Tim Carroll is making the Shaw Festival into a two-way conversation with its audience
About This Episode:
Tim Carroll has been the artistic director of the Shaw Festival for a decade, and in that time he’s reshaped the festival’s mandate, expanded its reach into the community, and built a company culture grounded in playfulness, humility, and genuine artistic ambition.
This episode explores:
- How Tim balances directing two major productions, Heartbreak House and Amadeus, in a single season, and why Tom Rooney is at the centre of both
- The economics of theatre: why even one of Canada’s largest festivals relies on donations for half its income, and how a small-audience show can be as valuable as a sellout musical
- Why Tim abolished the Shaw Festival’s mandate and replaced it with a mission; and what that difference actually means in practice
- How working at Shakespeare’s Globe with Mark Rylance shaped every aspect of Tim’s directing philosophy, from shared light to trusting the unexpected
- And much more!
Guest: 🎠Tim Carroll
im Carroll currently serves as Artistic Director of The Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a position he’s held since 2017. Carroll may be best known for his years as Associate Director at London’s Globe Theatre, in particular for his productions of Richard III and Twelfth Night, starring Mark Rylance, for whose Broadway run in the 2013-14 season he was Tony-nominated and Mark Rylance won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor.
Carroll worked with the English Shakespeare Company before serving as the artistic director of the Northcott Theatre in Exeter. Carroll also served as the artistic director for the Kent Opera, and he is a founding member of the experimental theatre group the Factory in London. Carroll’s directing work has spanned not only the Globe but the globe, from theatres in Hungary, Norway, Portugal, Romania, and Canada!
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Transcript
[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on Stageworthy, I talk to theatre makers of all kinds, from actors to directors to playwrights, stage managers, producers.
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Your ratings and reviews do help new people to find the show. So if you could do that, I would be forever grateful. Speaking of gratitude, I have a Patreon.
I will talk a little bit more about that at the end of the show. And you should stick around to the end of the show to find out who my guest is next week, and you’re going to want to do that. But I will mention that I have a Patreon and the people who are backing me on the Patreon helped me to make this show.
So if you want to be part of that, consider going to patreon.com slash stageworthy and becoming a patron. My guest this week is the artistic director of the Shaw Festival, Tim Carroll. Tim is a director and artistic director.
He’s been heading the Shaw Festival for about 10 years now. And before that, he was at the at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. He’s directed all over Europe.
We have a great conversation coming up about the Shaw Festival directing Heartbreak House and Amadeus in one season, what brought him to the Shaw Festival and just generally about him as a director and as a leader. This is a great conversation. I hope you enjoy it because here it comes now.
Tim Carroll, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you making the time. I know you are you’re just in the middle of the festival at this time.
And so things at this point in the festival when we’re recording this, it’s July. How busy are things for you on a daily basis? As the artistic director, what are you doing right now?
How does your day get filled?
[Tim Carroll]
Yes, it is different depending on the time of the year. So your question is a good one. Today was a rather untypical day because I’ve just come from performing at a pop-up patio.
It’s the one thing I perform every year. I put a little band together, TC and Friends, and we perform on one of the Thursday afternoons. Every Thursday afternoon in the season, someone performs out on our courtyard and it’s become very popular.
We get a big old crowd. All the tables are filled. Everyone’s eating hot dogs and burgers and drinking.
And we have an hour and a half gig by someone. And this was my day this year for TC and Friends. So we did a whole set of old man rockers and played them.
But as I said, that’s a very untypical day. More typical was yesterday where I watched a preview of one of my shows and gave notes on a performance of the show I’d been directing two shows this year. And on any given day, of course, your main job as artistic director is dealing with crises.
[Phil Rickaby]
So was playing a concert on the patio more relaxing than one normally would have? Is that a quieter day for you?
[Tim Carroll]
It’s a more fun day. It’s not relaxing because I’m not a professional musician. So I went completely wrong on one song, which was fairly mortifying.
But I sort of do it to test myself against the tension and the adrenaline of performing and also to give myself more training in self-forgiveness and getting back on the horse after you fall off. So I felt this year that although my secret wishes, which is, of course, to have a perfect gig where I don’t make any mistakes, that didn’t happen. But I did feel as though, yeah, it was OK.
We made a great big mistake. It was very obvious to everyone. We laughed it off and got on with it.
And there it is.
[Phil Rickaby]
That’s that’s just performing in the theatre, essentially, is like when when something goes wrong, you just deal with it and move on.
[Tim Carroll]
Exactly. And since I’m always trying to put my actors in situations where things are bound to go wrong and since I spend a lot of time talking to them about these are the golden moments, it’s good for me to put myself through that as well.
