The Gold Maker

As artistic director at the Lyceum Theatre, Mark Thomson is responsible for ensuring its programme is both challenging and entertaining. Sarah Hunter discovers that's not always an easy process

Mark Thompson

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Sarah Hunter

12 March 2008

It’s been nearly five years since Mark Thomson took over as artistic director at the Lyceum and it’s clear to see he hasn’t lost any enthusiasm for the job. He’s directed his own plays—Shakespeare and the epic Faust (parts one and two)—as well as overseeing recent productions of the Glass Menagerie and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

His success is no doubt in part down to the fact that he takes his responsibility for the theatre very seriously. Part of the Lyceum’s mission statement is about entertaining and stimulating the citizens of Edinburgh and for Mark Thomson that’s about having a dialogue with the audience, a conversation.

“I’ve tried to create a social integrity to the work,” he says, “which means that what we do on stage has something to say about the lives we’re living. I’m firmly of the mind that I’m charged with not being a purely commercial enterprise. It’s important that this has a social dialogue with not just Edinburgh but Scotland.”

For Thomson this means that each production must have a resonance with what society is dealing with now. The recent production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, a story involving an ex-husband almost sleeping with his ex-wife’s daughter without realising who she was, as well as a group of characters telling their story to a group of actors, was a reflection of today's society trying to find its moral centre.

He explains: “With the church losing ground, I don’t think people have a clear code of how to behave anymore or what’s right or what’s wrong; or what’s my job of being a human being on earth; what are my limitations; are there any? So there’s no moral centre. It creates a real disturbance I think, in the world.”

Thomson is open to any ideas and they don’t have to be his own. If a director approaches him with a project and he likes it then it quickly becomes about finding the right people for that particular play. And the process of going from an idea to a finished piece is not set in stone.

Thomson says: “You’re trying to make gold, the ingredients are the director, the play, the actors, the designers and all the creative team, and I try to gather them together in such a way so we can make gold – at least theoretically. Sometimes you come out with base metal, but art isn’t mathematical.”

For his next play, Vanity Fair, Thomson read it, loved it and asked Tony Cowan to direct it: “I needed someone who would be inventive and playful with it, who would be able to get their head round the physical aspects of the production, those pieces of dialogue that demand an invention of every page or two.”

In fact it’ll soon be time for this piece to be revealed to the artistic director, but Thomson is confident it’s going to be good.

“You get that just from talking to them and you can usually tell from the faces. You can sniff out when it’s not going well, usually when there is tension and you’ve got a director greetin' in your office.”