By James Hadley in London

One of the most prolific theatre directors working in London currently is Rupert Goold, and at the age of 36 his rise to prominence has been meteoric. Just three years ago he was Artistic Director of a regional theatre (the Royal and Derngate in Northampton), where he staged innovative recontextualisations of Shakespearean texts, and it was his horror film influenced production of 'Macbeth' in 2007 which brought him to the attention of a wider audience, transferring to both London and Broadway.

Last year his high profile productions included a modern dress production of 'King Lear' with Pete Postlethwaite in the title role, directing a high profile revival of the musical 'Oliver!' for Cameron Mackintosh, and a production of Pinter's 'No Man's Land' starring Michael Gambon. He also directed - for his touring theatre company Headlong - a radical rethink of Pirandello's 'Six Characters in Search of an Author', which I caught while it was on in the West End.

Recontextualising the play's imagining of a cast of characters protesting to their playwright to be written, this eerie production had a group of somewhat 'stagey' theatre characters turn up in a TV studio and demand that the director and crew help them to tell their story. The way the piece developed was eye-opening in its audacity, escalating to a climax which included the TV director seeking help for an unconscious girl by carrying her backstage in search of assistance. With the boundaries between reality and fiction having been greatly blurred within the world of the play, we now watched (via supposedly live camera feed) the director take the unconscious girl's body out onto Shaftesbury Avenue in search of help, and then through the backstage of the next door theatre (which just happened to be showing 'Les Miserables').

One of the more surreal moments I've had in theatre was watching the character wandering through the background of the barricade scene in the musical playing next door, trying to get assistance for the little girl, before wandering back through onto the empty stage we had been left watching. It was one of those productions which completely shattered the fourth wall and made suspending your disbelief frighteningly easy.
 
Goold, like many of the directors who make it into London's West End, had the benefit of an Oxbridge education. From there he followed an exemplary path to high profile recognition: after university he became a trainee director at Donmar Warehouse, then an associate director of the Salisbury Playhouse through his independent directing of productions, building up a track record of artistic achievements which allowed him to gain an Artistic Director position of the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton.

After a few years he set up his own theatre company, Headlong, in 2005, and directed the increasingly critically acclaimed productions which have transferred to the West End more often than not. Yet he's acknowledged that the most promising directors of his generation were held back from tackling high profile mainstage productions for several years, due to the previous generation of directors resisting making room for them. I guess that's a challenge in any theatre industry.
 
He's directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company, now he's made his directing debut at the National Theatre with a beautiful production of JB Priestley's 1937 play 'Time and the Conways'. Steven Daldry's 1992 production of JB Priestley's 'An Inspector Calls' was such a success when it premiered on the same Lyttelton stage at the National as Goold's production now does, that not only did it transfer to the West End, but it ran for years and is about to be revived in the West End again. It was a prominent example of the 'director as auteur' school of theatre, where the director's reconceptualising of a classic text places their vision as equally key to the experience as the playwright's original text.

With Goold's directing reputation having grown from several productions which have thrilled audiences with similarly revelatory revisioning of classic texts, there was bound to be an expectation that Goold's take on 'Time and the Conways' could be the 'An Inspector Calls' of a new generation of theatre-goers. And this expectation or comparison has led to most reviews of this production being a bit luke-warm, but as I attended the production with almost no expectations, I was enthralled by both the script and Goold's reimagining of it.
 
I have to admit I've never read or seen a production of one of JB Priestley's plays. Well, he's very rarely staged in NZ - like most English plays of the first half of the twentieth century with decent size casts and slightly dusty-seeming class and etiquette concerns.

Somehow I expected a rather dry drawing room drama, but the play introduces us to a vivacious set of characters, full of energy, passion and hope at the end of the First World War. The 'frightfully just so' upper-class English mannerisms of 1919 make for delightful escapism, but these characters still seem quite fresh for the self-conscious modernity with which they're seeking to embrace a new chapter of life. I'd initially been attracted to the production by the casting of Francesca Annis as the family's matriarch, and she certainly didn't disappoint. It's a wonderful role - in fact the play's full of good roles for women - reminiscent of Madame Ranyevskaya in Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard'.
 
What's quite experimental about the play - certainly for its time - is that the first and third acts are set in 1919, but the second act is set twenty years later. So you see how time has changed the characters, how they have achieved or shied away from the aspirations and ideals they expressed in the first act, and then when we return to the earlier time period, it's with a deepened sense of nostalgia and of poignancy. For instance, the youngest of the children in the family had died in the intervening years, so we read her on a whole new level when we return to 1919 and she's spouting on about all her dreams and ambitions. Characters who are charming and playful in the first act, become embittered when we encounter them twenty years later... others become wiser and more savvy to the ways of the world.

The play speaks volumes about how people respond to life over time, and how personalities shift as experience weathers them. At one point it suggests that a person's truest nature is not how they are now, nor how they were a certain number of years ago, but rather a cross-section of moments from throughout all stages of their life. And by extension it suggests a non-linear concept of time.
 
It's this aspect that the director has tinkered with in the production. On the whole, it's a remarkably faithful production to the original script, so quite an old-fashioned 'talking heads' sort of play, which is perhaps why many who expected a flashy recontextualisation were a bit disappointed. Instead the opening moment of each act is presented as a sort of filmic close-up; screens frame a detail like a camera iris before sliding back to reveal the full stage.

Then at the end of each act the director pulls out his box of tricks and plays with time in a different way. At the end of the first act, a character is suddenly caught in freeze-frame and the walls of the set spin out in all directions, which is quite thrilling after an hour of unbroken realism. After the second act, the walls similarly slide out of view, as a character is looking in a mirror, but what's revealed is six parallel versions of the same character onstage, so that all seven run through a movement sequence simultaneously (similar to a device that's been explored in music videos by Michel Gondry). Then after the third act, two of the 1919 characters are seen behind a gauze which allows their movements to be echoed and interact with ghostly afterimages of their 1939 selves.

This is only possible due to precise correlation between the live actors and projected images, and the effect is startling, embroidering around the central themes of the play. Some would say that the play didn't need these extra codas, and that they were just visual representations of what had already been said very well by the playwright.

But in our visually-focussed world, bringing some of that filmic vocabulary into a historic text like that never seems to do any damage to making a work seem more accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences. And you could say that's been key to the success of Rupert Goold as a director.