Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Making A Show of our Politics

      by

      Emma Burnell on Triggered

      Earlier this year, Emma Burnell‘s Triggered sold out its run in the lovely Lion & Unicorn Theatre. It’s now about to start a second run in the equally delightful White Bear Theatre from 22 November. Although it might be too late to get tickets as this has now sold out too! (We recommend checking with the venue for returns.) But sold out or not, we still grabbed the chance to chat with Emma about the show, reviewing herself and selling out.

      Diving straight in, tell us what audiences can expect from Triggered?

      Triggered is about the fictional deselection of a Labour MP. So first and foremost, it’s a play about political processes and the people to whom they matter.

      But in truth, it’s about the real human beings that get involved in politics. I tried to look at the question of deselections from every angle – without taking a view. When we showed it the first time in the summer, we had the head of Momentum (the pro-Corbyn organisation) in and the head of Labour to Win (the pro-Starmer group) who both enjoyed it and both thought it made their case!

      We get a laugh out of the byzantine nature of the rulebook, but what I wanted to show is that people in politics at all levels are trying to do their best. There aren’t any bad guys in Triggered – just good people with different perspectives.

      Triggered played a short run earlier this year in Lion & Unicorn, how did you feel went? Have you changed or revisited anything in the play for this second run?

      It went really well. We had incredibly responsive audiences who seemed to really love it. It was so interesting talking to them afterward and hearing their responses to it. Everyone has a different theory about it! It is so funny when people tell me that I wrote it with one aim or another in mind – and they all contradict each other. But the joy is – they do want to talk about it afterwards. That makes me feel like we’ve really achieved something.

      I believe you had some Labour MPs attend, did they have any feedback on how the play reflected life in the Labour party?

      They said it was almost too real! One night we even had a Labour whip in at the same time as an MP who was in trouble with leadership and whips. Luckily none of them was Gavin Williamson and everything was fine. The Whip was laughing a lot at the scenes about the discipline so that was good.

      They were actually kind enough to make a video of their reactions.

      [embedded content]

      It must be a fantastic feeling to have sold out your second run but does it also bring any additional nerves or pressure with it?

      In some ways I think it makes it easier. Audiences are lovely and responsive and give the actors so much energy. So, when we play to a full house, I think it just helps us all bring just a little something extra. However, we do need to make sure that whatever size of audience we’re playing for, we give it everything. The cast are so brilliant, I know they could and would deliver to one man and a dog.

      However many people are there though, the thing is that they have paid us their money to be there. That’s not something I take lightly in these times. As someone who has (and still does) reviewed, I know that an audience’s time is precious and valuable. We owe them the best show we can give them.

      During a recent round of chaos in British politics, there was a tweet from James Graham which said Don’t any of you buggers call anything political I ever write again ‘implausible’. It made me wonder, how do you approach presenting a play that audiences can believe and respect in a time when we have such unprecedented political chaos?

      It’s interesting with this play. My first play – No Cure For Love – was set in a world I know nothing about. And yet both characters are me. They’re an extension of an argument I have in my head about love and sex all the time.

      Here this is totally my world. I have worked in politics for 20 years. But none of the characters are me at all. In fact, at times I disagree with all of them.

      But I knew that we would have a lot of people coming who would be really really bothered by us getting details wrong. So I learned the rulebook backwards. I got someone who does sit on an NEC panel to look over the script to make sure we wouldn’t be jarring people out of the action with something unrealistic.

      This is your second play, plus you’re also a journalist and theatre reviewer. How have you found this new role as playwright and director? Has it affected how you approach your own reviews now that you have had a full view behind the stage curtain?

      I learned so much about directing from reviewing. So many night watching plays that either entranced me or left me cold or were even just a bit middling, I wasn’t just responding in the moment, but thinking deeply about why that was. And making sure I understood that well enough for myself that I could articulate it in a way that others could find helpful.

