One day last summer, Ivo van Hove apologised to the cast of the play he was staging at the Avignon Festival in France, but said he had to disappear for a day. He couldn’t explain what he was up to, but promised they would forgive him when he explained later.
Then the Belgian director flew to New York for two meetings that would change his life. At 8am he met with the feared Hollywood and Broadway producer Scott Rudin. Rudin had seen van Hove’s revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic in London and, like most of those who saw it, he thought it was astonishing. He wanted to bring it to Broadway. Sure enough, it opens there in October with its original cast, headed by Mark Strong.
After that, van Hove was riding high. So when, at 10am, he sat down for a meeting with David Bowie, his idol since he first heard Young Americans in the mid 1970s, he felt oddly calm. It was only about 20 minutes in, as Bowie told him all about his musical, Lazarus — based around Thomas Newton, the character Bowie played in The Man Who Fell to Earth — that he got the wobbles. That he started to realise the scale of it all. “Bowie’s very intense,” says van Hove, “but he was very nice to me, he relaxed me by asking lots of questions. He knew a lot about my work and about me.”
Bowie and his cowriter, the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, wanted van Hove to direct their show. They still hadn’t shown him a script, though. Instead, when they met him for the second time, Bowie and Walsh read it to him, playing the parts between them. Whenever a moment came for one of the 18 Bowie songs to be sung — 14 of them rearranged oldies and two new ones at that point, although two other new ones have since been added — Bowie had them all lined up in order on his computer. They sat quietly and listened to them before resuming the reading.
This carried on until the end of act one. Bowie wanted to push on, “but Enda said, no, let him read it at home . . .”
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He got the gig. Only weeks after A View from the Bridge opens at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, Lazarus opens off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop, with Michael C Hall (Dexter, Six Feet Under) as Newton. Van Hove has been working there since 1997, but never to this kind of scrutiny. The closest he’s come to it was directing the opera version of the film Brokeback Mountain in Madrid last year. Some 70 or 80 journalists arrived from around the world to cover it. “I was never, ever, ever as nervous as I was on that day. I never thought about it during rehearsals. But on the day of performance, when you can’t do anything more . . . With the Bowie, it will be in a very small theatre, 200 seats, the whole world will be looking at us. But I cannot think about it now.”
He’s hardly got time to. First he’s directing Song from Far Away, a monologue by Simon Stephens that opens at the Young Vic next week; the international tour of Kings of War, his hi-tech, hugely ambitious, four-hour condensation of five Shakespeare history plays (Henry V, Henry VI parts I, II and III, Richard III) will reach the Barbican next spring; and his production of Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche, has just finished an Edinburgh run and goes to New York in September.
Granted, he’s got some help from the regular team at his company Toneelgroep Amsterdam, particularly his designer and partner Jan Versweyveld, with whom he has lived in Amsterdam for 35 years. And though van Hove is slim, smiling and softly spoken, he is, in his affable way, pretty intense. Questions get long, engaged answers in near-perfect English. A View from the Bridge was the first show he originated in London, although several of his Dutch-language shows had visited the Barbican before. And he was surprised to find that London is much more of a centre for theatre than New York. Everyone, he says incredulously, came to see the show, even before it moved to the West End this year. “I have never experienced that before. So out of that came a lot of opportunities.”
His productions are always adventurous, but he insists he isn’t wilfully eccentric. “Sometimes we’re minimalistic, like with A View from the Bridge, sometimes we’re maximalistic, like with Kings of War. I am always just looking at the play, what is this play about, how does it want to be produced in the most extreme, most beautiful way possible?” Still, he came of age as part of a generation of Belgian directors born around 1958 — also including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, in dance, and Jan Fabre, in performance art — who shared a “f***-you attitude to everything that was before. We didn’t like it and we were rebels”.
In Kings of War, video cameras follow business-suited national leaders around in a modern-day bunker. There are bodies in the corridors; loud music at points, including a live horn section. For the Miller, by contrast, he removed the interval, the period trappings, most of the scenery, even the actors’ shoes. It’s just what he felt the story needed. “The only thing you can do is not to imitate what you have done before, to know that you have to start each show afresh.”
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What’s it like to be directed by him? “Ivo’s very easy, there’s no drama, but he’s mischievous, he’s got a twinkle,” says Strong, who won an Olivier for his magnetic yet utterly unshouty Eddie Carbone. The cast fought their director on the first day of rehearsals when he told them that the Italian characters would have the same accents as the Brooklyn characters. It made no sense, they said. Eventually they tried it his way. And were persuaded. “He’s got a very light hand on the tiller, but he gets his way in the end. We all know that theatre’s not real, so why pretend it is? It’s about telling the story, clearly and powerfully.” Even so, Strong can’t explain entirely how their show worked quite as well as it did. “We all shared the same feeling at the end of it. ‘Wow, how did that happen?’”
Not by accident, anyway. Van Hove asks his cast to have their lines learnt by the first day, and asks plenty of himself too. “I do a lot of preparation. I am not a director who comes to the first rehearsals saying, let’s see what’s in the script.” He and his team spent more than a year, off and on, working out the staging of Kings of War before rehearsals began. “It was like prepping for a movie. It’s so complicated. It costs a lot of money, so I’d better be sure that I want what I want.”
Stephens’s play is at the other extreme: his first monologue. It’s the tale of a New York banker who flies home to Amsterdam after the death of his brother. Stephens wrote it after spending a week in Amsterdam with him and his company. Yet van Hove doesn’t like seeing actors speak to audiences directly — he even gets Henry V to deliver the “band of brothers” speech off stage in Kings of War — so he has made the show a one-sided dialogue between the protagonist and his dead brother. “I created another theatrical world from what Simon offered me, but the text is all in there.”
Next year he brings more Brits to Broadway, when he directs Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo in Miller’s The Crucible. Yes, he agrees, these are honey times for him. “Honey times is also hard work, though,” he adds.
“The Bowie show, for example, is not an easy piece. It’s difficult. It’s not a jukebox musical. We will treat it the same as a Wagner opera or a play by Arthur Miller. We will read it very carefully and listen to it very carefully and then try to make it work.
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“I said to Jan, when I was asked to do the Bowie, I said, well that means they are asking US for what we are and what we represent — they won’t expect a golden staircase like a Broadway musical. So, yes, it was a thrilling year that I have behind me, and these shows coming, it’s thrilling too. But I don’t feel nervous. I’m not panicking. I feel at home.”
Song from Far Away is at the Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7922 2922), Sept 2-19. Kings of War is at the Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891), Apr 22-May 1