Thursday August 12, 1999 The Guardian In a rehearsal room in west London a couple of months before the Edinburgh festival, a theatre company sat around a table to read a script. Nothing unusual about that, you may think, but this was no ordinary company - it was Told by an Idiot. Since the day six years ago when John Wright, one of Britain's foremost exponents of mask theatre, got together with two of his former students from Middlesex Polytechnic, Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter, Told by an Idiot has been at the forefront of devised physical theatre. Not since the early days of Theatre de Complicite has there been a company so attuned to the idea of the play as an actual act of play, or so good at mining the despair and tragedy that lurk behind the dottiest of comic scenarios. So to find that the Idiots - last spotted in the plotless, wordless and very surreal I Weep at My Piano, a meditation on friendship, death and unrequited love featuring Dali, Lorca and Luis Bunuel - with actual scripts in hand, feels a bit like discovering that Anita Bruckner is planning an airport blockbuster. Or that Damien Hirst has taken up portraiture. Since Complicite first made the journey from clowning to Shakespeare, there's been an assumption that before long even the most dedicated physical theatre companies will feel the need to say something scripted, as if devising an gestural expressiveness is merely an awkward adolescent phase. At last year's Edinburgh Festival we saw The Right Size play Brecht and this year even Frantic Assembly appears to have decided that others may say better what it has come up with itself. Sell Out at the Observer Assembly has introduced a playwright into the devising process. Told by an Idiot has already shown signs of heading the same way. The company's most high-profile show to date, Don't Laugh It's My Life, was inspired by Moli�re's play about gullibility and religious hypocrisy, Tartuffe. Loosely inspired. No other version of the play has been quite as funny, quite as moving or featured a lunatic granny who goes round lopping all the legs off the chairs and tables on the grounds that the closer you are to earth, the easier the leap to heaven. But unlike most companies, which turn to the tried and tested classics when looking for a script, the Idiots decided to commission their own play. Happy Birthday, Mister Deka D, which has just opened at the Traverse, is written by the Nigerian-born playwright Biyi Bandele, who currently has a hit at Stratford with his adaptation of Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko and whose writing, like the Idiots' performance style, is marked by a deceptive simplicity. Making the leap from devising to script has not been straightforward. Whereas the company have never blinked twice at going into the rehearsal room with merely an idea and a first booking three weeks hence, Hayley Carmichael recalls her sense of panic on first reading the script and finding it such an enigma: "Here was this thing we'd commissioned, that we'd actually asked for, and when we got it in our hands we didn't know what it was." Certainly, Happy Birthday Mister Deka D hardly fulfils the idea of script as a security blanket. Even the most text-experienced company might be daunted by Bandele's exquisitely written miniature set in an almost deserted pub where a man and a woman meet again after a long separation. But then the Idiots have always revelled in work that reaches the outer edges of ambiguity. I Weep at My Piano was both criticised and praised because it was as elusive as memory itself. For a while during rehearsals the company played with the idea that both the pub and its inhabitants were merely a state of mind. Or perhaps ghosts? And maybe they are, but for the purposes of playing it they've reached a collective understanding based upon Bandele's insistence that everything that happens is absolutely real. Even so, Carmichael found herself worrying about things that wouldn't have panicked her in devised work. "When you're devising, you build your own character, you really know them. But with the character of Leika, whom I play here, I kept wanting to know who she was and where she came from. It took me a long time to realise it, but who she is less important that what's going on between her and Trisk on stage." So what is Happy Birthday, Mister Deka D? A love story? An elegy? A haunting? Or as Carmichael suggests, a play about the fact "that life is what happens to you when you're planning other things"? "It's a linear narrative. It works like a piece of music," says Paul Hunter. "What we've discovered is the difference between being ambiguous and being enigmatic. Enigmatic quickly becomes irritating for an audience." The production has also made the company realise the need to adapt their working methods. Previous productions have been created through playing games not only in the rehearsal room, but also in performance itself. "You can't do that here," says John Wright, "because you can't sustain the game for more than a few lines. The script is far too slippery." So does this mean that the strong, physical style that is so characteristic of the Idiots' work has been ditched? "We have found that we have to tone things down because otherwise the text would be swamped. But what we've also discovered is that you need to use the physicality in another way, as a source of energy. Otherwise you find yourself doing the whole thing as if it's for the TV camera. I think the most interesting thing for us about working on this is realising that working with a script is different but also in many ways very much the same as devising. You make a different journey, but hope that in the end you finish up in the same place." |
