Douglas Rintoul Archives - The Play Podcast

Douglas Rintoul

by Douglas Schatz | May 12, 2022 | Contributor

Douglas Rintoul

Douglas Rintoul has recently been appointed the Chief Executive of the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich. For the past seven years he has been the Artistic Director of the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, during which time the theatre won the London Theatre of the Year Stage Award 2020. He has also been a freelance director, an associate of Complicité, and a founder of the national touring theatre company Transport. His work has received no fewer than 24 Off West End Award nominations.

Selected credits as a director include: As You Like It (QTH and National Theatre); Abigail’s Party (QTH, Salisbury Playhouse, Derby Theatre and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg) Macbeth (QTH and Derby Theatre); The Crucible (QTH, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and Selladoor); Made in Dagenham and Rope (QTH and New Wolsey Theatre); Much Ado About Nothing, In Basildon Love Letters, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole The Musical, Misfits, The Hired Man (QTH); The Deep Blue Sea, All My Sons, Of Mice of Men (Watermill Theatre); Touched (Trafalgar Studios); and Elegy (Transport/Theate503).

Podcast Episode(s)

046 - All My Sons, by Arthur Miller

Recommended Play(s)

Douglas recommended Europe by David Greig

046 – All My Sons, by Arthur Miller

by Douglas Schatz | May 12, 2022 | Podcast Episodes

Eve Matheson as Kate and David Hounslow as Joe
Queen’s Theatre, Hornchuch 2022
Photo: Mark Sepple

046 – All My Sons, by Arthur Miller

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It is a sunny Sunday morning in the Summer of 1946. In the garden of Joe and Kate Keller’s home in the outskirts of an all-American town stands the broken trunk of slender apple tree. There has been a storm in the night that has struck the tree, an event that Kate Keller takes as a sign, because the tree was planted as a memorial to their son Larry who was reported missing in action in the war three years ago, and whom Kate wants to believe will yet return home alive. But there is a greater storm brewing that over the course of this long Sunday will destroy the fragile peace of this family.

This is the setting of Arthur Miller’s breakthrough play All My Sons, which Miller started to write during the early 1940s before it premiered on Broadway in January 1947. Despite some who criticized what they deemed the play’s unpatriotic sentiments, it ran for nearly three years, winning the Tony award for best author and earning Miller life-changing amounts of fame and money. Like some of Miller’s other work All My Sons is both a searing family tragedy and an exploration of the moral challenges that he believed were inherent in the American Dream.

Douglas Rintoul recently directed All My Sons at the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, where he has been Artistic Director for the past seven years. Douglas joins me to share his insights on this devastatingly powerful play.

Douglas Rintoul

Recommended Play

Douglas recommended Europe by David Greig

We have footnotes for this episode …

The Footnotes to our episode on All My Sons include Miller’s sources of the story in the play, observations on his critique of the American Dream, and the characters of Ann and George Deever.

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Douglas

The Texts

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063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel

May 24, 2023 | Podcast Episodes

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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.

Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.

062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward

Apr 26, 2023 | Podcast Episodes

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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.

061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn

Apr 13, 2023 | Podcast Episodes

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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.

I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.