London West End’s Queen of Drama Sonia Friedman Is Conquering All The World’s Stages — Deadline Disruptors
deadline.comWhen she was 23, Sonia Friedman was—to use her expression—thrown into a rehearsal room with Harold Pinter at London’s National Theatre.
She was his deputy stage manager during production for the premiere of his one-act play Mountain Language starring theatrical royalty Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins.“I was the person sitting right next to [Pinter],” she recalls. “He would whisper into my ear all the way through,” about how he wanted it to look, where’d there’d be a cue.
She says the playwright would make almost no changes to his script. “Though he did at one point add a pause and asked me to write that into the script,” she says, smiling at the memory.
It was a life-changing moment for her, working with playwrights who directed their own work. “I fell in love at that point, particularly with new work, watching actors mine something that no one else in the world has ever seen before.”She wanted more of that experience.
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