Joe Murphy, artistic director of Nabokov theatre company talks to Naima Khan about his latest work, E V Crowe's Young Pretender.
Theatre company Nabokov have championed some of the most memorable plays and playwrights of recent years. Their commissioning of Jack Thorne's award-winning Bunny helped cement his place in British theatre and their production of Edmund White's Terre Haute brought the American writer's work – and a load of American theatre critics – to London.
At the moment, Artisitc Director Joe Murphy is working on EV Crowe's Young Pretender, a take on the ambition and determination of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Both Murphy and Crowe's choice to explore a Jacobite pretender and bring him to contemporary audiences is at the centre of Nabokov's ethos.
“We're trying to redefine what theatre can be,” says Murphy, who has collaboration and a regard for the audience as his priorities. The Nabokov take on redefining theatre is refreshingly organic. While we talk about how he selects scripts and the process of bringing them to the stage, there's no mention of “innovation” or “diversity” those now meaningless buzz words. Instead, he wants to look at new ways of bringing familiar themes to theatregoers. “This felt like a new way in,” he says. “By taking a historical angle, allowing the audience to engage with him as a person, Charlie becomes the prototype of a modern rebel.”
So while the subject of his latest play, an eighteenth century historical figure remembered with a passing glance as a failure, might seem an odd way of engaging a contemporary audience, Joe notes the similarities between Charlie and our generation. “Charlie was twenty-four when he attempted to invade England and Scotland. What must it have been like to be in your twenties and to try to stand up for something? To try and do something extraordinary? How much self belief did that really take? Those are the challenges people my age are faced with.”
He mentions the recession, lack of employment and prospects, and a feeling “that the generations above have kind of screwed us a bit. Young Pretender looks at what it would be like to say 'this isn't fair, hand it over, it's our turn, we're going to have a claim on this world'.”
Dealing with overthrowing those in power, Young Pretender promises a long hard look at what Murphy calls “the intimate moments between the epic events”. Rather than try to recreate battles on stage, Crowe centres her writing on two people in conversation. “It's told mostly through this almost bromance between Charlie and someone fictional,” says Joe. “It's their relationship, how these two men go through this experience together. So you're dealing with this epic backdrop, but you're seeing it through two people in a room just talking.”
Image by Lesley Martin
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