      It is so much harder reviewing now. Because I know so much how it feels to be critiqued in that way. But I also know that I am not – eventually – doing anyone any favours if I am not honest. If I give a play a low score, then I always make sure that I say why in the review. What it was that didn’t work for me and why so that – if they want to – they can address it. I hate reviews that are just about the reviewer showing off and being catty and arch or even about them celebrating the theme of the piece rather than the theatre of it.

      For me reviews serve two purposes: firstly helping a hard pressed audience find something that they might want to go and watch; secondly, championing a piece that has really moved me (to laughter, tears or thoughtfulness) and that I think deserves shouting about.

      If something is not great, I feel a duty to that first audience to say so, but to the second to justify why I think so.

      Will we see more of Triggered, two sold out runs would suggest there might be a bright future for this particular play? Do you have anything else in the pipeline at the moment that you can tell us about?
      I mean obviously if a much larger theatre wanted to develop Triggered that would be great. I am extremely proud of it as a piece (*awaits reviews – GULP*). A lot of people on Twitter have also mentioned that they would love to see it in their town, and I think political theatre like Triggered is having a real moment so I think there’s an audience there. What I don’t have is a budget to tour a four actor show or a producer with the know how! I’m open to conversation though – as that would be the dream.
      I am also already working on my next piece of theatre – a one-woman cabaret show loosely based on the Medusa myth. And if I don’t chicken out, the one woman is going to be me. On stage for real, acting and even bloody singing!
      I am also – somewhat bizarrely – potentially working on a Hollywood film with a guy who used to be my music teacher and is now an Emmy nominated composer. As Ferris Bueller says – life comes at you pretty fast sometimes.

      Finally, for a bit of fun as we touched on your journalism and reviewing background above. What question should we have asked you here but managed to miss out and if you’d kindly answer it for us too 😉

      These have been great questions. I suppose the question I am asking myself as I type these answers late on Sunday night is how I fit it all in. Which I don’t really know the answer to yet.

      I know that the question I get a lot from theatre friends is whether I want to be an MP. My political friends know from the state of my Twitter (I am exceptionally indiscreet about myself) that I never would.

      The truth is I would be a terrible MP. I know lots of people who do it brilliantly and they are so dedicated – I hope that respect shows in the piece. But I like to flit from theatre to politics to journalism. I like to write about sex and love and my past and potentially my future and all of those things would make me very unlikely to get through a selection process or to put up with doing the same job for years and years.

      Thanks so much to Emma for taking time to chat with us, you can follow her on Twitter and visit her website here.

      Triggered plays at White Bear Theatre 22 – 26 November and has sold out it’s run. Look for our Everything Theatre review to follow. More

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Mum’s The Word

      by

      Psychonaut Theatre on bring Mums to Lion and Unicorn Theatre

      There’s a reason we love the Lion and Unicorn Theatre so much, and why it is the venue that perhaps comes up fairly regularly in our interviews. It certainly isn’t because of their comfy seats! No, it’s because they provide a place for emerging artists to hone their skill and their shows.

      Which is why when we heard about Psychonaut Theatre and their show Mums which will play at the venue in December, we didn’t hesitate to find some time to chat about the show and their company.

      So we sat down (on comfy chairs) with company founder and Artistic Director Arielle Zilkha, and Mums directors, Lavinia Grippa and Karola Kosecka, to hear more about the play and why venues such as this are so vital to young emerging artists.

      Let’s kick straight off with Mums and what’s it all about then?

      KK: Mums is a collective meditation on the process of grieving. During the performance we try to create a safe space for both audience and performers to draw on their internal landscapes of connotations with this state, through the story of one family who suffered a tragedy which pushed them into a permanent cycle of grief.

      An impulse that had led me to start thinking about the topic was a line that I found in one of my old diaries. It was saying: “I am grieving after my brother’s wellbeing” but the key point here is that my brother was never fully healthy, he has always suffered. How can I grieve over something that was never real? Something that had never happened? We try to unpack those questions but our performance is not at all an answer given to the audience. It’s rather an invitation to go through those questions individually but in connection with others.

      Mums is inspired by a 1994 play by Jean-Luc Lagarce – not a name that is probably known to that many of us, what brought you to this play?

