HAODS bring The Producers to the Horsham stage

He’s delighted to be working with them again: “They are good. They really are one of my favourite groups. They don’t muck about in rehearsals. If you tell them to shut up, they shut up but they also have a lot of very, very talented people and they put the work in. You know they’re doing extra and that’s fantastic.”

Barrie certainly wouldn’t want to overstate the importance of the director: “Directing is a pursuit where you can easily get caught up in your own ego because really directing is just being the ears and the eyes of the cast. They can’t see what they’re doing and you give them the feedback.”

Obviously you are telling them where to go and to an extent what to do: “But it is organic. I find very much I like to work as if it is a collaboration between the actors and the director and some of the actors are very good at that.

“I have been directing for about 20 years. I started acting in 1984 and I moved to directing because I thought I could do better than the directors that were directing me. And I would like to think I have been! I like the creative part of the process. People need the direction. People do need to be told where to go and that’s what you supply as a director. It is your creative choice.

“Of all the different roads that you could take you are deciding which one you think is the best and you also help the actors.

“A lot of the people that I work with are younger than me and at different stages of their acting journey. I’ve got quite a few years of experience behind me and I can tell them why something should not be that way or why it should be this way especially as comedy is my thing. But actually comedy is something that takes a lifetime of learning and I’m still learning it now.”

Barrie, who lives in Dorking, started rehearsals with the company back in December: “I’m nothing to do with the company. Sometimes they have internal directors but they have been pushing for years to do The Producers and they thought of me because comedy is my thing. They thought that nobody else could muck it up quite as well as I could!”

With The Producers, the audience are invited to follow the ridiculously funny endeavours of downtrodden ex-king of Broadway Max Bialystock as he teams up with timid accountant and wannabe theatre producer Leo Bloom to devise a fool-proof get-rich-quick scheme: produce the biggest flop on Broadway. All they have to do is find the worst play ever written, hire the worst director in town and cast the worst actors imaginable… It’s so simple, what could possibly go wrong?

“The original was a film made in 1968 by Mel Brooks and it was not a musical at all. It was a straight film with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel and it was written by Mel Brooks.

“The 1960s were not that long after the war and being a Jew, Brooks and his family had suffered greatly under the Nazis and his idea was to get his own back. He wanted to make fun of Hitler. There’s something very cathartic about humour that really did work for him.

“The show is a great one to do because there is lots of action. I’m running it at a hell of a pace.

“No one stands still for long. It is almost like a farce.

“My actors are complaining that they are exhausted by the end of the scene.

“I see them sweating because they are having to fly around the stage. It demands frenzy. The whole concept of it is stupid. You don’t want to give people too long to think about it or else they start seeing the holes and if they don’t like a certain joke then there is another gag coming along in a minute.”

Tickets from the venue

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