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Will Power
Heidi Vaughan and staging The Winter’s Tale
Having nipped out for a breath of fresh air, Heidi Vaughan returns to the rehearsal room in Bristol where we have arranged to meet. Apparently still full of energy and unaffected by the rigours of a long day’s rehearsing, she cheerfully tends the bodily needs with offers of tea before we slump into the couple of comfy sofas that act as a kind of ‘green room’ for the actors. She tells me this is the first day of blocking – that is the movement and placing of actors – what we might call the preliminary staging, having spent the first days of rehearsal outlining the direction the play was to take. “Directors need to do their background work”, she says, recognizing the intellectual control needed, particularly in what is considered one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’. She refers to Shakespeare chummily as ‘Bill’, as if he’d just left the rehearsal room himself and left her in charge of his latest work in which she is chief collaborator. She passes me a book that has been used as inspiration for the setting. The page is open at a sculpture. A tall, thin vertical cone of what seems to be various materials is, she says, a kind of needle which serves as a metaphor for the time – ours and the play’s – in which things need sewing back together.
In The Winter’s Tale the court (The Palace of Leontes in Sicilia) is juxtaposed with Bohemia, which for Shakespeare stands for something ‘other’, a bucolic paradise where satyrs and country folk sing, dance and disport themselves. It’s a difference that Ms Vaughan is keen to highlight: Shakespeare’s language changes, she points out, and prose takes over from the versifying of the court. Costume, she promises, will highlight the differences. Bohemia is a land where bears roam free and with that in mind the famous stage direction, ‘Exit pursued by a bear’, will be given due theatrical weight she hints with a smile that suggests it wasn’t worth pursuing the matter further. No spoilers here!
We turned to her role as artistic director of the Tobacco Factory Theatres (TFT) and I wondered how she went about choosing productions. I mentioned the success of the Ustinov in Bath, which followed from the careful programming of Laurence Boswell and more recently, Deborah Warner. “Unfortunately the Tobacco Factory cannot accept about eighty percent of the productions that tour simply because of the pragmatics of space.” Nevertheless she wants the seasons to be broad and eclectic in recognition of the nature of the potential audience and the area TFT serves. Musing on the rewards of being an artistic director as opposed to directing itself she liked the idea of being an ‘enabler’. How that pans out we’ll have to wait and see, but she is firm on one thing, which is the availability of actors in Bristol, something that will be music to the ears of the many talented performers who have made the city their own and who largely make up the present company.
Having Shakespeare return to the Tobacco Factory after a hiatus of some four years was no mere directorial whim. The reputation that Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (SATTF) had earned under the direction of Andrew Hilton, for productions of internationally recognized quality – uncluttered and consummately acted, is it seems keeping hope alive with Bristol theatergoers. Ms Vaughan instituted canvassing to find out what people wanted from their theatre. The clear message was that ‘Bill’ was due a comeback – by public demand!
The times are such that, “Redemption and the chance to make amends” make The Winter’s Tale a good choice for the reboot. It’s a play in which the villain, she suggests, “Is us, our blindness,” when cognitive bias prevents us from seeing things as they are. Moreover doing a Shakespeare has a special relevance for Ms Vaughan as SATTF was where she saw her first Hamlet, she tells me with a smile suggesting a satisfying circle being completed. So after spells at Bath’s Egg Theatre and the very successful and innovative Travelling Light theatre company it’s a homecoming of sorts; enabling her to feed what once fed her.
Of course the style of Andrew Hilton cannot nor should not be repeated; Heidi Vaughan needs to forge her own artistic path and that’s something she is acutely aware of, whilst paying due respect to his legacy. With ‘Bill’ firmly established as ‘box office’, in this neck of Bristol at least, the next few weeks will discover just how deep those roots have grown and whether the success of SATTF Mk.1 is something that can be repeated.
As Ms Vaughan gets to grips with, not only Shakespeare, but also the idiosyncrasies of the Tobacco Factory space, it happens by pure coincidence that on opening night of, The Winter’s Tale, elsewhere in Bristol, Andrew Hilton has a book launch in which he chronicles the ups and downs of building SATTF. A good omen perhaps? Certainly it marks the significance of the handing on of one of Bristol’s and indeed the country’s cultural batons. We at StageTalk wish her well.
Interview by Graham Wyles, February 2025
The Winter’s Tale will be staged at Tobacco Factory Theatres 20 February – 29 March 2025
Photo credits: Craig Fuller, Ali Wright