A family day at the beach. There's a song, an argument, a dash across
the white sand and into the high rolling waves. We're in Cape Town and
David Lan is ten years old. Cut to 1969 and, visiting London fresh
out of high school, he interviews theatre luminaries Sybil Thorndike,
Tom Stoppard, Trevor Nunn, Paul Schofield before heading home to join
the South African army. Now it's 1999. We're at the Young Vic where
David is interviewed to be artistic director, a job he'd do for eighteen
years, ensuring it's flowering into a great world theatre. There's a
redesign to be imagined, money to be raised, shows to be staged. And
when the doors reopen in 2006 we meet the extraordinary artists he draws
in: Ivo Van Hove, Jude Law, Richard Jones, Gillian Anderson, Patrice
Chereau, Katy Mitchell, Stephen Daldry, the Isango Ensemble, Yerma,
The Jungle, The Inheritance. We travel to Peter Brook's Paris, to
Iceland in pursuit of a circus Romeo and Juliet, to Lithuania in
search of his great grandparents, to a refugee camp in Congo with Joe
Wright and Chiwetel Ejiofor, to Broadway for the Tony Awards. There's
spirit mediums in the Zambezi Valley, Chekhov's Yalta, Luc Bondy's
Vienna, making a BBC film in Angola, rehearsing a new play in
Israel/Palestine. Along the way, memories constantly rise to the
surface: the Royal Court in the 70s and 90s, school plays, his parents'
complicated marriage. Woven through it all is his decades long
relationship with playwright Nicholas Wright. At times hilarious and
always deeply felt, David Lan's deft travels evoke a wildly varied
life in theatre as well as a unique theatre of life.
