The Life Artistic - Mark Dorrell
Over the course of his career as musical director, Mark Dorrell has worked with some of the greats – Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Hugh Jackman – actors who are, he says, “the real deal”. And yet when it comes to the matter of star quality, and the elusive alchemy that lies behind it, he hesitates.
“It’s an interesting one, isn’t it?” says Dorrell, the newly appointed musical director of Wellington’s Orpheus Choir. “I’ve met lots of people who are stars, but who have not become stars. People who I think have great talent and presence … I think it is very difficult to quantify, or even define these things.”
Dorrell moved to Wellington in 2007. He first visited the city in 1991 – arriving on a Saturday to find the city closed. “It was a different place then. I thought: this is a beautiful place and I’d like to live here – just not then. There was still much I wanted to pursue work-wise.” It was the 1990s and Dorrell was based in London, beginning a decade that would see him working on a succession of big productions with bigger names: Into the Woods, A Little Night Music, Oklahoma, Sweeney Todd.
“I’ve been very lucky in that all my theatre work has been new productions,” he admits. “Everything I’ve done I’ve started from scratch. I’ve been very spoilt.”
Dorrell, “a working-class boy from rural Worcestershire”, did not grow up in a musical family. In fact, if it were not for a junior school teacher – the “scary, elderly music teacher, Miss Jones” – his talent might have escaped unseen. “[She] just happened to mention to my mother one day at parent teacher evening: ‘Mark is very musical,’ (I played a recorder and sang in a choir), ‘have you thought about piano lessons?’ I was about ten. We didn’t have a piano, didn’t know anything about piano teachers … we caught the bus one Saturday and went to visit the piano teacher in the next town, because there wasn’t one in ours.”
Dorrell took to the piano and loved it, proving to be a fast learner. But it was a childhood trip to see The Sound of Music that would have a lasting influence. Dorrell’s interest, as he describes it, has always been “music with words, not music itself”.
“I think I knew back then, in my early teens, I wanted to work in the theatre. But I pursued my music and I was very fortunate and went off to Cambridge.” He attended the university as a contemporary of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson – even for Cambridge, with a long tradition in the theatrical arts, this was “a vintage year”.
“When I look back through my little box of programmes from my student days there are people that I saw acting as ‘Second Spear Carrier’ who are now making movies in Hollywood.”
The draw of the stage was confirmed for Dorrell during his year of postgraduate studies at the the Royal College of Music, London. He recalls long corridors of students in practice rooms playing scales hour on hour, day after day. “That has never been me,” he says. “I’ve never had that sort of temperament or interest. I’m too much of a social animal – I like contact with other people.”
Therein lies the appeal of the theatre: it is a collaborative process, although he admits that being essentially freelance “takes a certain temperament”.
These days Dorrell splits his time between teaching at Toi Whakaari and at the New Zealand School of Music. The hundred-strong Orpheus Choir rehearse weekly. It’s a busy schedule but Dorrell likes it: he has always enjoyed the social aspect of working with big groups. He is also looking forward to a rare break when he takes three months from New Zealand’s summer to head north into winter. “Although I have to say, I get very despondent at the thought of going back to cold, dark, grey.”
For now, though travel always beckons, Wellington is home. It is a far cry from rural Worcestershire; Dorrell has come a long way since the comments of Miss Jones. “I do look back at my little school with my little music teacher … and think how different my life could have been. You just don’t know, do you, what it all hinges on – all the tiny things that, in the end, make a huge difference.”