Inviting the Audience
Phelim McDermott in conversation with Caridad Svich
[Phelim McDermott has been directing and
performing for more than twelve years. His first work was for dereck
dereck Productions, which he co-founded with Julia Bardsley. He performed
in Cupboard Man, a solo show for which he won a Fringe First
Award. He then co-directed and performed in Gaudete for which
he won a Time Out Director's Award. During 1996-97 he directed
A Midsummer Night's Dream for the English Shakespeare Company, which
won a T.M.A. Regional Theatre Award for Best Touring Production. He
co-founded Improbable Theatre company with Julian Crouch, Lee Simpson
and producer Nick Sweeting in 1996. The company is distinguished for
its improvisational approach to text and innovative designs. Improbable's
productions include 70 Hill Lane, Lifegame, Coma, and
The Hanging Man. With Julian Crouch McDermott co-directed Shockheaded
Peter, a junk-opera collaboration with The Tiger Lilies, for Cultural
Industry. He has worked with Peter Greenaway and was a co-deviser of
The Masterson Inheritance on BBC Radio 4. This conversation was
held as Improbable's adaptation of Theatre of Blood was preparing
to open at The Royal National Theatre, and Shockheaded Peter was
about to return to New York for an Off-Broadway run.]
CS: Have puppets always been a part of your theatrical
vocabulary?
PM: Pretty much, even before I met Julian Crouch
and we started working together. I was at the Leicester Haymarket doing
a kid's show called The Ghost Downstairs, which is kind of
an inverse version of the Faust story, written by Leon Garfield, who
is a children's book writer. The story is about a lawyer who meets a
man downstairs who is probably the devil. The devil says to him, "I'll
give you all the riches in the world if you give me seven years off
of the end of your life." The lawyer agrees to this but in drawing up
the deal thinks about swindling the devil and decides that instead of
selling him seven years off of the end of his life, he'll sell him seven
years off of the beginning. Well, the deal is struck, and he does get
all this wealth, but slowly he begins to be haunted by the ghost of
a little boy, who turns out to be his own childhood coming to haunt
him. We used a puppet for the boy. At the same time Julian was doing
The Little Prince with great, big-scale puppets, and I became
intrigued. I was invited to direct a production of Dr Faustus
and I knew I wanted the Seven Deadly Sins to be puppets, so I asked
Julian if he wanted to work on it, and that's how we ended up working
together.
Improbable Theatre started in 1996 with 70
Hill Lane, but Julian and I had been working together for a long
time. We had actually resisted forming a company for years because we
didn't want to scratch money together and do all that. So, ours was
a backward route. We were working in the repertory companies doing big
shows and when we formed Improbable we went back to doing small shows,
partly because we wanted to do work that was more personal again while
we kept the bigger-scale projects going.
CS: 70 Hill Lane is very personal, and
you have traveled with it quite a bit. How does the connection with
the audience occur when you have toured with it?
PM: We took the piece to Egypt where the audience
was largely non-English speaking and it had an extraordinary response,
which surprised me. On some level, it is about the visual element of
the piece and about the imagination and the puppetry, but I think it
is also about that connection, if people are willing to relate to the
person who is talking. There are studies where it's been said that 10%
of our communication is verbal, whereas the rest is primarily visual.
In Egypt or in Syria, where we also performed 70 Hill Lane,
people are surprised and shocked that someone is speaking directly to
them--and also that not only will an actor speak directly to the audience
as part of the show, but that if something happens in the audience,
the performer will to respond to it spontaneously--unscripted--right
then and there.
People say that Shockheaded Peter or
other work that we do is really new, but I don't think it is. It's quite
simple, and old-fashioned. It's just storytelling: talking to people
and telling stories. I think what is different is that we are prepared
to use anything to tell the story. I like interacting with materials
and seeing what they can do and how they can speak. 70 Hill Lane
was an exploration of that. In fact, one of the decisions we made early
on was that we were going to make the house from newspaper stuck onto
cello tape, so we'd build it like a Wendy house. Then we realized that
just the tape in the space was magical, and strange, because it was
there and it wasn't there, and it left a lot of space for people to
read into it, so they could see their own house. We talk about our sets
and how we like to have a gap in them: a gap between what you're saying
it is and what you're seeing. So, you say it's a tree but it is obviously
a cardboard tree, so the audience plays the game with you and says,
"We'll believe it's a tree." We also talk about our sets as being like
puppets. The story of the set in the show is as important as the story
of the actors performing on it.
