Thea Sharrock directed her first West End play at 22 and is tipped to be the first woman to run the National. Who better to defend Keira Knightley, says Lucy Powell.

by Lucy Powell, The Times, December 12, 2009

You can forgive Thea Sharrock for being a wreck. The 33-year-old mother of two very young boys is also directing two very demanding plays. Her much-lauded Mrs Klein, Nicholas Wright's taut psychodrama, is soon to close at the Almeida, North London. Her feverishly anticipated revival of Martin Crimp's revamp of Molière's masterpiece, The Misanthrope, is just about to open in the West End, starring Keira Knightley in her stage debut.

What's more difficult, though, is forgiving her for being so preternaturally together. She ought by rights to have pitched up late, cardigan stippled with baby sick, nails bitten, eyes red-rimmed. But not for nothing was Sharrock the youngest person yet to run a theatre. Not for nothing did she direct her first West End play at 22. Not for nothing is she widely tipped to run the National, when Nicholas Hytner's tenure comes to a close. Unfussy and unflappable, with neither a lick of make-up nor a single wrinkle, Sharrock looks less like a theatre director than a tennis pro in country-club mufti: white linen shirt, dark jeans and glossy brown boots.

"I can't remember the last time I did three plays in a year," she says, by way of explanation, her melting As you Like It at the Globe in the summer marking the third. "Usually it's sixteen."

The current production, though, carries its own brand of pressure: the Knightley brand. Crimp's 1996 translation retains the metric bounce of the original, but updates the 17th-century action to contemporary London's vicious, backstabbing theatre scene, and the vacuous celebrity culture that has infected it. Knightley plays the lodestone part of Jennifer, an American star who holds London in thrall, including Damian Lewis's titular misanthrope.

"It shows incredible courage and great instinct," Sharrock says of Knightley's decision to take on the role. "It potentially looks too close to the bone, and, on the page, Jennifer is not very likeable at all. But Keira's an incredibly savvy girl, and she got the irony of the part immediately."

Still, it is a "daring choice", Sharrock says, for her as well as for Knightley, since "it doesn't matter what the play is, the critical establishment will want it to fail". The critics won't deliver their definitive verdicts on the production until next Friday, but the play has been in preview this week, and early indicators are good. Audiences reported that Knightley rose to her theatrical challenge. Unsurprising, perhaps, but had she decisively stumbled, the news would not have been kept secret from her fansites.

Sharrock has faced up to this double edge of heightened anticipation before. Neardelirium from fans and a collective sniff of opprobrium from everyone else greeted her shepherding of 17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe through his cultural coming of age in a West End revival of Equus, which transferred to Broadway last year. Radcliffe sailed through his full-frontal, horsemutilating stage debut. But, "you could feel on press night, not the pens, but the knives coming out", Sharrock says. "And not just from the critics. The pressure is unbelievable."

Why, then, repeat the experience? "Are these young people never allowed to do theatre?" she demands, sitting up. "What if they're good? What if on opening night everyone goes, 'Blimey, she can act, that did happen, that is amazing'.

"Keira Knightley has never had a rehearsal process," Sharrock continues, "and she has responded amazingly. If she is not allowed to have that experience, what? Is she to be punished for being young and successful? How does that work?" she says, frowning. "I just don't understand that."

Suddenly, it's clear that Sharrock's impassioned defence of her stars is also her own. Her rise through the theatrical ranks was nothing short of meteoric. The daughter of journalists, brought up in Kenya and then Islington, North London, Sharrock decided at 14 that she wanted to work in theatre. In her gap year she had a six-month apprenticeship in Johannesburg at the Market Theatre under Barney Simon, and then in London at the National, assisting Richard Eyre.

After graduating from Oxford with a French and philosophy degree, she embarked on a string of assistant directorships under the likes of Peter Hall and Peter Gill. Her first solo show, a revival of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, won the JMK director's award in 2000 and transferred from the BAC in southwest London to the West End.