[Phil Rickaby]
Now, you mentioned watching a preview of one show and notes on another. I assume that the preview was Amadeus. And you also directed Heartbreak House.
Now, both of those star Tom Rooney. What what makes Tom Rooney the perfect actor for both of these shows?
[Tim Carroll]
Well, Tom and I have really enjoyed working together the two or three times we’ve done it already on My Fair Lady and Victory. And he’s an actor I’ve always really admired. I think the the reason I love to work with him is because he really brings no ego to the job.
He he is remarkably he’s not meek. And when I say humble, I mean humble in the best sense, not in not in a Uriah Heep sort of sense. He’s just really simple and he focuses on the task.
And, you know, I’ve really come to value those actors. If I think of Amadeus, you know, the lead actors are Michael Terrio, Chrissy Frank, Graham Somerville, and Tom and and of course, my two Venticelli. And they all really focus on the job and on getting it right.
And they leave their egos at the door, which really saves so much time and so much energy. So Tom in particular, I think is a very special actor. He’s so funny.
He’s an incredible clown. And I do think there’s something in my makeup. I love laughing in rehearsal, and he makes me laugh a lot.
It really unlocks my own playfulness and creativity if I’m not having to get too heavy with people. And and he really relaxes the whole room. He’s a wonderful leader of the company, because when the leader is being so playful and not bothered about his own status, then it behooves everyone to follow that example.
[Phil Rickaby]
Do you feel that the lead actor and the director, if they can be playful, that that also helps the rest of the company?
[Tim Carroll]
Oh, hugely. I think the rest of the company will always be looking at the lead actor to see, is it okay to throw tantrums? Is it okay to bring a big black cloud into the room?
And, you know, there are always, especially younger actors who, who will look at that and think, aha, if I’m going to have status, I have to behave like that. And so it’s really good to demonstrate to them, you can get to the top of your profession and be one of the most admired actors in the country, while also just being a really good bloke.
[Phil Rickaby]
Doesn’t that also just, you know, being somebody that people want to work with is, is a huge help to build a career in this industry. Like, if you are, if you’re throwing tantrums, people don’t want to work with you.
[Tim Carroll]
Well, you know what they say, you know, you have to have two of the three. You either have to be very reliable, or you have to be good to work with, or you have to be a genius. And if you have two of those three, if you’re a genius and good to work with, people will put up with the fact that you’re a little bit flaky.
If you are very reliable and good to work with, you’ll have a career, it may not be as a lead. The thing is, we do have a bunch of actors at the shore, Tom’s not the only one, who really have all three, who are really, really gifted and reliable and great to work with. So I think the, what the Norwegian Olympic team calls the no assholes policy is a really strong one in the end, in terms of the company you can create.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’m always curious when I get to talk to somebody who is an artistic director about how a season comes together, how are the decisions made for what shows to do? Is it just as simple as, I like this show, I would love to do it, or what goes into the crafting of a season?
[Tim Carroll]
Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that there’s almost no show that gets in just because I like it and want to do it. One feels incredibly trammeled and constrained by all sorts of considerations. If I think of a show that I’ve done simply because I like it and I want to do it, an example would be Gnit last year, which I was very proud of, but I knew it would be a sort of loss leader, that you would have to put other shows around it that would do better business.
And I do think, and this is a sort of roundabout answer to your question, but actually even finding the right show that I really love and want to do can actually be very important for the health of the company because although that show will, in inverted commas, lose money at the box office, and I say inverted commas because all our shows lose money at the box office, half of our income is from donation. But even if you say, well, Gnit didn’t hit target and it only played in a small venue and it didn’t even fill that out, the fact that it was such a beautiful play that you could not see anywhere else, certainly not done with the level of acting that we had in it, that actually is a very big part of what many of our biggest donors love about the show.
So if one were being ruthless, and one has to be quite cold-blooded about making the books balance, I would say that in a funny sort of way, a show like Gnit, which plays to a very small audience, may do as much good to us as a big musical that sells out because if it secures the support of a donor who says to us, I’m going to give you a couple of million for your endowment because I really love the risks you take, then that’s a huge thing for us. So to take it back round to the other end, of course we need a big musical.
So of course one of the first decisions one has to make in every sense is what’s the musical. It takes priority not just in terms of importance, but literally in terms of timing because there aren’t that many big musicals and they are all still under copyright. So we literally have to pick and get a hit musical first before Mirvish and Stratford and everyone else gets it.
So we do come to that decision and we sound out. We’ve already sorted out our musical for 28 and got the rights to it because we can’t afford to doze on that. We have to be really alert.
But in every sense therefore the musical, because it is such a big part of our box office, is a very early decision. The other big decisions are what to do with the other shows in the festival. We’ve got two other shows that we have to find really good titles for and, you know, of course I don’t want ever to do a play just because it will sell.
