Mime is by definition the ‘quiet man’ of the theatrical arts, but each year the London International Mime Festival sets out to showcase sophisticated and cutting-edge forms of visual theatre that are worth shouting about.
This month world-renowned acts from across the globe will have their sights trained on London, with the Barbican one of the host venues.
Charades this certainly is not. Ball-bearings spin and pendulums swing in Expiry Date, by Belgian company BabaFish (19–23 January), while four performers give an ephemeral retrospective of one man’s life, whose memories are conveyed through an unpredictable mix of acting, juggling, movement and singing.
Monteverdi’s operatic take on the legend of Ulysses, and Primo Levi’s Second World War refugee memoir The Truce, are starting points for The Return (27–31 January), a production by Australian company Circa that explores states of exile, fusing singing and music with the physicality of contemporary circus.
String marionettes, operated by the German puppeteers of Figurentheater Tűbingen, make reference to art, science and nature in Wunderkammer (2–6 February), while in Dark Circus by Stereoptik, two French visual artists bring paper, ink, sand and silhouettes to life, drawing and playing music, with their creations projected onto a large screen (26–30 January).
French artist Yoann Bourgeois has a fascination with weightlessness and suspension. For his production He Who Falls, six performers react with agility when a suspended podium begins to pivot, swing and elevate, with each scenario choreographed to music.
The London International Mime Festival dates from 1977 and is the longest running event of its type in the world.
Emilia Teglia, founder and artistic director of Odd Eyes Theatre, is putting on a play about cultural clashes in Hackney (dare I say ‘gentrification’).
As such, it was pertinent when we met for coffee that we were faced with two adjacent establishments: a fashionably dingy, wooden stool-ed café full of beards, and a traditional East End caff, complete with full English breakfasts and fluorescent lighting.
It was also a bit awkward, since I assumed we’d go to the flat-white-vending locale. Luckily, Teglia is a woman of principles over coffee bean snobbery, and we went for builder’s tea next door.
Teglia was inspired to write #Haters by an event last year, when a man sought help in a ‘hipster’ Hackney pub, The Bonneville, after being stabbed. “The thing that really spurred me to write this were the comments on social media,” Teglia says.
The initial tweet, by a pub employee, kicked up a storm: “#CSIClapton due to events on Lower Clapton Road this evening, we will unfortunately have to close #WelcomeToHackney”. Followed by: “Some kid got stabbed over the road and decided to run into ours. Great look for our first week.”
Teglia was shocked by the online abuse that followed, from both sides. “It’s like the mass psychology of fascism, this peer pressure on social media. It’s scary, this faceless mob mentality,” she says.
“My first instinct was to say there are no winners. The comments were blatantly aggressive and really stupid, often people saying ‘oh you can’t come here and change our community’. And I’m thinking, well, I liked the fair rents before, but I didn’t really like the knife crime.”
Teglia moved to London 16 years ago, and was initially homeless. “I can relate to both sides,” she says.
“I can see the struggle of opening up a place or putting on an event – the responsibilities and also the excitement. On the other hand, I’m a private renter and a single mother – eventually I’ll have to leave my support system here behind and move out. So I can really feel for both sides.”
In founding Odd Eyes Theatre, Teglia hoped to create “social theatre to open up conversation between people from different backgrounds,” and her latest production – #Haters – is no different.
The play follows two characters on the day that leads up to an event based on the incident at The Bonneville, and is informed by interviews with residents from Hackney – including people who live in the same building as each other, but are required to use different entrances.
“I realised only yesterday,” says Teglia, “after one and a half years working on it, that #Haters is actually Romeo and Juliet. It is about two communities imposing their values on an individual and, instead of building constructive communication to build something new and different, they bring people apart.”
Odd Eyes Theatre has a strong focus on inclusion and participation, and Teglia has aimed to make the production process and event as accessible as possible. “As well as the professional cast, there’s a participation element within the play, workshopped with people from various backgrounds.”
In the research phase though, as well as through rehearsals, what has struck her most has been the fact that – in spite of community conflict – people never fit neatly into identity categories. “I’d interview one person, and think they represent a particular group. And then, as I talked to them, I realised they didn’t fit perfectly anywhere – and that’s what this play is about.”
Teglia believes people are “absolutely ready for a more integrated community. People want their voices to be heard, and I believe London has a respect for individuality that just doesn’t exist elsewhere. It’s why people migrate here.” She believes we need to do away with the nebulous idea of ‘who was here first’, and embrace dialogue to bring people together.
