When was the last time you were vulnerable?

The power of the check in

Welcome to the latest edition of the J Mail for paid subscribers! Thank you so much for your support - it really means a lot to me. If you like what you see in the preview, please consider becoming a paid subscriber of the J Mail to get all the creative juice every week. You can subscribe for as little as £3.80 a month if you choose annual membership - the price of one posh coffee!

Anoushka Lucas in my production of Elephant at the Bush Theatre. Photo by Sergei Sarakhanov

I’ve carved out a weird little niche for myself in the theatre world - and if you know my work, you’ll be familiar with it. I’m attracted to work that involves lived experience. Very rarely do I direct a script that’s already been written - it’s unusual for me to read a script and go - YES that’s for me - partly because I love to be involved in the writing process. When a script is all but finished, I often find myself thinking that a lot of the fun part is already done. So, often, artists and writers will come to me and say - “I want to make a play about my last breakup” or “my dissociative identity disorder” or “how I dealt with the death of my mum” (those are all real examples, of course). 

Gradually, I’ll work with the person to uncover the show they want to make, exploring their personal material together. We might use some verbatim text - we might include real people from their lives as characters - we might completely fictionalise all but their personal experience, the truth of their emotional inner life. 

I love working this way because it feels so deeply grounded in truth. And because of the intense personal nature of this kind of work, I’ve evolved some techniques to help keep everybody safe throughout the process. My favourite is the check in - it’s a really powerful exercise and I wanted to share a deep dive into how to run a great check in here.