Phelim McDermott talks about My Neighbour Totoro
Lyn Gardner speaks to Phelim McDermott, the director of the RSC smash hit, My Neighbour Totoro.
When Phelim McDermott, the director of the RSC smash hit My Neighbour Totoro, was a theatre-loving child growing up in Manchester, he was thrilled to hear he would be going on a trip to see Billy’s Singing Kettle with his school at the Library Theatre. But on the appointed day, he was sick and couldn’t go. The closest he got to the show was listening to his friends’ enthusiastic responses and imagining it from their reports.
McDermott, whose staging of the beloved 1988 Studio Ghibli animation cleaned up with six awards at the Oliviers earlier this year and is now back at the Barbican for another extended run, wonders whether his entire career has been a search to recreate the wonders of a show that he never actually saw but which in his imagination grew larger and larger, taking on an almost mythological status. “It’s as if that unseen show is still a touchstone for me. I am still constantly attempting to make it, and the reason I still do theatre is that I’ve not yet made that show, and what I’m always trying to do is create a piece of theatre which has the mythological power that the imaginary version of the show had for me.”
Phelim McDermott, the director of the RSC smash hit My Neighbour Totoro
Some might say that McDermott, whose sustained career both with Improbable theatre and as a solo artist has often been described as maverick and is certainly dizzyingly and dazzlingly eclectic—ranging from Philip Glass Operas at the ENO, work for New York’s Metropolitan Opera to improvised shows such as Life Game and Animo and the outdoor spectacle *Sticky—has done just that with My Neighbour Totoro.
It’s a tricky balancing act to bring this story about two sisters who move from Tokyo to rural Japan and discover a benevolent forest spirit in the woods with an invention and verve that makes it truly theatrical but also satisfies fans of the animated movie. The pleasure of this stage version is that it’s got a wow factor but also plenty of gentler pleasures too, in a story which celebrates and connects to the natural world and the environment.
“It’s incredibly timely given the times we are living through,” says McDermott, who, when he was first approached, sat down to watch the movie with his young children and was as entranced as they were. “It’s a movie that has such care and respect for the natural world. What I wanted to be able to do was bring that care and sensibility to the theatre show and trust that children would be drawn into it.”
It's been a long journey bringing My Neighbour Totoro to the stage and has drawn on McDermott’s vast experience of making shows using animation and puppetry, including the extraordinary 1998 junk opera Shock-Headed Peter. A legendary show about wayward children meeting sticky ends was described by critics as “the best thing since sliced thumb.”
At one point, the company were workshopping Totoro and playing with puppets at the Barbican in full PPE during the pandemic. But while there were moments of self-doubt along the way, and McDermott says that while, as a director, you may love moments you’ve made in a show, you never know whether an audience will love them as much until you put it in front of them. But he always felt “we were onto something. I think that if you make a show and put the things you love into it, there is a reassurance in knowing that you have properly followed yourself. But even then, there is no guarantee that audiences will respond in the same way." He adds, “Was I right person for the job? Well, somebody else would have created their version, and that might have been right too. But I always felt I was able to do this on my terms, and that meant heart as well as spectacle.”
Production photo from the RSC smash hit My Neighbour Totoro
Doing it on his own terms was crucial for McDermott, who in 2010 had the bruising experience of being pushed off The Adams Family Musical just before it reached Broadway after nursing it through successful out-of-town try-outs. “Maybe I wasn’t the right person for that show, or maybe I wasn’t the right personality, or maybe I didn’t have the right process for a Broadway show and all that rides on that,” he says philosophically.
The difference he says about Totoro—no less a huge project and one involving international collaboration—is that “the RSC and the producing team trusted us and knew our work and way of working. I am sure there were moments of worry, but the crucial thing is they held their nerve and could always see the promise and the potential of what we were doing and trusted we would deliver on that."
Older and wiser than he was when the Addams Family debacle unfolded, McDermott doesn’t see Totoro as a career-changer but more a “career affirmation.” or maybe a gateway. McDermott and his company, Improbable, are currently in the process of establishing a home for themselves at Bore Place in Kent. It’s not a theatre but rather a place where the company will be able to “hold space for other theatre makers, a place for everyone to learn and share, and grow.” Just as Improbable’s famed Open Space meetings, Devoted and Disgruntled, have done over the years for thousands of theatermakers, It’s about being generous.
McDermott says that he always wondered whether he might one day work for the RSC (he once staged an astonishing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a magical forest made entirely out of sticky tape) but was rather delighted that when the call came, it wasn’t to direct Shakespeare but a family show with puppets based on an animated movie.
“Of course what you do is treat it in exactly the same way as you would if you were directing King Lear.” He argues that when we watch a great movie or show together with our children or grandchildren, we enjoy it ourselves, but that enjoyment is enhanced because we are sharing it with the people we love. “We enjoy it with them and through them. That collective experience is a big thing, and I really hope that what Totoro does is give families that experience, something they share together and won’t ever forget".