#Haters is being performed at 7.30pm on Friday 11 December at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA richmix.org.uk
When it comes to pantomimes, Londoners are – let’s face it – spoilt for choice.
But while in the past one might have to schlep into the West End to catch the best shows, there seem each year to be more Christmas productions opening on our doorstep in East London.
One of the newest recruits to the East London panto circuit is at Winterville, the winter festival in Victoria Park, which this year is staging Snow White in its resplendently mirrored Spiegeltent.
With the inclusion of ‘dwarfs’ being somewhat problematic in this day and age, the production uses puppets – or rather Jim Henson-style muppets – as Snow White’s seven forest-dwelling companions.
“I think when the puppetry is good, the audience and the kids are going to believe them,” says director Peter Joucla, who has adapted the pantomime from a script he originally wrote more than 20 years ago.
“All of our puppets have different names, there’s no Sleepy, Dopey and all that, and we’ve given them different personalities too. And as they all look different, we’re taking the liberty of making them all ethnically different.”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to pick up on it, but I see the puppets as the outcasts, the economic refugees that have been thrown out of the city.”
Joucla is the founder of Tour de Force, a theatre company that since 1996 has toured world-wide, staging theatrical classics and adaptations in English and French including The Sting at Wilton’s Music Hall this year, and one of the first adaptations of The Great Gatsby in 2011.
Last year, at the first ever Winterville festival, Tour de Force staged a swash-buckling version of Robin Hood, complete with multiple-costume changes and choreographed fight scenes.
“The Spiegeltent is an amazing space to perform,” says Joucla. “The atmosphere in there is lovely, it’s absolutely enchanting. I think this year at Winterville they’re going to do a lot more for young people than last year. I think the organisers really want it to be an alternative to the more commercial Winter Wonderland.”
Alternative the production may well be, although Joucla promises that audience participation, hissing at the baddie and silly comic routines will still be part of the fun.
Another crucial difference is the music. Fitting an orchestra in the Spiegeltent would mean no room for the audience, so Joucla, himself a musician and singer, co-wrote all the songs himself, creating “sophisticated and complicated” four-part vocal arrangements.
Having the seven dwarfs belt out ‘Uptown Funk’ would be anathema to Joucla, who will not at any price sacrifice the story at the altar of “cheap contemporary references”.
“I’ve got written on the side of my van disbelief suspension services, because all my life I’ve thought that telling stories is the most important thing,” Joucla says.
“I think stories like Snow White have a lasting impact because there’s a kernel of truth in it. For this one the darker theme is about vanity, that Snow White may be beautiful but her message is about what’s lying underneath.”
Snow White is at Victoria Park, East London until 23 December. winterville.co.uk
The cast of Jack and the Beanstalk at Hackney Empire. Photograph: Robert Workman
Hackneydale is in the depths of climate change: it’s been winter there for 15 years and shows no sign of stopping. Jack’s job is to save the planet, which means defeating a lovelorn giant whose magical singing harp is feeding his gold habit, and somehow causing this meteorological mess.
In this year’s Hackney Empire pantomime, it’s not only the beanstalk that is green. Reimagining Jack and the Beanstalk as a climate change fable is not only cleverly topical, as the ‘perpetual winter’ makes for perfect panto staging, allowing dancers dressed in silver to whiz across the stage on skates, a talking snowman from Jamaica to become an unlikely hero, and the residents of Hackneydale to cut a dash in their winter finery, replete with furry collars and brightly coloured hats and scarves.
The likes of Clive Rowe in the cast means strong singing is almost to be expected, and with newcomer Debbie Kurup playing Jack they’ve uncovered another gem, someone who can belt out the rasping R&B of Jessie J’s ‘Flashlight’ whilst suspended in mid-air.
Rowe himself is at his wise-cracking best as Dame Daisy Trott the milk maid, resplendent in multiple costume changes, including a cupcake dress and surreal beekeeper’s uniform.
Clumsy Colin (Darren Hart) is another strong character, a loveable wimp whose secret love for ‘eco nerd’ Molly (Georgia Oldman) gives rise to a hilariously silly version of Drake’s ‘Hotline Bling’. No corners are cut with the set and costumes, with the audience gasping as the beanstalk rises up from the middle of the stage.
Then, in the second half, which is mostly set in the giant’s lair, we meet new characters, including Giant Blunderbore himself, played by Leon Sweeney, who skilfully tramps around the stage in a costume that must measure at least 15 feet tall.
