David Lan: Set in motion

Theatre is not always just about entertainment. Cathy Levy meets David Lan, artistic director of the Young Vic, to discover the sum of the parts

Above: David Lan will appear at The Dulwich Festival

Theatre as a tool for social and environmental change. This is the eyebrow-knitting topic that David Lan is preparing to debate with his friend and colleague Paul Heritage at the Dulwich Festival. It’s something he professes to know only a little about, but one gets the feeling this acclaimed artistic director of the Young Vic is just a little self-effacing, and rather more wise, talented and all-round culturally insightful than he’d willingly reveal.

Modesty aside, he lays all credit for his part in the talk to his friend, Professor Paul Heritage of Queen Mary University. Born in Brazil, Heritage founded People’s Palace Projects, which produces theatre that promotes social change in Britain, Burkina Faso, Brazil and Azerbaijan. "The two of us and our respective companies, Young Vic and People’s Palace Projects, are working together on a big project, creating work in Brazil, in the Amazon forest. It’ll happen partly there and here, building towards a show that we’ll perform here over Christmas."

The pair began plotting this a few years back, with Heritage as its director and Lan the producer. "Paul works in various ways with young people who are under some sort of acute traumatic social pressure, putting them together and creating a way of thinking about arts and culture as an alternative way of living. My real priority is in the making of the show and the moment of the meeting between that show and its audience."

Although originally trained as an actor, Lan never pursued that path for work. "I started writing," he says. "Most of my life in the theatre before running this place was as a writer. I was lucky, my plays got picked up by the Royal Court theatre in my early 20s." He’s also published what’s widely regarded as a classic of modern social anthropology, Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. It’s still taught throughout the world.

In 2000 Lan took hold of the Young Vic and began to stretch the remit, extend the boundaries and open wide its doors to create inspirational works and make this a unique, inclusive space, straddling two boroughs as it does (a plus for local residents of Lambeth or Southwark who get to see productions for free). Last year, following its £7m redevelopment scheme, it even picked up the 2007 RIBA London Building of the Year.

"We do an enormous amount of work in our immediate neighbourhood with schools and community groups. But everything we do is about performance at some level – what we know a little bit about is theatre, I mean, I’m not a social worker. We work with groups who see themselves as survivors of the mental health system, and others who are survivors of addictions, there’s a group of ex-sex workers and so on. Our main purpose beyond all else is to put on shows and we like to produce them in a way that would be of interest to anybody really."

But how exactly does he choose those plays? "That’s a good question. I think if you put it in its most general terms, there are powerful forces that we live with today which dehumanise us, which make it progressively more difficult to live a fully human life and to fulfil the complex potential that everybody has. So you travel on the underground or you sit for 10 hours on a plane and you spend most of your time aggressively ignoring the people next to you. It’s very difficult not to live like that. The density of experience that comes flooding at us all the time is so unsustainable that you can’t break your heart over every person who needs help. One thing about working in the arts is you can create circumstances in which for a brief period of time you can overcome all that. The relationships you form with the people you’re with can be, if you’re lucky, complex and deep and humanising. The total experience of entering this building – which is why it’s so carefully designed – is to do with trying to get back to, even briefly, a sense of wholeness and integrity." See, it’s not just two hours sat in the dark watching people in costumes parade on a stage. And it’s also why, when it works, we’re able to walk away feeling moved and touched and briefly, changed.

But making and sustaining good theatre will always be tough with its constant pressures of ticket sales, funding and production values. It’s the imagination that’s to blame, says Lan. "If you can do one play, you’ll always want to do two. The struggling is because there are no limits to the imagination really. If we only did one show our financial problems would be over, but you always want to do more. One’s always pushing at the margins and trying to expand the possibilities."

He stops to talk about the two young people who came to visit him about a play they’re doing. They were filled with excitement, he says, and it made him think: "Where the hell does that come from, why does it keep turning up like little bluebells you’ve planted? It’s astonishing, some people feel it’s their life, it’s their destiny." What Lan and the Young Vic seem to do is positively encourage that yearning and excitement. "A big part of my job is trying to create the environment, the ambience in which things can happen. We see it here that we have a culture of yes, as opposed to a culture of no, so if people want to do something, the default should be yes, and you only say no if there really is no way of doing whatever it is. But one’s impulse should be yes, if you really want to do something, let’s find a way of doing it. Life would be very boring otherwise." Now that deserves a standing ovation surely.

As part of the Dulwich Festival, Future Arts: David Lan in conversation with Paul Heritage is on 16 May at 7.30pm in the Linbury Room at Dulwich Picture Gallery; tickets £12 including supper. www.dulwichfestival.co.uk

The Good Soul of Szechuan by Bertold Brecht stars Jane Horrocks 7 May to 21 June at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut SE1 8LZ; 020 7922 2922; www.youngvic.org