CS: How much turn-around do you allow between
the creation of pieces? Is it open or do you have a set time-table?
PM: It's open out of necessity because we do
not get revenue funding. We are project-funded, so if we're not doing
a show, we are not making money for Improbable. Things which have kept
me going have been: Shockheaded Peter, and doing improvising
gigs at The Comedy Store, which is where Lee Simpson (co-founder of
Improbable Theatre) makes his wage. Julian does other design and directing
jobs, which is healthy for all of us, but also presents difficulties.
Our office is paid for basically by touring in the US. This also comes
down to the decision about how we work, because if you become revenue-funded
then you have to produce a certain number of shows, etc. One of the
problems, I would say, is that we had an initial burst of shows--70
Hill Lane, Animo, Lifegame, Coma, Sticky (which is an on-going
large-scale project) and Spirit--but we don't get much time
to do any kind of seeding or dreaming, which is so important. I think
it's especially difficult now because you can get on a treadmill and
just do and not think. The good thing is that we're not comfortable
with being comfortable. We recognize this is a company, so if we're
going to do something, we have to be interested in it.
CS: How did the idea for The Hanging Man
come to be, and how did it morph into what it is now?
PM: The initial idea for the story came from
Julian Crouch. He had just been working on a TV job from which he got
sacked, and he was driving in his car, feeling pretty angry, and the
idea for a story came into his head: a man tries to hang himself, but
he's so inflexible that he can't actually do it. That became the key
to the whole piece. We also decided we wanted to do a new show that
had the scale of Shockheaded Peter but was more like our Improbable
shows, which have a more intimate quality. I talked about the idea of
wanting to do something that was more vulnerable and less showy. It
was important to me that the new piece had more contact with the audience,
where the performers could be themselves. The other idea was that we
wanted to start putting together an ongoing ensemble that would learn
how to work the way that we work, so in effect our work could tour as
it has done but we wouldn't have to tour with it as performers. So,
we had a couple of development periods for The Hanging Man.
One was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the other was at
the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Then we had about
three weeks with an initial workshop with actors.
CS: Actors were not involved at every step of
the development?
PM: No, just in the three weeks after we'd made
some decisions as a company about the show, its shape, and so on. The
first two development periods were with Lee Simpson, Julian Crouch,
sound designer Darron L. West (of SITI company), and myself. We sat
in a room together and talked about what we were going to do. Julian
found a painting by Tiepolo, which was of a group of Pulchinellos. What's
interesting about the painting is that all the Pulchinellos are the
same. They're all wearing tall hats, sitting around a cooking pot and
cooking gnocchi. They're in half-light, yellow-light, very beautiful.
The painting is very atmospheric and languorous. It's not in a performance-mode.
It's as if the Pulchinellos were off-duty. We liked what they looked
like, because they reminded us of ourselves: artists hanging around
the outskirts of a city, outcasts from the theatre.
So we then spent three weeks with a group of
actors, and Julian made some Pulchinello masks, and we explored ideas
and shapes for three weeks trying to find out what the story was, and
what these characters were like. We then decided that the guy who wants
to kill himself is an architect, who has done a great project. He's
made a beautiful cathedral, which is a great success. And the funny
thing is, he made the cathedral without really thinking about it. The
guy who was designing it had died and he had to take over the project,
so he just kind of made decisions really quickly. And then someone says,
"Okay, you've done this great building and we want you to do another.
Here's all this money. You can do whatever you want." And he starts
this new project, and when it's half-built, he realizes that it's not
working. It's a failure. And rather than deal with the issue of it being
a failure, he decides to kill himself. He decides to hang himself inside
this unfinished cathedral. But it doesn't work. At which point Death
turns up and says, "Wait a minute, it's not that easy. Just because
you had this thing happen you think you can just use me? You've never
ever thought about me. You've never had a relationship with me. You've
got to hang around for a while and deal with me."
CS: And Death stays present.
PM: Death's present in the show. We wanted to
create a modern mystery play. It's interesting because since creating
the show, a number of people have said, "Oh you know the story about
. . ." Apparently, there's some story about an architect who did hang
himself in his own church. But for us, it's a story about us as an ensemble,
about our journey, and where we were at the time of making the piece.
An interesting thing that happened in the process
of The Hanging Man was that we decided to have a script before
we went into proper rehearsal. That's something we hadn't really done
before: write everything out. But Julian decided he wanted to write
a play. So, he went away and wrote a script, after which Lee said, "We're
not very good at doing plays. We're much better at adapting things.