There are plays I could do that would sell. I’m not going to be rude and name names, but there are some pretty trashy comedies out there. There are some pretty ropey pieces which might well bring us an audience, but I think again would damage our brand in a way that would have much deeper and more lasting effects.
That’s not to say everything we do has to be pompous. Tonight they’ve just started playing One for the Pot, which is an absolutely daft farce. So we have to entertain and I love the fact that we entertain, but I do have to start with the festival and filling the festival with three or four shows which are all also of the highest quality and not just populist rubbish.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that there are people who would be surprised that one of Canada’s largest festivals, if not one of the two largest festivals in Canada, doesn’t break even out of ticket sales. It needs the donations and things like that. I think there are people who would be surprised by that.
Now I know a little bit about the way theatre works. You’ve worked in theatres all over the world. Is that unique to Canada, or is that something that’s just theatre?
[Tim Carroll]
It’s extremely rare for theatre to make money anywhere. Almost everywhere I’ve worked there is a great deal more government support for theatre than here. So I’ve done a lot of work in Europe.
I’ve directed seven productions in Hungary and six in Spain and two in Romania and three in Norway, etc., etc. And in all of those countries, the tickets are quite affordable because, I think it’s fair to say, in all of those countries, at least half of the entire budget of the theatre is covered by the government. Whereas here, two percent of our budget is covered by government grants.
And in Britain, it’s halfway between. It’s probably about 20 percent of 25 in some cases is covered by the government and subsidies. But the obvious corollary to all of that is in none of those cases is theatre a money-making exercise.
It is only a money-making exercise for the likes of Mirvish and the likes of the West End and the likes of certain shows on Broadway. But as you know, all of those arenas where the Mirvishes and Broadway and West End play are about panning for gold. And a great many shows, the vast majority of shows on Broadway don’t make anything like their money back.
The vast majority. And that’s where you get an idea like the producers, where if you get enough backers for a show and the show loses money, you just get to keep the excess funding that you raised. Of course, the joke in the producers is that their show is a hit and then they’ve got 300 percent investment and people expecting their cut.
So there is a lot of misunderstanding about the economy of theatre. It’s incredibly expensive to put on live theatre. You never move into gravy like you do with a movie.
Once you’ve made a movie and it makes its budget back, then pretty much everything is just printing the odd copy and distribution. But pretty much everything after that is straight profit. Whereas if you’re running a musical, you may have broke even, but you will still only be making a very small profit after that each week because you still have to pay for your orchestra and your crew and your chorus and all the rest of it.
[Phil Rickaby]
There is still the overhead. It’s a live show, so it’s always ongoing. I’m curious, when you came to the Shaw, you were announced in 2015.
You took over in 2016. Your first Shaw production was 2017. I believe at the time when you joined, the mandate of the Shaw Festival was pretty strict in terms of they did shows that were written by Shaw or set in or written in the period that George Bernard Shaw lived.
I think that you’ve expanded that a bit to include shows that are outside of that particular timeline. I think that that’s a really great thing. What was the reasoning for you for that change to the mandate for the festival?
[Tim Carroll]
The whole edifice of the mandate was already crumbling, and I just gave it a final push because, in fact, there was an extra extension that had happened a few years before that Jackie had brought in, which was it was no longer necessary for a play to be by Shaw, which was never the case, of course. There were always non-Shaw plays, and it was no longer the case in Jackie’s last few years that a play had to be set in Shaw’s lifetime or period. Jackie had already extended it to all the play had to be on Shavian themes, which, as she said, already had sold the pass because you can say any play is on Shavian themes because Shaw was interested in everything.
They’d already done a play like Arcadia, which wasn’t set in Shaw’s lifetime in either of its time periods, and you were already doing plays like The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, which was a contemporary play and not at all set in Shaw’s lifetime, but extremely Shavian, of course, even to the extent of quoting him in the title because The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide is a reference to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide.
So given that, you know, as Jackie said, she said, I was sort of not interested in the mandate really and wanted to just do the plays we wanted to. So that is just a form of words that allows me to do what I like. And I just gave it the final push by saying, yes, but why have a mandate anyway?
A mandate, the word mandate comes from the same root as the word command, and I’m not in the business of being commanded. You don’t get to tell me what I can do. And people in the early days, some of our audience said, you know, but how dare you break the mandate?
And I just said, what are you doing? What are you talking about? You’re all acting like you’re sort of Talmudic scholars poring over the sacred text to find out how I’ve sinned.
I can do what the F I like, actually. And so we don’t have a mandate anymore. We have a mission, and our mission is to put on plays that celebrate the life, work, and spirit of one of the great provocateurs of history.
