Nadia Fall on why her first Theatre Royal Stratford East season will channel Joan Littlewood

“I hope my enthusiasm was infectious. I genuinely wanted it. I was, like, ‘Please!’ I’m so excited by it.” Nadia Fall beams as she explains why she feels the board of the Theatre Royal Stratford East gave her the job of artistic director. Today marks the much-anticipated announcement of her first season at the helm and thus also a new chapter for this sleeping giant of London theatre, which has been left to paddle in the shallows of mediocrity and falling attendance for too long. As one top-level industry insider said scathingly to me, Stratford East had “no audience, no product and no purpose”. All that is about to change. Fall is here — now the rise can start.

Fall has long been recognised as one of theatre’s brightest younger talents. Her work at the National, where she is an associate director, includes the much-praised Home, which she co-wrote, about temporary accommodation for young people. So what was the appeal of this challenging new job? “For any of us who love theatre, this place has such a rich history and legacy, with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop,” she says. “But it’s also the people of the area. You feel it as soon as you get off the tube: this place is pulsing. It’s restless, but energetic. East London has always been a gateway for immigrants, so you’ve got loads of cultural backgrounds. You’ve got a working-class community. Stratford is changing so quickly, there’s a new building every week. It feels like a microcosm of everything going on in this country at the moment.”

She is clear about what she wants to achieve. “I’d like to grow the audience and put this theatre back on the map,” she says firmly. Why did it fall off the map? Fall’s reply is tactful. “In some ways, it was spearheading diversity and telling stories from different groups that were often marginalised, but I think some of the programming was slightly inconsistent. The momentum wasn’t there.” She pauses. “Diversity has to be in our bone marrow, that’s who we are, but that’s not our end game. Our end game has to be quality of work.” Some shows at Stratford East, it transpires, were playing to audiences of less than 20 per cent.

It was always a mystery to theatre insiders as to how a venue in receipt of a hefty £1.1 million annual grant (in London only the National, Royal Court and Young Vic receive more) from the Arts Council was allowed to present such a sporadic, stop-start programme. “We also need a re-connection with why we are doing these plays and who for,” says Fall.

“The audiences need to grow, it’s as simple as that. I think there’s a completely exciting untapped audience one stop away in Leyton, three stops away in Snaresbrook.” I live six stops away, in Epping Forest, making Stratford East my local theatre. When I mentioned to a high-ranking member of the previous regime that I never got any sense of the many keen theatregoers around me heading to Stratford East, I was told “that’s not the sort of audience we want”. Fall is too diplomatic to comment when I tell her this, but the look on her face speaks volumes.

How is she going to reach these new audiences? “I might be naïve, but I’ve got to believe that if the work is good they will come,” she says. All and sundry will surely be enticed to E15 to sample the tantalising season that Fall announces today. “I’m trying to channel Joan Littlewood, because what she did was eclectic and for her popular was political. Her programming in the heyday of this theatre was classical work — Shaw, Shakespeare, the Greeks — done in new and inventive ways, which is what I want to do. Alongside this there was new work about current-day situations, such as A Taste of Honey. And musicals.” Fall’s seven-show opening season starts with Fall directing The Village, a new version set in contemporary India of Lope de Vega’s Spanish Golden Age classic Fuenteovejuna, and concludes with Lyndsey Turner directing a large-scale community co-production with ENO.

In between these comes the in-form Ellen McDougall directing The Wolves, a highly-praised American play about a girls’ high school football team, and The Unreturning by Bruntwood Prize winner Anna Jordan, about three young men over the past 100 years returning from war to a northern coastal town. After this come the revivals of two modern classics, hotshot young director Ned Bennett with Peter Shaffer’s Equus and Fall directing August Wilson’s King Hedley II.

Fall chose Fuente/The Village, about a rural community rising up against its oppressive overlord, for many reasons, not least that Littlewood herself presented the piece twice. “It’s a play about sticking it to the man, a warning shot to authority,” she says. “It’ll be kick-arse! The Village [which will have a cast of 14] is designed to throw down the gauntlet and say, ‘Look at our beautiful theatre, look at the stories we can tell’.”

If her first season is exciting, just wait until her second, says Fall. “I’m positively giddy about the season after. Because of timelines I’m commissioning now and sowing the seeds for the following seasons.” Fall is bursting with ideas, promising some big-name actors will grace the TRSE stage — she drops some tantalising hints — and mentioning the possibility of a merger with next-door arts centre Stratford Circus. Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of the National, is certain Fall has what it takes: “She’s fiercely independent, very much her own woman and unlikely to be shackled by convention.”

There has been disquiet expressed in some quarters that Stratford East was recently given a one-off grant of £800,000 by the Arts Council, the very Arts Council that told London theatres in the recent funding round that there was no more money in the pot. “The choice was a simple one: we either get the money, or we close the doors,” says Fall. With that annual grant of £1.1 million? “It was in a fragile condition,” she says and her work has been to “slim-line” and “stabilise the organisation”, closing down “satellite” projects such as the studio and catering.

How will you measure your success, I ask. “People,” she says simply. “The artists we attract and the audiences who come.” Are you giving yourself a timeframe for your regime to bed down? “I have no patience. I want everything to be brilliant yesterday,” she says. “I’m here for the long run, to put the sweat in. I’ve got two babies in my life: one is the little man [Fall has a 12-year-old son] and one is this place. They’re my priorities and I’m going to bring it, or die trying!”

The new season at Theatre Royal Stratford East, E15 (020 8534 0310, stratfordeast.com) starts on Sept 7