The night before the theater director Atri Banerjee was due to leave London for Manchester to start rehearsals for a new show, burglars broke into his house. First he was assailed with racist abuse, then physically assaulted.
It was May 2019, and the Manchester job, directing an adaptation of “Hobson’s Choice,” at the prestigious Royal Exchange Theater, was a big break for Banerjee, who was stepping up after another director withdrew.
“It was a landmark moment for me,” said Banerjee, 30, whose parents are Indian and who grew up in Italy and the Britain. “I had never felt victimized or oppressed because of my brownness,” he said. “Suddenly you realize it’s very easy to be put into a box. It sharpened my political awareness about why theater, so good at celebrating the multiplicity of identity, is important.”
Banerjee was speaking in an interview at the Almeida Theater, in London, where he was rehearsing John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 play, “Look Back in Anger,” which opens at the playhouse on Friday. Part of a repertory season called “Angry and Young,” it will run in tandem with Arnold Wesker’s 1958 “Roots,” directed by Diyan Zora.
“Look Back in Anger,” teeming with fury and frustration at the hidebound British class system, sparked the Angry Young Men movement in literature and theater in the 1950s. (The writers Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Alan Sillitoe were also associated with it.) “A watershed in the history of modern drama,” Martin Esslin wrote in The New York Times on the tenth anniversary of the play’s West End premiere, which was followed the next year by a Broadway run.
The play hasn’t had a major British revival in over 20 years, perhaps because of what Rupert Goold, the Almeida’s artistic director, described in an interview as “slightly challenging gender politics,” alluding to the misogynistic abuse that the working class protagonist Jimmy inflicts upon his more genteel wife, Alison.
For Banerjee, it spoke directly to his own experience. “I thought about the attack, what it might mean to be an angry young man who feels disenfranchised, and how that can turn to violence,” he said.
He added that he was interested in theater as a “liminal space” and in “the threshold between characters and audience.” Naturalism, he said, “hasn’t always been my comfort zone.”
Banerjee, who is tall and handsome, speaks thoughtfully and deliberately, pausing often to select the right word. He was born in Oxford, where his father, an economics professor, was teaching, and the family spent time in Canada, New Zealand and the United States before moving to Florence when Banerjee was seven. He went to an international school, but did all his classes in Italian and spent much of his free time watching DVDs of old movies. By the age of 12, he had decided he wanted to be a film director.
The family moved back to Oxford when he was 14 (“Gray England was a shock,” he said), and after finishing high school, he did an English literature degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. There, he began directing at the university’s two student-run theaters, hotbeds for emerging British talent that count Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Rachel Weisz among their alumni.
Those student shows included the musical “The Last Five Years,” Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors.” Looking back, he said, there was a through line between his work then and now. “A lot of my work has been about memory and the slippage of time,” he said. “Looking back at what I did at 19 or 20, I realize somehow, with a play, you are always telling your own story.”
After Cambridge, still uncertain about what direction to take, Banerjee started working in the press department at the National Theater, in London. That led to encounters with the directors Lindsay Turner, Rufus Norris and Simon Godwin and, encouraged by Godwin, he successfully applied for postgraduate study in directing at Birkbeck College, University of London.
His second year placement was in Manchester at the Royal Exchange, where Sarah Frankcom, then the artistic director, was immediately struck by Banerjee’s “complete engagement with what a piece of theater can do” she said in a phone interview. “There is a heightened theatricality in what he does; he can take you lots of places, but you are never not in a theater,” she added.
It was Frankcom who asked Banerjee to take over “Hobson’s Choice” when a director had to withdraw. An adaptation by Tanika Gupta of Harold Brighouse’s 1915 play, relocated to a Ugandan Asian household in 1980s Manchester, it won Banerjee critical plaudits and the 2019 Stage Debut Award for best director. Then, just as his career was beginning to take off, Covid intervened, and Banerjee spent the lockdowns teaching and directing a film of “Harm,” a new play by Phoebe Eclair-Powell, for the BBC.
When he directed a theater production of “Harm”— one of the first live shows to be staged in London after theaters reopened in 2021 — he put a nine-foot stuffed bunny onstage, which a lone actor eviscerated over the course of the show.
“His work, as with a lot of directors of his generation, is very European influenced,” Goold, the Almeida’s artistic director, said. “I think he starts visually, but he is sensitive and nuanced without forcing an agenda, and he has a calmness and grace about him which is reassuring.”
A slew of productions followed, including a much-admired, neon-lit “Glass Menagerie,” in Manchester; “Britannicus” at the Lyric Theater, in London; and “Julius Caesar” for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which divided audiences and critics with its female actors in the roles of Cassius and Brutus, and Caesar bleeding oil rather than blood.
“Atri has a keen eye for the aesthetic and exploring the world of storytelling through metaphor,” said Ellora Torchia, who is playing Alison in “Look Back in Anger.” She added that Banerjee didn’t avoid “letting us explore the hard, difficult things, and the fact that some of this will be problematic for an audience.” Torchia added that she hoped the production would nonetheless offer a nuanced view of Jimmy’s abusive behavior. “What we are trying to do is tell a story of flaws, people who are struggling,” she said.
For a while, Banerjee said, he was “quite scared” of “Look Back in Anger.” But theater, he said, “is a space to explore things that are dark and shocking. And a place to ask how we love each other in a world that feels broken.”
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