Maddy Costa: David Eldridge and Rufus Norris at the National (original) (raw)

When Nicholas Hytner became artistic director of the National Theatre in April 2003, it was his ambition to fill the Olivier stage with new, unexpected and, most importantly, young voices. Seasons have come and gone, and while the likes of Davids Edgar and Hare have addressed racism, war and the poor state of the railways in that huge space, new young voices have been in noticeably short supply. Next week, however, sees the opening of Market Boy, in the Olivier's prestigious Travelex £10 season. Its writer, David Eldridge, is 32. Not that the play's director, Rufus Norris, is impressed. "The hopes of a generation are resting on David's shoulders," he says, "and he's blowing it on a ridiculous theatrical smorgasbord of a 1980s fluorescent chocolate cake."

Norris can get away with disparaging Eldridge's play - set in Romford Market in the second half of the 1980s - because the two have long been friends. On first sight, they make an unlikely pair: with his boyish face and floppy fringe, Eldridge has something of the student about him, perhaps inevitable in someone who started writing plays at university and never stopped. The youngest of three children born to working-class parents from London's East End, he's the product of a peculiar adolescence: he studied at an independent school, but also worked on Romford Market helping his father sell shoes. Norris, at 40 almost a decade Eldridge's senior, had an odder youth still: his father worked for the overseas civil service, and he and his five siblings grew up in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Malaysia. His career has been no less peripatetic, taking in stints as a painter and decorator, playing in bands, composing music and acting before he fell into directing in the early 1990s.

Despite the apparent differences, Eldridge says "there's undoubtedly something simpatico" between them. They met in the summer of 2000, when Ian Rickson, artistic director of the Royal Court, picked Norris to direct Eldridge's play Under the Blue Sky. "He had a hunch we would get on," says Eldridge, "and he was right." As they talk, it becomes clearer why: they share a similar sense of humour (plenty of guffaws at the rude bits in Market Boy), a forthright manner, and a refusal to suffer fools. Most of all, though, they have a shared desire to forge a dazzling new theatre for the 21st century. "The friendship is based on work," Norris says. "We had a great moment in the first weeks that we knew each other: we went to see a play together and went to the pub afterwards to talk about it, and after about 30 seconds David said, 'I'm sorry, mate, but can we talk about our play instead?'" It's been that way ever since.

So far, those conversations have proved remarkably fruitful. Two years ago they resulted in Eldridge's adaptation of the Dogme film Festen, which Norris directed. The production at the Almeida in London was a phenomenal hit - in the Guardian, Michael Billington declared it a "landmark play", one of the best of 2004 - and was followed by a West End transfer, a British tour and, this year, a move to Broadway. Unfortunately, New York audiences proved less receptive to the play; critics panned it and it closed this month, six weeks after press night (losing, claims Norris, $2m in the process). The duo have barely had time to digest this news: straight after opening night, rehearsals started in earnest on Market Boy, a significantly more ambitious project. With 31 actors and 58 characters, it promises to bring all the hustle and bustle of Romford Market to noisy, exuberant life.

It's taken Eldridge and Norris several years to get Market Boy ready for the stage. It was commissioned in 2001 to appear in the 2002 Transformations season at the National, but the timescale, says Eldridge, proved hopelessly unrealistic. Instead, writer and director were encouraged to spend three years experimenting in the National Theatre Studio, conducting workshops with actors every few months and developing the play quietly and without any time pressure. Together they were adamant that this should be a big show: "We've been Olivier or bust all the way along," says Eldridge. At the same time, says Norris, "secretly you know it's not going to happen, so you're never going to have to step up like that". Hytner, though, called their bluff. And despite the amount of time they had already spent on it, Norris says, "both of us felt we weren't quite ready. But there comes a point with slow-cooked stuff when you've got to say: the meal-time is here. Then you just get on with it."

The play draws on Eldridge's experiences on his father's shoe stall; and yet, he says, the current script is far removed from the "16 pages of autobiographical material" he knocked out in readiness for the first workshop. As far as he's concerned, "autobiography isn't a play. I wouldn't want to write my own story: I'm more interested in the theatre as a metaphorical experience." And although Market Boy is designed as a celebration of the "anything-goes spirit of the 1980s", Eldridge also insists that: "The play isn't an exercise in nostalgia. What's interesting about it is what it says about now, because we are Thatcher's children."

If he's worried about how people will react to this brash tale of a teenager growing up in an Essex market, with its soundtrack of 80s chart pop and scenes of women being seduced into buying breathtakingly ugly red patent-leather stilettos, Eldridge isn't showing it. That might be because, stressful though the rehearsal period undoubtedly is, it's also a blissful time for him in which he gets to escape his desk. "In some senses," he says, "I'm temperamentally well-suited to being a writer because I get things finished. But in another sense I'm really ill-equipped for the writer's life because I get terribly bored. So for me, a production is Christmas come early: I get up at 8 o'clock, get on the tube, gossip about Big Brother with someone, have 10 people to have lunch with and some people to have a pint with at the end of the day."

Norris, by contrast, is knotted with nerves. Rehearsals have been "frightening and a little bit traumatic"; on bad days, he finds himself thinking: "I'm a terrible director," comparing himself with other innovators who have already produced work at the National, such as Improbable's Phelim McDermott (Theatre of Blood) or Kneehigh's Emma Rice (Tristan and Yseult), and concluding that he's "completely mediocre". Then again, he has said this about pretty much every show he has directed. Like so many creative people, he is an untidy mixture of inspiring self-belief and agonising self-doubt.

"Every day I think I'm totally not cut out for the job I'm doing," he confesses. "I'm nowhere near robust enough. You have to spend 10 hours a day standing up in front of 40, 45 people telling them what to do. And you have to be able to take the knocks as they come. You need to be quite driven to do this job, and that's not something I was born with." And yet he's driven enough to work almost constantly: what with the adaptation of Tintin he directed as a Christmas show in London last year, the tour and Broadway transfer of Festen and now Market Boy, he hasn't had a break from the rehearsal room since October. By his own admission, his wife and two sons "suffer like hell" because of his work.

That cost to his family, says Norris, "increases the need for the work you do to be brave, because otherwise, what is the point? I can understand the appeal to other people of directing every Shakespeare three times because there's no better dramatist than Shakespeare, but for me that's not scary enough, it's not new enough." With Eldridge, he is set on creating "a piece of theatre for which we have no template".

"As a generation of dramatists," Eldridge says, "we've got to find our own way of working on these big stages. We can't write plays the way they did 20 years ago. One of the things that's become clearer to me as Market Boy has evolved is that, if you're going to write about the 80s, the last thing I want to do is create some sort of awful 70s-style state-of-the-nation play that casts its cool, critical eye of perspective on the decade. I'm the Spitting Image generation, I'm not the Goon Show generation - it's really important for us to address these moments in our experience in our way." He sounds angry, defensive - and thrillingly determined. As Norris nods in support, a thought occurs: whatever happens with Market Boy, this isn't the last we'll see of them on the Olivier stage.

· Market Boy opens at the National Theatre, London SE1, on June 6. Box office: 020-7452 3000.