Her second directing job was Art, Yasmina Reza's caustic three-hander, in the West End. "I left home and said to my best friend, ‘What am I doing?' " Sharrock laughs: "I'm about to walk into a room with Richard Griffiths, George Segal and Paul Freeman, and I, aged 22, am supposed to tell them what to do. It was hilarious. But the moment I walked through the door, I understood what I had to do and how much time I had to do it. And those boys gave me such respect immediately that I just expected that that's what happens from then on."

Two years later she became the youngest artistic director of a theatre when she took over the Southwark Playhouse. In 2004 she moved to the Gate, where she mounted a string of rare revivals. As a freelance she also directed stage megaliths such as Penelope Keith in Blithe Spirit and Derek Jacobi in A Voyage Round my Father.

This eye-watering ascent was accompanied, though, by the malingering accusation that Sharrock is aggressively ambitious. "It seemed so unjust," she says. "I put in hours of hard, slogging work, and I don't think the people who branded me with that word saw any of it. I was young, and I was a woman -- so punish me for those things."

This last comes as a surprise. It's hard to imagine anyone accusing Sharrock of using her femininity to get ahead. "Are you saying I'm not a girlie girl?" She squints. Yes. "Well, that probably comes from having my brother throw a football at me from year dot. And I never assisted a woman," she says, "so maybe I've got a kind of male confidence ... but as I'm saying that, it doesn't feel right. Ask someone else."

Radcliffe, currently filming the last instalment of the Harry Potter films, is godfather to one of Sharrock's children. When I catch him by phone on set, he says that he "can't speak highly enough of her. She is amazing. She's this 21st-century woman who can direct four things at once and brilliantly mother two children at the same time. I don't know that anybody else could have got me to the place she did with Equus, because it was nerve-racking. But if what you're doing is crap, Thea will absolutely tell you, so when she gives you a compliment it feels amazing because you know it's true. She's got an incredible way about her in rehearsals. If Keira Knightley's terrified, she's right to be. But the experience has totally changed me as an actor, and I can't wait to get back to the stage."

Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe, who transferred Sharrock's Top Girls to the West End, says that her formidable reputation stems from her being "blonde, successful and very economical with her attention. What requires energy she will give an immense amount to. What doesn't she won't, because she can't. She's very impressive. Her confidence means that she can stay true to herself in every circumstance."

Confidence seems too wan a word for it. Sharrock is, without doubt, theatre's most dauntless daughter. When asked whether she worries that people will accuse her, by casting Knightley, of recreating the flashy, soulless circus that Molière sought to attack, she replies: "If people can be bothered to have those thoughts, there's nothing I can do about it. What's exciting me is that the next Keira Knightley will see from this that I'm not afraid to work with very famous people."

That particular, critically highly dangerous speciality is fast becoming Sharrock's directorial calling card. But trying to discover where she found her fearlessness is only partly satisfying. When she arrived in England, she says, she was a "painfully shy" seven-year-old, but her prodigious ability at sports provided a cure.

Although her parents were supremely uninterested in drama, they possessed, Sharrock says, "a kind of courage I never will have". They met in Vietnam during the war; her father went out with the troops. Her mother, she says, "risked her life because she believed it was right. They did unbelievable things." Next to that, opening plays and running theatres must seem a pretty flimsy form of plucky. Being the child of such parents was, Sharrock concedes, "difficult. Now I find it incredibly inspirational, but I always said that I would never be a journalist, because it is so all-consuming."

That challenge, however, remains a long way off. For now, Sharrock has the small matter of a Molière to crack, and a star to debut on stage before a rabidly baying public. Staring up at the waif-like Knightley, Sharrock concludes: "I've got a feeling she is going to be better than good, you know. She's going to be fantastic. Wouldn't that just blow everyone's preconceptions right out the window?" And you know she's talking about more than just Knightley's detractors.

The Misanthrope is at the Comedy Theatre, London SW1, until March 13, themisanthropelondon.com.

Caption: Role play: Damian Lewis and Keira Knightley in rehearsals for Molière's The Misanthrope directed by Thea Sharrock, below.