Nice.
[Phil Rickaby]
Has your vision for the festival, I mean, I’m sure it has, but how has your vision for the festival changed as you’ve been heading the festival?
[Tim Carroll]
That’s a really good question. It certainly has evolved, and in some ways it’s got out of hand. This is sort of Frankenstein’s monster coming to life around me now, because I got there and they said, okay, we need a strategic plan.
So I said, well, I think the strategic plan should be about two-way theatre. Our strategic plan should be that we increase our engagement with the audience and we really let them into what we do. And then one of the main things I came absolutely sure of was no capital campaigns.
All my friends who are artistic directors said, don’t do a capital campaign. It will just kill you. It will take years off your life.
And then as we started to sort of make this two-way theatre a reality and expanded enormously, I mean, by a factor of 20, the number of education and outreach events we were doing, from a few hundred every year to several thousand every year, we needed more space. We needed places where we could meet our audience and show them what we do and encounter them. And so rose the Shore Artists Village, which was one of those things that sort of fell into our lap because the end-of-life care facility right next to us was vacated, or was about to be vacated, and the bylaws said that it couldn’t be used for commercial use.
So more or less it was offered to us as being so obviously the people who should take it over. And we said, well, yeah, five buildings. We could have two for putting up our actors, and that would really ease the pressure on accommodation in the town for us.
We can have a dormitory for visiting student groups. We can have a beautiful space for our wardrobe, and we can have a central hub, which has become the Burton Center for Lifelong Creativity, which in itself, that title tells you how the vision has evolved, that from being simply, we let you in and we show you what we do, I’ve really come to see everyone involved in theatre on both sides of the curtain and backstage as having creative powers that may be neglected and may need to be reawakened. And for me now, the point of the Shore Festival is for everyone who comes to have the chance to reawaken their inner artist.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that it is a great thing to do to connect with the audience like that, because as my friend Sue Edworthy used to say all the time, is what we do on the stage and the rehearsal hall in the wardrobe room to people who are not in the theatre, it is magic. And when they get to experience all the things that go into it, that it’s not just what happens during the show, that it’s like that whole breadth of before and after, it becomes like, I think like watching those old, like how Star Wars was made films that we used to get on TV and things like that. People are fascinated with how things work.
And I also think it’s interesting that Shaw is one of the few festivals that has an ongoing podcast and is connecting with the audience in that way, with a regular audio podcast where shows and the people in them can be discussed. How did that become part of the two-way theatre?
[Tim Carroll]
Well, a lot of the what you might call digital connectedness that we have developed, and we now indeed have a digital lab in the New Artist Village, I think really came up as the result of COVID, that we had a choice to make like everyone else when COVID hit. And I made a very unambiguous choice that we were not going to film our productions. And that even if we had films of our productions that we had made, we’d only made them for our own use and they were not broadcast worthy.
And many people said to me at the beginning, oh, don’t you wish you’d done what Stratford did now and filmed your productions? And I said, one of those productions they filmed was mine. It was King John.
And I’ve seen it and I fell asleep because theatre on film is boring and it’s not the thing itself. And it was a really good production that had some amazing performances. Tom McCammon and King John was absolutely spellbinding, but on film, no thanks.
So making that very strong choice that we weren’t going to try to deal with COVID by performing plays or showing videos of plays, that of course wasn’t the end of the conversation because we clearly had to do something to connect with our audience. But what we did was talk to them. We had a huge number of happy hours and meet the festivals and interviews.
And I recorded a whole bunch of acting exercises with actors, which people were able to switch on and look at and see, oh, that’s how he works. And we created all sorts of creative, but not theatre events. We created all sorts of strange little puzzles and riddles.
We had a traitor’s game that we played that the audience could watch. So we were quite sort of early out of the gate with a lot of that connectedness. We had an actor’s gym that people could take and a wellness session, et cetera, et cetera.
So as well as just lots and lots of Q and A’s, chances for people to put their digital hand up and ask questions. And it was clear when the dust cleared from COVID, it was clear that a great many of our audience for those pieces had been people who hadn’t actually been able to come to the shore for a couple of years because their mobility had declined. And they had been really, really grateful for that content.
So we thought, well, we’ve got to keep it going and we’ve got to be open-minded about what the digital sphere can do for us. It can’t replace performance, but it can make very available at your convenience, a huge amount of behind the scenes, lifting of the and unveiling the mystery, which I do feel, as you say, it’s magic to people. And the beautiful paradox is that however magic it is, when you reveal how you do it, it doesn’t actually reduce the charisma and the glamour of the performance, quite the reverse.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think that’s one of the fascinating things about theatre. If you show somebody how an actual magic trick is done, they will, you know, usually the solution to a magic trick is stupid, right? It’s just, it’s dumb, simple stuff.
