Film, theatre and opera director Phyllida Lloyd was born in Bristol. Her film work includes The Iron Lady (2011) and the box-office hit Mamma Mia! (2008), based on the 1999 West End musical she directed. On stage she has directed Mary Stuart, The Handmaid’s Tale (Royal Danish Opera and ENO), and Tina: The Musical. Her Donmar trilogy of all-female Shakespeare plays will be on the BBC iPlayer, following the broadcast of the Donmar’s Julius Caesar on BBC Four tonight.
1. Music
Joan Armatrading
Joan is surely one of our greatest vocalists. I’ve been a fan since I saw her when I was at university in Birmingham in 1976, and her new album Not Too Far Away is as great as her early stuff. Two weeks ago I saw her live in Greenwich Village, and hearing her perform The Weakness in Me at the grand piano, her voice is undiminished in power and haunting beauty. Although the evening was not all about me and just for me, the genius of the woman is that she made me pretty sure that it was.
2. Fiction
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
This debut is a startling collection and I keep going back to it, although I’m not sure it would herald a good night’s sleep. It’s a series of dramatic monologues, and the writing’s wildly original: one minute it’s playful, even laugh-out-loud funny, and the next it’s deeply unsettling. She manages to take you from broken knobs on her cooker to genocide; she sucks you down the cracks so you find yourself dead and buried without quite working out how you got there. It chimed for me a little with George Saunders’s writing in Lincoln in the Bardo.
3. Pub
Duke of Cambridge, Islington, London
I’m scared to plug this because it’s already popular. It’s my local, and it was one of the first properly organic pubs in London; you can trace the parents of every vegetable served. It’s a big room and you share tables and long benches, and there’s a sort of village hall feeling about it. Dogs, kids in high-chairs, everybody’s welcome. I would say the only thing that’s a bit too organic are the chairs, which are damned uncomfortable – I might have to start a petition.
4. Play
Notes from the Field at the Royal Court, London
When we were working in the US with the Donmar, we learned something of their Kafkaesque prison and parole system, particularly with regards to the African American population. So I am very much looking forward to seeing Anna Deavere Smith in this one-woman show about how the US criminal justice system feasts on poor, young black people. I’ve seen her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the Gate, but I’ve never seen her perform. I’m really interested to see her play umpteen different characters based on interviews she did, showing their journeys from schoolroom to jail.
5. Poetry
Jade Anouka
I’m a big fan of Jade Anouka, who is about to be as widely known as she deserves to be. She does what all actresses need to do nowadays – other stuff. Next week she’s at the Roundhouse as part of the Last Word festival, performing her own poems. She’ll be accompanied by the remarkable four-times UK beatbox champion Grace Savage. If you’ve never heard beatboxing in action, you need to go to this gig just to experience that. What a human voice can do in front of your eyes, it’s a kind of Houdini experience.
6. Film
Alexandra (Dir Aleksandr Sokurov, 2007)
This is something I keep close by; I keep going back to it. If I’m about to direct a film I gather all my favourites around me for safety and inspiration. It stars the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, making her screen debut at the age of 81. The story is about a Russian grandmother on a minibreak to visit her grandson’s army battalion on the frontline in Chechnya during the second Chechen war. There are moments in it that have an ecstatic beauty. Honestly, its explicit meaning is a mystery to me, and I guess that’s what draws me back to it.
