RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award Winner Lily Dyble: “The landscape’s really hard right now. And who gets to do it?” 

Want to spot tomorrow’s directing talent? Look no further than the resident or associate director listed in your theatre programme. 

Last weekend, Lily Dyble stepped into the Globe’s courtyard with the unhurried calm of someone who has learned to trust herself under pressure. 

She is this year’s winner of the Royal Theatrical Support Trust Sir Peter Hall Director Award — and in the current climate, that distinction carries more weight than ever.

Photo credit Matt Chandler

Dyble has served as associate director to Joe Mantello on Stephen Sondheim’s Here We Are at the National Theatre — a connection that led directly to Broadway and an associate directorship on the starry Death of a Salesman. A remarkable trajectory.

But that pipeline is under threat. Producing theatres are making less, squeezed by years of stagnant funding. Less production means fewer opportunities for directors, actors, and every kind of theatre freelancer — and ultimately, a talent development pipeline running dry.

Patrick Marber, one of the directors she names as a formative influence, recently told The Stage that it’s “a really hard time” to make a living as a director, with even well-established figures struggling to land work. Dyble doesn’t flinch at this. “The landscape’s really hard right now,” she says. “And who gets to do it?” 

The award, she makes clear, isn’t a trophy. It’s a lifeline.“I hit a point in my practice where without meaningful intervention I couldn’t scale up, I couldn’t go any further. And then this happened.” 

Born and raised in Manchester, Dyble is a product of precisely the ecosystem she now champions. Free music lessons. The Hallé Youth Choir. A Northern brass band. “I went to a state school where I was really lucky that so much access to the arts was still free” she says — and she means it without sentiment. She knows how easily that luck could have gone the other way, which is why paid placements and access remain causes she returns to again and again. The first assisting job she took was unpaid. She worked back 139 hours to do it. “Getting in the room is so much of it.”

Much of her career has been built through associate work — a role she defines with precision. “It’s a really intimate relationship. You’re a sounding board. You operate as a real partnership.” 

She credits Marber, alongside Nick Hytner, Joe Mantello, and Nadia Fall, as directors she’s learned from profoundly. But it’s the other female creatives — Marianne Elliott, Bunny Christie, Vicky Mortimer — whose teams she watched obsessively as a student, spending every spare penny on tickets, trying to understand how those collaborations functioned.

“It’s a really short window of your career where you get to have that privilege of sitting in another director’s room,” she says. “It goes really quickly.”

Her chosen piece for the award is Sally Cookson’s Jane Eyre, and the choice is anything but academic. She first saw the production at eighteen in Bristol. “I remember when Jane walked across the gantry and it set on fire, sitting there and being so overwhelmed and thinking – that’s what love should feel like. It’s messy and it’s complicated, it defies a straightforward answer”. The RTST will also make a grant of £60,000 to support the costs of the production. 

Now directing it herself, across regional venues including Chester — close to where she grew up — she’s drawn to what the play demands: courage in uncertainty, clarity under pressure. “It gives a theatrical language to those feelings that you can’t articulate. Jane’s internal world is such a vast, emotional landscape.”

Right now she’s in rehearsals for an all-female Glengarry Glen Ross at the Old Vic. A new musical is finding its next home. Jane Eyre awaits. She is, unmistakably, moving. “Holding on,” she says. “Holding the line. Keeping the faith.” In a hard time for directors, that’s not a platitude.

It was a wonderful starry reception hosted by Sir Ian McKellen. RTST chairman Sir Geoffrey Cass said: “We warmly congratulate Lily Dyble and the runner-up, Sophie Drake, and applaud the six other directors on the all-female shortlist.”

So in more ways than one, UK theatre directors need a sustained ecology of work, not isolated chances. Without sufficient opportunity and invaluable schemes like RTST that come with cash to keep talent rooted in the regions, the next Dyble simply won’t emerge.