Lily SykesDirectorMagdalen College, 4th YearHow did you first get involved in directingin Oxford?I first started doing Cuppers – I wanted to act but noone else wanted to direct so I ended up directing instead, and to our surprise we won! After that I did lots of acting, until a term came when I wasn’t getting any of the parts I wanted. A friend suggested I direct something, so I put on a production of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, which was one of the most fun and rewarding things I have ever done.How do you like to go about putting a show together?Everything has to be very free to begin with. The problem in Oxford is that everyone has so little time, which means that when you call people for rehearsal, they don’t have time to experiment.That’s why I took the cast of The Caucasian Chalk Circle away for 5 days so we could just have time to try out ideas. If you spend intensive time with a group of people you learn to trust them in a way you can’t do if you’re just popping in and out. In rehearsals I like to play: that’s what makes it fun, and it has to be fun. So we do a lot of playing, and we take the bits we like and relate them back to the text, and that’s how it starts.How did working abroad last year influence you?I had two very different experiences: working in an opera house in Munich, and working in a little theatre in Berlin. Munich taught me about delegation and organisation; Berlin taught me about storytelling. Both projects were very low budget, but instead of stretching ourselves to produce big sets and costumes, we told the story with acting. That’s very important. I think a lot of student shows fail because they try to be something they’re not. We don’t have professional budgets, but what we do have is energy, commitment and willingness to experiment. We also have a very particular perspective on events. People say that we are very naive, but I see that as a positive thing.Are you planning to pursue a theatrical career after your degree?I hope so, but we’ll have to see. I might go abroad again. You can learn a lot from the way that other people do things, and I’d like to do that for a couple of years.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005