So Lee suggested we would create a document--a historical document written
as if someone three hundred years after the fact was researching this
myth of the Hanging Man. It was a mock historical document that then
became a script, which we adapted.
It was weird because in order to get to a point
where we were happy with a script, and having one in the first place,
we had to adapt our own. We had to pretend we were someone else. It
was an interesting process that we ended up with. In the U.K. we put
a bit of that mock document into the program, and people said, "Oh,
it's a real story? It's not a myth?" We created a myth. A new myth.
CS: Have you been working with the same group
of actors throughout the piece's development and touring?
PM: No. After the first workshop we kept one
of the actors and then we re-cast. So we had a whole new group of people,
partly because I wanted to address the issue of getting the actors to
bring themselves to the process in a very direct way. We kind renegotiated
the deal with the performers and said, "Look, it's going to be like
this: You're going to have to be yourselves at certain points in the
show, and we want you to know that that's going to be a challenge."
So, there are sections of the show where they are themselves and not
characters or figures. There are sections of the show that are descriptions
of their own dreams. And there are sections where they talk about their
own death fantasies: they imagine how they'd die, what it would be like,
and what would happen afterwards. That's the bit of the show that changes
each night.
CS: I'm interested in the central act of suspension
in the piece. The architect character is hanging for the entire length
of the show. Physically, how does that work?
PM: In terms of the actual, physical structure
of the set, one thing we wanted to make sure is that whatever technology
we used had to be seen. That's important to us in our work. Phil Eddols
(the co-designer on this show) has something of a medieval technological
mind. He knows about pulleys and weights, etc. When we were workshopping
at the Walker Art Center, I found a beautiful French book of architectural
drawings and co-designer Phil got very inspired by these pictures. For
the show, he created a pulley system that is human-driven.
It's not as physical as we imagined it would
be, but it's pretty clear that it's human-operated. It's a pulley system
that goes up and down, and also trucks back and forth, so that's the
leeway that you've got. You see the structure also around all this stone.
There's something exciting about the unfinished nature of it, about
an unfinished show playing at BAM! I think that's essential to Improbable's
work. We've always felt that things are unfinished until the audience
turns up. Things are porous, therefore, so that the audience can partake
in the show.
CS: I've been obsessed with the question of virtuosity
in theatre, especially because it has been an ongoing question with
a lot of the artists I work with. I feel that sometimes you go to a
theatre to watch a virtuoso, to watch superb technique, to watch a company
craft something. But at the same time that can't be the end-product.
PM: I think that you go to the theatre to see
people be super-human. For me, the exciting thing is to see potential:
to see someone reaching into and outside of themselves in the moment.
That's what I think skill is for: to create the space and the potential
for something amazing to happen. Ultimately the problem of artistry
is that you can't make it happen. All you can do is create the situation
where potentiality exists.
CS: I've been thinking, as you've been speaking,
about this agreement that you say you have with the audience. What happens
in the moment where you offend the audience? I happen to think sometimes
that's valuable. But how do you regain the audience once you've crossed
that line? Are there strategies you have for doing that?
PM: There's the bit of The Hanging Man
where the performers talk about their death fantasies. In rehearsals
we played a lot with using mini-disc recorders recording text and then
playing it back, and then repeating it exactly as recorded. We then
played with the actors recording each other's death fantasies, as well
as their own. I wanted to find out what it was like to do that in front
of an audience. Our shows are basically quite accessible, but this tiny
transgression, this section on death fantasies, tends to put people
off. I think it's often the frame that offends, and a frame can be more
offensive than questionable moral content.
CS: Shifting gears a bit, you've received a NESTA
fellowship to continue your research work especially in regard to Arnold
Mindell's conflict-resolution methodologies and how to use them in the
theatre. What does this kind of open dream time allow you to accomplish
now?
PM: I'm collaborating with Jude Kelly, from West
Yorkshire Playhouse, and she has created this amazing space in London
called Metal. It's an arts space. And what's extraordinary about it
is it is a space to facilitate creativity. You walk in, and you're in
this brick, stripped-down room, and the most important thing in the
room is a big wooden table and an Argo cooker. At the center is a community
space at which to have meals. And then there is the big, tall structure,
which is the office, and there's a gallery, and at that other end they've
got the flats for artists to stay in, to be artists in residence, to
come and create something for the gallery. But they also have this space
to have a meal in, with people they would happen to network with, brainstorm
with. So it's actually a beautiful space and idea, because it's about
creating something that supports the creative process in a whole new
way. She's created a home for artists to come and to be mentored in.
