Before I meet Sam Mendes in the memorabilia-strewn office of his Neal Street production company in Covent Garden, I email him an excerpt from our last interview, 31 years ago, in GQ. It shows him on the same street as he was about to reopen the Donmar Warehouse in 1992. He’s done pretty well since then, I think.
The Donmar became a creative powerhouse during his twelve years in charge: he took Cabaret to New York, directed by the National, Royal Shakespeare Company, on Broadway and in the West End, and set up the transatlantic Bridge Project around an ensemble of British and American stars.
Then there’s his film career, which started with an Oscar for Best Picture for his debut, American Beauty, and includes two Bond films and more personal projects like 1917 and Empire of Light. On television he produced Call the Midwife and Penny Dreadful. He was knighted in 2020.
Amid a new creative streak on stage – The Ferryman, The Lehman Trilogy, The Motive and the Cue, plus a new Jez Butterworth play next year – he received the Lebedev Award on Sunday at the 67th edition, which makes a special contribution to the theater rewards. Evening standard theater prices.
On stage at the ceremony at Claridge’s, Mendes said how grateful he was to “go home tonight with my favorite person,” his second wife, classical trumpeter Alison Balsam, with whom he has a six-year-old daughter (he also has a 20-something year-old son and a stepdaughter from his first marriage to Kate Winslet). He then paid tribute to his production partner of more than 30 years, Caro Newling, and thanked the theater community for making them the family he never had as an only child of divorced parents, living with a mother with mental health problems.
“I didn’t have a functional education,” he said. “But I found in this community a family, warmth, humor, friendship and joy. When I stumbled into it, I found a calling. Something I wanted to dedicate my life to.” He also announced that his Theater Artists Fund, which he founded in 2020 and which provided hardship grants and advice to an industry reeling in lockdown, would soon launch a pilot program, giving 20 mid-career theater makers a two-year contract at partner theaters. He’s only 58.
“It’s about the award for best newcomer, wilderness years, lifetime achievement, if you’re lucky,” he says, smiling through his silver beard, of a director’s career. “Otherwise the Wilderness Years will continue as usual. I’m incredibly flattered by this. But lo and behold, here we are: we met 31 years ago in almost the exact same place. It’s my home.
“There have been many opportunities and temptations to leave, to other places and different ways of working, to the movies, to television, but theater is my home. It is truly meaningful to receive this recognition for the years I have worked and continue to work in theater. But I feel like in terms of new work, in many ways I’m just getting started.”
He was born in Berkshire, his mother Jewish and his father Catholic from Trinidad, and went into directing at Cambridge, where he was also an excellent cricketer and graduated with a first. He cut his teeth at the Chichester Festival Theater and in 1989, aged 23, directed Judi Dench at the Cherry Orchard in the West End.
Above his head hangs a photo she sent him, starkly inscribed with a phrase he said to her during rehearsal: “Well, you can try, but it won’t work.” In 1990 he convinced the Donmar’s owners to appoint him artistic director and opened it after a two-year renovation with the London premiere of Sondheim’s Assassins.
“My work then inevitably veered towards things I thought would sell well,” he recalls, “so it was modern classics and revivals, things like Habeas Corpus, The Real Thing, Translations of Glengarry Glen Ross. There was a mission to add to the Shakespeare debate, to perform the plays as if they were new. And there were small-scale musicals, which culminated in Cabaret going to New York for five or six years. When I was in my twenties, I definitely looked around to see what would make the biggest noise and splash.
I mention The Blue Room, David Hare’s 1998 update of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, in which Nicole Kidman appeared with a brief flash of buttocks opposite (a completely naked, cartwheeling) Iain Glen. “That was definitely my Barnum and Bailey side,” he grins, “but I also believed, and I think I was proven right, that she was a really great actress. Unfortunately, it was made up by the British media because of her brief nudity. Then the Standaard presented her with an award, which was important to her and gave the event some seriousness back, so I was grateful for that.”
He did his first major West End musical, Oliver! In 1995 he then made American Beauty in 1999. In 2002 he left the Donmar and “went to New York for eight years”. He and Winslet had met in 2001 and married in 2003 when she was pregnant with their son Joe. During those two years he also founded Neal Street, directed Bernadette Peters in Gypsy on Broadway and made his second film, The Road to Perdition with Paul Newman and Tom Hanks. Jarhead with Jake Gyllenhaal and Revolutionary Road with Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio followed.
The Bridge Project, which staged classics at the Old Vic and the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a British-American cast between 2009 and 2012, was his way of keeping a foothold in theater. It proved an unsustainable pressure, with each new season stumbling over the next, but “when it worked, it worked really well” and he fondly remembers Ethan Hawke as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, “looking like Slash from Guns N’ Roses”.
He and Winslet divorced in 2012 and he met Balsam that same year, two months after his first Bond film, Skyfall, was released. Since then he has been based in Britain and the workload is steady, hugely impressive, but less manic.
“I was a real workaholic in my 20s and 30s,” he says. “I mean, I cringe a little bit, I was doing four or five shows a year. Partly because I had to earn a living. But at the same time, I think I just became addicted to life in the rehearsal room, life in the theater, and like any addict, you don’t really want to recover.” Has the fact that he now has a young daughter made him more present? “I don’t think I had any relationships with my other children,” he says, unoffended. “I’ve never been away for long. But being physically present is not everything. You also have to be there mentally and spiritually.”
‘Going up a level actually only means paralyzing organizations that know what they are doing. It’s just another sign of the overwhelming incompetence of this latest administration.”
I wonder if it matters that Balsam works in a completely different creative field. “I love that she is an incredible talent in a world that I love and admire, music, but don’t really understand. And maybe she would say the same about me. So you have the feeling that there are kindred spirits, but the daily practice is pleasantly new for both of us. But I think it’s not just that: it’s also the person she is. And yes, I feel very happy.”
He recently tackled his grandfather’s 1917 war experiences and his mother’s mental problems in Empire of Light on screen, but he still seems most at home in the theater (Lehman helped him discover his cultural Jewishness, he says). When I ask what brings him back to the stage, he mentions the vibrancy, the non-literality and the camaraderie of theater.
During the lockdown, when he didn’t know whether the form would survive, he gave writer Jack Thorne two books in 1964 about John Gielgud, who directed Richard Burton as Hamlet on Broadway: that became The Motive and the Cue, a love letter to the theater, which won Best Play at the Standard Awards and moved from the National to the West End in December.
He and Butterworth have become so symbiotic that they now look alike. “I always think it looks like he ate my head,” Mendes says. “But it’s a very, very good relationship and I’m in awe of his brilliance.” He starts rehearsals for Butterworth’s The Hills of California next week and is “as excited as I was on my first day in a rehearsal room”.
We’ve already significantly exceeded our allotted time, so I fit in a few quick topics. Would he like to run the National Theatre? “That’s certainly not going to happen. This time it is time for the next generation and – how can I put this – someone who is not exactly like me.”
What does he think of current arts policy, in particular the fate of the English National Opera? “Going up a level really only means paralyzing organizations that know what they are doing. It’s just a sign of the overwhelming incompetence of this latest administration. Beyond idiocy.” Could there ever be a great cricket play to match James Graham’s football drama Dear England? “If I want.”
I feel excited when I step onto Neal St. again. What a body of work Mendes has given us, and what a driving force he is. I hope it won’t be 31 years before we meet again.
The 67th Evening Standard Theater Awards, hosted by Lord Lebedev and Ian McKellen, took place on Sunday 19 November at Claridge’s.