And so the magic is gone, but with the theatre, they’ll still have the experience of seeing the show. They just have a deeper understanding of how it all comes together. And the magic could even be increased by that.
[Tim Carroll]
Absolutely. Yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
You were for a time at Shakespeare’s Globe and yeah. Did your time at the Globe shape your directing style that you brought forward and took with you to the Shaw Festival?
[Tim Carroll]
I think I, I can honestly say there’s no part of my directing style that isn’t the result of working at the Globe. I think everything about my life changed working at the Globe, meeting Mark Rylance and working with him over so many productions. That’s, that’s a privilege that I, I will go to my grave grateful for because he’s a genius and working with a true genius was revelatory.
But in terms of my own directing style, the shared light with the audience at the Globe, the sense that it was a party that we were all invited to, that there was nothing pompous or pretentious about it. The simple direct connection between are you entertaining them or are they wandering off to the pub? Because we had 600 people standing in the yard for every show and they’d only paid a fiver.
And that of course is sort of crazy. It’s a tenner now, but it’s still very cheap, but they’d only paid a fiver, which meant that they had no real, you know, sunk cost fallacy to keep them there. They, and you would see it, you would see if a, if an actor was indulging himself in a monologue, you’d see one person turn to the other and make the universal gesture for, shall we go to the pub?
And they just wander out and the actors would see it because they’re in the same light. And so they would have to deal with a completely different kind of insecurity and lack of ego stroking. And they would have to work out, you know, I literally spoke to actors who said they came off stage and said to themselves, that’s never happening again.
I don’t know how, but I’m never going to let anyone do that again. Never going to let anyone wander off to the pub when I’m speaking. And of course, it’s not as easy as saying that’ll never happen again.
You really have to work out what am I doing wrong? Why am I boring them? And so the, the, the sort of festive sphere of the globe, the fact that it wasn’t a bear pit, it wasn’t like winning over a hostile crowd.
The actors knew that they had the audience on their side to begin with. And so if they lost them, it was their fault. And then the absolutely incredible bacchanalian release of the curtain call, when the show had worked, it was like a rock concert.
The end of our 12th night, when they hit the last beat of the jig, the place went up like a Roman candle. You couldn’t believe it. And you’d see the actors, just their eyes were like saucers going, fuck me.
I’d never heard a sound like this. And so they would come off high as kites, you know, and that’s the pay, the payoff from having really opened up to the audience and having really allowed the audience to affect what’s happening on stage. Both, you know, literally sometimes by shouting things out, but also just by feeling their vibe and going with them and leaning into what they wanted, or indeed sometimes grabbing them and saying, no, we’re not going to turn this into a comedy.
This is a serious bit. You’re coming here. You know, it really made, it made better artists of everyone.
[Phil Rickaby]
That shared light situation is, it must get, it must really become difficult or like just getting past the fact that you see the audience, they see you, you can see everybody. There’s a certain comfort that comes in many spaces where you, you know, you can see the front row, but that’s about it. You know, you have that, the audience is in darkness, but to be able to see them and connect with them, that’s often, I think, a new experience for a lot of actors.
We sometimes get that here in some very small theatres, but like, it must be very exciting and frightening for actors the first time that they do it.
[Tim Carroll]
Yes, but also really exhilarating. I remember an actor saying to me after he played at the Globe, he said, I’m never going to shout Shakespeare into the dark again.
[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, it is so rewarding when you actually speak it to a person. Like I’ve performed it and had the opportunity to like say a soliloquy to somebody and it changed the way that I’d done it because now it wasn’t just to an audience. It was to a person, which made it very intimate and wonderful.
[Tim Carroll]
Yeah, I have so many memories of really personal connections between the actor and either someone in the audience or sometimes, you know, a really good actor like Rylance could just pull them all in. He always talked about magnetizing rather than radiating. He would, he would go out and his voice would be audible, but only just.
And everyone would lean forward and then he’d get quieter and quieter. And then everyone was simply in his eyes with him and it was magic. But he was also robust enough that if a boat on the Thames just next to us blew its horn, he wouldn’t pretend that hadn’t happened.
He would take that in and he would let us all go, huh, what a strange moment for a horn to blow on a boat on the Thames. And somehow by trusting chance, it was never a, it was never a disaster. It was always, huh, yeah, there’s that.
[Phil Rickaby]
It can’t really be viewed as a, as a disaster because it, because it’s an open air theatre, the outside noise is the thing that you can’t control. You just have to accept that it’s there and, and acknowledge that everybody heard it.