      KK: At the beginning of our creative process, I proposed a few general topics to the other performers to see which one resonated with all of us. I wanted to observe if there was any subject that could be thrown into the room and wake up people’s imaginations, memories, dreams. I started the discussion with giving them four broad terms: longing, grieving, sex, exclusion. We started unpacking those words and each member of our group had a possibility to share. After a short time, it became clear that we were all strongly interested in exploring a state of grieving. I started to collect all the things that can bring a person to grieving. I believe that you can reach this state not only after going through somebody’s death but also after a break-up, losing mental stability, after a job that you no longer have, youth, friendship and many more.

      I started looking for texts that are very much rooted in this weird, ghosted sense of living with grief but I kept in mind to search for a piece that would still have elements of non-fiction storytelling. And that is when I first thought of Jean-Luc Lagarce – French director, actor and theatre maker from the second half of the twentieth century.

      And you say inspired by as opposed to based on, how much is the original text and how much is your original for this play?

      KK: Yes, I never say that we are basing our performance on Lagarce’s play. What I believe we did is that we took his text as a base to build on. After I translated the French script and cut out some bits from it, we ended up using less than one quarter of the original drama. Moreover, we added plenty of multiform content that we created in the process of workshopping. Our piece is immersed in music written by Arielle, which she based on a Polish folk song that I sang at one of our first sessions, during an exercise of creating a soundscape to situations that happened in our lives and that are somehow connected to grief. Later I also added the Parable of the Prodigal Son which became an ending to our story – a confession of the Mother to her kids, her subtle but unbearably honest way of telling her children what a mother is going through when she loses a son. There is also a monologue that Eva’s character gives– it was written by her and it came from her own process of building a relationship with the character she is playing.

      The common thread is one of grief and how we deal with it, have you or the performers brought personal experiences to the performance as a way of making it more personal?

      LG: The subject of grief was decided as the base of our play from the beginning of our process, mainly because we have all experienced grief in some way. It was very clear from the beginning that we didn’t want to restrict the concept of grief to death: we wanted to see it more as the loss of something or the longing that will never be fulfilled, something which is heavily explored in Mums.

      Our process for the play started by exploring this concept further, through workshops and exercises, finding what grief meant for each performer and what their bigger object of grief was. As a company when devising work, we begin our process from the ‘outside’, exploring themes broadly through diving into our personal experiences, and then moving ‘inside’- finding a frame to apply our findings to. The text of Jean-Luc Lagarce was a great fit for our work: a common subject of grief and yet five very clear, personal and different approaches towards it.

      This is Psychonaut Theatre’s first production, is this a sign of what you intend to do with future works? Will we be seeing more European inspired works?

      AZ: Definitely! Because we’re such an international group, it’s really important to us that our work authentically represents the diversity of our ensemble. And through that, we love to discover less well-known international texts that we can translate and adapt as a springboard for our own material. Text has never been the driving force of our work as a group or as individuals, but that’s not to say that it hasn’t underpinned our devising process, like in Mums. Our work tends to be less narrative focussed, and perhaps less of what British theatre audiences are used to. Part of our mission as a company is to introduce these audiences to a more experimental style of theatre, and challenge them to take risks with the theatre they choose to watch- like we take risks with the theatre we make.

      Additionally, because we operate as a collective of artists, the style of our group work will change on a project-to-project basis, representative of the directing member’s practice: a piece led by me would have a different focus and style to one led by Karola. But, we are all part of Psychonaut, and therefore we are driven by the same core principles.

      What was the thought process behind that company name, it certainly stands out!

      AZ: Thank you! Well, a psychonaut is someone who uses hallucinogenic substances to explore their subconscious. And that’s basically the experience we want to give to audiences who come to our shows. As performance-makers in the 21st century, we place a lot of focus on theatre as a live art form, and how that liveness can create new and perhaps unexpected events for the audience. Our aim for Mums is for it to take the audience to a place of meditation around grieving, where they can totally immerse themselves in the thoughts, feelings and experiences that come with it.

      How did you get involved with The Lion and Unicorn Theatre?