While I'm at Metal, I will create forums for people in the theatre community
to process issues that don't get processed, voices that don't get heard,
and explore what those issues are. For me, these forums are an attempt
to process those issues, rather than just have a conversation. They're
an attempt to create some fluidity and give people a chance to say things,
but also to free up people stuck in identified roles. Mindell's new
book is The Deep Democracy of Open Forums, and it's basically
about how to run and create forums, and we'll be using the book as the
basis for our work.
CS: It sounds amazing and necessary. Especially
now because people seem so fragmented and afraid, because the economy
is so horrible and with every decision you make as an artist it's like,
"Oh my God, why am I doing this? How is this going to be received? Am
I going to lose all the people who supported me before?" All of that.
I'm very curious about the new Improbable piece, about the critic.
PM: Theater of Blood. It's one of those
late-night films that I saw when I was a teenager. It's a fantastic,
quite camp film with Vincent Price in it, which has a terrible ending.
But it has this wonderful central idea that there's a kind of fantastic
old Shakespearean actor, who's famous for doing these Shakespearean
roles. He gets rejected at this awards ceremony and then goes into this
room where all the critics are, the critics' circle, as it were, and
he commits suicide. And of course, he hasn't died. What then happens
is, slowly, one by one, the critics get killed off. Someone's murdering
these critics. But they're each murdered in these horrible ways that
are very similar to Shakespearean deaths. So basically, as this actor,
he takes revenge. He re-writes The Merchant of Venice. He feeds
someone their own poodles in a pie. It's almost cheesy, but it has got
the potential to be both entertaining and scary and open up quite an
interesting discussion about criticism and critics.
CS: Are you thinking of making it contemporary?
PM: It might be interesting to keep it set in
kind of a 1970s style. But there's one bit of me at the moment that
thinks theatrically it might be interesting to explore different theatre
styles: 1980s RSC, Butch, Alan Howard, mid-nineties physical theatre.
One of the central debates in the Theater of Blood is the concept
of the virtuoso, the classical Shakespearean actor, and what happens
to virtuosity and its perception over time.
CS: Wearing many hats sometimes confuses people.
They don't quite understand how you can shift your energies around as
an artist. It is something I do all the time because I am simply following
my interests and being true to my heart, but I know the question often
arises: "Aren't you supposed to do just one thing?"
PM: Well, it scares people because they can't
relate to you in a particular way so they know what you are. For me
the development of a person is that you become flexible about those
roles. You can be all those things. And the boundary of what you do
and can do, your sense of yourself, grows and changes all the time.
It is also the way I like to think about shows and about work. It is
a constant journey. Each person has their own version of how things
get formed, and how you keep breaking out of that eggshell.
CS: I think the hybrid form is the 21st century
form, at least in theatre, where an actor, a dancer, a DJ, a film, can
all co-exist in one piece of work. It is part of the world we live in.
At the same time this world which we say is shrinking and moving ever
so fast and incorporating all is ignoring countries that are not part
of the shrinking, globalized marketplace. I think artists have a responsibility
to keep an awareness that there are other people on the planet who aren't
part of the driven, corporate machine, and if enough artists are alive
to those voices which are being ignored or left behind, the voices will
come into the work and maybe communicate something else to an audience,
because it is easy to think this is the only kind of world we live in
and necessary to be reminded otherwise.
PM: The same things that present opportunities
also mean people will be left behind and marginalized in different ways.
Arnold Mindell talked about it when we worked on Coma. When
someone goes into a coma, they get treated as if they are not there,
as if they are invisible, they don't exist, they may as well be dead,
and people won't go near them, quite literally. What Mindell says the
comatose person is doing is that they are in a deep state which is the
kind of state shamans would go into to do deep work for the community.
He also says one of the reasons people get stuck in comas is that everyone
around them is denying their experience. Mindell tells a story about
a man he worked with who had leukemia and they were ready to turn the
machines off and pump him with morphine and his family fought for him,
so the doctors asked for a signal, and the man woke up, looked at everyone,
and then went back to sleep again. Before he died, he woke again and
said, "I found it. I found the key to life," and it sounded like nonsense,
but it was this vision of the world like the Zurich transit system and
it was this fantastic, visionary thing. And this is the work that is
not happening in our communities.