in Standard 7 my mother gave me a wonderful book, it was Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and my mom inscribed it,  'To Roy, Have a wonderful career in English.' I have. That's been terrific.  Other forms of theatre don't massively attract me, Physical Theatre in its purest form 'laat my koud', I don't understand so often what is going on. However, the uses of physical theatre techniques have contributed to production techniques. They are not techniques I use because I don't have the training.

What do you think makes the work of Shakespeare, and a play like 'The Merchant of Venice', timeless?
It's impossible to answer in the framework of this interview. The great dramatist - he was perhaps the greatest the world has ever know - has a unique insight into human motive and I think that is what makes him so endlessly timeless. If you look at `past significance and present meaning', to use the critic, Richard Weimann's phrase, and you can find a match between them you can be on to something. Those `past significances', which Shakespeare deals out to us, have so many resonances through our contemporary life. It's irresistible. But one has to be very careful when you are moving the play out of its Renaissance context, you can't do it lightly, you have to answer all the questions and solve all the problems or you will get into awful trouble. There's a  reference in 'Rome and Juliet' to `the Cyprus Grove', and I thought director Bazz Luhrman, who made the movie with Di Capprio, was inspired when he made the Cyprus Grove an old, Art Deco, decaying cinema. That was inspired! I always think of that when I am trying to move a play forward, like the 'Hamlet' I have been doing over the past two years, or now with 'The Merchant of Venice', setting it during the Second World War. There are some problems that are insoluble, but the audience accept the fact that the characters talk about ducats and not lire in the play, because you can't solve that one, but if the other problems are solved well you can sweep the audience along.

What attracted you to direct 'The Merchant of Venice'?
The Maynardville season has a bidding process every year, whereby directors have to make proposals, present concepts for plays and how they will stage them visually. I thought to myself I hadn't done a Maynardville since the mid-nineties, I'd like to do one again, although I don't like working at that time of year very much! The Maynardville Trust wanted a comedy, they did a tragedy last year (Romeo and Juliet), and I did not want to think about A Midsummer Night's Dream - it's been done too often in the Park, it bores me -  I 've done Much Ado About Nothing, which I do think is one of his funniest plays, and I thought `well you'd better get on and offer The Merchant. I read it and thought again what a marvellous piece, it's so complex and so entangled, full of lovely wonderful human contradictions. I had a need to do this play and I was sitting in Italy just outside Assisi on a farm (in May 2007) and the whole production kind of bounced into my head as to how to do it, it was very clear. I woke up one morning and had kind of half-waking visualisation of the ending of the play, which is a very special end which I am creating for our production, and which I am not going to describe to you. It was that image that drew me back into giving its 1943 setting, the middle of the Second World War just before the "Nazis invaded Italy" for Italy's protection! Off course, the allies were storming up from North Africa, including the South African forces, and so it seemed just so right. Hopefully it will be so.

What do you hope audiences will get from watching 'The Merchant of Venice'?
I think the play deals with betrayals essentially. Betrayals and deceptions in both a very serious manner and in a comic manner, so it is what the scholars would call a tragi-comedy, it's not a pure comedy, it can't be with the appalling journey Shylock undertakes during the play. I hope the reflection of racism, which we will explore in the production, will be very meaningful, particularly to South Africans who've live through Apartheid. It can't have an Apartheid setting, because that would then be just too crass to bear, but when you can find a concept in the play that deals with racism, as this one does, anti-Semitism and anti-Christianism, if you can find a way of reflecting that in a non-up-your-nose' manner, I think you might have achieved something. We might achieve that I hope.

Do you really enjoy watching theatre, being part of the audience?
Naturally.

What inspires you?
Hard work.

Any advice for those interested in making a career in the theatre?
To young people I say, do what you want to do with your lives. If you want to go into the theatre, then damn well do it, BUT beware, the Theatre is a Bitch Goddess. It's so tough inside there, there are so many disappointments, should they become overwhelming then get out and do something more peaceful and probably more reliable financially. There are two routes, going for training within a school of drama or battling into the profession and learning on the job. They work equally well, except graduating from a drama school doesn't mean you know the job, there is still the apprenticeship to be served. So, to sum up be determined, work hard, be respectful and, when necessary, be ruthless!

Copyright © 2007 Daniel Dercksen/The Writing Studio