Marianne Elliott interview: 'I've read Death of a Salesman 55 times'

"Directing can be lonely,” says Marianne Elliott. “I think the skill of being a leader is never to show the strain — and that’s quite isolating.”

It’s a striking statement from someone whose reputation is based on her ability to marshal large casts and craft productions that are at once visually bold and acute in their psychological detail. The 51-year-old has the distinction of being the only female director to have won two Tony Awards, for War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Yet her manner is measured, even self-effacing.

She can certainly project an air of joie de vivre — when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in July the luxury she chose was a bath with a third tap to dispense wine — but she’s also candid about the insecurities rife in her profession, and there’s a sense that her authority is grounded in a watchful self-awareness.

Elliott has a trio of shows in London. Curious Incident has just returned to the West End, and her biggest hit, War Horse (which she co-directed with Tom Morris), is back where it began life, at the National Theatre. They join her most recent success, a revelatory gender-swapped take on Stephen Sondheim’s Company, which claimed the Best Director gong at last month’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards (as well as Best Musical Performance for its star Rosalie Craig).

“Who’d have thought it?” she says, with a bright peal of laughter. While she’s grown accustomed to plaudits, a note of incredulity remains because she grew up believing that theatre directors had to be highly cerebral Oxbridge-educated men. Indeed, her late father, Michael Elliott, was precisely that — a founding director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, noted for what the Guardian’s Michael Billington called his “priestly integrity and uncompromising vision”.

Her family has theatrical connections stretching back as far as her great-grandparents. Unsurprisingly, she reacted against this. “I didn’t want to go anywhere near it. I thought it was full of self-indulgent, narcissistic people.” She ended up studying drama at Hull University because, by her account, she didn’t have good enough grades for any other course. “Nobody thought I was going to go to university. Nobody thought I would do A levels.”

Yet after spending most of her twenties in secretarial jobs and TV casting, she gravitated towards directing. “I suppose it was in my bones,” she muses. “By osmosis I’d picked up so much about the language of how people make theatre.”

When she started out in the mid-Nineties, she had the impression that there were only two female directors in Britain: Deborah Warner and Phyllida Lloyd. A third, she concedes, was emerging — Katie Mitchell. But while she was respectful of their achievements, she aspired to forge a different path.

From the outset she wanted to avoid creating the sort of work that resembled “an intellectual exercise”. She also chose to concentrate on women’s stories and on collaborating with other female practitioners. Her interpretation of Company is very much in this vein, and while Sondheim has said that this is a story about “a boy becoming a man”, Elliott so convincingly refocuses it on a woman’s experiences that it’s not easy to imagine it reverting in future to its original form.

It’s her first time directing a Sondheim musical, but she has adored his songs since her teens, when she was introduced to them by two men she refers to as her uncles. They were, in fact, a gay couple that her mother, the actress Rosalind Knight, lodged with while appearing at Sheffield Crucible. Company was the score that stirred her most. Later, she got to know Sondheim personally: he admired her urgent take on Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at the National Theatre and invited her to dinner when she was working in New York.

A vague notion of staging West Side Story evolved into a very different proposition. “My business partner, Chris Harper, was in America. He had twins with a surrogate mother, and they were born prematurely, so he was having to go to the hospital every day — and he would listen to Company.”

It struck them both that the story of a commitment-phobic 35-year-old man no longer felt resonant, and Harper wondered, “What about the idea of doing it as a woman?” An initially unconvinced Sondheim agreed to a workshop and in due course gave the plan his blessing.

Elliott & Harper is the name of the British duo’s company, launched in 2016. She and Chris Harper knew each other from the National Theatre, where they’d both worked extensively; his production credits had included the West End transfer of War Horse. The concept behind the venture was a simple one: to create the sort of shows that might be found at the National, yet for a commercial audience.

“We’re small, so we can be agile,” says Elliott, “but it’s high stakes.” In part this is because she likes to spend a long time developing each project. She speaks of doing “darkened room” prep, which involves shining a light into every corner of a text. Four months seems to be her absolute minimum, and her revival in 2017 of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America gestated for two and a half years.

Her next labour of love is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which opens at the Young Vic in May. Wendell Pierce, best known for his appearances in Suits and The Wire, will be her Willy Loman, alongside British talents Sharon D Clarke and Arinzé Kene. She describes re-reading the play repeatedly, in order to tease out every nuance. How many times? “Fifty-five,” she says, and I’m reminded of her friend Simon Stephens’s comment, when she was putting on his play Port, that she knew its details better than he did: “She creates this illusion she’s not working at all, but underneath the water she’s working harder than any director I’ve dealt with.”

And after immersing herself in Willy Loman’s unravelling dreams? Since the triumph of War Horse she has been identified as a potential leader of the National Theatre, yet she worries that running a building would result in spreading herself too thin. She mentions that she’s considered walking away from this “emotionally expensive” industry; it’s essential to be able to retreat to the sanity of life in East Dulwich with her husband, actor-turned-producer Nick Sidi, and their teenage daughter, with whom she gorges on TV shows such as The Good Place and Stranger Things on Netflix.

At the same time she’s sustained by two beliefs: in the “euphoric” rewards of teamwork, and in theatre’s capacity for changing audiences’ lives. She’s so evangelical about the latter that it’s difficult to picture her choosing another medium, but she’s intrigued by the possibility.

“I’d love to do a film,” she says, and she repeats the words carefully, as if the idea is new. It’s not hard to imagine what a Marianne Elliott film would be like: observant, elegant and meticulously constructed, sometimes operatic in scale and happy to embrace technology, yet insistent on a solid core of emotional truth.

Company is booking at the Gielgud, W1, until March 30; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is at Piccadilly Theatre, W1 until Apr 27; War Horse is at the National, SE1, until Jan 5. Buy tickets for all three shows at eveningstandardtickets.co.uk