Atri Banerjee looks slightly stunned. I’ve just reeled off his CV, and it’s as though this is the first time he’s processed it.
But then, when has he had the chance? Since winning The Stage’s best debut director award in 2019, he’s been resident director at London’s Almeida Theatre, been awarded the National Theatre’s Peter Hall bursary and worked at venues across the country, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, London’s Lyric Hammersmith and Manchester’s Royal Exchange. Banerjee directed three productions last year, another three the year before. And he’s only just turned 30.
“It does feel quite rapid,” he admits with a smile. “I think the first time I was directing on the main stage at the Royal Exchange was 25, which is quite a bit younger than I’d expected.”
He was born in Oxford, moving with his family to Italy when he was seven, before returning to England when he was 14. He lives in London but is now in Manchester, where we meet, for his next addition to that CV. Shed: Exploded View tracks three couples whose relationships implode over three decades, each offering a different perspective on the fallout from domestic violence.
When he first read the play — while judging the Bruntwood Prize, Europe’s biggest playwriting competition, in 2019 — he thought it was the best he’d ever come across. “I remember thinking: ‘If this play doesn’t win the award, something has gone terribly wrong.’”
Banerjee can’t have been alone because its writer, Phoebe Eclair-Powell, did win. “What I loved was its treating all the characters with a great deal of empathy,” he says. “Even the characters who are abusive. I love that she treats things with equal parts violence and tenderness. And she’s got a lot of humour about it as well, a lot of wit.”
The pair previously worked together on Harm at London’s Bush Theatre in 2021. Banerjee describes her as a visual theatre-maker. So is he. His work is aesthetically striking, from the huge plush bunny that dominated the set for Harm to the black, oily blood in his Julius Caesar. As he discusses Shed: Exploded View, he places his coffee on the floor so his hands can sculpt and gesture.
It’s an ability Banerjee needs here. The piece is inspired by Cornelia Parker’s 1991 installation “Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View”. It featured a suspended cluster of debris from a garden shed that Parker asked the British army to blow up. Banerjee won’t be doing the same, or recreating the sculpture physically (“I don’t think you could ever do it as well”), but the play lobs other grenades.
It, too, reads as though it was created and then blown up; a stage direction describes it as “an explosion in action”. It comprises fragmented scenes that can be arranged in any order, many of which depict domestic abuse. There are traces of numerous writers: the brittle, highly charged dialogue of Simon Stephens, the formal ruptures of Sarah Kane, the surrealism of Caryl Churchill.
This formal challenge is exactly what Banerjee looks for in new projects. As are the questions it asks: “How do we love each other, and how do we look after each other in a really difficult world?” he says. “The great joy of theatre is, it’s the most political of art forms because it’s getting audiences to look live at something which is a really present issue in the world and saying, ‘How do I react to this?’”
There are other themes he keeps returning to, such as memory, as his dreamlike, slow-burn production of The Glass Menagerie proved in 2022. “I’m really interested in the poetry of time and how theatre is a form where you manipulate time,” he says. “Which is probably why I’m drawn to classics, as well, because it’s, ‘What is the conversation with the past and our present moment?’”
Banerjee’s own past work is also swinging back around, tackling his first revival when The Glass Menagerie embarks on a UK tour in March. It’s apposite of a memory play about summoning and reliving the past, but there are other resonances. “The way we responded was very linked to the world today, thinking about political apocalypse and cataclysm, which is climate change but also the situation in Gaza and war brewing around the corner — that will be heightened now it’s Ukraine and Gaza.”
Others with Banerjee’s success might pursue the allure of London and West End, so why keep coming back to regional theatre? “It’s very different from London, where there might be 20 theatres within a couple-mile radius,” he explains. “I love the idea that someone might come to see every single show in a season at one theatre, which might not happen in London.”
He doesn’t believe this abundance and saturation should give the city “any sort of privilege over the rest of the country”. Especially not when, he points out, the cost of West End tickets seems to “creep up every single day”.
The financial climate across the UK concerns Banerjee. “There has been a very worrying trend towards cuts,” he notes. “The impact of austerity is something we still feel very strongly — not just arts on the stage, but arts education has been stripped away consistently across the country.”
These conditions are partly what triggered the exodus of artistic directors nationally in the past year. But there was some reprieve last month with the announcement of Indhu Rubasingham as the National’s next artistic director. While Banerjee reflects on the appointment of the first woman and person of colour to the job as “absolutely brilliant”, he’s nevertheless aware that it shouldn’t slacken ongoing diversification in the industry.
“I would really hope that no one felt like we’d done enough,” he says. “I don’t think we can ever do enough. Representation is something I think about a lot as a south Asian director, but I’d like to be thought of as a brilliant director, rather than a brilliant south Asian director, as I’m sure Indhu would as well.”
Banerjee sees running a theatre as “an administrative and a storytelling job”, shaping what it wants to say about itself and the world at the same time. He expresses an ambition to do so in the future, and imagines, for a moment, what it would be like: audiences returning show after show, using the bar, sending their children to the youth company. “Theatres, at their best, should operate like civic hubs: places where people feel there’s a community and a sanctuary as well.”
I don’t doubt he’ll get his chance. For now, though, he picks his coffee back up. He has a shed to get back to.
‘Shed: Exploded View’, February 9-March 2, Royal Exchange, Manchester, royalexchange.co.uk. ‘Glass Menagerie’ tour starts March 16 at the Belgrade, Coventry, belgrade.co.uk
