Theatrical hitmaker Justin Martin on Prima Facie's follow-up: ‘It wrestles with how to bring up boys'

The Guardian

10 hours ago

Earlier this year, opposing theatres in Charing Cross Road displayed 'sold out' signs for their shows. Both of them – Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Kyoto – were co-directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. 'It was surreal,' says Martin. 'Someone sent me a photo and I thought: I'm keeping that. As a little Australian, I'm still surprised to make a living out of this crazy career.'
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Kyoto had a limited run but Stranger Things has been going for 18 months and has 'the noisiest audience I've ever heard', Martin reports. 'I think the stat is that 60% of [them] have never been to a play before. So they eat popcorn throughout and just respond in a really natural way. If it's boring, they leave. If they're frightened, they really scream and gasp. It's very live but, if you're used to traditional theatre, it's weird.'
Martin has had a centre seat for the modern evolution of theatregoing. As a solo director, he staged Suzie Miller's Prima Facie, a horrifying monologue by a barrister who is a survivor of rape, with Jodie Comer winning Olivier and Tony awards in London and New York. Uniquely for a stage play, it also twice topped the UK cinema box office when screened by NT Live. For Martin, that felt as unlikely an achievement as having double hits in London.
'I think a lot of it was Jodie,' he reflects. 'But also the subject matter of the play: that people wanted to be part of that conversation about relationships and consent. With a new play, you never know what you've got until it meets the audience. The first preview of Prima Facie, the audience was almost all women and I'd placed Stephen Daldry in the middle of the stalls to give me notes. And, even as the final music cue played, all the women in the theatre leaped to their feet with such energy and passion. And that was pretty much repeated everywhere.'
Martin and Daldry intermittently fantasise about creating templates for sellout shows that can be copied around the world by assistants who occasionally check in by Zoom with the creators on their yachts. 'Sadly,' he laughs, 'we don't seem to have achieved that. We have to be around a lot for every run.'
Just back from working with Daldry to open Stranger Things on Broadway, Martin will next year direct Comer again in a UK and Ireland tour of Prima Facie. Next month, he makes a National Theatre debut with Miller's new play. Whereas the earlier work took its title from the Latin legal phrase meaning 'at first sight', Inter Alia borrows the lawyers' term for 'among other things'. And, after the barrister's monologue of Prima Facie, Inter Alia is a sort of double soliloquy, for a high court judge, Jessica Parks (Rosamund Pike), who delivers both her public and private thoughts as a family crisis tests, inter alia, her judiciousness.
'In conversation' is a favourite term of Martin's for how culture works and Inter Alia has a lot to say to Adolescence, the Netflix mega-hit, as the judge becomes involved in the case of a young man accused of an assault on a classmate.
'They're definitely related,' Martin agrees. 'Both Inter Alia and Adolescence are talking about what everyone's talking about, which is how to bring up boys with an understanding of women and consent. What interested me about Adolescence was the response: get rid of mobile phones, get rid of social media. And you think: that's one of the things but there are other issues about our complicity in the society we've created. Rosamund's character in our play is trying to bring up a feminist son. And what does that mean? Suzie's play is wrestling with how to bring up boys.'
The Adolescence overlap is another example of a phenomenon that fascinates Martin: how plays are changed by the surrounding context. Kyoto by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson – known to Martin and Daldry as 'the Joes', having previously written for them The Jungle, the 2017 immersive drama about a refugee camp at Calais – premiered in summer 2024 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and transferred to London this year.
'What was amazing about that play,' says Martin, 'is that we changed it a little bit between the two productions but the world had changed a huge amount.' He means the election of Donald Trump, which made the audience even more unnerved about an American lobbyist, Don Pearlman (played by Stephen Kunken), trying to sabotage the 1997 international agreement in Japan to reduce global warming.
'If you do stuff about what's going on now, which is what I like to do, then it's exciting when the context changes the play. Because of Trump, the play's discussion of the divisiveness of America had a different focus.'
Kunken was, pantomime-like, regularly booed at curtain calls. But Martin has deep experience of theatre bumping into current affairs. In 2013, when Margaret Thatcher died, he was assistant director to Daldry on two West End shows in which the contentious former prime minister was satirised: Lee Hall and Elton John's musical Billy Elliot and Peter Morgan's Westminster bio-drama The Audience.
'We thought: hang on, these shows become about something different tonight. Stephen held an audience vote at Billy Elliot about whether the song fantasising about Thatcher's death should be included. [It was.] And Peter and I went on stage before The Audience and talked to the, er, audience about whether the Thatcher scene should be included. [It was.] But, when it gets like that, it's really exciting. When Haydn Gwynne, who was playing Thatcher, came on, the audience all went deeply quiet as if: are we allowed to do this tonight? But then she did her deep curtsey to the queen and everyone laughed and it was as if there was permission to be in conversation with what had just happened. It was electric.'
Martin was working as 'resident director' (day-to-day show-running) on the Australian production of Billy Elliot when he first encountered Daldry and moved up, via assistant and associate director, to co-director (on The Jungle, Kyoto and Stranger Things). Some duos who use that term sit side by side at desks during rehearsals, but not Daldry/Martin: 'We divide up the show and then come back together to look at what the other has done. Every director runs out of ideas in a rehearsal room so it's great to have someone who can pick it up and run with it.'
Together and separately, a trait of their productions is pace. Without ever dropping a word, Comer in Prima Facie gave a sense of a racing brain and body. Kyoto, a hefty two-act play, felt much shorter than its running length.
Martin nods: 'I love it when a play is just ahead of the audience and they're trying to catch it. With a monologue, it's someone's inner thoughts and people think so quickly so it has to go: boom, boom, boom. When I started on Prima Facie, it wasn't quite coming alive and I rang up the friend who did it in Australia and she said with monologues you have to go at a rapid pace because of the speed of thought. I think pace is everything. Although it can be a fight now because a lot of actors try to act between the lines. That's the influence of screen work where it's in the pause, it's in the look. But in theatre you have to act on the line. It's an oral medium; if you're not hearing it, there's nothing going on. Stephen and I are notorious for saying to actors: if you're doing nothing, then nothing is happening.'
Martin is one of a group of Australian directors – Simon Stone, Benedict Andrews, Kip Williams – who have worked prominently in London. 'I came over chasing a partner who had moved here and I just found it was the place I wanted to work,' he says. He is pleased that Inter Alia is scheduled for NT Live. 'For someone living across the world from where my parents are, it's a way of connecting … But, more importantly, it's democratised theatre.'
All his big shows have been new – including The Fear of 13 with Adrien Brody – but do producers ring up and offer The Cherry Orchard or Richard III? 'Yep.' And he says no? 'Yep. Until I find my own way into a classic the way Stephen did to An Inspector Calls, where you feel the play is turned on its head.'
After Inter Alia he is planning to complete a trilogy with Miller: 'We have a third one with another Latin legal title that I can't say for the moment.' While Martin insists that collaboration must remain sub judice for now, his track record suggests audiences are unlikely to be in absentia.
Inter Alia is at the National Theatre, London, 10 July-13 September, and in cinemas as part of NT Live from 4 September. Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at the Phoenix theatre, London.