Melly Still: A Director/Designer Is Born
When Broadway.com asked Coram Boy's director and co-designer Melly Still to describe her path to a theatrical career, we had no idea that Still had such a varied background in art, dance and design. It's unusual, of course, for the director of a large-scale theatrical production to double—or, in Still's case, triple—as the show's set and costume designer. But as the Olivier Award-nominated director tells it, her childhood and education prepared her to tackle all aspects of "devising" a stage extravaganza. In the case of Coram Boy, Helen Edmundson's adaptation of Jamila Gavin's young-adult novel, Still's wildly theatrical production puts a cast of 20 plus 20 more members of an onstage choir in constant motion to tell the overlapping stories of an aristocratic 18th-century British family, a villain who accepts payment for placing unwanted children in the famous Coram orphanage and the resilient young Coram residents themselves. Here, Still traces the origins of her passion for the stage.
It's 3:00 AM. I've moved to New York from London with my three children during rehearsals for the Broadway production of Coram Boy, and I've been ineffectually enticing sleep for the last hour. I'm not sure if it's my internal clock still hankering after Greenwich Meantime or the bone-shaking lorries of Sixth Avenue relishing four unobstructed lanes. I'm relieved and amazed that the children sleep through the noise. At home in Peckham, an inner-city London suburb, they are accustomed to a concert of desperate high-pitched squeals as yet another squirrel begs for mercy in the face of razor sharp teeth. The children wake in terror at home but take comfort here in ever-restless Greenwich Village. If they stir here, they know they are not alone. The noises aren't to be guessed at. There are no wild animals, and it's never pitch black or "patch dark," as my five-year-old says.
Insomnia is not to be fought, so I ponder—as I was asked to for this piece—the path that has led me to direct and design. I wasn't driven by ambition, but a series of unexpected turns—prompted by restlessness or passionate teachers in and out of school—indicated, never promised, an alternative view or terrain. I was never destined, as I would often fantasize, to have a job with purpose, with tangible value and benefit and work for medicine sans frontiers. Better in the end to find faith in and shape a wayward propensity to dream, draw, dance, play and tell others what to do.
As I ponder, a few episodes on this path stand out.
I painted in the kitchen while Mum washed my baby sister's nappies at the kitchen sink. If she was in the mood, she would deftly reveal the secrets of proportions and noses in profile. I hated the mess I produced. To my shame, Mum would hang the paintings because she and Dad enjoyed their five-year-old's confident and unabashed way of seeing the world. One freezing night in a new white nylon petticoat with a pink frill and precious bow in the center of the neckline, I danced in the snow, invulnerable to the cold and spookily snow-clad branches. The spell was broken by Mum's remonstrations, replaced days later by worry and love after the doctor's diagnosis of double pneumonia.
Junior schools in the '60s and '70s were rigid and uncreative. We learned largely by rote. I was frequently chastised, I'm sure with reason, for "distracting others." But chastisement took the form of shaking, shouting and slapping, inevitably breeding further recalcitrance. Two teachers made a difference. First, a progressive P.E. teacher at secondary school in 1973 introduced us to Rudolf Laban and Martha Graham in a brand new subject called Modern Educational Dance. We learned about the kinaesthetic impact of movement on fellow dancers and the audience; composition; the beauty of a body moving into an empty space. Then, at 15, when I was asked firmly and politely not to return to my school after the summer holidays, I moved back to Dad's Mum and Dad divorced when I was six, and my new art teacher persuasively argued that he would teach us "to see." I was smitten.
This art teacher maintained that I should give up any woolly notion of being a choreographer or an actor and go to Art College. But painting is lonely. So I found a course at university level—the only one at the time in the UK—offering a Combined Arts degree in Drama, Dance and Art. In the early '80s, I was introduced to the inspirational vision of Pina Bausch and the New York Post Modernists as they were known in the UK, Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown.
On leaving college in 1985, I worked as an assistant to the choreographer at York Theatre Royal on a seedy production of James and the Giant Peach. I taught a vast chorus of youth theater kids the choreographer's steps, scrutinized by a tobacco-rolling assistant director called Tim Supple. In the pub later we forged an unshakeable friendship born of our shared love of theater not of the Giant Peach kind. We became close colleagues. Meanwhile, struggling to survive as an independent choreographer due to lack of money and dancing skills, I funded life working as a scenic artist, decorator, artist's model and movement director. But restlessness set in. The drive for humans to communicate and share loss, love, pain, fear, joy and loneliness as well as cling on financially is irrepressible. And once you've worked out that you're not going to change the world and accepted you're an artist of sorts, then movement directing and painting sets is not enough. I returned to painting.
Accompanied by my infant son and writer friend Anita, I went to Tuscany on receipt of a bursary to paint. There I met New York artist Don Perlis, who expounded enthusiastically Renaissance theories of composition and enthralled me with his own poetic sense of scale, color and space. At night I read Grimm's fairy tales to my son, and before long, the urge to create theater was re-ignited. I missed bringing stories to life—visceral, three-dimensional, breathing, human stories. I returned to London to devise with Tim Supple a production based on a collection of eight Grimm stories. As well as being involved in the movement and staging, I cut my teeth as a designer, drawing on my time in Tuscany. We wanted to close the divide between "real" theater and "children's" theater. We hoped the stories would enthrall, enchant and excite theatergoers of all ages. From 4 to 94. The same objectives have propelled Coram Boy.
So I began to focus on conceiving productions that I might fully realize aesthetically and conceptually as a director/designer. I was looking to work on a production that might synthesize the visual, the choreographic, the theatrical and the narrative. I was invited by Simon Reade, the artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, to direct something so that, he quipped, he wouldn't have to pay for a movement director and could pay less for the design. After Beast and Beauties I directed and designed a second show, Alice in Wonderland. Tom Morris and Nick Hytner from the National Theatre saw the show, and Nick invited me to develop a show for the Olivier Stage at the National.
My brief at the National was to adapt the novel of a living author with a view to inspiring the next generation of theatergoers and practitioners. I was given three weeks to select a novel. After a dozen or so books and two days to the deadline, I read Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy and I could immediately envisage it on stage. Helen Edmundson then adapted the book, and the show went on at the National in 2005 and again in 2006. The producer Bill Haber saw it and, driven by his vision and enthusiasm, Coram Boy has arrived at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway.
The early hours have drifted into morning. The four lanes of Sixth Avenue are clogged and impatient. Sunlight touches my arm, but I know it's freezing outside. Who cares? New York is intoxicating, greedy, needy, heartless and generous, and I love walking 40 blocks uptown to the Imperial Theatre where I am welcomed by a team of tirelessly generous and skilled actors, designers, musicians and stage managers. The kids have just joined me in bed. My boyfriend Mark has introduced them to a new game while they wait, as usual, for me to finish blimmin work. I join in. We have to improvise a story. Each player is allowed three words before the next player takes over without hesitation. We start to giggle at the absurd unfolding of the story. My new teachers, I think romantically—until we all start fighting over how the story should end.