In this 55 minute physical theatre performance, Theatre Re open the lid of a long forgotten toy box and therein lies a small circus.
Steeped to the hilt in French stylings with only a ladder, a wire and a microphone for props, two brothers fight over the beautiful tight-rope walker. Her perpetual smile leads them above and below themselves into other imagined worlds where they fall through the sky, sleep on bunk beds and sail through the air on a porch swing. But only one of them can win the girl and things grow unsettlingly violent.
There’s no precise plot to this atmospheric Theatre Re production but it creates a world of possibilities to get lost in. The three performers, Selma Roth, Malik Ibheis and Guillaume Pige, who also directs, are supported by a brilliant live musician in Alex Judd who loops and plays the soundtrack on which the show hinges. Together with make up and costumes that are simultaneously child-like and sinister, they push themselves physically to master the illusions that help us escape into their heads.
The simple story manages to stay away from anything twee. Instead the company makes us focus on things like the fear that lies behind Selma’s perpetual smile as the ballerina watches these two men battle over her while leading them on in some evasive way.
A strong, thoughtful and atmospheric show that could perhaps say a bit more than it does, but nonetheless makes an unforgettable hour of theatre.
For lovers of a classic farce, Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse (1958) is the pinnacle of thought-provoking comedy. But that’s for people who love farce and in Jamie Lloyd’s production at Trafalgar studios, you get little else. No moments of reflection, not enough points of pure disgust but still a great mix of institutional politics and co-worker comedy.
Simon Russell Beale plays Colonel Roote, the incompetent head of a state-run mental institution where career competition and abuse of patients is rife. He sweats and bumbles his way through his duties perfectly and after you leave the theatre, the image of his character, whose responsibilities extend over hundreds of vulnerable people, becomes a lasting, frightening picture. But while you’re watching the play, there’s little to recoil at.
Contrastly, Indira Varma as sexy Miss Cutts, who’s having an affair with her boss, hits some perfect notes. She makes an utter fool of herself as she desperately tries to find some satisfaction and power. Her delusion is matched only by John Simm’s fierce, sharp callousness as another of Roote’s subordinates. But I found myself waiting to be stirred during this play. Only after I left the theatre did I feel its strength and enjoy its politics.
Playwright Simon Stephens has a fantastic habit of including a question in his answers. It might just be that my questions are a bit weak but he seems to enjoy wondering aloud in the middle of a conversation: “Is it possible to be increasingly less certain?” he says at one point, “Is it an English thing to be suspicious of travel?” he says at another. And later, “Why hasn’t Lesley Sharp played Hamlet!?” long pause, “It’s fucking crazy! She’d be an amazing Hamlet and it’s an absurdity that that hasn’t happened!”
Gender in writing and casting rears its head when Simon reveals that in her embryonic stages, Racheal Keats, the protagonist for his play Port, was in fact a man. But more on that story later.
For now, theatre’s most prolific contemporary playwright, the writer of Punk Rock, Pornography, Three Kingdoms and adaptor of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is being very kind about sitting outside in the freezing cold to avoid an exceptionally noisy café. He’s also giving a superbly spontaneous speech about how to achieve our full potential. “I’m a boring fucking middle-aged old social fucking democrat” he says, “and I kind of think we’d be better off if we invested more in ourselves as a group.”
This comes after a discussion about a scene in Port, currently at National Theatre, Lyttelton directed by Marianne Elliot. Simon’s 2002 play, follows Racheal Keats at two-year intervals in her life in Stockport from the ages of 11 to 24. In those deprived suburbs, she contends with the mess her absentee mother leaves behind including an emotionally vacant father and a damaged, vulnerable younger brother.
The scene we’re talking about sees Racheal at 17 ask her grandmother to help her out with the deposit for a flat but like most of Racheal’s plans, it doesn’t quite work out. The point, says Simon, is about empowering Racheal to do it herself.
“The word ‘entitlement’ is a really complicated word, isn’t it?” he begins, “I noticed in my work as a teacher, a rather unsettling and perhaps counter-intuitive phenomena. The troubling extent to which emerging writers tended to attain the level which, in their heart they felt entitled to attain, is quite startling. It’s a limited belief in their capabilities and I can’t help feeling that culturally and economically and socially in this country, we’ve constipated people’s entitlement along class and gender and racial grounds in a way that makes us poorer as a nation.”
The belief in our capabilities, he emphasises, is what enables us to turn things around and this idea is expounded in every scene of Port. “But” he says about breaking cycles and making change, “the notion of inevitability speaks of determinism and that makes me nervous. I always think that Port is quite an optimistic play disguised as a cynical play. Racheal can always take agency over her own life. At the very least she can try to.”
So if we’ve drawn lines about that agency around class, gender and race, how much of Racheal’s agency is down to her being a woman, especially considering she started life in Simon’s mind as a man before he realised (after seeing Leo Butler’s 2001 play, Redundant) that he was writing about a woman. “Well,” he says, “something I wrote in the introduction to the book. and I don’t even know if it’s true but you know, I wrote it down once so I thought I’d say it out loud now: I wonder to what extent the emotional and psychological metabolism of the North is down to the women. The men were working so the women were raising the children and if the women were raising the children the women are more able to determine the emotional metabolism of the town aren’t they? We’re talking 20th century as opposed to 19th century when women were often working as well, and the second world war being the exception that tested that.”
“Gender” he continues, “is one of the defining axis of a character like economics, race, religion, experience, biography, DNA. When I was growing up as a student – and I’ve only really been interrogating this in the last five years – I always kind of worked from the assumption that economics was the defining motor of behaviour which is quite a Marxist historiography, i.e. that we only really do what we do because of how much money we’ve got, more so than gender. I don’t know if I believe that now. Which is a good thing I guess. The worst thing you can have as a dramatist is intellectual certainty.” Which brings us back to Simon’s ideas on the tricky notion of entitlement. He’s redefined it so that it encapsulates more than the hand-outs and arrogance that the word is usually associated with.
“I know certain kids of extraordinary youth,” he says, “I’m talking considerably pre-teen kids who would astonish me if they didn’t end up as leading lawyers or a cabinet ministers because they carry it about in their bodies: the sense that that is what they can do. It’s what every parent ought to encourage in their children. If you want to be a journalist/a playwright/a cabinet minister, you can be! You are entitled to! In places like Stockport it’s increasingly difficult to smash the shell of entitlement and say: Do you know what, you fucking can do it if you want. As a nation we ought to take responsibility for encouraging ourselves. I’m a boring fucking, middle-aged old social fucking democrat and I kind of think we’d be better off if we invested more in ourselves as a group.”
Written for Spoonfed:
In an achingly trendy space in Stokey, Tim Etchells is very modestly telling me about one of the best ways to present Shakespeare, ever! It’s a film that involves non-actors relating the plots of Shakespeare plays through objects on a table. So possibly how you might discuss Shakespeare over dinner (if you’re one of those families), but with a soundtrack and stuff.
One of the founders of theatre company Forced Entertainment, this latest work called Be Stone No More, is an example of one of Tim’s major interests as a theatre maker and visual artist: how to tell a story. It also reflects an interest he shares with the uber left-field FE, with whom he’s directing The Coming Storm at Battersea Arts Centre alongside his own show, Sight Is The Sense That Dying People Tend To Lose First.
What follows in the time he’s set aside for this interview proves him to be a brilliant thinker, a humble talker and a mine of great ideas and odd perspectives (not that 28 years with Forced Entertainment and his own solo shows hadn’t proved this decades before). Here’s some of the things he said about the visual power of language, his love for “democratic” story telling and why he hates the ends of novels.
‘A cat comes into a room’
“There’s a big interest for me” he begins, “in the way that language can make things happen. I can say something and you make the picture of that thing. So I can say ‘a cat comes into a room’ and language becomes a strange way of creating almost a virtual event or an imagined event. In The Coming Storm, one of the starting points is what is a story and what makes a good story? That strange power that language has to summon a set of events or people that aren’t here, I still find completely fascinating.”
In The Coming Storm, Tim directs Forced Entertainment in an exploration of narrative that looks at a plethora of themes. The company tells us they include all manner of things “from love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow. Personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies, and half-remembered novels bump into distorted fairytales.” When I ask him about how he selects ideas to be featured in the show he says:
“It’s a balance between those two things [themes and form]. Part of the content is the stories. It’s important for example, that one of the stories is about a family that’s starving, it’s important that another is about a first love and that one is about a death in a family…I’m always looking at things that have a particular way or a particular kind of currency. You feel it when you’re rehearsing, you can feel that there’s something strong about it” [Tim also uses the phrase “that's hot!” in this part of the interview but I fear that when transcribed, it may make him sound a little like Paris Hilton. He's the exact opposite of Paris Hilton]
“When I’m hunting for stuff I can use,” he continues, “content is part of that but so is the way performers can relate to each other and how they are as people. The whole thing with working with improvisation is that you’re drawing on quite a deep sense of who people are and what they’re like. You have this encounter with material and you also have an encounter with a group of people on stage in front of you, who are revealed in what they’re doing. Even if they’re being ridiculous, you see their capacity to be that ridiculous.”
Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First is a one man show, penned and directed by Tim and performed by Jim Fletcher. Jim played Gatsby in the epic eight hour-long show GATZ that saw New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service read and recreate the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel in its entirety on stage. Such a feat around a character as sedate as Gatsby requires a performer to have stamina, consistency and some sort of intangible allure. Jim lucked out on all fronts and his particular set of skills (if you’ll excuse the movie reference) that make him the perfect actor for this role. It explains why Tim wrote it with Jim in mind.
“It was written as a text and very unlike the process with FE and The Coming Storm” says Tim of Sight is the Sense… “That said, I was working very heavily off Jim’s performance because he’s very calm, very slow and I always say he’s very democratic in the way he performs because he makes everything as interesting as everything else.”
“Because I had him in mind,” he continues “I knew how to write it. It’s a strange meditative state that this text is in and that he’s in. So although he’s very calm and the text is moving from one thing to another in a kind of free-associating way, mentally, to watch it, it’s kind of a big swirl in your head. That’s different to The Coming Storm where a lot of the energy and the chaos is on the stage.”
“They’re all running about making music, telling stories and jumping around. In the Jim thing, it’s very simple and very still but there is a chaos in it and there’s a set of questions but it’s all happening in your head. One of the basic aims of it is that it tries to describe things that you already know. You know wood comes from trees, trees grow from the ground the ground is made of…. etc and in the world you don’t tend to think about those things much. For example when you’re talking, you don’t tend to think ‘what is language?’ So picking these things up and describing them becomes quite unsettling because we don’t normally do that. In trying to define it, it can become more unstable than it was previously. This text unlocks you into a zone where everything has to be clutched at.”
“It’s almost like there are two stories. There’s the one that’s happening on the stage and the one that’s happening in the minds of the audience. It’s a big thing for me and for FE to unlock that secondary narrative, that sense of an audience who can run with things in their own terms and go off with things in directions that we can’t really anticipate, I see that as a good thing.”
Sight is the Sense….with Jim Fletcher
Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First is a one man show, penned and directed by Tim and performed by Jim Fletcher. Jim played Gatsby in the epic eight hour-long show GATZ that saw New York theatre company Elevator Repair Service read and recreate the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel in its entirety on stage. Such a feat around a character as sedate as Gatsby requires a performer to have stamina, consistency and some sort of intangible allure. Jim lucked out on all fronts and his particular set of skills (if you’ll excuse the movie reference) that make him the perfect actor for this role. It explains why Tim wrote it with Jim in mind.
“It was written as a text and very unlike the process with FE and The Coming Storm” says Tim of Sight is the Sense… “That said, I was working very heavily off Jim’s performance because he’s very calm, very slow and I always say he’s very democratic in the way he performs because he makes everything as interesting as everything else.”
“Because I had him in mind,” he continues “I knew how to write it. It’s a strange meditative state that this text is in and that he’s in. So although he’s very calm and the text is moving from one thing to another in a kind of free-associating way, mentally, to watch it, it’s kind of a big swirl in your head. That’s different to The Coming Storm where a lot of the energy and the chaos is on the stage.”
“They’re all running about making music, telling stories and jumping around. In the Jim thing, it’s very simple and very still but there is a chaos in it and there’s a set of questions but it’s all happening in your head. One of the basic aims of it is that it tries to describe things that you already know. You know wood comes from trees, trees grow from the ground the ground is made of…. etc and in the world you don’t tend to think about those things much. For example when you’re talking, you don’t tend to think ‘what is language?’ So picking these things up and describing them becomes quite unsettling because we don’t normally do that. In trying to define it, it can become more unstable than it was previously. This text unlocks you into a zone where everything has to be clutched at.”
“It’s almost like there are two stories. There’s the one that’s happening on the stage and the one that’s happening in the minds of the audience. It’s a big thing for me and for FE to unlock that secondary narrative, that sense of an audience who can run with things in their own terms and go off with things in directions that we can’t really anticipate, I see that as a good thing.”
“…the story as a site of potential”
In all his years of exploring storytelling, I wonder if Tim has reached any conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. Inevitably, he steers clear of making sweeping statements and instead tells me what he’s learnt about himself:
“A completed story” he says, “I find that pretty problematic and difficult to deal with. I think it’s because as things wrap up and tidy themselves, basically I lose interest. I’m interested in the story as a site of potential where my mind goes racing in different directions. I’m like this with novels, often I like the first third, I don’t particularly care about the middle and the back end of it. I’m much more interested in the set up and the world and all of that much bigger stuff.”
And from that mind, no doubt a chaotic one bursting with language, events, characters and absolutely no conclusions comes The Coming Storm which runs at Battersea Arts Centre from November 20th to December 1st and Sight is The Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First which is at the same venue from 22nd -24th November.
From the writer-director of Harsh Times, comes the pretty average cop drama,End of Watch. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as partners in the LAPD, manning the streets of the notorious South Central district of LA, the film tries to portray events from the point of view of the policemen as much as possible. But this plan fails and what starts off as kind of genius becomes part of the film’s mediocrity.
It’s ingenuity lies in the questions it makes us ask. Although I think its aggression and emotional formula are on the same level as a lot of cop-dramas, it makes a really interesting point about the way we consume information about the police and the sources of that information.
Its most obvious way of doing this is to have Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal), start a film project and use the footage he collects to introduce us to his colleagues, capture car chases, document crime scenes and talk us through his day including the calls he answers, the weirdos he meets and his great banter with partner, Mike Zavala (Michael Pena).
Director David Ayer’s chosen subject here is partnerships and to his credit, he presents many dimensions of a variety of couplings that are essential to the force but also sacrificed in service to it. As well as the heartening brotherly love between Gyllenhaal and Pena, we see America Ferrara and Cody Horn as their colleagues lamenting the way that rookies can compromise their experienced partners. Frank Grillo as their superior orders us to empathise with said rookies and David Harbour as a lone ranger struggles with his humourless take on policing and we are effectively nudged to have empathy with him too. Humour, as Ayer’s characters show us, is essential to survival in a job like this.
But while his range and his characters are excellent, the whole police POV thing doesn’t quite work, mostly because Ayer feels like he has to set it up in order for us to get it. Is it really necessary for Gyllenhaal’s character to be taking a film class? This is a film afterall, Ayer’s can shoot it however he wants without giving one of his characters license to give their perspective. Unless the point he’s making is that police are rarely given the chance to give their perspective to a viewing public. If so, you could argue that they get to give their perspective where it matters most, in the courts.
It’s also really frustrating that he doesn’t bother giving Gyllenhaal anything to do with the footage he’s captured. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were a bit more thorough with the first person perspective but if you’re paying for Jake Gyllenhaal, you want his face in your film, so of course we seem him from a regular third person perspective as well as his own and his partners.
Not sticking with the first person angle also allows Ayer’s to show us the completely banal conversations between the gangsters who form the major, if short-lived, plot line when they put a hit on the two city cops. Their activities are depicted with appropriate abhorrence but my god, their conversations are ridiculous. The cops have much more to offer so why not stick with them? Particularly as the violent plot turns towards the end of this film, war-like as they are, could also be completely captivating if we hadn’t been spoonfed what was going to happen.
What starts off as interesting, if a little obvious, gets even more obvious but maintains its emotional core and although it becomes quite formulaic with that sentiment, End of Watch does pull all the right strings.
Despite my shoddy googling before going to see The Hatpin at Blue Elephant Theatre, I failed to realise why The Hatpin is called The Hatpin. So finding out at the end via Emma White’s moving solo left an unshakeable after-taste, the kind a musical about murder should leave.
Emma plays Clara Makin, daughter of baby farmers Charles and Agatha Makin who take in the illegitimate children of single women and charge them for the care which inevitably, they don’t deliver. Her character is a good example of everything that’s right and wrong with this Lazarus Theatre production. Clara is intentionally underdeveloped, stifled and mocked by her murderous mother. She is 16 but behaves like a 12 year-old which is simultaneously intriguing and really irritating. Her physical performance here is spot on, she creates an eerie character who knows far more than anyone else and as such becomes something horribly creepy.
Similarly, Kate Playdon as Agatha Makin is hilariously arch and contributes to some welcomed momentary changes in tone. But the lines given to these characters in James Millar’s 2008 book do them few favours. It’s a very classic, lazy look at villains from 1879 that would have had much more impact if Millar approached them through more consciously contemporary eyes.
Sadly his neglect of the characters in this respect doesn’t let up so the depiction of the whole appalling affair is limited by the original text. Were director Ricky Dukes to take a less faithful hand to it, we might have something more sophisticated. But his deft approach does challenge the claggy, overly traditional text.
His use of space is near perfect, the movement is also engaging and clever and he’s got some outstanding solo singers in his cast. Particularly Eleanor Sandars as Harriet Piper, best friend of Amber Murray, the most vocal mother willing to challenge the Makins in court. Sandars voice is clear and well-projected and she sings with conviction. But it’s during the harmonies that things get a little too shrill. A degree of sharp panic is appropriate for this show but there’s often a lack of control and clarity when it comes to the sound and sometimes it feels like the voices are competing with the music.
Still, Lazarus do bring out the disturbing nature of this musical to great effect and leave me unnerved. But it’s a shame this feeling isn’t succinctly manipulated throughout.
The Serpent’s Tooth by playwright David Watson is one of the richest new plays I’ve seen all year. Taking its audience to an England under occupation in the tunnels beneath Shoreditch Town Hall, it conjures a land cogently unsure of what it stands for. Inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, it looks at what happens after the death of Lear’s daughters and allows the country that exists in their wake to draw on the family’s most disturbing notions of each other.
Dropping us in what seems to be a totalitarian state, it becomes clear that despite attempts at uniformity, “England is grieving” as one seemingly nonchalant guard puts it and nothing here is as it seems. No one is sure of who they are or what they’re doing and as the audience are corralled through vast corridors and tiny rooms, we get to watch them figure it out. The most confused is Abina (the completely absorbing Babou Ceesay), an official who arrives at the prison in which the play is set, to ensure that the villainous Edmund gets a fair trial and is duly punished.
Formal, polite and lacking identification, Abina is keen to prove he’s on side, a servant of the nation as much as anyone else. He comes up against a weasely, loquacious prison warden (witty and unsettling Alexander Campbell) who fiercely guards the elusive Edmund.
Outwitted at every turn, Abina, straddles his loyalty to England and his foreignness which is reinforced by everyone he meets there. At the same time, he struggles with his ideas about fairness and justice. He preaches an ethos for an undecided nation and ends up exacting his own version of trial and punishment.
David’s writing is a perfect example of using Shakespeare as part of our country’s story and continuing a discussion about loyalty and rule that the Bard began. Masterfully he has also created something that doesn’t require previous knowledge of Lear at all. But if you are familiar with the Shakespeare story that spawned The Serpent’s Tooth you can draw on it in the many many ensuing discussions.
There’s way too much to say about the effectively varied female guards (Alisha Bailey, Charlie Covell, Imogen Doel and Olivia Morgan) in his hour-long story to fit into this review but I can tell you that their changing positions reflect a multi-dimensional take on women and force. Similarly, Edmund is not a simple villain. His charges being so unspecific and compounded point at the boogie man he has become. A cartoon character to depict evil who, once destroyed, will leave England free to be good again.
My one criticism regards the audience. Shepherded by guards, we never really understand why are we there. Are we Edmund’s fellow prisoners? Are we conspirators? Are we rebels? Because to be simply voyeurs of this story in this particular setting, leaves something missing. More structure to the audience role in relation to the talented performers who play the guards is needed. Nonetheless, I really hope The Serpent’s Tooth is given extended life after this run.
After launching in 1998, theatre company Shunt have established themselves as key purveyors of site-specific theatre. Now that they’ve left their well etablished Shunt Vaults in Bermondsey, they’ve set up camp in The Biscuit Factory where their new show, The Architects will run from 27th November.
I spoke to two of the founders, David Rosenberg and Louise Mari at their rehearsal space, the equally bizarre home of Theatre Delicatessen in Marylebone Gardens. The two are incredibly synchronised. They appear to read each others thought, adding to them succinctly and literally finishing each other’s sentences, which made transcribing this interview kind of hard. But here, for your reading pleasure are 5 things you should know about Shunt’s new production, The Architects. 1. It’s not about a minotaur
In the most commonly known version of the Greek myth, the city of Athens sends King Minos of Crete a group of children to be sacrificed to the raging minotaur, imprisoned in an endless maze. More interesting for Shunt are the questions about what led them to do this. On the surface there was the imminent, repeated threat of King Minos. A little deeper and there is the creation of a monster and the need to feed it at the expense of a seemingly weaker community. For our favourite interpretations see Ancient Greece for Kids (“Whenever King Minos was bored, he took his navy and attacked Athens”)
On a more serious note, there are also the ideas of maintaining control and placing blame and the notion of dealing with a creature that is not fully understood. There’s the challenge of creating an inescapable maze for such a creature and whether or not to assume it lacks sense. The minotaur has turned up in countless interpretations including Japanese animation called Tekkonkinkreet where he appears without origins or motive. In Dante’s Inferno, the beast is taunted, damned and distracted by those who have power in the narrative whereas in Asterion, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, we are given the minotaur’s perspective. Borges presents a playful but lonely character befuddled by his predicament and accepting of his fate.
“There are many different versions” says David, “and they all have an influence on what we’re creating. There’s a particular feature of the story that’s interesting: the potential propaganda about a vicious beast. For whatever reason there is a monster that’s created and the viciousness of that monster – or people’s fear of that – drives some other agenda. In the Borges story, the minotaur is actually quite easy to kill and there’s something quite pathetic about that.”
2.They made a sex-machine
A machine that aids sex? Or provides it? Who knows? We can discuss the details later. For now, know that the main character Shunt focus on is Daedalus, the architect who designed the labyrinth to enclose this beast. “He also made a kind of machine” explains David “which allowed the queen of Minos to have sex with a bull and conceive the minotaur. So we’re interested in erm, you could say, the broad range of skills that this character has.”
3. They want to confuse you “A particular concern in this piece, is about labyrinths and disorientation and the audience not knowing where they are or being confused as to how they imagine the space to be. So it was about creating a disorientating environment with surprises where we don’t reveal the space to them at all.”
Louise adds: “I think we create a world which is subtly changing so you’re never quite sure. We always work in a way that’s quite abstract.”
On the labyrinth David explains that “to be disorientated, you have to be orientated prior to that. So it’s not just about throwing shit-loads of confusion at an audience.
We’re also interested it the idea that Daedalus and the architects are working for tyrants but they have a job that they’re passionate about. The money allows them to make their work but it’s filthy money.”
4. You’ll have to work out the politics yourself.
As Louise mentioned, Shunt are always abstract but their shows tend to reflect the environment they grown in. Their show Money for example was already being put together before the 2008 crash. Now with Greece in the state that it’s in socially and fiscally, it’s hard not to draw parallels about fearmongering. But Louise and David are certain there’s nothing immediately obvious in the show about the real world conversation you could draw.
“There is a climate,” says David “a political climate and an economic climate, in which we are making a show so the work develops under the influence of those events
and we’re very focused on European concerns. The fact that we’re exploring a Greek myth when contemporary Greece is really on the edge is a strong point of interest for us.”
“But” says Louise, “not to the extent that someone who came to the show might be able to read it as a political metaphor, there’s nothing that overt. When we’re making a show we try to do something that picks up on a current climate and whatever’s prevailing in that climate will inevitably unfold, sometimes in a very public way.”
5.You have a role to play
But you don’t have to do anything. “The audience shareholders in one of our shows [Money]” says Louise, “or they’re co-conspirators in another show [Dance, Bear, Dance]. It doesn’t mean they have to participate in a terrifying way but they are included in the performance, they aren’t simply voyeurs.”
“We should point out there are some things we can’t say” says David, “because the experience of the audience not knowing much about the environment they’re going into is key. We can say the architects are Danish though.”
