I was an actress and I was finding it increasingly difficult to sustain a sense of my own creativity because as an actor you are always waiting for someone else to give you a job. You are always waiting for someone else to endorse you basically, and I found that increasingly difficult, and so I was looking around for other things to do and, purely by accident, I took up designing. I never imagined that I was going to give up acting, I just thought I needed something else that would give me a fall-back, as it were, and the designing of clothes took over. I became more and more successful, very quickly. So I gave up acting and became a designer, and removed myself from the theatre, and grew up!

Suddenly, I was going to the theatre purely for pleasure. Then a friend of mine gave me a play that she had written and I literally had a moment of epiphany where I woke up in the middle of the night and went ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to direct this play, this is it!’ We were very lucky because we took it to the Battersea Arts Centre and they said yes! They were fabulous. We went straight on, we did it, we sold out round the block, and then we took it on a tour which also sold out. I then raised money from the Arts Council because I felt that this writer was important and she should be paid to write a play which she then did. We took that play to The Bush Theatre and from there it transferred to The West End. So, the second thing I directed transferred to The West End and I had a very, very quick learning curve.

Then I came to Sheffield and Michael Grandage gave me the kind of break which very few new directors are ever given - the opportunity to direct on that massive stage with that huge auditorium. This is unusual now that we don’t have the repertory system in this country in the way that we used to. I realise that I am privileged, in that I have been escalated, if you like, very quickly through the ranks. So that’s my story in a nutshell.

Is one of your aims as Associate Director of Sheffield Theatres to encourage other directors?

Yes it is. Since I have been lucky enough to become an Associate Director I have spoken at evenings which are designed to encourage new directors, and I’ve met over cups of tea and chats, a huge amount of new people including designers, directors and writers. A big part of what Michael Grandage set in motion when he took over programming here, is indeed exactly what he did for me - encouraging new talent. There has been a lot of new talent developed through The Crucible Theatre, people like Nikolai Foster, who was our Assistant Director for two years, and was then given his first directing job on our main stage, A Chorus Line. I am aware that Michael also gave me that break and it is absolutely an aim of Sheffield Theatres that we encourage people. This touches me personally because I know what a difference it can make to somebody’s development as an artist.

Well written theatre. I’m always looking for the great new play. I love the thrill of working on new writing because you never know what will happen. Everyone is making it up together for the very first time and an audience have absolutely no idea what they are coming to see. So there is this wonderful act of faith, an act of trust, which happens when you are working on something new. Firstly, between the actors who will commit to it when no-one else has told them if it’s a good play or not - it is just their own instinct and taste. From yourself, just trusting your own instinct that it’s a good play. From the writer trusting you to do your best with their vision of the play. By which, I mean they’ve written it, we all suspect it's great, but there is no actual proof it’s going to translate onto the stage. And then that act of faith extends to Designers and indeed from the audience. You get this extraordinary vibe in an auditorium when an audience have no idea what they are coming to see, they have come because some piece of the pre-publicity has interested them in some way and not because they have expectations based on an earlier production. It quadruples the very profound dramatic affect of an evening in the theatre because you never know what a particular production or play is going to be like. That’s why I love it. The privilege of being in any rehearsal room with a group of talented actors and a writer is that as a director sometimes you get to facilitate people’s creativity to become bigger and greater than everyone imagined.

Well, I think that The Crucible is probably one of those plays that every director who gets an opportunity to direct it then thinks to themselves, ‘Wow, aren’t I clever, now is the perfect time, the only time in history, there couldn’t be a more perfect time in history to do this play’. Unfortunately, that is very, very often the case because we live in a culture surrounded by crisis and it felt to me that with what was going on in the Middle East and indeed America and Britain, The Crucible seemed like an important play to produce. It has been one of those plays I have always wanted to do and although, politically, it is extremely relevant I am also fascinated by the heartbreak involved in it. There is so much heartbreak and I think that that is a profoundly theatrical thing.