| Told by an Idiot: There is method in this madness... Even for a physical theatre company, Told by an Idiot is bold and surreal. And its new play about Alzheimer's has already been labelled 'Jane Austen with Tourette's'. Rachel Halliburton meets its radical creator, Paul Hunter The Independent, 23 January 2002 There was once a woman who could recognise her husband only if he was wearing his trilby. She was so convinced that the hat was the sole reliable representation of the man she married that she would not let him into the bedroom unless he had it on. It is a case that evokes the neurological disorder made famous by Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in which a man loses the ability to organise the information his eyes feed him, and fails to distinguish faces from, for instance, the ends of banisters or parking-metres. But the disorder this woman suffered from was far more common � for she was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. When Paul Hunter, from the theatre company Told by an Idiot, planned to create a play about Alzheimer's, he little expected that the production would be so topical by the time it arrived in London. Indeed, while the film about Iris Murdoch derives a fierce poignancy from portraying a brilliant mind sinking from philosophy to the Teletubbies, Hunter was well aware that its wide fascination lay in the fact that many people will have first- or second-hand experience of the disease in those with no claim to genius. Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia for individuals over 60, and while initially symptoms may vary from forgetting your Wittgenstein to forgetting your shopping-list, for those close to the sufferer, it always ends up with distressing redefinitions of what life and love mean. Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, was offended when another man married to an Alzheimer's sufferer described the experience as "like being chained to a corpse", but what is the truly worse separation � mourning a loved one, or looking into a parent's or lover's eyes and seeing no returning flash of recognition? Hunter lost his mother after a period of Alzheimer's. In I Can't Wake up, far from giving a biographical account of her demise, he has created a story whose colourful details are determinedly detached from his experiences. "We didn't want to use anything at all contemporary," he explains, "so it's set in 1812 in a naval hospital. The central figure [played by Hunter], who is suffering from Alzheimer's, is like Captain Bligh � he's been on an epic voyage and has survived a mutiny. The question I wanted to pose was: does someone disappear once they develop the condition? Can it be compared, in a sense, to going on a voyage, where the people this individual loves are inevitably left behind?" For those who have followed Told by an Idiot since its birth in 1993, Hunter's decision to address Alzheimer's from the perspective of a dotty Napoleonic-era sea captain should come as little surprise. The day when John Wright, a leading practitioner of mask theatre, decided to collaborate with two former students from Middlesex Polytechnic, Hunter and Hayley Carmichael, has proved historic for intelligently inventive theatre. All three were struck by the vast possibilities in physical and experimental theatre opened up by companies such as Complicite, and started to map out a distinctive path with devised works that have dug deep beyond the protective barrier of language to reveal the rawest emotions of characters who are frequently outsiders. Don't Laugh It's My Life was a makeover of Moli�re's Tartuffe; I Weep at My Piano was an appropriately surreal evocation of friendship between Lorca, Bu�uel and Dali; and Shoot Me in the Heart was a beautifully theatrical remake of a film about a dwarf called Carlotta, whose romance with the tall, exotic stranger who comes to her village tears her away from the protective embrace of her mother. It says much about the company's working style that Hunter was delighted when its latest work was described by one reviewer as "Jane Austen with Tourette's syndrome". Sitting in the entrance hall at the Battersea Arts Centre, in south London, he says: "We hired these costumes that made us look like characters straight out of Horatio Hornblower. Then we read Jane Austen and started improvising our versions of her language. We were fascinated by the early 19th century, because it was an age of enlightenment, when great voyages were being embarked upon and scientific discoveries were being made. There is a surgeon in the play who feels he can understand anything scientifically because of the confidence of the age, and yet he is revealed as more ignorant and more powerless as the captain's condition develops." Ignorance and powerlessness. Those are the taunts that Alzheimer's throws at those surrounding the sufferer, and it is no coincidence that both the film Iris and the play I Can't Wake up operate most effectively by looking at the people left behind. Hunter found the story about the woman who could recognise her husband only in a trilby when he was studying case histories, and decided instantly that he could translate it into an episode reflecting the decline of the relationship between the captain and his wife. "My character can only recognise his wife if she wears her blue bonnet, and the instant she takes it off, he goes, 'Who are you?' There's an awful poignancy to it � the audience members laugh, and then suddenly they think, 'This is awful: this man can't recognise his wife.' That tension between the laughter and the seriousness of the situation excited us. As anyone who has known an Alzheimer's sufferer will recognise, there are humorous elements that have to be acknowledged in this awful condition." The set for the play, designed by Naomi Wilkinson, has proved to be a masterful exercise in visual ambiguity. The action flashes between the captain's early life and voyages and his time in hospital, "so we wanted something that had echoes both of an early 19th-century hospital and a ship," explains Hunter. "There is a floor that sweeps up at one end and turns into a sail, and a long, wooden table that can act as both an operating-table and a boat. At one point this man's being bathed in hospital, and suddenly he's at sea.On another occasion the doctor writes a letter, which becomes a bird. We were also keen that people should not mistake the play for a period piece, so we've deliberately put some contemporary objects on stage to clash with the set. There is a scene where my character mistakes a microwave oven for a television set, and flicks through the channels, humming theme tunes to himself." Superficially, it is the ability to oscillate between inspired lunacy, such as the microwave scene, and heartfelt emotional exploration that has built Told by an Idiot a loyal following. Hayley Carmichael (whose luminous stage presence has led to comparisons to Judi Dench) has described their philosophy as "finding the epic in the most personal of stories". In this odyssey of the mind's decline, they have provided a challengingly view of the disease described by Murdoch as "sailing into darkness". It would be interesting to see what Sir Richard Eyre might make of it, if he felt moved to turn up at the Lyric. |