Harry Michell clearly has a busy Michaelmas ahead of him: as President of the Footlights Committee, he will be auditioning first-time Cambridge comics for the upcoming Virgin Smoker and thereafter the regular ones; his Edinburgh show with Lowell Belfield I Am, I Am will be doing a brief home run and a play he has written, Post, will be on at the ADC at the end of term. However, I sit down with him to discuss his upcoming production of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a project about which he is clearly passionate.

Being inspired to apply with the play to the Marlowe Society after being on last year’s committee (despite it being on the shortlist of suggested plays), Michell seems keen to demonstrate that non-Shakespearean early modern theatre can elicit real, honest laughter from a modern audience. He is unimpressed with the premise of many current professional productions of Shakespeare of giving the text an unusual twist in order to give it a ‘new life’; rather, a key goal for Michell as a director is ensure that the play gets “the same big laughs [as it initially did] not just from elderly people giggling at witticisms and not just from phallic fingers, but because it’s an inherently funny play… I wanted to do a play that isn’t just seen as an early modern work, rather a piece which can be enjoyed on its own merits”

Alongside the obvious creative role that being director entails, some of what Michell has to be mindful of is far more managerial in nature. With a cast of 25 (a number which he reckons is part of the reason Bart Fair is seldom put on professionally, given the expense that hiring that many actors would entail), Michell stresses the importance of needing to ensure “everyone is kept happy” from previous experience of acting and being made to wait around for long periods of time doing nothing in rehearsals. In addition, finding the right actors for the role was crucial, particularly given that they would be tackling Jonson’s sometimes “dense” language. He felt that he needed “people who are smart and can understand the language and can understand what they’re saying…[because]as an audience member, you don’t understand what they’re talking about if they don’t understand what they’re talking about.”

Bartholomew Fair seems like a perfect choice of play for someone who while currently very attracted to comedy, sees his real future and interest lying in directing. The kind of humour Michell is interested in is determinedly, unabashedly feel-good, talking of his wish when both performing and directing to make people smile and have a good night. It’s clear that, both when creating works of theatre and comedy, audience rather than agenda is what he considers to be the true measure of success, with his process reflecting this.  “When something’s comedic, you’ve got to find the funny a lot, it’s about experimenting and giving everyone the freedom to muck about. I find the idea of ‘funny’ very interesting and intriguing: it’s a science but it’s also something ineffable. It’s a difficult thing and also something you can never really tell until you show it to an audience for the first time. You’ve got to trust what you think is funny is funny” This confidence with his and his cast’s own taste is tempered, as ever, by a mindfulness of those who will be sitting in the auditorium to watch what they have produced.

Squeezing laughs out of every line is not something Michell seems interested in: “the harder you try to make people laugh, the less laughs you get.” Instead, he seems focussed on pulling out the common threads that link us, a modern Cambridge theatregoing population with Jonson’s Jacobean contemporaries who would be viewing a satire of their own society. He notes, with an apparent optimism, that “we’ve changed morally and physically” over the last 400 years but still wish to laugh both “wholesomely and wholeheartedly.”