AS SHE LIKES IT

Photography by Ameena Rojee

From her days as an “insanely bookish” child, Josie Rourke has been obsessed with texts. Every time the theatre and film director embarks on a classical play – Shakespeare in particular – she will sit down and parse every line herself, extracting every nuance of meaning and intimation, and sometimes pushing it into new and unexpected places.

Nowhere was that more evident than in her production of As You Like It, which ran from December 2022 to January 2023 at the new West End theatre @sohoplace. The show, which starred deaf actor and Strictly Come Dancing winner Rose Ayling-Ellis as Rosalind’s cousin Celia, was partially performed in a “very theatrical” charismatic sign language, which comprised elements of British Sign Language, gesture, Sign Supported English and visual vernacular.

This part of Rourke’s directing practice, of getting into the nitty gritty of a playtext and making it sing (literally, in the case of As You Like It, which also had a strong musical element), “actually did start in The London Library”, she tells me when we meet at the Soho flat she’s renting with her writer partner and their excitable small dog.

Usually the couple live in rural Suffolk, but As You Like It was the first of three shows in London that Rourke is directing back to back. Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner at the Harold Pinter Theatre, starring Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman, followed. And Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa opens at the National Theatre on 6 April.

“I started directing at quite a grown-up level as quite a young person,” Rourke says of directing productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company in her mid-20s. “I think we all, to an extent, suffer from imposter syndrome, but I was legitimately an impostor at that point. So, to make sure that I felt like I had the authority to be at the Royal Shakespeare Company directing big classical productions, I probably over-prepared.”

A member since 2001, Rourke “found the resource and also the ambience of the Library to be a really reassuring space in which to do that. And that set my practice on classical plays going forward. The majority of my preparation for a rehearsal process is very painstaking work with the actual text of the play.”

Starting with the first folio, she’ll “go through that as a first pass, and modernise all the punctuation and look up a bunch of the words”. She also uses a concordance – a book that details all of the instances where a word has appeared across Shakespeare’s plays – to understand how the word has been used and its intended meanings in different contexts.

From that “clean version”, she’ll edit it, “and that gets me ready for the rehearsal room and really confident with the material”.

It speaks to Rourke’s meticulousness that her experience alone isn’t enough. She started directing plays while studying English literature at Cambridge; now aged 46, she has been artistic director of two London theatres.

The first was the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush: a mecca for new writing, which she moved from a tiny space above a pub to its new home in the former Passmore Edwards Public Library. (Part of her legacy there is the creation of a library of playtexts, many donated by publishers.)

The new space opened in 2011 with the typically ambitious 66 Books, a 24-hour performance cycle of 66 short plays by writers from Enda Walsh and Anne Carson to Laura Dockrill and Wole Soyinka. Each of the plays was based on a different book of the King James Bible, to celebrate 400 years of the Church of England translation.

Then she ran the Donmar Warehouse from 2012 to 2019. More than a decade before, she’d been resident assistant director there under Sam Mendes. Not only was she the Donmar’s first female artistic director, she was also the first woman to be appointed to run a major London theatre.

She presided over numerous triumphs there, including Phyllida Lloyd’s pioneering all-female Shakespeare trilogy; James Graham’s innovative play on data security, Privacy; and his equally ingenious The Vote, which was set in real time in a Lambeth polling station over the last 90 minutes of voting for the general election of May 2015. It was televised on More4 from 8.30–10pm on election night – the first play to be broadcast live from the place and time of its setting.

Breaking new ground is something of a habit. It’s one of the reasons that Rourke was thrilled to become a Vice President of The London Library – not just for the “swishy” feeling of being involved with an institution for which she has “a great and very personal sense of its status”, but also because she felt inspired by the efforts to open the Library up, especially to new writers, and to support new writing.

“There’s almost no better energy than the energy that exists around new writers and new plays,” says Rourke, “and what it is for people to be at the beginning of their careers and finding influences and mentors and partners in crime. It feels like the Library is creating a space for that.”

Though she acknowledges that many people adore The London Library for its atmospheric nooks and corners, “I actually love the main Reading Room. I think that there’s something really wonderful about the quality of light through those big windows over the square. I just think it’s one of the great spaces [in London].”

Not that she’s especially fussy about where she does her reading. She grew up in Salford, Greater Manchester, in the 1980s and 1990s and, like many of us who came of age in that time and place, she was a visitor to the legendary Haçienda nightclub: “I was so bookish that I finished reading EM Forster’s Howards End in the toilets. So I can talk about the solace and comfort of The London Library but I am capable of finishing a novel in the toilets of a club.”

She puts her love of reading down to her upbringing. Her mother Vivienne was an English teacher for many years, and taught Rourke to read when she was “very little. I don’t know if this is true, but my mum says that I could read when I went to nursery at three. There’s a story in my family that my parents were called into my school and slightly told off because I told the teachers that I’d read all the books in the library.”

Her parents were “massive readers. My dad had sets of books; he had a set of Dickens. So as a very little girl, I read all of Dickens. I’m sure I didn’t understand it, but I’d just run out of other stuff to read.”

A tradition of autodidacticism goes back several generations in her family of Irish diaspora in Salford, she says: “That idea of part of your education being reading that you do at home, not reading you’re set in school. My dad will decide, apparently out of nowhere, that he wants to know everything about the Holy Roman Empire and just read around the Holy Roman Empire for six months.”

Her work feeds into this voracious appetite for knowledge and, for that, the Library has been invaluable, she says. “Directing is such an interesting job, in that you become a kind of temporary expert on something.” In 2018 Rourke made her first feature film, Mary Queen of Scots, which required her to delve deep into Tudor history, and she is currently working on three more, one of which she describes as “a kind of constitutional comedy”.

“I’m required to read up on democracy in England, and the history of it. Then one of them is an adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel, so I think the last book I borrowed from The London Library was her autobiography.”

“The other one is about the broadcast ban in Northern Ireland in the 1980s–90s. The Library has been brilliant, because it has some quite specific academic publications around the broadcast ban, but the subject is incredibly niche. The Library has those books that, if I were to buy them, would be 140 quid. It’s just a great resource – and incredibly cool.”

Nancy Durrant is the Culture Editor at the Evening Standard