In the original tale Jack kills the giant, which isn’t exactly in the spirit of panto. So instead we learn the giant is a misunderstood lover whose attentions have turned to gold after being jilted by Mother Nature, the show’s Cockney fairy godmother (Julia Sutton).
Two hours and 40 minutes might seem a touch on the long side, but the pace is unrelenting and there are no lulls in the action. Five minutes in, and we’ve already done ‘it’s behind you’ and been treated to a round of ‘oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’.
Writer and director Susie McKenna each year pulls a rabbit from the hat with traditional pantomimes that retain that mischievous twinkle in the eye, and this is no exception.
The script might even be funnier than last year’s – certainly it is more daring, with rude gags involving selfie-sticks (think about it), and puns galore. One word of warning though: if you’re sitting in an aisle seat take care, unless you want to run rings around Buttercup the cow in a slapstick milking routine and be the subject of Dame Daisy’s amorous gazes. But this is panto after all, and audience members looking for a quiet evening out are probably not in the right place.
Jack and the Beanstalk is at Hackney Empire, 291 Mare Street, E8 1EJ until 3 January hackneyempire.co.uk
Alan Cox and Oscar Pearce in The Divided Laing. Photograph: Adam Bennett
Part of the appeal of madness for dramatists is the way that uncontrolled unconscious appetites and desires are thought to lurk so closely underneath the conscious, rational, socially acceptable world of everyday life, threatening to burst through at any minute.
Against the Apollonian forces of order and moderation struggle the wild and terrible Dionysian passions; behind the flimsy face of every unassuming Dr Jekyll is a ravening Mr Hyde.
Patrick Marmion’s new play at the Arcola, The Divided Laing, turns this fertile dichotomy on its head. It’s 1970, and the doors of perception are wide open: at any given time, someone on stage is either drunk or high on acid, or fighting, or all three.
The setting is Kingsley Hall, the counter-cultural anti-asylum set up by Glaswegian psychiatrist R. D. ‘Ronnie’ Laing as a place where, as Laing saw it, any sufferer of mental illness could come and be treated as “a person to be accepted, not an object to be changed”.
Madness – and its embrace as valid, perhaps superior, experience – is the order of the day. But manifesting at every turn are the Apollonian, Jekyll-style forces of sensible, normal, well-adjusted life, appearing in various guises: as policemen and pub landlords; as the suggestion of new ‘house rules’ for Kingsley Hall; as Laing’s elderly mother, insisting he return to the five children he has abandoned in Glasgow; and as a medical seminar happening in 2015, visited by Laing during an acid trip to the future and which through its multi-disciplinary, detailed, considered and intelligent discussion of the case in question, sounds the death-knell for everything he stands for.
At heart, The Divided Laing (subtitle: The Two Ronnies), is a sort of domestic farce, with Laing and his followers and patients staving off one crisis after another as they await the arrival of Sean Connery, who’s coming for dinner. (According to Marmion, this really happened, and it’s a nice detail – James Bond is British culture’s Dionysian hero, always drinking and chasing girls, never following the rules, always saving the day; Laing as imagined here is similar, and continually introduces himself with the formula “the name’s Laing, by the way. R. D. Laing.”).
It’s a laugh several times a minute, and if some of the historical irony of the 2015 trip stands out as a bit cringe (“they have this thing, what do they call it, ‘Google’”), it’s because Marmion’s good ear for a comic cadence is usually so perfectly shared by the play’s brilliant cast, with Alan Cox, for instance, as Laing, so accurately landing the gulp for air in a resigned, hyper-erudite line like “he means, Mary, is it too late to resist the glacial slide towards medicalised psychiatry and universal state funded compliance reinforced by a fiscal model of the patient as economic unit – or not?” as to make it laugh-out-loud funny.
The real life Laing died 26 years ago, at the same time as Communism was collapsing. Mourning for Kingsley Hall, as for the Eastern Bloc, is misplaced; but it is also foolish to look back triumphantly on both failed experiments and think how naïve their instigators must have been.
That overestimates our own wisdom. Marmion has done us a good turn with this play, as a reminder that all our radical clarity will in its turn appear comical.
Brigitte Aphrodite in My Beautiful Black Dog. Photograph: Richard Davenport
Brigitte Aphrodite is a wonderful performer. Funny, watchable, and present, she has a sold out audience eating out of the palm of her hand before the show has even begun.
