Jack McNamara directs the first UK production of Don DeLillo’s Love-Lies-Bleeding at The Print Room at The Coronet. Starring Josie Lawrence and Joe McGann, with Clara Indrani and Jack Wilkinson is a moving and surprisingly witty story about a family trying to take death into their own hands.
Love-Lies-Bleeding will be performed at the Print Room 9 November – 8 December 2018.
You’re directing Love-Lies-Bleeding at the Print Room at The Coronet, what can you tell us about it?
It’s the third play by the American writer Don DeLillo. Many people know DeLillo as one of our greatest modern novelists, but few know that he also writes for the stage. There seems to be a natural scepticism when a novelist tries their hand at theatre, but DeLillo is totally fluent with the dramatic form.
Love Lies Bleeding follows the story of three family members who have to decide what to do with a loved one after a stroke leaves him paralysed and helpless. It’s a simple premise but a beautifully complex play as each family member has their own history with the man which colours their approach to the problem. It’s intense and blackly comic, like the best of DeLillo’s fiction. Yet as a piece of theatre it really has it own voice, in my view sitting amongst the great works of modern American drama.
You’re the only director in the UK to have stage Don DeLillo’s work, why do you think you are so drawn to him as a writer?
I think DeLillo captures everything I love about art. His work is vast and intimate, dark and light, surreal and absolutely real, all at the same time. He’s one of the funniest writers I know and yet the comedy has a depth and that gives it such meaning and insight. He’s a profoundly philosophical writer yet somehow the wealth of ideas never overwhelms you. Many people have said that as a contemporary writer he writes the best sentences in the English language, and the great thing about doing his work onstage is that those sentences now get to be spoken out loud.
I feel very lucky that he has trusted me with his work a number of times before, first with his play Valparaiso and then with an unpublished piece that I staged at the Southbank called The Word for Snow. He’s shown me a lot of generosity, which I hope to repay by doing his work really well.
Love-Lies-Bleeding is one of his later works, will fans of his earlier material recognise this as being written by him?
A lot of people know DeLillo as a writer of urban experience, whereas this play is slightly removed from the thrum of the modern world. It’s a play about city people in a kind of exile in the desert, cut off from so called normal life. But the concerns of his other work and the uniqueness of his characters are absolutely there. He writes about the strangeness of modern experience, the relationship between people and their environment and the wonder and danger of being alive in the age that we are.
What are you most looking forward to about working with the cast?
It’s only early days but I am confident to say I have a truly amazing cast. They really get the world that DeLillo has created, but they also really put it to the test by interrogating each thread of it. We are very aware that we have to make this show for people who have never heard of DeLillo so we are not taking any assumed knowledge for granted. We have spent a lot of time unpicking everything that the writer is saying but for me the really exciting part is when we start building the flow and tone of the production. DeLillo once wrote to me that he admired the fact that in theatre, as opposed to novels, words are only the beginning of the process.
What are the challenges that come with creating the South Western American desert in a London Theatre?
The challenge for myself and the designer, Lily Arnold, was finding an environment that both contained the interior action but also evoked a kind of epic-ness. DeLillo’s vision is too big for the drawing room, it would break all the windows! So, we worked hard to find a space that gave the actors enough naturalism to play the scenes but that never got too stuck in the literal. I’m always interested in spaces that open things up, that activate different levels of perception. We are working with a kind of minimalism, that forces a lot of focus onto the actor’s performances.
What would you say to anyone thinking of coming to see Love-Lies-Bleeding
I would say please see the above. Now stop dithering and take the plunge!
