Portrait: Jamie Lumley

After an earlier career as a playwright, librettist, anthropologist, and documentary maker, David Lan took over as Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Young Vic in 2000. He is unusual in that he has come to understand his role explicitly as producer. He draws considerable inspiration and personal energy from this role, and sees the whole team at the Young Vic as directly involved in producing.

The road to his appointment at the Young Vic has traveled through varied terrains. David grew up in Cape Town, where he trained as an actor and in the early 1970s he came to London, hoping to become a director. He had begun to write plays and some early works were produced at the Theatre Upstairs of the Royal Court, when he was still only in his early 20s. He then decided to study social anthropology combining an undergraduate degree with having his plays produced at the Royal Court and the RSC. After graduation he went to the newly independent Zimbabwe to undertake research amongst the guerrillas who had fought and won the war of liberation and the communities amongst whom they had lived. His resulting PhD led to a book, Guns and Rain, which is considered an anthropological classic.

Following this, David decided to return to his life as a playwright; he also moved into television documentary making, which took him back to Africa. In the mid-1990s he was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court, and then, following a project at the National Theatre Studio, was invited to direct his first full production at Watford Palace Theatre. This was followed by an invitation to direct at the Young Vic. Whilst in rehearsal, the post of Artistic Director became vacant. David applied, and got the job.

Under his tenure the Young Vic has enjoyed an undisputed renaissance. The ambition and scope of the Young Vic's programme has been remarkable, as has the bold, thoughtful confidence of the vision driving it. The same dynamic has transformed the company's financial fortunes, as the Young Vic has successfully drawn the support of audiences, the local community, artists, funders, and donors behind its ideas and plans.

Perhaps one of the company's biggest producing successes, and a mirror of the energy and vision that has driven the artistic life of the company, has been the commissioning and building of its new home. This opened in October 2006 on time and on budget, the capital fundraising campaign complete, and is widely felt to be an inspired expression of the company's identity, values and its relationship with the artists and public for whom it exists.

Backed on all fronts by a truly strong team, David's role in this transformation has been fundamental. His artistic judgement and ability to nurture a show to its most successful realisation is combined with an alert sense of direction, of what should happen next in the big picture. A quiet adventurer of real probity, he has tapped into an extraordinary energy and ability to forge ahead, to find the way to realise a particular idea, and to take risks on the way. He has proved to be a powerful and clear advocate for his projects, for the Young Vic, and for the arts. His passionate and lucid expression of what theatre can mean in contemporary life has provided the basis for so much of the support that the Young Vic has been able to attract to its work. In this, he is inspired by a vision of theatre as a means of connection between people, as a place where relationships can be forged, potential realised, commonality found.

I arrived at the Young Vic as the 'wild card'. I thought there was a chance I could do it, that I was probably ready. I wondered: how difficult could it be? It was something I had always wanted to do. But I had to learn how to do it, what it meant to run a theatre.

I've found I'm good at listening, at learning and taking things in. I assimilate what's happening and can feel where people want to go. I seem to have an idea where to go next, what the next move needs to be. Increasingly, now that I have built up confidence, I trust my sense of shape, of form.

My energy comes from my love of what I do, though I feel I'm constantly struggling to maintain the stamina I need. You have to have love for this sort of work and for the means we have of making it or you can't do it. My energy comes from pleasure and, I guess, from my impatience.

I spent time deep in the bush in Zimbabwe for two years as a young man. I lived in a little village after a terrible war, everyone had lost everything, been in concentration camps, beaten up. They were very poor. By some means or other I seemed to find a way to make some of the people trust me, to let me in, and felt incredibly close to them, one man in particular and his family, his two wives and children. They and those they lived amongst were the people you pay no attention to as you drive through the world, standing on the side of the road, working in their barren fields, or in town as labourers or as waiters if they're very lucky. One boy I spent a lot of time with - he taught me to speak the local language. I thought: here we are as far as you can get from the centres of power in the world and this boy could be prime minister, a nuclear physicist, but the best he is likely to do is become a village school teacher.

We were surrounded by members of the guerrilla army that had lost the election and they were angry. I got to know them too and discovered they were mixed-up kids like everyone else: too much drink, drugs, anger - only trained to kill. Everyone told me it's too dangerous, you have to leave. I could see it was a time of real, real danger. Finally, I left for a while. But I had to go back - and I did.

Having gone through an experience like that, of course it changes you. Afterwards you are asked to accommodate back intoa world which is so hierarchical and in which our assumptions about people are so artificial. There is so much pressure to gloss over profound abilities and talents and values.

And having faced real danger, I find, to my surprise, that I am not afraid. I feel I'm not afraid of anybody. The experience of really going there, as deep into the bush as you can -because any further and you start coming out the other side -and loving it, knowing that, though a lot of the time I was miserable, scared and lonely, this is the best time of my life, this is the most interesting thing I could possibly do. Then you feel you sort of know what's rubbish and what isn't in the world. You know the world's a struggle between the people trying to deny others their fulfillment and the people struggling to find fulfillment. That's what the world's about. At the moment, that struggle is very, very acute.

The whole thing -art -is a conversation, an endless multilayered conversation between people. If you don't intervene the conversation goes on without you. Maybe theatre can talk in a different way, or at a deeper level, but it's people talking to people and saying the things that matter most to them. Our new building was always understood by our architect as a mediation, as a means of bringing people together in the most humane way so they can be themselves, express themselves. As artists, we instinctively try to do the same thing. We try to do it with the shows, and with the audience. We invite them in, try to create the right context for them, the most congenial context we can, in the right way, attentive, alert - not fawning - democratic, equal, particular, personal.

There are two ways you can make theatre. You can see the way we live as a struggle between the powerful and those who have no power, and consider that our function is to keep this wound open, to help people not to forget. Or you can see our purpose as to bring people together, to make our dysfunctional society more functional, to offer community, a common experience, a place in which strangers can come together in peace. Mediating, creating a connection, anybody would want to do that. I enjoy it very much.

It's not inevitably the case that you can connect. If it's the right work at the right time, and you present it well, you can effect that transfer of emotion and friendship, that extraordinary sense of mutuality with strangers. This tells us what we, all of us, deep down know - that at some level we are all the same. That's why it's worth doing.