      AZ: Mums is a piece we developed during our final term at university, in preparation for our graduate showcase. We’d built the company during our time on the course so everything would be ready for us to launch into the industry once we graduated. Mums received really positive feedback from all different age groups, so I didn’t hesitate to take the plunge and get it out there! The Lion and Unicorn Theatre really stood out for me as a venue for emerging artists and companies, where the work doesn’t have to tick a specific box, but rather artists are free to take risks and experiment however they wish to. I’m really thankful that they saw something in our company and invited us to be part of their curated programme!

      With the play called Mums, we have to ask, are you inviting your mums along to see it in December?

      LG: With our mums all from different countries, it will be tricky- but we’ll definitely film it for them! However, there are a few different reasons why we chose this title. The first one is because of the more common name for the flower Chrysanthemum that is usually put on the graves of loved ones.

      Grief, and the burden of pain sometimes distances us from all of the characteristics that usually represent motherhood, such as looking out for others, putting oneself as second and putting others as a priority. When grief comes along, especially grief for one’s child, all of this can fail. For our mother in the play this is exactly what happened: to nurture her pain and her grief she stopped nurturing her children, which led to them all trying to nurture themselves. We started to see them all as possible motherly figures, especially my character, the Oldest, who takes on the duty to do what her mother, destroyed by her own grief, is no longer able to do.

      What do you have planned for 2023 after this then?

      AZ: Our main goal for 2023 is to focus on taking Mums to more audiences and build more relationships with venues, perhaps also exploring non-theatrical spaces where it can be performed. We’d love to secure a longer run in London and maybe even take it out of the capital. In addition to that I’m also producing the UK premiere of a piece by collective member Juraj Benko, made in collaboration with Nordisk Teater Laboratorium-Odin Teatret in Denmark. And I’m going to start thinking about our next project which we’ll likely start working on in 2024. So, a lot to look forward to.

      Our thanks to the team at Psychonaut Theatre for chatting with us. Mums will play at Lion and Unicorn Theatre 6 – 10 December 2022. Further information and bookings can be found here.

      (Photo credits: Christina Sarkisian, Sanna Hofker and Alex Forey) More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: Tellling The Truth for Pinocchio

      by

      Justin Audibert and Eve Leigh on Unicorn Theatre’s Pinocchio

      This Christmas at the Unicorn Theatre there’s not just one, not two, but three shows for families to choose from, both live and streamed. We were delighted to have the opportunity to chat with Artistic Director Justin Audibert and Playwright Eve Leigh about one of them, Pinocchio, and ask them about what they are getting up to with this classic family favourite.

      Hi Justin, Hi Eve! It’s fabulous to get a chance to chat with you about Pinocchio – the Play at the Unicorn this season. I was going to start very rudely with “Duh, why Pinocchio AGAIN? Everyone does that!”, but having seen the incredible Gulliver‘s Travels you guys came up with earlier this year I now know better than to doubt you. What prompted you to choose this play?

      EL: We’re in a moment that many people describe as “post-truth.” In a post-truth world, what is the value of telling the truth? Why teach our children to tell the truth? What kind of behaviour is encouraged in a world where your word is assumed to essentially be worthless?

      I wanted to make a version of Pinocchio that was incredibly joyous and satisfying as a seasonal play, that also, quietly but persistently, asked these questions. How are we in relation to each other?

      JA: Eve spoke with such a clarity of vision about how she felt the story sang to her that I was compelled to commission, and she duly delivered with her first draft. But what additionally surprised and moved me so much was how rich and true to life the relationship between Pinocchio and Gepetto was. In this version you see Gepetto struggling to be a good parent just as much as Pinocchio is struggling to be a good boy, and that is where the heart of the story lies.

      The story originated in Italy way back in 1883, in Carlo Collodi’s brilliant book: are you going for a traditional style of Christmas show reflecting its heritage, or can we expect some twists and tech?

      EL: Justin will talk more about this, I’m sure, but this is a playful, theatrical production that makes great use of puppetry and a very physical ensemble!