[Tim Carroll]
Well, one of the most memorable moments I had there was actually an actor called Jasper Britton, who was playing Macbeth. And he was, he’d just been told that the queen, my Lord is dead. And he, he said, she should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word. And then a pigeon landed on the stage and, you know, pigeons are not tragic birds. Pigeons are comic birds.
So, so the audience sort of laughed nervously, but he absolutely didn’t miss a beat. He looked at them and laughed as well with a wry laugh of look, life isn’t even allowing me to be tragic. Life is laughing at me.
And the pigeon started walking up and down on the stage in front. And he just said, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time. And he said, and it stopped and then it started again.
And he said, life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. And then he waited and the pigeon flew away. And he said, and then it’s heard no more.
And I used to meet people like for years afterwards, I’d meet people saying I was there that day. Never forget it. Cause the sound of an entire audience exhaling in amazement, just in wonder that he’d had the balls to take that in and to wait and to let it become a moment of magic instead of a problem.
I mean, that was balls the size of China. You do that. And we go to the theatre for courage.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Tim Carroll]
We go to see courage and he showed courage and he showed trust. He trusted the gods to reward him.
[Phil Rickaby]
And they did. Yeah. I, I’m always curious about how people find their way to the theatre.
I’m curious for you, how you found your way to the theatre. What is your theatre origin story? But I’m also curious what, as a part of that, what made you want to come to Canada to lead the Shaw festival?
So in two, there’s really a two part question, but let’s start with how did you first come to the theatre? What was your first exposure to it? What made you want to do it?
[Tim Carroll]
I was brought up in a pretty literate household. My mother was a real intellectual and she took me to the Manchester Royal exchange. I grew up in Manchester and I was lucky enough.
I saw Ben Kingsley play Dr. Faustus and I saw Helen Mirren play the Duchess of Malfi. You know, these are pretty, pretty lucky for someone growing up in a provincial English city. But I, I didn’t expect to be a theatre person.
I was, I was more interested in being a writer. And I even thought I might possibly be a good actor, but I went to university and at the end of my first year, my friends sat me down and said, you’ve got to stop. They sort of staged an intervention and said, you’re a terrible actor.
Don’t, don’t do it ever again. And I, I thought, oh, but by then it was the end of my first year. And you know, you only have four years at Oxford and I, all my mates were in the theatre world and all the best looking girls were in the theatre world.
I thought if I don’t find a way to stay in this social group, I’m going to die a friendless virgin. So, so I thought, oh, I know I’ll try directing. And it really was sort of, I liked, I liked Shakespeare.
I was already really into Shakespeare. So I started directing Shakespeare plays. I did five while I was still at university that I was totally going in the wrong direction.
Everyone else sort of warms up on lots of other plays and then tries Shakespeare. But my first five Shakespeare productions, my first five productions were all Shakespeare. And, and it was that thing where I think after about my third or fourth rehearsal, I was walking home with one of the actors and he said, that’s nice for you then.
I said, what? He said, well, you, you’ve found what you’re going to do. And I said, he said, yeah.
He said, he said, that just fits you so well. So then I left university and I, I got a job teaching and directing at a drama school where I was younger than some of the pupils. But I really, by then I did know a lot about Shakespeare verse.
So I was teaching Shakespeare at this school and I’d been banging on the door of the English Shakespeare company ever since I started directing while I was still at university. And Michael Bogdanov gave me an interview and I assisted Tim Luscombe actually on The Merchant of Venice and Volpone. That was my first job as assistant director on those shows.
And then really after that, the sort of steps on the ladder were very, they were sort of slow and halting, but they were also very much the conventional ones. You know, you assist, you get some actors together, you put on a show with them, the artistic director sees it and thinks it’s good and gives you a slight and gives you a show of your own, albeit a small one. And, and then a bigger one.
And then I was an associate director at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter. And then I think almost straight after that, for three or four years after that, I got in at the Globe to direct a new play. And then Mark and I really hit it off.
So I stayed there as associate director for seven years.
[Phil Rickaby]
So what, what is it, what brought you to, what made you want to leave there and come to Canada to lead the Shaw Festival?
[Tim Carroll]
I never thought I was going to be an artistic director. I’d always thought I just want to be directing. I don’t want all the hassle.
But then a friend of mine with whom I’ve worked a lot said to me, when this job came up, he said, well, I think you should go for it. I said, why? And he said, because you go all over the world and you work at all these companies and everywhere you work, it was being very flattering.
He said, everywhere you work, they all say that you’ve transformed their idea of acting, but then you disappear again and they all slide back into their old habits. He said, the only way you’re actually going to make a difference is if you have your own company and you can actually set the compass for the ship. And so I kind of took that to heart and thought, well, all right, I’m coming up to the age of 50.
