Theatrical hitmaker Justin Martin on Prima Facie’s follow-up: ‘It wrestles with how to bring up boys’

Earlier this yr, opposing theatres in Charing Cross Road displayed “sold out” indicators for his or her displays. Both of them – Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Kyoto – had been co-directed via Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. “It was surreal,” says Martin. “Someone sent me a photo and I thought: I’m keeping that. As a little Australian, I’m still surprised to make a living out of this crazy career.”

Kyoto had a restricted run however Stranger Things has been going for 18 months and has “the noisiest audience I’ve ever heard”, Martin reviews. “I think the stat is that 60% of [them] have never been to a play before. So they eat popcorn throughout and just respond in a really natural way. If it’s boring, they leave. If they’re frightened, they really scream and gasp. It’s very live but, if you’re used to traditional theatre, it’s weird.”

Martin has had a centre seat for the trendy evolution of theatregoing. As a solo director, he staged Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, a scary monologue via a barrister who’s a survivor of rape, with Jodie Comer profitable Olivier and Tony awards in London and New York. Uniquely for a degree play, it additionally two times crowned the United Kingdom cinema field place of job when screened via NT Live. For Martin, that felt as not going an fulfillment as having double hits in London.

“I think a lot of it was Jodie,” he displays. “But also the subject matter of the play: that people wanted to be part of that conversation about relationships and consent. With a new play, you never know what you’ve got until it meets the audience. The first preview of Prima Facie, the audience was almost all women and I’d placed Stephen Daldry in the middle of the stalls to give me notes. And, even as the final music cue played, all the women in the theatre leaped to their feet with such energy and passion. And that was pretty much repeated everywhere.”

Martin and Daldry intermittently fantasise about growing templates for sellout displays that may be copied all over the world via assistants who now and again take a look at in via Zoom with the creators on their yachts. “Sadly,” he laughs, “we don’t seem to have achieved that. We have to be around a lot for every run.”

Just again from operating with Daldry to open Stranger Things on Broadway, Martin will subsequent yr direct Comer once more in a UK and Ireland excursion of Prima Facie. Next month, he makes a National Theatre debut with Miller’s new play. Whereas the sooner paintings took its name from the Latin criminal word that means “at first sight”, Inter Alia borrows the legal professionals’ time period for “among other things”. And, after the barrister’s monologue of Prima Facie, Inter Alia is a type of double soliloquy, for a prime court docket pass judgement on, Jessica Parks (Rosamund Pike), who delivers each her private and non-private ideas as a circle of relatives disaster assessments, inter alia, her judiciousness.

“In conversation” is a favorite time period of Martin’s for the way tradition works and Inter Alia has so much to mention to Adolescence, the Netflix mega-hit, because the pass judgement on turns into concerned relating to a tender guy accused of an attack on a classmate.

“They’re definitely related,” Martin is of the same opinion. “Both Inter Alia and Adolescence are talking about what everyone’s talking about, which is how to bring up boys with an understanding of women and consent. What interested me about Adolescence was the response: get rid of mobile phones, get rid of social media. And you think: that’s one of the things but there are other issues about our complicity in the society we’ve created. Rosamund’s character in our play is trying to bring up a feminist son. And what does that mean? Suzie’s play is wrestling with how to bring up boys.”

The Adolescence overlap is every other instance of a phenomenon that fascinates Martin: how performs are modified via the encompassing context. Kyoto via Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson – recognized to Martin and Daldry as “the Joes”, having up to now written for them The Jungle, the 2017 immersive drama a few refugee camp at Calais – premiered in summer time 2024 via the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and transferred to London this yr.

“What was amazing about that play,” says Martin, “is that we changed it a little bit between the two productions but the world had changed a huge amount.” He way the election of Donald Trump, which made the target audience much more unnerved about an American lobbyist, Don Pearlman (performed via Stephen Kunken), looking to sabotage the 1997 global settlement in Japan to scale back international warming.

“If you do stuff about what’s going on now, which is what I like to do, then it’s exciting when the context changes the play. Because of Trump, the play’s discussion of the divisiveness of America had a different focus.”

Kunken used to be, pantomime-like, frequently booed at curtain calls. But Martin has deep enjoy of theatre bumping into present affairs. In 2013, when Margaret Thatcher died, he used to be assistant director to Daldry on two West End displays during which the contentious former top minister used to be satirised: Lee Hall and Elton John’s musical Billy Elliot and Peter Morgan’s Westminster bio-drama The Audience.

“We thought: hang on, these shows become about something different tonight. Stephen held an audience vote at Billy Elliot about whether the song fantasising about Thatcher’s death should be included. [It was.] And Peter and I went on stage before The Audience and talked to the, er, audience about whether the Thatcher scene should be included. [It was.] But, when it gets like that, it’s really exciting. When Haydn Gwynne, who was playing Thatcher, came on, the audience all went deeply quiet as if: are we allowed to do this tonight? But then she did her deep curtsey to the queen and everyone laughed and it was as if there was permission to be in conversation with what had just happened. It was electric.”

Martin used to be operating as “resident director” (day by day show-running) at the Australian manufacturing of Billy Elliot when he first encountered Daldry and moved up, by means of assistant and affiliate director, to co-director (on The Jungle, Kyoto and Stranger Things). Some duos who use that time period take a seat aspect via aspect at desks all through rehearsals, however now not Daldry/Martin: “We divide up the show and then come back together to look at what the other has done. Every director runs out of ideas in a rehearsal room so it’s great to have someone who can pick it up and run with it.”

Together and one after the other, a trait in their productions is tempo. Without ever shedding a phrase, Comer in Prima Facie gave a way of a racing mind and frame. Kyoto, a hefty two-act play, felt a lot shorter than its operating duration.

Martin nods: “I love it when a play is just ahead of the audience and they’re trying to catch it. With a monologue, it’s someone’s inner thoughts and people think so quickly so it has to go: boom, boom, boom. When I started on Prima Facie, it wasn’t quite coming alive and I rang up the friend who did it in Australia and she said with monologues you have to go at a rapid pace because of the speed of thought. I think pace is everything. Although it can be a fight now because a lot of actors try to act between the lines. That’s the influence of screen work where it’s in the pause, it’s in the look. But in theatre you have to act on the line. It’s an oral medium; if you’re not hearing it, there’s nothing going on. Stephen and I are notorious for saying to actors: if you’re doing nothing, then nothing is happening.”

Martin is one in every of a bunch of Australian administrators – Simon Stone, Benedict Andrews, Kip Williams – who’ve labored prominently in London. “I came over chasing a partner who had moved here and I just found it was the place I wanted to work,” he says. He is happy that Inter Alia is scheduled for NT Live. “For someone living across the world from where my parents are, it’s a way of connecting … But, more importantly, it’s democratised theatre.”

All his large displays were new – together with The Fear of 13 with Adrien Brody – however do manufacturers ring up and be offering The Cherry Orchard or Richard III? “Yep.” And he says no? “Yep. Until I find my own way into a classic the way Stephen did to An Inspector Calls, where you feel the play is turned on its head.”

After Inter Alia he’s making plans to finish a trilogy with Miller: “We have a third one with another Latin legal title that I can’t say for the moment.” While Martin insists that collaboration should stay sub judice for now, his monitor file suggests audiences are not going to be in absentia.