CREATIVE TEAM INTERVIEWS
DIRECTOR
PHYLLIDA LLOYD
Phyllida is a world-renowned theatre, opera and film director. In addition to Tina, Phyllida directed Mamma Mia! on stage and screen and has worked extensively with the Royal Court Theatre, Donmar Warehouse (with several productions transferring from London to Broadway), the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House and English National Opera. Other film work includes The Iron Lady and Herself.
This is the story of Tina Turner, a mighty icon of the music world who started with nothing except a God-given, jaw dropping talent who’d overcome unbelievable odds to get where she got to.
The biggest challenge in creating this show was the structure – where to start and where to end?! The first half of Tina’s life has already been a movie (What’s Love Got To Do With It?, 1993) and we had to decide what and how to tell the story. If anyone was going to find the way to Nutbush and Tina’s voice, it was Katori Hall.
In the opening moments of the show, we communicate Tina’s sense of wonder at the way in which her life has unfolded.
She’s got her foot on the step, and she can hear the crowd.
Her entire life flashes in front of her.
Tina takes nothing for granted – even after having achieved such huge fame and success – and much of this is also embraced in her spirituality, which helped us create the shape of the show. This spirituality – the Buddhism and chanting, the circular and meditative space – enabled us to look at memory and time in a different way. We decided that we didn’t want a linear narrative, so we’ve created a memory play which takes place in the space of about a minute before Tina goes on stage to perform for her crowd of over 180,000 people in Rio de Janeiro.
Tina’s own sense of wonder at the unfolding of her life made complete sense of how she would, at the point of walking up those steps, question how she’d got there. There’s this idea that she is carrying with her all of the people who got her to this point – both good and bad. Katori called it ‘Etherland’ – this space in which Tina contemplates this past.
Katori wrote such wonderful words.
We wanted the words to be as important as the songs.
As Anthony Van Laast (choreographer) says, it’s a play with songs rather than a musical. It’s a play that conveys a heroic struggle but it isn’t just a battle against Ike – we had to find the conflict after Ike too. Tina battled ongoing racism and impediments such as her gender and her age. She was considered ‘old’ to be becoming a solo artist – she wasn’t even 50! She was the first female black rock ‘n’ roll artist to perform in a stadium and she became a rock goddess. She’d been heavily restricted in the style of music she could sing, particularly in the Ike and Tina years.
Tina was listening to and liking music that she then went on to sing herself. She was listening out for something that other people in her world were not singing, and getting excited by it. She was finally able to sing what she wanted to sing.
The show is incredibly demanding for the artist playing Tina. One person carries this whole evening, delivering every single one of these Olympic-scale songs! Everyone who is on the stage is there in support of her and so the challenge is how you work with the artist to honour their own spirit and inner life, and then that of Tina Turner. How do you avoid succumbing to impersonations of Tina Turner? You need to release the individual spirit that is in that performer as you would in any play, but it is very complex when the person they’re portraying is alive.
One of the wonderful things about the collaboration with Tina Turner was how, for someone who had never worked in theatre in this way, she quickly understood that this was not the story of her life, but this is the story of a woman called Tina Turner to whom these things happened. We couldn’t put her whole life on stage. We were creating something that was trying to say something and so we had to think carefully about the function of each of the scenes that we created, and Tina herself understood this instinctively.
Tina herself is two people. She is still Anna to the people who love her. Tina Turner is this person who comes alive when the music starts. She profoundly understands the role of acting.
All of the actors who play Tina in our productions across the world are all so different. The question is therefore what is it that they have to have in order to be able to play Tina. The first is a voice from God. The second is the ability to dance like they’re making it up! Tina did choreograph the moves herself but when you watch film footage it does look like Tina’s making it up as she goes along – like she’s dancing in her kitchen! That’s the conjuring trick – making it appear that it’s totally spontaneous. This is something we embrace in the show.
I want the audience to feel it’s an unrepeatable night of theatre.
Like it’s never going to be the same.
In the acting work at the very beginning, we did a lot of work on actions and objectives. We actioned the entire script. We were constantly trying to work out what one character was trying to do another. The actor could change the action the next night if that helped them play the scene. It was constantly refreshed in that way, and the action helps actors avoid being in ‘bubbles’ or losing the sense of spontaneity.
The play goes through so many worlds – like a movie. We had to build the world of Nutbush, of Club Manhattan, of a recording studio. Building the world of Nutbush was the most powerful workshop that we did, particularly when we were rehearsing the show in America. When we went to Broadway, I was working with artists whose ancestors and relatives had such a profound relationship to historic suffering and the legacies of abuse. This was incredibly powerful. I also hadn’t understood the function of church until I rehearsed the show in New York. We spent a few days improvising services – we created the community in that the characters all had names, they were all related to somebody. We had services where we’d say ‘what’s the issue for today?’ and we’d deal with a specific scenario for someone within that community. We created the rules of Nutbush and the city limits. That’s the schoolhouse, that’s the outhouse. We’d have services that dealt with the tragedies, the lives and deaths of the people in Nutbush. Likewise, all of the Ikettes had histories, several of which based on real people. We were lucky enough to meet some of the Ikettes in New York. Using the same process of creating those characters we were able to build the world of the recording studio, establishing real depth in the detail. We were building an ensemble that had depth, where people felt invested much further than where they stand and what they say. We also did lots of improvisation – for example at Club Manhattan.
In New York, I found a vinyl disc of Ike’s music that I played to the cast. We sat down and listened to this and other blues music of the time, and we changed some of the songs that we included in the show. This process was about giving the company ownership and agency in what they were doing. It was intended to be a counter to what Tina had had to do in the early days of her own career. In the second part of her career, Tina had created a complete family of people who were utterly loyal to her.
Tina wanted to give each audience joy.
You just need to look at the footage of Tina being lowered into the crowd in one of her stadium gigs. She wanted to see their faces and ensure they were enjoying themselves!
I did extensive research when preparing to direct the show. I watched every bit of footage that I could, and I read as much material about the South in the time Tina was born. I visited Nutbush. I also tried to learn as much as I could about the history of music, about the States in the 19th century. I read several biographies and autobiographies of Tina and Ike. The gestation period of a show is quite long and so I had the time to do a lot of work on the research before rehearsals.
However different the styles have been, Tina is such a huge influence on artists. She’s an important part of the ancestry of female artists. We can compare some of the footage of Tina in Rio, we can put some of Beyoncé’s performances right next to it and see the influence.
Tina worked her way to happiness. She found work to be a solace and a haven, but there is so much joy that she got from work. She’s a real example of when things go wrong in your life, get back to the drawing board and get working!