It’s now or never. If I don’t go for it now, I never will. So I thought, all right, I’ll try.
[Phil Rickaby]
In terms of, you know, having worked in Europe, in the UK and in Canada, what do you see as the biggest difference in terms of the way that we view theatre in those places?
[Tim Carroll]
There are a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. So, you know, good actors are good actors everywhere. And the game recognizes game.
You know, I have Hungarian friends who come over here and see the likes of Tom Rooney and Julia Corse and they go, ah, that’s class. And similarly, I know many of my English friends came over and saw shows of mine in Hungary and, you know, you know which actors, you don’t have to prompt them, you know which actors they’re going to single out and go, wow, where did you find her? You know, so there’s a very strong, of course, we can always say it’s subjective what good acting is, but it isn’t.
We all know it when we see it. And that is universal. The context is very different in different places.
You know, in Hungary, you rehearse 10 till two and then you’ve got the afternoon off and then you rehearse from six until you want to stop. And sometimes you’re still going at midnight and everyone’s exhausted and you’ll have a breakthrough and keep going till one o’clock because you’re suddenly flying. And sometimes you just do six till nine and go, okay, that was useful.
You know, Hungarians are, of course, there are national types and Hungarians are very, very intense and argumentative and working with them challenges you in a way that working with Canadians doesn’t. Working with Canadians challenges you in different ways because you have to learn the language of passive aggression and you have to learn how you are being judo thrown so that you think you’re getting your own way and then you realize, oh, I’ve been played. I haven’t really got anything I wanted here.
So, you know, Hungarians won’t do that. They’ll just go, no, this idea is a shit. It is a shit.
And, you know, it’s great. The first show I did in Hungary, this is a good example of how the audience differs as well. A guy came up to me in the bar after my first night and said, you are Tim Carroll, yes?
I said, yeah. He said, your show is very good. I said, oh, cheers.
Thanks a lot. He said, you made these mistakes. And he held up five fingers and just counted off five mistakes.
And I thought, you know what, when in Rome, I just said, oh, those are very interesting. You’re wrong because, and I counted them off and I rebutted all five of his points. And he nodded and said, interesting drink.
And we just drank. And that was that great. And I thought, wow, it’s not like that in England.
And it’s certainly not like that here. So there’s a whole different culture around theatre and in different places. And it does depend a lot on the environment in terms of funding, you know, in Hungary until Orbán got in and it got a bit weird, that theatre was so well subsidized that everyone went.
The audience had tons and tons of kids in their 20s in. It was a good thing to do on a date for students who have no money. And you think, I’d love that to be the case here.
But it isn’t. In this country, theatre is a hobby for people whose kids have left the nest and who find themselves with disposable income.
[Phil Rickaby]
One of the things you were mentioning about how, you know, there were people who sort of like open doors for you, you knock on their doors, you open as you as you progress. There are people who who sort of like helped you get to where you were going. It occurs to me that you do the same as the artistic director.
You see people, you nurture their talent. I was speaking with Peter Fernandez just a little while ago, who is an actor. He’s assistant director and directed Sleuth this year.
And he spoke about about that and about how you have opened that door and helped him to nurture his directing. Is that for you a necessary part of being an artistic director, artistic leader?
[Tim Carroll]
Yes, it is. I think you wouldn’t really want to be an artistic director if you didn’t enjoy that, because it is one of the most rewarding parts of the game. You know, you have to have something to set against the fact that you spend a lot of your time as artistic director crushing people’s dreams.
They come to you with shows they want to do or parts they want to play. And you go, oh, yeah, that would be quite good. No.
And, you know, they go off really with their day ruined. So when you can bring someone on and help them improve, that’s really a kind of small, but very beautiful recompense for the rest of your job being mostly quite hastily.
[Phil Rickaby]
The first time that you ever had to say no, was that difficult or was it easy?
[Tim Carroll]
It’s never easy. I don’t enjoy it. And it was slightly different saying no as an artistic director than, for example, saying no to an actor who you audition.
But, you know, having said that, I have had a lot of experience. I’ve said no to more actors than I have cast in my life, just naturally. That’s how it goes.
And I’ve said no to more actors ideas in rehearsal than I’ve said yes to. Not because they’re stupid ideas, but because that’s the panning for gold that one does. You know, I’ve said no to more of my own ideas than I’ve said yes to.
And, you know, so in that sense, you have to learn to be robust and you have to learn to work with creative tension that people will be upset that you’ve said no to the play they pitched, but they still have to go and do their job that night. And they still have to decide whether they want to be in the company, even though you’ve offered them something much less exciting to them than the part they thought they were perfect for. And, you know, I think actors are really very good at dealing with that by and large.
