As I sit at my kitchen counter, eating eggs on toast and drinking a cup of coffee, I open a large envelope that arrived yesterday. It’s a rainy Saturday. Quiet time at home. A little break from the four different jobs I have as a freelance, migrant, working-class artist.

Inside the envelope is a copy of the latest edition of The Stage. I obviously know why I’ve been sent it. I’ve been nominated as one of four finalists for their Best Director category (including Ralph Fiennes – Shocker!). The show is The Uncontainable Nausea of Alec Baldwin, the first production I created under my newly founded theatre company, TG WORKS.

I founded the company out of anger. Anger at the constant rejection that so many of us theatre-makers face, particularly in the world of directing.

I say anger because, for the third time in four years, I had reached the semi-finals of the Venice Biennale’s young directors programme without ever making it to the final stage. I had gone into debt funding the projects myself and, on this final occasion, had been personally selected by Willem Dafoe – only to be told that my piece was “too post-modern”.

So I said: fuck it. I would create a company. I would gather my collaborators and focus on what I know I can do: make my own work. Write. Carry my vision, translate it to the stage, and lead an ensemble of extraordinary artists towards a shared artistic purpose.

I anxiously turn to the page where I know my picture is going to be, and I laugh.

Best Director.

I barely consider myself one. Maybe not the best thing to admit after being nominated, but I’m an honest person. I approach a theatrical process from multiple angles (most of the time due to the limited resources available!). I look at the design. I write it. What’s the language? I devise. I R&D. What’s the vision? How do I create it?

Sometimes I wonder whether it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does this feeling that I don’t quite fit the definition of “director” come from me, or from what the industry expects a director to be?

Labels are funny things. We search for them, and then sometimes, when we finally find one that fits, we want to reject it because it suddenly feels too narrow. I’ve never felt particularly easy to label.

Growing up in a strict Catholic family, being gay was already something I had to come to terms with. Luckily for me, that label eventually didn’t feel narrowing at all. It was liberating. It helped me understand that the way I saw the world could exist in contrast to the majority of people around me – and that there was freedom in that difference.

I think that has shaped the artist I am. Whenever I make work, I try to break away from the mundane. I want to take what I know about theatre, question it and turn it on its head. Of course, that can be a double-edged sword. With this show, we’ve certainly seen that: reviews ranging all the way from one star to five.

But perhaps that’s part of making something that refuses to fit neatly into a box.

At the end of the day, whether I’m a director or not a director, the aim has always been the same: to digest the world through art and bring my vision of it to life.

And this nomination is a good little reminder that sometimes, when you stop trying to fit the mould and make the work that feels true to you, people notice.

Tommaso Giacomin @tommasogiacomin is an Italian theatre-maker and director based in Brighton and Artistic Director of @tgworkstheatre at www.tgworkstheatre.com/

Topics: queer theatre