      JA: We have all the festive bells and whistles that you could possibly want; sparkles, dances, live music, a set so delicious that you want to eat it right up, but we also have not shied away from the danger, darkness and surrealism of the original. Collodi mixes light and shade up so powerfully in the novel and we have been inspired to do that with this production. Any moment you find yourself belly laughing you are probably in for a nasty shock thirty seconds later…

      I see there are puppets in the show, designed and made by the amazing Chris Pirie, and you have the fantastic Laura Cubitt directing puppetry and movement – both top talent! Can you tell us a bit about this?

      EL: Chris taught Jean Chan, our wonderful designer, when she trained at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama so she was the first person she thought of when we realised we wanted to play with scale and puppetry in the production. Chris works with such love, care and attention to detail, but he also has a very funny sense of humour. I think the children will be scared of his hulking dogfish and I think the parents will be chortling away at his interpretation.

      Laura has been someone I have wanted to work with for ages because I have followed the shows she has made and her work as a performer. It’s been a dream collaboration. She has such a wide range of skills and influences that have fed into the show. Special mention of course has to go to the delicate work she has done with Peyvand Sadeghian, our Pinocchio, in slowly turning the character from a marionette puppet into a real boy. Also, she has done some wonderful work with Susan Harrison in creating Marmalade the Cat and in giving us a Blue Fairy in Eleanor Wyld with a whole heap of world weariness, but also true magic. It’s been such a lovely experience.

      What about the rest of the cast? I’m presuming there are also some humans onstage?

      EL: For me, something that’s given the production a lot of richness is that Peyvand, playing a puppet, is also a professional puppeteer. I feel like you can really see that in what they bring to Pinocchio –  there’s just a specificity and delicacy in their performance that helps the production language between puppets and actors come together.,

      JA: Tom Kanji as Gepetto likewise brings such a tenderness to his portrayal and yet such a vulnerability and humanity. He isn’t the doddery old man in the Disney film; he is so much more rounded and flawed. And then Tom gets to absolutely let his comic chops rip in portraying the raffish and dastardly Fratello who leads Pinocchio astray. Additional shout outs to Pinocchio’s sticky fingered, studious best friend Polpetta (Eleanor Wyld), who is maybe the pinkest thing on the planet and to Sam Pay’s utterly terrifying bully Mommo, part giant manbaby part arsonist. My personal favorite character though is Eleanor as the toy obsessed Duchess, with a golden wig from the heavens. It has to be seen to be believed.

      Using puppetry as part of the production, I’m guessing it will be taking us on adventures to places we wouldn’t normally get to go. What can you tell us?

      EL: Did you ever wonder if there were glow-in-the-dark fish skeletons inside a shark’s belly? WONDER NO MORE (and spoiler alert).

      JA: Ha ha ha! Eve, I can’t believe you’ve spilled those beans! We also do some very fun and magical flying too – well, it is Christmas after all.

      Many of the audience will know the story from the Disney movie, which has some fabulous songs in it. Will you be having music too?

      EL: Yes we do! Our brilliant music is by Barnaby Race, played mostly on the accordion by Sam Pay and sung by the cast.

      The original story is about Pinocchio’s moral development, which sounds a bit heavy going on paper. Will there be themes that are fun and relevant to today’s audiences at Christmas?

      EL: Absolutely. I’m tempted to list some of the more obviously fun and ridiculous things the production has – con artists! A murderous ginger cat! The Blue Fairy as played by Carol Kane from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt! – but really, what the production is about is the ways in which we are real to each other. We can’t understand that we’re real until we understand that other people are real, that the impact we have on other people is real. Being reminded that we’re real, that other people are real, and that our actions matter, could not be more important going into this winter.

      JA: Amen to that. We want to spread joy, laughter and hope with this beautiful show this festive season.

      Many thanks to Justin Audibert and Eve Leigh for taking the time out of their busy schedules to talk with us. Pinocchio runs at the Unicorn Theatre from 6 November – 31 December 2022 and is aimed at ages 7+. Check the website here for full dates plus a range of access performances. More