A life less ordered

After almost 30 years of distinguished, salaried employment, the last nine as artistic director of the Birmingham Rep, Bill Alexander recently sampled freelance life for the first time. Staging his debut production as a hired hand, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People at Theatr Clwyd in April, he experienced a new sensation: "It was nice to be rehearsing a play without wondering, as I always did at Birmingham, if it was the right play to be doing to attract an audience."

This feeling recurred when he moved on to The Importance of Being Earnest in Northampton, and Frozen, Bryony Lavery's exploration of child murder, at the National, and persists as he returns to the Cottesloe to direct Shelagh Stephenson's new play, Mappa Mundi. He can concentrate on "discovering how Shelagh's style works and finding the playing style that suits the material", leaving Trevor Nunn, the National's boss and Alexander's former mentor at the RSC, to shoulder "that huge weight of responsibility of having to face the consequences of the choices you've made in terms of audience figures."

Rates of attendance were the bane of Alexander's tenure in Birmingham from 1992 to 2001. It was an "utterly exhausting" period in which he doubled as chief executive and artistic director as the Rep's fortunes were shored up by £5m of Arts Council funding, the extra money helping him to relaunch the building's second auditorium as the 140-seat Door studio, in 1998, and commission dozens of new plays for it.

He was determined to fill the 900-seat main house with a programme of classics, new plays and "discoveries". That meant, for example, a 2000-01 brochure offering Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Peter Oswald's adaptation of The Ramayana, Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular and Timberlake Wertenbaker's take on Cinderella – an appealing, varied selection that brought good reviews but played to an average of just 48 per cent capacity. Even before the season opened, Alexander had announced his resignation, forced to admit that "I could no longer think of any way of putting together a season that I wanted to do and the public wanted to see. The contradiction was too much to bear."

The Rep's box-office staff would have been kept much busier if he had programmed "plays such as Dead Funny or The Weir, that were available for general repertory release. Why, then, pursue an agenda that was "of absolutely no use" to his marketing department? "I guess I was just too proud. Throughout my life the word "rep" has always had vaguely pejorative connotations and I feel that repertory theatres need to be thought of by actors as equally as good a place to work as anywhere, and as important places for theatre critics." Those reviewers always turned out for the Rep's topical new dramas, such as Peter Whelan's vision of a Republican Britain, Divine Right, or Lucy Bailey's steamy production of Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll. "I thought we would increase our audience because people in the Midlands would be reading about us in the national press," Alexander says. "It didn't work."

His dedication to Shakespeare was especially problematic at a venue whose proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon means that local Shakespeare enthusiasts are far more likely to favour the RSC than the Rep. One of his successor Jonathan Church's first moves was to ban the Bard, and, helped by the casting of TV star Matthew Kelly in Of Mice and Men, Church's first, Shakespeare-free Rep season saw box-office leap by 90 per cent on the previous year.

Alexander could reasonably have criticised Church's stance and defended his own by arguing that our second city's theatregoers are entitled to see the work of our greatest dramatist without having to make the trip to Stratford. Instead, he says: "The policy Jonathan is adopting is better for Birmingham than mine. But, selfishly, I couldn't be at the Rep and not direct a Shakespeare play.

Alexander's twin passions – for new writing and for Shakespeare – developed during stints at the Royal Court and Bristol Old Vic during the Seventies and deepened when he joined Nunn's RSC. "Trevor was probably the biggest influence on my work," he says. "From talking to him and seeing his work I learnt hugely about mise-en-scène and about bringing the best out of people." Alexander won an Olivier for The Merry Wives of Windsor and directed Antony Sher's crookback on crutches in Richard III (at our interview, his mild manner, stubble and faded lumberjack shirt lived up to Sher's description of him as an "attractive, kindly, rather scruffy man, greatly liked by his companies").

Given special responsibility for the RSC's new writing, he began a long and fruitful partnership with Peter Whelan and has now directed seven of his plays, including The Accrington Pals, The School of Night and Divine Right. "Somebody once called Bill the most democratic of directors and he's just that," says Whelan. He gratefully recalls Alexander dissuading him from premature rewrites when actors voiced reservations about a scene or line, and is certain that the director will be applying his "very critical, firm and thoroughgoing" approach to dialogue and staging for Mappa Mundi.

The central character of Shelagh Stephenson's play is a dying map collector forced to challenge his views of national and racial identity as he prepares for the wedding of his daughter (Lia Williams) to a black human rights lawyer (Patrick Robinson). "The story deals with making sense of one's life at the end of it," Alexander says. "There's a strong secondary theme concerning how we're becoming a more mixed society. I find it difficult to say what the play's about, because our job is to get it right moment by moment."

Once Mappa Mundi has opened and he has remounted his hugely popular adaptation of Raymond Briggs's The Snowman for its fifth annual Christmas run at the Peacock Theatre, Alexander's diary is blank – and he doesn't mind. "Apart from the financial insecurity I'm enjoying hugely just waiting to see what comes up." If that freedom palled, would he consider running another theatre? "Absolutely not. A couple of people tried to persuade me to apply to succeed Adrian Noble at the RSC, but not forcefully enough. The frustrations I had at Birmingham would be the same wherever one was. I'm glad I ran the Rep, but I wouldn't do it again."

'Mappa Mundi' previews at the Cottesloe (National Theatre), London SE1, from 18 Oct and opens on 24 Oct (020-7482 0000)