Full name/age/job title:

Joe Murphy, 25, Artistic Director of nabokov theatre company.

Please give us an overview of your average day…

I don’t really have an average day. Sometimes my day is stuck behind the desk at the nabokov office working on admin, booking tours or doing script development, or sometimes it’s doing understudy rehearsals for Ghost Stories, which I’m the resident director on. 

Other days, I’ll be running nabokov projects in London, Liverpool or in other places around the country. Then, when I’m really lucky, my average day is in rehearsals for a show I’m directing. So, a big mix of admin, meetings, script development, rehearsals and creative project management.

What is the most common misconception about your job?

As a director, the most common misconception is that we just tell actors where to stand.

What is the hardest thing about your role? 

Keeping an eye on the million and one logistical needs of running a company.

When did you decide what you wanted to do with your life and how did you set out to achieve it?

When I was 13 I auditioned to be in a local amateur dramatic play to impress a beautiful Irish student in her 20s who was a friend of the family. She had mentioned in passing that plays were cool and therefore I thought being in a play was the only thing that stood between her and me.

As it turned out, I was very misguided and it was the nine-year age gap, rather than a lack of theatrical success, that separated us. But what I found was infinitely more important to me and that was experiencing the sheer thrill of being in a play: the clash of ideas, emotions and all-out fun was something I had never experienced before. Then I found out it could be your job. I was hooked.

Convinced I wanted to be an actor, I did school shows and many other amateur plays. Then I went on a gap year course in Stratford-Upon-Avon called Year Out Drama Company – an incredible experience that I cannot recommend highly enough. From there I went to Exeter University to study Drama and discovered directing, and that ramped up the thrill I originally felt to new levels.

I moved to London and did a fantastic postgraduate Directing course at Mountview. I then did a mixture of Assistant Director jobs and directing small new writing projects, gradually growing both strands of my work over a year. By the end of my first year in the industry, I was an assistant director at the Royal Court and for nabokov at The Bush. It was at this time that the old Artistic Directors of nabokov, George Perrin and James Grieve, took over Paines Plough and offered me the job of running nabokov, an opportunity I grabbed with both hands. 

What can you do to get a head start?

Having advocates who respect you and will speak up for you has been the most useful thing for me. I owe a huge debt to many people: working with great practitioners whom you can learn so much from and who offer their support is perhaps the most useful thing you can do to get a head start. 

Could you describe the creative element to your job? 

As an Artistic Director, you are in a very lucky position to curate work and offer jobs to fantastic people. Being excited by great work and great artists, then finding ways to put them with other interesting practitioners and coming up with a project is incredibly creative.

As a director, the entire process is very creative: you take a script and build a creative team around it, then you bring the world you’ve read to life in collaboration with actors, designers, technicians and many more. It is a truly remarkable experience.

What’s the one thing you wish you had known at the start of your career that you know now?

That I don’t need to be in a rush: it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Which organisations/websites/resources do you think would be useful for people entering your industry?

Young Vic Genesis Directors

IdeasTap

Old Vic New Voices

Bush Green

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