ANNIE BAKER THE FLICK MOVIE

With a keen ear for the subtleties of everyday speech, a masterful command of dramatic structure, and a willingness to allow silences to linger on stage (often to a point of discomfort), she brings to life the erratic rhythms of human interaction. Until Mar 3.Annie Baker is a playwright exploring the complexities of human behavior and the ways in which language is often inadequate to build true understanding between people. ‘John’ is at the National Theatre, Dorman. There are lots of other principles that I violate on a daily basis, but for some reason theatre is sacred to me.’

ANNIE BAKER THE FLICK MOVIE

I will never cast a movie star to sell tickets, I will never cut something down to please a commercial audience and I will never work with a director in London or New York who I don’t know and love. I hope this doesn’t sound haughty, but when it comes to theatre I will never sacrifice the integrity of the work. ‘I’m still stunned I have a career at all. Is that a reasonable way of summing up your career?

Is it okay to describe you as a cult playwright? You have a huge following but have never exactly gone ‘mainstream’ in terms of casting or venues. James Macdonald does the opposite: he helps people scale way back and find the nuance, which is also where I think the humour lies. I also find that most directors push actors to perform in ways that I find showy and unfunny. A lot of it has to do with having a certain sense of humour, and a love of composition and meticulous design choices. ‘I feel like only a handful of directors understand my work. You only really work with a couple of directors – are you very protective of your work? ‘I’m really not trying to say anything with them, I swear! I’m just following my instincts entirely when it comes to pace.’ Your plays are deliberately slow and packed with pauses and silences – what are you trying to say with them? What I’m hoping, though, is that the more hyper-specific and up-to-its-own-thing the work is, the more likely it is that the right people will respond to it. ‘The play takes place in Gettysburg and there’s a lot of Civil War history in it, which I do think will land differently than it did in the States. So I wanted to write a play about a young couple breaking up that also related to ideas about selfhood and autonomy and American history and God.’ĭoes the risk of any of that being lost in translation worry you? I also wanted to upend the genre of the relationship drama. I’d say all of that relates to the theme of religious dread and responsibility, and how people in secular culture become obsessed with the supernatural as a way of stimulating an old-school kind of religious dread. Then those transition into notes on William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: first-hand accounts of madness in the nineteenth century, and then a lot of people writing about the power that dolls and inanimate objects hold over us. They start with an interest in the tourism industry in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the eerie world of American bed and breakfasts. ‘I just went back and looked at the 66 pages of notes I have for the play. ‘John’ is a pretty unusual mix of concepts.

Her latest, ‘John’, about a disintegrating Brooklyn couple who stay at a creepy Gettysburg B&B, opens at the NT Dorfman next week. Her ode to independent cinemas ‘The Flick’ sold out at the National Theatre almost straight away back in 2016.

US playwright Annie Baker has won a loyal following with her wry, glacially paced dramas about smalltown America.

Annie baker the flick