My Beautiful Black Dog, Aphrodite’s unabashed theatre-gig about one of society’s biggest taboos has been at Hackney Showroom this week, and before the show starts Aphrodite takes it upon herself personally to apply glitter to the beaming faces of almost everyone in the room.
The show is a personal reflection of Aphrodite’s own bouts of depression, which have kept her away from the stage and confined her to bed for up to three weeks at a time.
Using a mixture of spoken word and song, she is accompanied onstage by the leather-clad, guitar-wielding Quiet Boy, forming a musical duo that invokes shades of Bowie and the Bromley Contingent, where Aphrodite also hails from.
Easy targets though they are, it is the coke-fuelled rants of London’s media trendies that provide Aphrodite with some of her funniest lines. In ‘Pop This Party’, her satire of a Saturday night in Shoreditch, the popping of a champagne cork is one partygoer’s second favourite sound – after birdsong.
Quiet Boy also finds his niche on the track ‘Prickly’, which pitches him somewhere between the hard rock credentials of Dave Grohl and the tongue-in-cheek vocals of Jack White on ‘Danger! High Voltage’. Their partnership is mostly choreographed and amiable but occasionally, like life, it veers into hostility and anger.
The morning after the night before, and following a bitter exchange with her guitarist, Aphrodite retreats to her human-sized, glitter-lined, flight case for the next few minutes. Closing the lid to the world to better contemplate the dark.
In her absence we hear a series of voicemail recordings apparently left on her phone during her real-life depression. We hear what claim to be genuine recordings of Dad, Mum, Nan, boyfriend, and others attempting to coax Aphrodite from out of the box.
But like her onstage relationship with Quiet Boy, it is never entirely clear whether these are genuine. Are they the original recordings, retained during her actual depression or have they have been mocked up for the show? Are the musician and performer a couple in reality or is it purely onstage chemistry?
Even though the show is about honesty and the raw truth, it would benefit from greater artifice. Aphrodite’s unadorned reflections on how she felt at key moments are heartfelt but the lack of metaphor, and character, fails to transmit the message as powerfully as it might.
Nevertheless, this is a courageous performance and both of the performers are excellent, Aphrodite in particular has such a strong relationship with the audience that by the end the whole room was shimmying along with her.
She shares a powerful conclusion with us at the end of the show too – that this is not the end. This journey she is on, along with so many others that suffer with depression, will never be definitively over. It is a present and constant struggle. One that, for now, she is winning.
My Beautiful Black Dog is at Hackney Showroom, Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT until 20 November. www.hackneyshowroom.com
My Beautiful Black Dog at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015. Photograph: Richard Davenport
Bestowed on her during a Greek baptism ceremony involving a cauldron, a frightening priest and a lot of olive oil, Brigitte Aphrodite’s eccentric moniker is in fact her real name.
The self-styled feminist showgirl took ‘Aphrodite’ as her own name at a baptism ceremony that she describes as a “kind of torture”. It was originally the name of her grandmother, and after the ceremony Aphrodite set about imbuing it with its classical connotations of love, beauty and pleasure.
Aphrodite is bringing My Beautiful Black Dog to Hackney Showroom this month, her musical play whose title went through a similar process of re-appropriation.
“I always see the beautiful in life, and I’m bloody ambitious, so all that time that I wasted in bed, I was so angry and guilty, and self-hatred and worthlessness and all that stuff – the frustration of the wasted time – it became something that I had to write about,” Aphrodite says.
Part gig, part theatre show, part tidal wave of glitter, My Beautiful Black Dog is based on Aphrodite’s own experience of depression (originally referred to as the ‘black dog’ by Winston Churchill), which she says is still hard to talk about. But she is determined to open up the conversation.
Brigitte Aphrodite. Photograph: Olivier Richomme
“People really want to talk about mental health,” she says. “So if it’s in a way that is palatable but also makes you think and feel, the more we’re going to help everybody as a nation to accept it, and probably save lives.”
Mental health was a theme at this year’s Edinburgh fringe, with a number of performers and comedians deciding to tackle the stigma that surrounds it.
Coupled with Jeremy Corbyn’s recent appointment of a shadow minister for mental health, the issue that affects one in four people in the UK every year is becoming less of a taboo subject.
Many have described Aphrodite as brave for making the show, though for her it was an integral part of her recovery.
