Twelve Questions: Benjamin Henson

Since moving from London, director Benjamin Henson has made waves with his experimental company Fractious Tash, whose play Not Psycho debuts next month. He talks about his hometown, coming out and what he thinks of New Zealand.

1. You've worked as a director in London, Germany and France. Where are you from?
I'm from Leicester in the East Midlands, which is where they found the body of Richard III. I remember a kind of run-down, terrible 1960s shopping centre but now it's going for cultural city of the year. I was brought up by my mum in a tiny terraced house, with my auntie and nan in the same village, all kind of living in a triangle. It was great. I'm an only child and for a while I was the only grandchild and nephew, so I was very spoiled. Dad was always around but my parents split up when I was about 2 so I didn't have many male role models.

2. Do only children really struggle to share?
I have learned to share the hard way. It comes in useful in this job because you have to fight for what you want. In Not Psycho I'm the writer and director and I think there's something about being an only child that helps with having to look at both the inside and outside of things.

3. Has that lack of male role models in your upbringing influenced you?
Again I think it helps massively with directing because I can relate to both sexes. I don't feel like I bring a sexual element to the room, so all of that is fuelled into the work. My rehearsal rooms are really about safety, there's nothing tyrannical. You want the actors to feel safe so that they can go to dark places and know that there's a catchment.

4. When did you come out as gay?
I had my first boyfriend when I was about 14. My mum said, "Do you think you and Chris are in a relationship?" She just came out with it. And I was like, "yeah we definitely are". She was upset that she thought I'd gone through something on my own. She felt like she might have missed the mark. Then within five minutes she was like, "Well I've told your nan and I've told your auntie." It's never ever been an issue. Ever.

5. What were you like as a teenager?
Incredibly independent, because mum would always be at work and she's a terrible cook. Her favourite dish would be potato waffles and baked beans, everything beige and out of a packet. So I would have dinner on the table when she got home. I still love to cook. For a long time I worked for a youth company in Leicester that was set up to do shows with kids who had fallen out of school or been expelled, to try and get them back into being part of a system. We used to take about 80 kids to the Edinburgh Festival every year. Performing was secondary. We ran things [in a] very sort of anti-star system; everyone would have an equal part, learning how to fold their props nicely was more important perhaps than their performance. Now I see those kids' names crop up everywhere. And I remember what they were like. My working practice has shifted massively since training to work with professional actors - you no longer have to cater to the work being their support. It took a long time to beat that out of me, actually. I'm still always worried that the actors are feeling included and enjoying themselves.

6. Do teenage delinquents fit well with the theatre world?
I think they do. The actors get to embody what it is to be someone else and explore different elements of themselves free of the schoolyard hierarchy .

7. Where did you fall in the school hierarchy?
I used to have a big loyal gang of girls.

8. Actors are sometimes stereotyped as having a vacuous quality in real life. Is that fair?
The best kind of actors have that yin and yang of introvert and extrovert. In their personal lives they might be quite protective of themselves but on the floor they are extremely extroverted. The ones that are too far in either direction will either give something you can only capture close-up on screen, or they'll just be shouting at you and they won't have the deep undercurrents.

9. How did you meet your partner, Stuart?
In a club. I'd gone to see a band. He'd turned up drunk. So we had a dance and exchanged numbers. I knew immediately. And so I texted him in the morning and said, "When are we going on a date?" And I think that first date was about a week long. Stuart is an urban designer from Wellington originally. He is a calm, quiet, reflective soul with a cheeky inner clown and I think we just complement each other.

10. How did you feel about leaving London to move here for Stuart's job?
I just had no idea what to expect. But being in a theatre network here, every project you do snowballs really quickly, you get to know more and more people from The Basement Theatre, to the whole of Auckland to Wellington, to the whole country. I've definitely found in New Zealand that the network of people is much more supportive than you might find in London. In London if people found a great rehearsal space they'd keep it to themselves.

11. What do you miss about London?
Night buses. Being able to go out every night of the week if you feel like it. And I do sort of miss a culture about culture; simple things like taking the arts supplement out of the Sunday papers and seeing what's going on. Or a Newsnight review with critics debating the new theatre piece. There's not that relationship with theatre here; it's still a luxury, not a necessity. And that can mean that, if you're dabbling with a piece that's dark, it's a harder sell. But you have to stay true to what you want to create.

12. Your latest play Not Psycho explores themes of violence in entertainment. What's your view on that?
We can watch a film now and 15 henchmen get shot and we don't bat an eyelid. So this play is questioning what that might be doing to us. And looking at the debate which has been going on forever, mainly since Hitchcock's Psycho, which is: do violent movies create violent people? One of our actors, Donogh Rees, recalls seeing Psycho for the first time and being terrified, then seeing it now and having no reaction. It's so strange to realise that we can become immune. If you look at the original Psycho, the violence and sex are always bubbling underneath, and in this play those are the two through-lines that we've turned up the volume on.

•Not Psycho is on at the Q Theatre Loft, Queen St, August 15-29. See qtheatre.co.nz for booking details.