Arts: New play? Take it to the Max

Max Stafford-Clark is on a roll. His production of Drummers is a hit and he's about to open Some Explicit Polaroids, the new one from Mark Ravenhill, author of Shopping and Fucking. What makes him the new play guru?

OK. You're a new writing company and you've commissioned a hot playwright. The tour dates have been booked for months and your forthcoming play is the prime drama component of several theatres' autumn seasons. Now all you need is the script. The deadline arrives and guess what? It isn't ready.

What on earth do you do? If you're a grand-scale operation like the National, it's a nightmare but the breadth of commissions and revivals under consideration is so wide that all you need do is juggle the schedule. But for a small(ish), one-at-a-time outfit like new-play specialists Out of Joint, it's a potential disaster.

Earlier this year, when the crunch came and an exhausted Mark Ravenhill failed to deliver his eagerly awaited Some Explicit Polaroids, director Max Stafford-Clark found himself in the unlikely position of being able to wave a magic wand. He granted Ravenhill a two-month reprieve. Stafford- Clark already had Simon Bennett's Drummers waiting in the wings. All he had to do was persuade the tour venues, not an easy task. "They'd programmed the new play by Britain's most popular young playwright that you can market towards students and young people, and instead we're swapping it for a play by a completely unknown burglar."

Pardon? Yes, Bennett had done a stretch for theft and his first-hand knowledge of crime courses through the play's bloodstream, but authenticity alone only gets you 10 minutes of docu-drama. It's the emotional truth of this often caustically funny tale of brotherly hate that attracted Stafford-Clark. This, he confided at its triumphant premiere, was one of those occasions you dream about, when a genuinely vivid first play lands on your desk. "I read the first 20 pages and thought it might be a good play, it might be a mediocre play but I knew it wasn't a bad play. I knew this guy absolutely knows what he's talking about."

After an initial meeting, he set up a workshop. "We brought the mother, who had only been offstage, onstage." Despite the domestic setting, he recognised that it hit levels of emotion that were epic in scale. "It became a play about families. I think he's written about his own fractured childhood." It is this development of a play's potential that has earned Stafford-Clark his reputation as the most important director of new writing of the last 25 years.

His years with the legendary Joint Stock, more than a decade running the Royal Court, and his subsequent helming of Out of Joint have seen him spotting and honing such talents as Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sue Townsend, Sebastian Barry and Hanif Kureishi, the last of whom paid him the backhanded compliment of painting him in rather less than attractive colours in The Bhudda of Suburbia.

Drummers went through several drafts. During the workshop, questions were asked and improvisations set up, all of which Bennett absorbed. "But none were as good as the version he came up with in his subsequent draft." Not that this is necessarily typical. Each writer responds differently each time. "In Caryl's Blue Heart I think three lines were cut between the version I read and the staged production. But her Serious Money changed enormously: music was cut, scenes were cut, reversed, running order changed."

Stafford-Clark's route to this level of dramaturgy - and his exacting, detailed approach to actors and their connection to text - was unexpected. As a student at Trinity College Dublin he was on a rugby tour when he wandered into Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre and wound up stuffing envelopes with Richard Demarco, who invited him to bring over the Trinity revue he was involved in. "It was big success and we were invited back to the festival."

This was not long after the heady days of Beyond the Fringe, but that year the Oxford and Cambridge revues were dire, so the show transferred to London. It closed in three weeks. "Milton Shulman's review said the one good thing about this infantile undergraduate revue is that none of these people will ever be seen near the professional stage," beams Stafford-Clark.

He, however, returned to the Traverse as a stage manager, just before a bloody palace revolution during which rogue Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn fired everybody. "I wrote him a letter questioning his actions and talking of my loyal service. The middle-class tone obviously struck a chord and he said `oh, come to lunch'. There he told me, `there's obviously been a mistake... we didn't mean to fire people like you. Why don't you become artistic director? Well, actually, no. We've got to advertise that one. Have you directed any plays professionally?' I said no. `Oh God, why don't you just run the place?'"

He became general manager and, soon afterwards, artistic director. "The first thing you learn is that the actors know far more about it than you. In the first play I directed there was an actress called Susan Williamson. I had a car and she didn't so I would drive her home every night. And she would say, `Well, look, if you really want George to run that scene he's got to be standing up behind that table, he can't be sitting down.' So the next day I'd come in and say `George, I've been thinking, maybe it would be a good idea if... shall we try it with you, er, standing up? Great!' I learned that the actors are not your enemies and you shouldn't be scared of them."

His other great teacher was Bill Gaskill, who was leading the Royal Court where Stafford-Clark went as a staff director, aged 30. When Gaskill's contract expired, the two of them formed Joint Stock, which changed the landscape for playwrights in its unique approach to workshopping texts and building actors into the writing process.

Using prinicples culled from Brecht (to whose work Gaskill had led him), Stafford-Clark had a breakthrough on one of the company's most influential works, David Hare's Fanshen. "It meant that instead of an actor thinking `What am I doing in this scene, because that's what my character would do?', it should actually be `What am I doing in this scene in order to make the point that the author wants to make?'" Actors tend to work according to their ideas about a character's psychology. Stafford-Clark hit upon the technique of animating the absolute necessity behind every moment, enabling actors to carry out the writer's demands. Character became the servant of the text, rather than its master.

A quarter of a century later, he remains optimistic, if realistic about theatre's current low status. "You have to have a belief in your own work that makes you want to take it to people." He has a point. Shopping and Fucking began as a first play by an unknown writer in a 60-seat venue. "It seemed like an obscure, possibly an obscene play, certainly not a huge, commercial phenomenon. Room 101 for me would be marketing. How can you market Shopping...? You can only do it in retrospect. At the time you can only say I'm doing this work because I believe in it. And sometimes it strikes a chord, but you can't know that. You have to start every time in a state of innocence".

He shrugs, half jokingly: "Every play I do, I think the history of 20th- century theatre is going to change. Very rarely it is." A defiant grin flashes across his face. "But certainly this one is absolutely on course to change it."

`Drummers' is at the New Ambassadors, London (0181-836 6111) and touring; `Some Explicit Polaroids' opens at Bury St Edmunds on 30 Sept (01223 503333) and tours