“Part of the process of beginning my recovery was making it, because I’ve always expressed myself through poems and songs, so it was the best way,” she says. “And the rewards have been massive. I understand myself much, much better.”
Aphrodite is a keen supporter of emerging artists. She mentored a student at Clapton’s BSix College a few years ago for the charity Arts Emergency, and even did a fundraising gig for them on the second highest peak of Mount Kenya, huddling up to comedian Josie Long, her tent-mate, to endure the extreme conditions at high altitude.
As for this show she says: “It’s like watching a gig but it’s a piece of theatre, it’s sweaty, it’s messy, its totally rock’n’roll.” Tracks from her forthcoming studio album Creshendorious will be released to accompany the show’s tour.
My Beautiful Black Dog is at Hackney Showroom,Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT from 18–20 November. hackneyshowroom.com
Psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Illustration: Paul Coomey
It is 50 years since the Philadelphia Association housed itself at Kingsley Hall in Bow, and 45 years since the Hall closed its doors amid local residents’ discomfort and a sense that things had got out of hand.
For the five years in between, the East End was witness to a radical experiment in treating mental illness, orchestrated by a charismatic group of doctors who eventually attracted the name ‘anti-psychiatrists’ for their rejection of mainstream psychiatric practices, most especially the use of drugs in treatment and the traditional power relationships with patients that characterised the profession.
Doctors and patients lived under the same roof at Kingsley Hall, and were collectively known as ‘residents’. Non-doctor residents were encouraged to make symbolic expressions of their illnesses through art, especially painting, and through talking to doctors in long conversations that respected the way patients used language, and engaged with it on its own terms. In the psychiatric world outside, lobotomies had only recently ceased to be the rage and it was not yet unknown for civil rights activists and feminists to be compulsorily confined to asylums.
The driving force behind the Kingsley Hall institute was the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Born into a poor family in Glasgow in 1927, he was successful at school and went on to study medicine, qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951. Called up to National Service, he served as an army psychiatrist for two years before returning to Glasgow, where he first worked with schizophrenic patients. He developed new approaches to treatment, which laid less of an emphasis on controlling patients and more on doctors and nurses spending time with them.
Having moved to London to study psychoanalysis, he published The Divided Self, an account of his new theories, in 1960. The book presented case studies of some of his patients and argued that mental illness could be seen as the outcome of a struggle between a ‘true’ inner self and a false self presented to the world, and that madness, far from being a medical condition, could be a logical response to the contradictions of the surrounding world. It’s still in print.
“Is love possible?” he asked in a BBC interview. “Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s actual self with another human being? Is it possible to be a human being anymore? Is it possible to be a person, do persons even exist?”
Kingsley Hall was to be a place where people could live without these contradictions. The most famous resident was Mary Barnes, a prolific and accomplished painter who developed her artistic career at Kingsley Hall in the sixties and continued to produce work until her death in 2001. With Joseph Berke, her therapist, she produced a book, Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness, and Laing contributed copy to her exhibition catalogues.
“There was a lot of colour there,” says Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail theatre critic and author of a new play opening at the Arcola this month about the closing months of the Kingsley Hall experiment. “Laing styled himself as a Glaswegian street fighter almost, a really colourful, charismatic person who was ferociously bright. And he gathered around him some extraordinary characters,” explains Marmion.
Joe and Shree by Mary Barnes, painted in Kingsley Hall. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop
Marmion’s play is set in the Hall’s last crisis days, Laing’s administrative headaches exacerbated by the return of one of his colleagues from “an acid trip to the future” in which he has seen how low the reputations of everyone involved are to sink. Laing became a symbol for a new counter-cultural approach to mental illness throughout the sixties and seventies, and it is as a symbol that his legacy has been judged.
Despite distancing himself from the term, it is he who has become most closely associated with the label ‘anti-psychiatry’, although better candidates might be his colleague David Cooper, who coined it, or Thomas Szasz, the American psychiatrist whose books include The Myth of Mental Illness. Anti-psychiatry has been widely and justly debunked, most forcefully by the left-wing academic Peter Sedgwick in his 1982 book PsychoPolitics, in which he pointed out that the movement’s critique of established mental health services was being used to justify huge cuts to funding. By the eighties, mentally ill patients were at much greater risk of neglect than of over-zealous medical intervention.