They really, as my associate Kimberly would say, they they’re good at fixing their face and saying, OK, we you know, we go on.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I want to come back to the two shows that you are directing this year, Heartbreak House and Amadeus. And I’m curious, I mean, both of those shows, they star the same actor, as we mentioned.
They’re both directed by you. How do those two shows speak to each other in the season?
[Tim Carroll]
I always leave that to be a little bit up to the music of chance, how plays interact. I’m not interested in themes for a season. I always find those quite bogus.
But there’s no doubt that the two plays interact a lot because it’s not just Tom. Michael and Christie and Julia and Sochi and Alison, I mean, are all in both my shows and Graham Somerville as well. So it’s a it’s a very, very crossed over pair of plays.
I have in a very capricious, whimsical, pretentious and self-regarding way linked the two shows because I use Mozart’s music for Heartbreak House. And I have Michael and Christie, who are, of course, Mozart and Constanza in Amadeus. I have them as a butler and a maid in Heartbreak House, conjuring up the world and conjuring the play as a kind of a game.
So my idea, which nobody will get, my idea is that it’s sort of Mozart and Constanza revivified and still playing their little love games. And Heartbreak House is just another of their games. So it makes sense that they sing Mozart and play Mozart while they play that game.
[Phil Rickaby]
I believe next year, the 2026-27, so next summer, is the 65th anniversary of the Shaw Festival?
[Tim Carroll]
It will be the 65th anniversary. It would have been the 66th season. But because we lost a season, our math sort of is easier now that when we have a 65th anniversary, it’s also the 65th season.
[Phil Rickaby]
That’s a great combination. Without saying what the plans are for the shows or things like that, is there anything that you are planning to do to mark the anniversary of the festival?
[Tim Carroll]
No, I’m not that interested in numerology. I think so what that it’s 65 and not 70 and not 60. You know, I think, honestly, you can get a bit carried away with all that.
Maybe 50 and 100 are worth marking. But I think all the rest, you know, the audience don’t much care, frankly, what sort of anniversary it is. They just want to know that you’re doing exciting shows.
[Phil Rickaby]
You’ve been the artistic director for 10 years. It sounds to me like you enjoy it, that you still are having a good time, that it’s something you feel meaningful work. Is another 10 years as the artistic director in the cards for you?
Have you thought about anything like that? Or do you take it year from year? What is your way of looking at a 10 year as artistic director?
[Tim Carroll]
That’s a really good and dangerous question. I don’t think another 10 years is on the cards. I think that would be pushing my luck.
I’d be 70. And this is a young man’s game. It takes a lot of energy.
I think so far, I’ve managed to stay ahead of the energy required by, you know, doing what you do as you get older, which is using your energy more sensibly. But at a certain point, that equation will not be in my favor. And so no, I don’t think I’ll be here in 10 years time.
But we do have work to do. We are building a Royal George. And I’m going to get that open.
And I’m going to play in it before I go.
[Phil Rickaby]
And in terms of getting the Royal George open again, do you? I mean, again, it’s the kind of question that I can’t ask. I want to ask, like, what kind of show would you love to open there?
I can’t. I asked that question because you can’t answer it. But if you had a dream, yeah.
Is there a show you would open that with?
[Tim Carroll]
Well, I’ll tell you some of the things that we’re pondering that we’re thinking about things like, if we can, as we plan to, if we can have a little orchestra pit in the new Royal George, does that mean we could do a musical? And wouldn’t that be a great thing to do? Now, I don’t know yet if and when that will be possible.
The numbers, the money will determine it to some extent. But that would be a very cool thing to do. And, you know, there are certain Shaw plays that would be beautiful to have in that new space in the first season.
Shaw works really well in that kind of chocolate box theatre at that scale. And of course, you know, I’ve got lots of ideas for kind of twists on the sort of genre plays that we do. Murder mystery with a difference, farce with a difference.
You know, there are all sorts of things one wants to experiment with. I think we have to make sure that we don’t take too much for granted that there’ll be an audience for the new Royal George. Of course, for the first few weeks, it’ll be packed out as people come to check it out.
But but that curiosity won’t sustain on its own. We’ll have to have, as always, we’ll have to have an eye on the bottom line.
[Phil Rickaby]
Absolutely. Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you making time.
It’s been wonderful talking to you.
[Tim Carroll]
It’s been great. Thank you very much.
[Phil Rickaby]
Thank you for listening to this episode of Stageworthy. Before I get into who my guest is next week, please let me talk about my Patreon because I can’t do this show without the people who’ve chosen to back me on Patreon. It costs money to make a podcast like this, even though the podcast is available and all of its archives are available to you for free.
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And that’s a great conversation. You’re going to want to tune in for that one next week on Stageworthy.
