SUNLIGHT glittering on the lake, eyes meeting on the balcony, hands intertwined at twilight - the stuff of holiday romance, certainly, but in Beautiful Thing, the holiday is from school and the romance is between two 16 year old boys who live on a council estate in southeast London. There may be problems in their lives - Jamie is bullied on the street while Ste is beaten at home - but during this long summer, theirs is essentially a bright, optimistic world.
For Hettie McDonald, who makes her debut as a screen director with Beautiful Thing, this is "a very accessible film, with funny dialogue, sympathetic characters and a great heart underneath it. She should know, since she directed the stage production two years ago, written by the 24 year old Jonathan Harvey, which won a clutch of awards and went from an acclaimed run at the Bush Theatre, west London, to the Donmar Warehouse and the Duke of York Theatre.
When Channel Four decided to commission a screen version from Harvey, Hettie McDonald found herself being consulted by the producers; finally they invited her to direct it. Ten years experience of theatre directing in the West End, the Royal Court, National Theatre and in Ipswich and Nottingham - ensured that she wouldn't shrink from the challenge, but she had not anticipated how much she would enjoy it.
"This was an amazing chance for me," she says. "I knew nothing, but I loved it. I didn't find it difficult, though the rest of the crew may have, since I had to learn on the job. I had braced myself, expecting to be told look, you're new, you're a woman, you know nothing, but in fact, the team of people were extremely generous; they put their faith in me."
Jonathan Harvey wrote the screenplay, which, McDonald says, has added more characters and developed them. "It works much better as a film, in fact. There's a truer sense of place and what's important is that it's a real place and not a set." It was shot on location last summer at the Thamesmead estate in south east London. The sunshine helps, of course, but the complex of flats, with its views over an artificial lake, its bright walkways and balconies decked with flowers seems unusually attractive, full of well maintained communal spaces.
In the film, the character of Jamie's young mother, a lone parent played by Linda Harvey, is central. "She has been fleshed out from the stage version, as a woman with her own worries and pressures. That mother son relationship is at the heart of the film." This broadens the appeal of Beautiful Thing, so that as well as being a budding gay romance, it becomes a rite of passage story concerned with a son's urge towards independence from his mother, and her painful recognition of the necessity to let him go. Had she not been able to do that, the film would have been very different, less sunny - showing the more familiar story of the rejection and isolation of the gay character.
Hettie McDonald affirms the fairytale, happy ever after mood of the film. "It's a celebration of love. It taps into people's need to believe in the dream, to trust that sometimes things can work out, that life does not have to be awful, all of the time. But I don't think it's soft centred. It is politically hugely important, and it's subversive of some of our stereotypes, particularly about class."
THE experience of making Beautiful Thing has whetted McDonald's appetite for more screen directing. "For me, choosing the shots was the hardest thing, though by the end, especially through the editing process, I was beginning to get a sense of how to put shots together. You have to trust your instinct hugely. I had always loved the technical side of theatre, using the lights and set to paint the picture. In film, I found it hard to visualise the end product, but I enjoyed being able to be really rigorous, moment by moment."
It was also an enormous change not to shoulder the burden of the whole project herself. In theatre, the director has to carry a lot more on his or her own. "Yes, you have to carry everyone else, really. You have to do all the shouting, chivvying and hassling. In film, the first assistant [director] does that. Everyone's skills are clearly defined, and it's collaborative, so the whole process is geared to allow you, as director, to work with the actors. A space is created at the centre of this huge spiral, so that you can get the shot you want.
McDonald has always worked closely with writers, developing scripts and exploring new directions in workshops, and hopes to continue to do this for film. At the moment she is buried in screenplays. "Writing is the true skill; that's the really creative part," she says, squashing any suggestion that she might write a script herself. "My talent is to be an objective eye. It's an editorial skill really. I'm not full of ideas - I analyse things and then bring them to life."
She has no intention of abandoning theatre completely. Having made her West End debut as a director at the age of 24, her commitment to the form is enormous. Referring to a comment by Jonathan Harvey about the buzz of film compared to theatre, she insists: "theatre can be exciting. It certainly was for me, when I was growing up. Nothing can match that sense of watching a live art, knowing that no performance can be repeated."
She argues that there is a negative perception of theatre among younger audiences and thinks that schoolchildren are not exposed to good work, seeing perhaps one production per year of a set text. "The other problem is that there's a lot of bad theatre around. So many writers, in Britain, were really thrown by the 1980s, by the recession and by Thatcher. They found it all very shocking and there was this terrible malaise."
The tendency then was for playwrights, such as David Hare, to feel that they had to respond to that, to take it all on, but now, McDonald thinks, this is beginning to change, with young writers like Jonathan Harvey writing about the little bit that they know.
"There are some little green shoots coming up, but these are lean, scary times for theatre, and many of the good, young writers are being poached by cinema..." Yet, as McDonald knows from personal experience, not all the traffic in that direction need be a cause of lamentation.