However, the symbol of Laing is changing again and being disentangled from anti-psychiatry. He is increasingly celebrated now as an early champion of compassionate treatment for the mentally ill, and also as a poet (his book of dramatic verse Knots was made into a play in 2011, while the half-centenary celebrations have recently seen live performances of his other well known collection Do you love me?). Marmion’s play is in this mode. His favourite Laing quote, which appears in the play, is Laing’s saying that patients were “not objects to be changed but people to be accepted”. The time may have come for us to again accept R. D. Laing.
The Divided Laing is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 18 November – 12 December. www.arcolatheatre.com
Karlina Grace-Paseda in Sarai at the Arcola Theatre. Photograph: Sarah Hickson
Scriptural tale Sarai begins with the audience being plunged into literal and figurative darkness, as Abraham’s companion Sarai laments her childless state in an unforgiving ancient land.
It’s a thunderous opening to a story of migration, family and fulfilment, with Karlina Grace-Paseda as Sarai announcing herself as the play’s titular character and central force using the full force of her body and voice.
The production uses a minimal set, with music the only accompaniment to the performance. Sarai manipulates her on-stage environment to show the camp she has left, while costume changes accompany different circumstances.
Mood lighting reflects Sarai’s state-of-mind and invites the audience into her physical and symbolic journey. The live musical accompaniment is a fusion of cultures and could easily find a home at experimental jazz venue Cafe Oto next door.
Musical director Byron Wallen has assembled a quartet from the African, Middle Eastern and Japanese traditions, which provides a wholly original backdrop to events. Dynamic range is conveyed with the diverse array of instruments including cellos, trumpets, flutes, harps, percussion and drums. This pan-continental approach voices Sarai’s tribulations and is played with verve and precision, converging with her movements in moments of epiphany.
The production tells a religious story, all the while endowing it with wider significance. Grace-Paseda’s performance is full of classical intensity and poise, as she dominates the material in a multi-faceted, towering performance. Sarai is an enveloping theatrical experience that brings to life its source material and a reminder of the power and quality of Old Testament narratives.
Sarai is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 7 November. arcolatheatre.com
Soldiering on: Lines at The Yard Theatre. Photograph: Ben Hopper
A surprising fact little trumpeted is that 2015 is the first year since the start of the First World War in which British troops are not engaged in warfare.
But what are the implications for the army’s 81,700 full-time service personnel, and what does it mean to be ‘at peace’ anyway? These are questions explored by Lines, a new play that has opened at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick.
The play focuses on four young recruits who join the army for different reasons. The audience witnesses the boys transform into soldiers, but in a time of peace these new warriors play out their days cleaning their guns and ironing, a situation that soon becomes combustible.
“There’s a line in the show that says peace is just a gap between wars, that peace is bullshit,” says the play’s director and Artistic Director of the Yard, Jay Miller.
“We rationally try to want peace and desire it, but blimey look at what happened in Ankara – at a peace rally. This show tries to explore that really human need to be violent, regardless of who we are, where we are or what we’re doing.”
Miller, along with the writer Pamela Carter and the creative team, visited barracks and spoke to soldiers whilst preparing the script. Some of the soldiers, Miller says, were deeply disillusioned and bored and have subsequently quit. Following these visits they felt confident enough to create characters that were true to real life.
“Sometimes we literally took lines, sometimes there was just a sense of someone,” Miller says. “What we did do explicitly is spend time researching the process the army takes young recruits through, what they do on day one, what they do on week one, week two, etc. And we’ve been very, very careful to mirror that process on stage. All of these things that you’ll see the soldiers do on our stage, they do in real life as well.”
But how to make a play about violence with it being violent itself? Miller assures that Lines is not the theatrical equivalent of an action movie –a Rambo Goes East, if you will.
“It’s about an everyday violence,” Miller says. “A lot of male relationships are formed on a bed of violence, because they take the mick out of each other, so violence is represented through those relationships that are formed on stage.
“We see the characters become very aggressive, and although there is physical violence it is used very sparingly. Then what we do is that we fire the audience’s imagination to make them imagine and feel what these boys do.”
Promising explosive techno and angelic choral singing, Lines is The Yard’s third in-house production, following The Mikvah Project in February and last year’s Beyond Caring, which was transferred to the National Theatre. How important is it for the Yard to be making its own work, I ask.
“It’s really important,” Miller replies. “It’s just as important to define contemporary theatre as to be responsive, and I really believe we’re defining what is contemporary in theatre today.
“We want to be pushing theatre in new directions and working to try to figure out what tomorrow might look like.”
Lines is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2A Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN until 21 November. theyardtheatre.co.uk