No, I don’t. I really dislike message theatre. I would never ever set out to make a piece of theatre where people went away thinking ‘Ah, that’s the message’. My intention when I make a piece of theatre is that it is as complicated as possible so that it speaks to as many different individuals in the audience, on a personal level, about whatever happens to be important in their lives at the moment. So the more complicated the ideas, the more complicated the emotions in a piece of theatre, the better the theatre is.

One of Miller’s geniuses is that he puts together some of the most complex questions man can ever ask himself, but the story is so simple that you have a compulsive need to know what on earth is going to happen next. Emotionally you are drawn along by this tidal wave of events. Then you leave the theatre with your brain really buzzing with questions and ideas, all of which you know could take a lifetime to answer. That to me is great theatre - intellectually complex whilst being emotionally compulsive.

That’s exactly what it is. I think one of the things you can always do as a director, when you are setting out to direct a play, is to ask yourself ‘What is the central question that is this play?’ You can boil it down, and although it is a simplistic way of looking at it, it can be very useful. I was thinking about this the other night - I was thinking ‘OK, if I had to say it was about one thing, what would I say, and I suppose the central question is - is the truth going to be told?’ Then in brackets ‘What is the truth?’ And those are great, great questions. Those are the questions that we should all be asking ourselves every single moment we are alive. And, are we going to be a big, brave, bold enough person to be able to tell the truth at every moment of our lives. And indeed, what is our personal truth?

One of the ways I know that I want to direct a play is that I have a strong visual image; I can see a picture of the actors in a particular environment. It very often ends up being something completely different, as it is in this case, but I can see it like a film in my head, I can see the pictures. So I start from that point of view. Then I read the play and I just start to make notes of anything that comes into my head. When I read it, I am not reading it for the ideas and the intellectual arguments, I am reading it imagining the actors acting it and imagining different versions of staging, and imagining sound effects and music I might use. I jot down all those ideas and I read the play 10-15 times, allowing all that stuff to just come to the surface. It can be completely different each time I read it. I can imagine one scene being directed one way one time I read it and then three days later I can read it again and it goes in a completely different direction.

I start to talk to a designer very early on and I bring all of those ideas to the table and then talk through all the ideas for the play with the designer. We talk and talk and talk until we find a world that seems to work for both of us. So all of this is going on in parallel - the development of the design with my own work on the play. It is about this time that I start to do research around it. For instance, for this play I read the transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials and I did quite a lot of research into the nature of hysteria. These are things that may never be used in rehearsals but they just interest me. At this time I’m also having similar conversations with the rest of the creative team – the Lighting Designer, Choreographer and Composers or Sound Designers.

Then I will get together with a Casting Director and I will talk through what I believe are the essential qualities of each of the characters that have to be cast - what I believe are the most important qualities a specific character needs to portray. The Casting Director will come with their ideas and we will discuss that. Then we will get together with a group of actors to meet. So then the casting is set in motion.

Before I go into rehearsals, I hone down that huge melting pot of ideas that I have had in response to the text. I have basic ideas for the staging of the play which I take into rehearsals with me so that the actors are not forced to have to make everything up. I give them a skeleton of where they can stand on stage and then they will have the confidence to play with that.

As an actor I used to, with my own part, work on the development of my character through the play and how that character’s developing arch intercepts with other characters developing arch and so I use this technique to chart the development of each character in the play. It is like creating a framework of the play; the emotional development of the structure of the play. In this instance I also hired a dialect coach and worked on, after my research into how Arthur Miller used the phonetic transcripts of the actual trials, what dialect we wanted to invent.

The important thing to remember is that there is no formula. It is different for every single play. It is important to have a structure for the way you work which you can then just completely chuck in the air. In a way the most important thing for a director is to have as much inspiration, information and ideas at your fingertips because rehearsals are all about a group of individuals getting together and you have no idea what those actors are going to bring to the table so you need to have as many ideas as possible to allow you to go off in as many different directions as you need to.