Meet the young directors breathing life into London's theatre scene

Alice Hamilton

Hamilton is used to fighting for her job. ‘As a young female director I have occasionally found that the trust and respect I need to do my job are harder won from some corners than they ought to be,’ she rues. ‘The only productive response, I think, is to swallow the frustration and patiently prove myself worthy of that trust.’ The 29-year-old Devon native is doing a pretty good job of that. While reading classics at Oxford, she started her own theatre company, Up in Arms, which she still runs with her mate and ‘long-term collaborator’, award-winning playwright Barney Norris. They’d been friends since meeting at Salisbury Playhouse’s Stage 65 Youth Theatre when they were just teenagers, and rather than apply fruitlessly for oversubscribed jobs in existing companies, Hamilton and Norris decided to make themselves professional — producing plays by day, bartending by night. Or in Hamilton’s case, working front of house at the National Theatre: ‘Some of my happiest times have been spent in and around that building.’

Hamilton has directed every one of Norris’s much-lauded scripts, including the five-star Visitors at the Bush Theatre in 2014 and this year’s Echo’s End. It’s one of five plays she has directed in 2017, including Anything that Flies at the Jermyn Street Theatre, a much-praised production of David Storey’s The March on Russia at the Orange Tree Theatre and the Bush Theatre’s While We’re Here (another Norris play), showing that a desire to prove oneself can be productive indeed. She’s rounding off the year in fitting, if uncharacteristic, style, with Thirty Christmases at the New Diorama (‘a daunting and thrilling first foray into comedy’), which features songs, snow and corned beef sandwiches.

Ned Bennett

Bennett is spending a lot of time in a south-east London young offender prison. Not as an inmate, but as director of Baddies: the Musical with the Synergy Theatre Project, a charitable organisation that helps rehabilitate prisoners through theatre. ‘The prison governor had the idea of putting on a family musical so the inmates’ kids could come and see them perform before Christmas.’ The 33-year-old award-winning director’s whole career was inspired by his ‘brilliant’ drama teacher, Peter Jolly, at Dulwich College, ‘an incredible theatre brain and compassionate, all-round legend’. After studying drama at Manchester University and getting an MA in directing at Lamda, Bennett dedicated himself to putting on new plays above pubs, while supporting himself as a teaching assistant. He coped with London rents by living in empty office blocks and a disused police station as a property guardian — and still does, at ‘a Miss Havisham-esque house on Abbey Road. I have cheap rent and lots of space to develop work.’

He has a knack for directing fringe plays that transfer to the big time: 2015’s Yen moved from the Royal Exchange to the Royal Court, and Pomona transferred from the Orange Tree in Richmond to the National Theatre. Those plays — both bleak social commentary — won him the UK Theatre Award for Best Director that year. Not bad for a then 31‑year-old, and he’s hardly rested since. An Octoroon, at the Orange Tree Theatre, totted up rave reviews and transfers to the National next year. He’s also a champion of The Big House, which introduces young people who have been through the care system to theatre — Bennett is not just a brilliant next-gen director, but a brilliant, compassionate person too. Post-Christmas musical, it’s back to gritty, with Buggy Baby at his beloved Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick — a ‘harrowing new play by Josh Azouz; a horror-comedy that follows a love triangle between a teenage woman, her baby and her friend’. Knowing Bennett, it will be one of 2018’s hottest tickets.

Roy Alexander Weise

It’s impossible not to feel inspired when talking to Roy Alexander Weise. ‘Theatre changed my entire world. It made me into an activist, it has made me find a voice to be vocal about the injustices in the world,’ he says. The 29-year-old grew up in Brixton in a ‘working-class’ household where ‘nobody in my family was even vaguely in the arts’. One day, aged 13, he was walking home from school and needed the bathroom. ‘I went into this building and it was the Ovalhouse Theatre. They told me, oh we do these classes.’ Five years on — bitten by the acting bug after taking the lead in a production of Enda Walsh’s Chat Room — Weise did a directing BA at Rose Bruford College. He then joined the Young Vic’s Genesis Directors Network, meeting contemporaries such as Ned Bennett, a ‘legend who makes brilliant work’. It inspired him to continually enter the JMK awards until he won in 2016, enabling him to produce The Mountaintop (the story of Martin Luther King Jr’s last night before his assassination).

Why direct? ‘It’s 100 per cent my aim to make theatre more diverse. The first time I was referred to as an ethnic minority — a phrase that really pisses me off — was when I went to drama school. Forevermore while working in theatre, I’m an “ethnic minority”.’ He raves about Inua Ellam’s Barber Shop Chronicles at the National, but rails at a lack of appreciation for black talent — ‘Idris Elba, how is it that we only “discover” him in America? He only becomes our star after working there. Why couldn’t he build his career here?’

His next play at the National in April next year is Nine Night, a family drama about the Jamaican tradition of a nine-day celebratory wake after a loved one dies. When Weise isn’t directing revolutionarily diverse plays, he’s watching Netflix documentaries (he recommends One of Us) and teaching at Bethnal Green’s Young and Talented stage school. Why bother when, as he says, ‘my career is kicking off’? Because, ‘if you can’t dream or reimagine yourself or your world around you, you’re kinda f***ed.’

Josh Roche

Sydenham-based Roche must be pretty damn tired. ‘I have five jobs,’ he laughs. ‘I’m a copywriter, I’m an acting coach, I’m a teacher, I’m a script reader’ — and an award-winning director to boot. Born in Wadhurst in East Sussex, the 28-year-old never went to performing arts school or college; instead ‘the theatre stuff kind of kicked off’ while he was studying English with creative writing at the University of Warwick. A production of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui might have bombed at the National Student Drama Festival, says Roche, but it got him an interview with the artistic director of the Soho Theatre, who took him on for six months as a writer’s associate — which turned into two years. ‘I was in the artistic meeting when Fleabag first came round. [Artistic associate] Joe Murphy came in and said, yeah, Phoebe’s got this thing, it’s a bit mad but I think it’s going to be really good.’

He received the 2017 £25,000 James Menzies-Kitchin (JMK) award for young directors (after six years of entering), enabling him to stage My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Young Vic in October — a hard-hitting, gut-wrenching play based on the diaries of the eponymous 23-year-old activist killed in Gaza in 2003. It reflects his penchant for ‘humanitarian and political stuff’ — see also, his revival of Howard Brenton’s Seventies state-of-the-nation play, Magnificence. If that seems a bit worthy then yes, Roche’s politics are ‘fairly left’, but he wishes there was a little less uniformity of opinion in the theatre world. ‘It’s a real shame there are not more right-wing people around. The community can get very boring in terms of political conversation. It’s so rare to find someone you fundamentally disagree with. I’ve never met anyone who voted Leave.’ Next up is Plastic, a genre-defying musical drama, with the brilliant new-writing focused Poleroid Theatre company. And how will he be preparing for the fear of opening night?

‘I walk around muttering to myself: “There are hundreds of thousands of much, much more important things going on in the world.”’