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Self-effacement and Self-fashioning: Michael Blakemore and the Craft of Directing

In a career lasting over fifty years, director Michael Blakemore has enjoyed box office success, critical acclaim, and long term, and fruitful, relationships with leading playwrights of the English speaking world. Over the last ten years Blakemore’s international profile and name recognition has also increased as his successes in the USA have gained enormous publicity: for example, in 2000 Blakemore was awarded one Tony for his production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and another Tony for his production of Kiss Me, Kate. In 1967 Blakemore directed the first production of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, when no other director would take on the play and thus he helped to launch Peter Nichols’ career by taking the production on from Glasgow Citizens to London and Broadway; he has directed the premieres of most of Michael Frayn’s plays; and he directed the historic and highly acclaimed National Theatre (NT) 1971 production of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Laurence Olivier, which was subsequently filmed and shown on television in April 1973. Blakemore has directed Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui several times, most famously in 1969 with Leonard Rossiter as a ‘cataleptic Hitler arousing a terrible and riveting hilarity’ at a time when much contemporary Brecht was solemnly serious. In his commitment to directing new plays and nurturing the careers of writers like Peter Nichols and Michael Frayn, Blakemore has had a major impact on the repertory of most English speaking theatres. Blakemore’s directing practice is grounded in self-effacement and this commitment to professional self-effacement has probably resulted in a certain underrating of his work, certainly in relation to some of his more self-promoting, auteur inclined peers, whose logo is printed onto any production they direct. Blakemore’s self-effacement is also in tension 1. Blakemore’a production of Kiss Me, Kate later opened and did good business in London’s West End in autumn 2001, at a time many productions were closing as theatre goers avoided the centre of London in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks.