Constipated Entitlement and Emotional Metabolisms: An interview with Simon Stephens on Port

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.” 

Port runs at National Theatre until 24th March.

Interview: Tim Etchells on Language and Mental Chaos

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.

5 Things You Should Know About The Architects by Shunt

Written for Spoonfed:

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.”

Image by Adam Trigg

Preview: Arab Nights, Part 1 of 3 (on Language)

Metta Theatre create theatre that insists the audience are included in the telling of a story. From 21st November, they’ll be at Soho Theatre with their production of Arab Nights, a collection of short performances that respond to recent ongoing events in the Middle East and North Africa, giving the audience ultimate power over the protagonist, Shahrazad.

The line-up includes works by Hassan Abdulrazzak, writer of Baghdad Wedding, Egyptian Storyteller Chirine El Ansary, writer and journalist Ghalia Kabbani, live artist Tania El Khoury and Palestinian human rights lawyer and Orwell Prize-winning writer Raja Shehadeh.

The works take their inspiration from 1001 Nights and explore issues that vary from the “security wall” bordering Palestine to the Louboutin’s that belong to President Assad’s wife. We spoke to  Raja, Tania and curator of the event, Poppy Burton-Morgan about the powers of myth in dealing with contemporary politics.

What do you think of the language used in Britain around the subject of the uprisings in the MENA region?
Tania: The uprisings further impress upon the world the need to understand the MENA region and its people on its own terms. Unfortunately, that continues to not be the case as terms like Arab Spring, Arab Awakening, and a host of other phrases used to describe recent developments seek only to perpetuate the plotting of the region and its people on a linear trajectory in which the West is advanced and the rest is behind trying to catch up.

It is not so much about appropriateness or style. It is about the ways in which the language being used seeks to blunt the sharp critique that the uprisings offer about the status quo of the MENA region, the role of Western powers in propping up such a status quo, and the insistence that everyday people in the region are incapable of charting their own path, knowing their own interests, and asserting their own preferences.

Poppy: Semantics is a tricky thing – to allow us to maintain any kind of discourse on the subject we need a shared set of terms by which we can debate. But equally, generalised catch-all terms can and do perpetuate  ignorance. I struggle with the term ‘Arab Spring’ – implying as it does a finite time period (with events having started long before Spring 2011 and continuing to unfold even as I write this in ‘Winter 2012′). One of the ‘Arab Nights’ writers is Iranian, but Iran is not an ‘Arab’ country. And there are significant populations of Arab Christians in the ‘Muslim World’. Ultimately I think it’s vital that we keep interrogating these terms and that we don’t necessarily accept the language of political scientists as the best way to represent the diversity of the subject. Language is often an imprecise tool and equally a constantly evolving one – yesterday’s ‘politically correct’ term can be today’s ‘morally abhorrent’.

Next Question: Other than its setting, what appeals to you about the tales of Shahrazad? will post tomorrow (it’s a long interview)

Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall talk Constellations at Duke of York’s Theatre

I had 7 minutes with Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall and this is what the three of us came up with (Written for Spoonfed):

This Friday the heartbreaking Royal Court Theatre play Constellations will show the West End what it really means to be romantic. Written by Nick Payne and directed by Michael Longhurst, this structurally unforgettable play stars the disarming Sally Hawkins and the downright cheeky Rafe Spall.

Sally, who delivered a dark dose of reality to the kids in Never Let Me Go and a bigger dose of sunshine in Happy-Go-Lucky plays quantum physicist Marianne. Contemplating the many possibilities of the multiverse, she charges head first into a relationship with the more stoic, straight-talking beekeeper Roland.

We caught up with the indomitably jolly pair at a press junket where they revealed their own take on romance, how acting can make you self-conscious and why their characters are so alluring.

Constellations would have us believe that Marianne and Roland have romantic jobs, what’s your idea of a really romantic profession?
Rafe: Roland’s a beekeeper and I think the idea of a beekeeper is quite romantic but in practice, it’s really hard work because effectively it’s like being a farmer and a beekeeper is the sort of job that people only really do in plays.

Sally: It’s your perception of a job, you put the romance on it. Like with beekeeping, you do embellish it with a kind of romance but it is also a lovely, earthy sort of job. I think it depends on who you are and then any job can be romantic, you can make it so.

Rafe: I think working in a book shop is quite romantic. Maybe like a travel book shop, in west London or something. I’ve just come up with a really good idea for a film. I’m gonna patent that. That’s just come to me. Actually, if anyone is passion about something, it can become quite sexy. I find people who are incredibly intelligent very attractive.

Sally: People who have a skill that you have no idea about like musicians, they pick up something up and you go: Wow.

Rafe: Like me and my saxophone

Sally: Yes, he’s very sexy with his sax

Rafe: I call it a sexophone.

Sally: [laughing] That’s gross.

Your characters have jobs that help them make sense of their lives, how does acting inform your take on life?
Rafe: It’s like what comes first, is it my interest in people that informs my acting or my love of acting which informs my interest in people? I think my interest in people is probably why I like acting so much. I’m happy to sit on a tube or I n a café listening to other people’s inane conversations, it’s my curiosity.

Sally: It’s the psychology of how people think and why they say certain things; unlocking that as an actor is interesting. It makes you think about your own reactions and how extreme people can be in certain situations and it’s just fascinating what makes people tick and why they do what they do.

Rafe: It can make you very introverted

Sally: Do you think?

Rafe: Maybe that’s the wrong use of the word but you can worry too much about how you’re coming across because you’re so interested in the mechanics of what makes up a person’s personality.

What makes Roland and Marianne work?
Rafe: They’re so different in so many ways. Roland is very earthy and Marianne is in the brain, she’s all about physics and what makes up the world. He’s like a tree and she’s like a bee that goes around it. He’s always constant but she’s this brilliant woman who’s up in the air all the time.

Sally: Those two extremes are so lovely but you wouldn’t necessarily put them together. That’s why they should be together. They completely compliment each other, it makes sense and it’s so unusual.  That’s what’s beautiful about it, how they stumble across each other by accident, and that’s luck isn’t it. Also that way of really respecting someone’s passion is so attractive. You’ve got someone who is passionate about beekeeping and someone who loves trying to work out how the universe works. To see something like that in someone when you have no idea how their mind thinks or how they do what they do – that’s beautiful.

Constellations runs at Duke of York’s Theatre from 9th November 2012 until 5th 2013 January

 

Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, sex and scandals: Declan Donnellan on Bel Ami

Ignore the blatantly SEO-ed title and the article isn’t that much of a sell out.

Written for Spoonfed

Declan Donnellan, co-director of Bel Ami, is positively effervescent on the phone. With fellow director Nick Omerod sitting next to him, he’s brimming with stories about Robert Pattinson’s commitment, Uma Thurman’s expressive face and the process of film directing which he’s thrilled by and in awe of. He talks corruption and women, envy and death as he promotes the release of the Bel Ami DVD which is out now.

The film is an adaptation of Guy De Maupassant’s 1885 novel of the same name. Written with disdain for gossip and the whole idea of climbing the ladder, Maupassant wrote his own epitaph which reflects, in its own creepy way, the nature of Robert Pattison’s leading character in Bel Ami: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing” Maupassant wrote.

As well as boasting the Twilight star and Uma Thurman among its leading cast, the film has Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas topping the credits. The women are players in the heady realms of Paris’ high society of the late 19th century. They’re a group that Pattinson’s character, George Duroy, storms into and shags to his (and their) delight with the purpose of not just getting his rocks off but accumulating his own wealth, contacts and position in society.

“I think sex is a central part of life” says Declan of the dominant theme in his film. “It’s one of the greatest forces of the world, we ignore it at our peril”.  One of Duroy’s first encounters with the women in Bel Ami sees the master manipulation of a newspaper editor by these women as they champion Duroy as a writer despite his inexperience. It’s an encounter that reflects aesthetic and sexual desire as a driving force. “It’s present in everything however much we joke about it” Declan asserts, “it is central and it does change things.”
But sex is one part of a film adaptation that both Declan and Nick have had on their minds for some time. “I think it’s so much about now” he says, “it’s about journalism it’s about corruption in journalism. There’s a corrupt media who’s trying to cover up the governments invasion of an Arab country for it’s wealth. It’s about politicians getting mixed up with newspapers in order and publishing lies in order to get into power and it’s about that too cosy relationship. It is also about sex and celebrity and getting to the top with very little clout. That’s Robert’s character, a businessman with one commodity to sell.”

And there’ll always be a market for that. “All of these women are married” he continues, “but interestingly, none of them are unhappily married. All of them want to preserve what they have and he’s a bit on the side. The cliché is of the woman stuck in the unhappy marriage and a glamorous young man comes along to save her, but this isn’t that at all.”

Instead, it’s about the games involved in the pursuit of everything. “Somebody once said something to me that was very stupid” says Declan. “It was very interesting but it was also stupid. I was talking about envy and I was saying how terrible it is that none of us can get rid of our envy and this person said well, yes you can get rid of your envy, you can get rid of envy by getting it all. And I thought what a stupid thing to say, you can’t get it all because for one thing, you’re going to die. That’s one bit of ‘all’ that you’re not going to get.”

Then his tone takes on a much darker, more philosophical tone that smacks of Hollywood disillusion and he says: “To be honest, we all want it all, it just depends how we define ‘all’. Some people are very entitled, they don’t understand that they maybe have to give up some things in order to get other things. George sees something that other people have, he wants it so he just takes it. Everything is his or it should be. That seems to be a modern phenomenon, the way we live like everybody can have it all: everybody can have everything, everybody can be famous and rich and everybody can be young no one is ever going to die.”

But he cheers up when he talks about putting the film together. “It was a dream I loved being on set”, he enthuses, “but we were  under incredible pressure. Nick and I worked as co-directors, he’d look after the cameras and I’d look after the actors. I still don’t know really how one person can direct a whole movie because there are so many questions that you have to answer all the time. We’d arrive in the same car, Nick would get out of one side and I’d get out of the other, a pair of umbrellas over our heads and we’d hardly see each other till lunchtime. We were massacred, eaten alive with questions, it was thrilling.”

Nick and Declan are better know for their work as co-directors of Cheek by Jowl theatre company. “In theatre and film you’re bottling life.” he says of the two mediums. “Work in theatre gave us tremendous confidence, especially in editing. (When you work with Shakespeare, you get very used to editing). But in both you’re trying to challenge and surprise the actor into giving you a moment of life. In theatre, you’ve got to help them recreate it night after night, in film it has to be bottled just once.”

Bel Ami is out on DVD now on Blu-ray, DVD & EST, courtesy of StudioCanal

Artists, Doctors and Blaggards: An interview with Nadia Fall

Written for Spoonfed, London Theatre
“I’m a doctor and nothing gets in the way of that. Nothing!” Yeah, I had a choice, I could have started this article with a George Bernard Shaw quote. It would have been relevant to his play The Doctor’s Dilemma soon to run at National Theatre. It would have been pertinent to our times and damning of the medical profession. Or, I could have chosen a cheesy line from E.R. And yes, I chose E.R and not just because Doug Ross is a boss but because the rock star image of self-sacrificing, life-saving emergency medicine plays a part in our perception of doctors, as does our real life experiences with them and those perceptions and experiences have changed rapidly.

In the damning preface to his 1906 play, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw writes: “The tragedy of illness at present is that it delivers you helplessly into the hands of a profession which you deeply mistrust, because it not only advocates and practises the most revolting cruelties in the pursuit of knowledge…but, when it has shocked the public, tries to reassure it with lies of breath-bereaving brazenness.”

His words apply to the challenge facing charismatic Dr Ridgeon (Aden Gillet) who discovers what could be a cure for tuberculosis. As he struggles to decide who to trial it on, he meets Jennifer Dubedat (Genevieve O’Reilly) whose artist husband (Tom Burke), she believes, should be saved. But Ridgeon also has a colleague who, while not as brilliant as Dubedat, may be more deserving. By the end of the play, at least one of them is dead.

Unlike the Dr. Dougs of the medical world, GPs are perhaps the most obvious target of mistrust and scepticism in 2012. Comparatively short working hours and high salaries make them an easy target and the increased inclination to run their services with business models in mind doesn’t help.

It wasn’t the case in the ’70s when director Nadia Fall’s grandparents arrived in the UK having worked in India and Africa. During a break from rehearsals of The Doctor’s Dilemma, she reminds me that back then, there was a certain status, a respect for doctors that ties in with Shaw’s notion of a “high-character”, a personality type which we, as a nation, used to assume came with the profession.

Now the personalities of doctors are viewed with more variation. TV tells us Emergency Medicine is full or rock stars, Surgery is full of pendants who think they’re rock stars and dermatologists are a little socially challenged. Nadia, who comes from a family of doctors, has something more useful to offer: “My uncle who’s a surgeon is really confident,” she says, “he’s really ambitious, quite arrogant, quite pompous but delightful and well-meaning. Members of my family who work with children are more approachable. And that’s what Shaw shows us, all sorts of doctors. There’s some quackery involved, sure, but he doesn’t paint them as evil or two-dimensional, they do have redeeming qualities and he makes us think about those.”

The quackery fuels much of the comedy and though Nadia confesses she’s not easily tickled, she admits: “the arrogance makes me laugh. The complete 180 degree turns they make on their own arguments make me laugh. So does the shock of what they’re doing. While not anything unbelievable, the power we give doctors is laughable. This play is one of those situations where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. That’s Shaw for you, he doesn’t make things black and white and at any time – I hope this comes across in the production – what he’s doing is trying to trump you and your perceptions. So you think you’re really for one character and then hang on a minute, they’re talking rubbish. He’s showing humanity, nobody is pure evil or purely stupid, we are all so many things.”

Take the artist, Louis Dubedat who’s wife is vying for him to get onto those trials. He is easily regarded as interesting and bohemian but also amoral and not particularly likeable. But Nadia disagrees: “How dissimilar is he to Ridgeon though?” she asks. “I read the artist differently – and I find myself sometimes alone in this – but I think he’s very likeable. I find him charismatic and dangerous. He is quite beguiling and arrogant and I know lots of people, especially young men in the arts who are like that. And he is young, you know, he’s a young guy. It’s too easy to write him off as an arse and simply a blaggard like the doctors do. But I’m quite charmed by this artist.”

His wife is an equally difficult character. “She’s fighting for her out-there, addict type of husband and your instinct is to think ‘Girl please, get a grip!’ so it’s hard to empathise with her. But Genevieve [O'Reilly] – who is absolutely wonderful – has brought such a strong, earth-rooted interpretation to the part that I think she’s turned it on its head. She is vulnerable and burdened by her husband but she’s strong and driven and I really think her reading of the part is particularly refreshing. In fact, I would say it’s her story. What happens to this woman by act five is a coming of age.”

Shaw doesn’t make sweeping statements about his characters, nor does he attack doctors in his long socialist preface. Instead, he attacks our way of looking at the medical profession and the systems that we don’t challenge. He attacks a stagnation we accept. “Shaw wrote this long before the NHS” says Nadia, “but he had a vision for it and now our NHS is being slowly dismantled. Until you’re ill and vulnerable you don’t think about it and then when it affects you, boy does it affect you. Now it affects everybody.”

The Doctor’s Dilemma runs at National Theatre from 17th July until 12th September. 

images by Johan Persson

Cadillacs, Coke Floats and Girls: An interview with Rory Keenan

Written for Spoonfed:

I’m half-way through a conversation with actor Rory Keenan when he says -not really out of the blue -: “In Ireland these days, there’s increased emigration numbers simply because there’s very few jobs.” It’s obvious but easily forgotten and you’ll be reminded of it if you’re going to see the Donmar Warehouse production of Brian Friel’s tragi-comedy, Philadelphia, Here I Come!

One of Friel’s best-known plays, the story follows disillusioned Gar O’Donnell, an extrovert trapped in an introvert surrounded by brilliantly mad women and his surly father in the small town of Ballybeg. He falls more or less into that bracket of 19-24 year-olds whose numbers in Ireland have decreased by 12% since 2011 and they are leaving at an astonishing rate: 3,000 people a month, averaging 111 a day, so the recent stats tell us.

But Gar, unlike his 2012 counterparts, is stationed firmly in 1964 and his dreams are often unfairly reduced to “Cadillacs, coke floats and girls”. However, since Friel cleverly splits his lead in two, we get to hear from public Gar (played by Paul Reid), the one everybody gets to see, and private Gar, (played by Rory) as he confronts his past on the night he plans to leave for The States.

Each side of Gar reveals the desperation constructed by the past, which he looks at through a glaringly skewed prism and the public dialogue rests on inhibited communication and affection between him and his dad.He exists at a time when Irish prime minister Sean Lemass’ was making his attempt pull the country out of its protectionists ways à la De Valera and into the wider economy. In fact, Lemass graced the cover of TIME magazine (on this very day 49 years ago) for his efforts, however flawed they might have been. Gar too is making his way into the world or at least relishing the idea of it.

Today, Rory talks eloquently about “a migratory type dream within all of us”. He sheepishly admits to being an Irishman who’s never seen a production of the 1964 play, a piece of theatre so well known because “it broke a certain mould of its time when it was written” he says, “the idea that you can communicate one character with two people was quite a modern idea at the time.”

As well as separating the two sides of Gar, Friel hit on a something universal and runs with it quite sentimentally. “Whether it’s to America or Australia or anywhere,” says Rory, “there is often this idea of restarting somewhere else.”

He lends weight to an argument against the notion that Friel’s play must be viewed as a period piece now, as Christina Hunt Mahoney put it in Irish Theatre Magazine earlier this year. “Nothing will enable a contemporary audience to partake of Gar’s longing for exotic hamburgers and Cokes” she writes, “his Ballybeg world is now more foreign to our experience than are the major American cities.”

She has a point about the fading vision of the American dream. However, in 2012, not only are we familiar with the bright lights of the commodified States, but we’re tired of it. One part of our response to this production, directed by Lyndsey Turner, will rest on our understanding of what followed Lemass’ efforts and the booms and busts that echoed globally.

Conversely, Gar’s most private thoughts are fixed in what Rory explains is “a vivid idea of a far away place where he can start afresh and indulge in the fantasies that he’s indulged in in his own bedroom. Even though they might not be real, it’s their attractiveness that lifts any depression. And any notion of depression is only a few seconds away from madness or comedy.”

“Even if you take the most – if you will – boring person and you split them into two,” says Rory, “you’ll find something really interesting about the psychology of that person. This play brings that to the fore and displays how complex even the plainest individual is.”

“We’re constantly having to return to the idea that we are a single person” he continues about the way he and Paul (Reid) work. “Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, a person’s private side might be called into question and sometimes a person’s public side might be called into question. We don’t see it as a half and a half. Sometimes the private side of him will have more input into the world and sometimes the public side with have more input so it’s a share and share alike situation.”

Trouble is, they’re sharing a complex character. “He’s absolutely in his own head and it’s probably a symptom of his home life. He has this stilted relationship with his father, his mother isn’t around and he has this complex thing going on with his lovelife. And he’s an only child too. All these factors add up to him having to create friends. May be that’s why he indulges himself really vividly in music and movies. There’s a lot of scope for invisible friends here. ”

Unlike most actors I’ve interviewed, Rory locks into the big ideas around his character almost refusing to be insular about this role, which is rare and refreshing. He talks politics and psychology and happily, he can’t think of any specific examples when I ask how he might relate to his character’s way of looking at the past. “There’s The Sliding Doors effect,” he offers, “but you have to accept your losses and move forward. A lot of this play is about that, it’s about making friends with your ghosts.”

Philadelphia, Here I Come! runs at Donmar Warehouse from 26th July – 22nd September

Images: 1st – Paul Reid and Rory Keenan by Simon Kane, 2nd- Rory Keenan, Laura Donnelly and Paul Reid by Hugo Glendinning.

Taking a magnifying glass to the Egyptian Revolution: An interview with Christopher Haydon

“I’ve only been thinking about this in the last week,” says Christopher Haydon, “but I mean 15% turn out!?” This is the artistic director of Gate Theatre on news of Egyptian elections. “You have to compare that with 80% in November,” he continues. “That’s a catastrophic drop. The disillusionment in Egypt is huge.”

Addressing the revolutionary events in January 2011, Christopher’s latest production, The Prophet, written by Hassan Abdulrazzak makes a lot of the experience of those events. The script, inspired by interviews conducted with people in Cairo, follows young engineer Layla. Struggling in a stagnant marriage and frustrated by slow political progress, she places herself in the thick of Tahrir square and is invigorated by it.

With the election stats on his mind, Christopher taps into what creates the changes now symbolised in Tahrir Square. “I hope that people who looked at Egypt in January last year and thought ‘Oh well, of course Egypt’s going to go to shit’, will watch this play and come to think that nothing is inevitable and nothing is irreversible. That energy, that excitement that was felt in those 18 days, that has to be re-found.”

I don’t this is meant as political as it sounds., he’s not looking to create an activist piece of theatre. He’s talking about people, our fallibility and our humanity, the great things we’re capable of and the piss poor state of affairs we allow to continue “It’s about reminding people of where something came from, creating a consciousness that things don’t have to keep going the way they are. It’s not an event, it’s a process.”

But that’s a tall order for an hour and forty minute-show, the programming of which says a lot about Christopher and his vision for The Gate: ‘London’s International Theatre’. Taking over the 70-seater fringe venue in Notting Hill has had Christopher readdressing that tagline. “For The Gate, its internationalism should interrogate what it means to be international. It should look at those processes that shape the world, that drive globalisation, it should look at those forces, those ideas, that engine behind change that gives someone this international perspective. ”

Perspective is what must set The Prophet apart. If it provides a new perspective, it can avoid that overused generic label: topical! To engage with its subject matter and reflect the universal, human capabilities that Christopher is so impressed by, The Prophet has to present a new angle on something familiar. For him, this is the individual and the detail.

“The news coverage is about tens of thousands of people in Tahrir square,” he explains, “it’s about Mubarak stepping down, it’s about the big things. But what you can do in a theatre is take a magnifying glass and find an individual within that and say what was it like for this person? By fictionalising it, you can have more fun as well. For an audience of outsiders like us, it’s about creating something that gives a different way of accessing what happened and the aim of The Prophet was to explore that nexus between those large scale events and the personal ones.”

For Layla and her writer husband Hisham, however, their own independent personal events aren’t just connected to the larger ones, they’re engulfed by them. Ahead of his brutally romantic play Tender Napalm last year, Philip Ridley told me “none of the relationships we have are just about that relationship. They’re always about where we are at that stage in our lives, and how the world is at that stage in our lives.” It seems especially fitting for these two characters within the grey shades of the secular left. Disunited, disconnected “they find their scruples challenged” as Christopher puts it.

“You do have political arguments between characters in the play. Layla’s boss is an old Mubarakite, his argument is look, I’m a Coptic Christian. If the Muslim Brotherhood comes into power then I’m going to be victimised, of course I don’t want them to win, of course I want Mubarak to stay, that’s safer. And Layla, this young radical, can’t stand that her boss is conservative.”

“For me” he says “those conversations aren’t the most interesting.The most interesting thing is when characters crash into themselves and can’t resolve something.”

I’m not sure the two are so different. To me, the former leads to the latter. These specific political arguments are what makes a play stand out. They enable writers to pull the political through the domestic and more often than not, they tap into ideas beyond the specific time and place of their setting. They reveal how a character thinks. Take Chicken Soup with Barley which you can boil down to its family-focused essentials, or read for clues to the decline of socialism in the UK or both. Either way, in Wesker’s play the initial scene that sees a family stare out of a window onto a fascist march in east London is what spurs discussions of beliefs, values, ambitions, priorities and relationships. And these discussion are what cause the characters to crash into themselves.

“In a way,” he reconsiders, “the 15% is brilliant because it shows people aren’t being suckered by what’s happening. Yes, the fact that there is disillusionment with the process could be really bad because it could be a sign that people are retreating into their shells and saying we knew it wasn’t gong to work, we’re screwed. But it could also be a sign that there’s more to come.”

Inside the rehearsal room of Tender Napalm

This not in any way , shape or form “embedded criticism”

Written for Spoonfed:

Under the arches near Southwark Playhouse, Tom Byam Shaw and Lara Rossi, the new cast for the return of Philip Ridley’s Tender Napalm, are locked in a pretty sexy game of chicken. Far from my office-based 9 to 5, this is work for them.

Pacing towards each other, they challenge, intimidate and threaten before a sinister hissing arises as they circle one another with a resoluteness that makes me feel uncomfortable. Their chemistry is seriously impressive considering they’re only in the first week of rehearsals of a play that consistently proves itself to be difficult to describe. Lauded across the board, Tender Napalm is a gloriously metaphorical, funny, uplifting, devastating argument between a man and a woman and it gives you the feeling these characters have been at this urgent impasse before.

That notion of familiarity makes a second viewing of this play very tempting and the casting of Lara and Tom does too. Their lines this morning are steeped in fantasy and they’re surrounded by images of monkeys, grenades, explosions, tropical flowers and on one mood board, a series of dildos shaped like dolphins.

As they dissect the script, Tom is occupied by the sibilance in his lines, aware of the intensity he brings to this role – don’t catch his eye in the street, this guy will just stare right back at you. He is the unnamed Man as Lara is the unnamed Woman in this two-hander and while Jack Gordon gave Man a swagger to contend with, Tom lets his softness take centre stage and David goes about eliciting small bursts of cockiness in his rapidly forming performance.

Similarly, Lara’s physical confidence brings out the boisterous nature beneath Woman’s vulnerability, she has a power in her delivery I didn’t expect. The power and the far away exotic imagery of this conflict are put into context with director David Mercatali’s sage advice as they rehearse a painful but delicate scene. “Arguments exist for different reasons” he explains, “sometimes we need a distraction, sometimes we need to be scared”.

Maybe Tom should be scared. He is at one point tied up in a cave, his only human contact being with the woman who tied him up there in the first place. It’s during the rehearsal of this scene that I get to see what David means when he says “Actors impulses constantly surprise me and in rehearsal rooms, they create the best drama. They can become so immersed in what they’re doing, that what they produce comes from their impulses, it can’t come from direction.”

“This is your chance to create the grotto” he says simply to Lara who’s about to approach the cave “by reacting to your surroundings”. Suddenly there are sticky floors and cramped tunnels in a dark, damp cave with no set designer present and only Lara moving from one end of the room to another. And then one more moment of spontaneous theatrical brilliance before I have to go. I can’t give it away – I don’t even know if it’s staying in the play – but in escaping Lara, Tom flees the cave in a way none of us saw coming.

“The only concern when you see something like that” says David clearly impressed by Tom’s intuition “is that now they have to recreate it. It’s now my job to interpret their choice and make them intellectually understand it so they can do it again in front of an audience.”