Coriolanus Vanishes ★★★★
One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment.
For her past few shows, Sarah Kendall's stock in trade has been intricately crafted stories that mix fact and fiction, drawing on her childhood in Newcastle, New South Wales, and observations about the world she now lives in. Her latest show, One-Seventeen, continues in that vein, and this time she has threaded in some deeply personal material.
Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based on Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts from 23-27 May. It will then tour to London’s Southbank Centre as part of LIFT Festival from 4-7 June 2018. Theartsdesk spoke to Gob Squad’s Sharon Smith (b.1970).
THOMAS H GREEN: Are there comic elements in what Gob Squad does?
SHARON SMITH: We think we’re hilarious! We like to employ a light touch. Often our themes and aims are epic, and a way we deal with that is by employing what we call naive blind faith. So we like to set ourselves very big challenges then deal with the inevitable failure, and there’s a certain pathos and, hopefully, comedy about that.
What do you, personally, do in Gob Squad?
Well, we’re quite committed to the collective idea. We argue everything. There’s no director in the group. Everybody is fully involved in all aspects of making and performing. The seven members of Gob Squad are, if you like, the shareholders. We’re the core. Then there’s quite a large family that hovers around that core; video designer, lighting designer, music and sound designer, people designing costumes, set realisation. So we outsource departmental jobs but we all have our fingers in the pie. We exchange roles constantly then we keep this collective thing and we're quite opposed to authorship within the work. Everything’s very fluid.
What have you done to Oscar Wilde?
We hope that we’ve done him proud because we love him. We’ve taken that as our springboard for talking about beauty in this age and also about who is the artist, who is the spectator of the artwork, and who is the subject. This triangle we borrowed; Basil, Henry and Dorian [in A Picture of Dorian Gray] create this triangle, so we borrowed that and the Faustian pact with the Devil and a few beautiful verses from the book. We’ve built something incredibly lush visually because of the lushness of Oscar Wilde’s writing, his descriptions of what is beauty and nature and art really inspired us to make something drenched in beauty.
For this piece, you interact with local performers. How does that work?
We’ve never done this before, actually. We made a call-out to local performers in the area. We wanted people under 22 and people over 75, three young people and three older people to join us in this multi-generational cast, because Gob Squad are middle-aged. The requirement was you’re either aspiring to be onstage in some way or you’ve spent a life onstage, so basically your body has been looked at and been your currency, your work. You’ve enjoyed the gaze of spectators. That’s the thematic common ground.
Have you been to Brighton before?
Yes, we’ve been working for a little bit at the University of Sussex at Falmer, built up relationships over the last couple of years. We’ve been doing workshops and we performed our last show, War and Peace, there. Four of us in the group are from England and quite a few of my very favourite people live in Brighton. I have an old relationship with it because of the Polytechnic. One of my favourite people of all time is Mine Kaylan, she was head of arts and culture there. And Matt Rudkin who was a freelance artist, an incredible artist based in Brighton. It’s a very special place, culturally, for me and it’s by the sea and the beautiful hills. It’s just a total win-win, isn’t it - a brilliant city.
How did you end up in Berlin?
Because of Gob Squad. Gob Squad’s been together for 25 years. It started in Nottingham and we still have a little office there. We’re very committed to keeping an active profile in the UK but we came to Berlin in the late-Nineties mainly because of opportunity. We were offered a great residency here at a place called Podewil and one thing led to another. Even now, although it’s changing, it’s possible to live here solely as an artist without trying to run around doing other jobs. There’s very good funding in Germany for the arts. It’s a very important part of cultural life, the free theatre scene and so on.
What are your own thoughts on ageing?
Well, of course I want to be incredibly graceful and ideological about it. I want to age gracefully. I do love spending time with old people. My granny’s 94 and she’s one of my favourite people in the whole world. But at the same time, as a middle-aged woman of 48 in the process of the menopause, I’m losing what I had. It’s happening daily and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel quite vain. So I’m caught between two places and I think what this project has taught me is that the middle place is, in some ways, the hardest part of the ageing process. For women, when you finish the menopause, things change, you’re free, potentially, if you’ve still got health and fitness. You can have this whole other emancipated chapter, free of ties that bind you. In a way, I’m quite looking forward to it.
Has physical beauty become our obsession in this age of endless visual documentation?
Yes, yes, I utterly do believe that. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t hate it and feel a little bit imprisoned by it. It’s the ultimate end-of-capitalism prison; the body is our last site of exploitation for both men and women, trapped by the capitalist fiction that if we work harder, try harder and spend more money and time on it, we’ll be better, more attractive, successful and happier. It’s the ultimate product. It’s not just beauty, it’s a commodity.
You are a feminist. How do you feel when artists such as Nicki Minaj claim their porno chic videos are empowering for women?
I’m a massive Nicki Minaj fan. I was having a conversation about Beyoncé the other day, about girl power and how that space is also occupied by the capitalist machine, a product probably surrounded by men, even though the figurehead is a woman, steeped in the male gaze. Strong women are speaking up for themselves and owning their bodies… at least the illusion of that has got to be better than its opposite. I don’t think it’s entirely an illusion either. Nicki Minaj is emancipated and exciting for women - and still for men - so I’m conflicted about it but my daughter, I hope, grows up feeling very empowered by visual culture, gender fluid, even post-gender, not so concerned by the history and politics that Nicki Minaj has grown from.
Overleaf: Watch a trailer for Creation (Pictures for Dorian)
Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6th and 11th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.
THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?
SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Lancashire, in that it’s full of straight-talking working people, so mine wasn’t a particularly arts and culture household, but it wasn’t anti that either. The arts just didn’t figure that much.
What pushed you in the direction your career went?
I should clarify that I don’t in any way consider myself to be an actor. Actors tend to pretend to be other people. They play a character whereas the first thing my co-performer, Zoe Bouras, and I do when we walk on stage is announce, “Hello, I’m Seth, hello, I’m Zoe” so we’re performing but we’re not acting. This particular show came out of the fact I liked games when I was a teenager in the early Eighties. I liked computer games before the era of graphics so it was all text. All of the action and environments happened in your imagination. It was very much like reading a book, but it was interactive and the consequences of your decisions would unfold. The show I’m bringing to the Brighton Festival is very directly an attempt to capture that experience live.
When you were in the States, were you also involved in performative arts?
Not so much. My training was actually in film, so I was in film and television. Then I met my wife, moved over to Brighton with her job, phased out the film and TV and moved into the arts. For nine years I ran a company, Rules and Regs, which produced residencies for artists, so they could develop and try new things. It tended to be towards the performance side, whether visual art or a painter doing whacky experimental stuff. That kind of crossed me into doing my own stuff.
What are your thoughts on Brighton?
I love it, a great place to live. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the UK. There’s always lots of energy and lots of stuff going on. It doesn’t feel huge and overwhelming like London can, but it’s close enough to London so you can access all the world-class things London has. Locally we have loads of amazing things too, but it’s still a place you can walk across in about an hour, and you’re always bumping into people you know so it has a neighbourly feel, with the energy of a city.
How many nights a week do you hit the town, then?
Zero, because I have a child.
A baby?
Not any more, she’s actually shockingly old now. When I look at her I go “[SHRIEKS]” and say, “When did you grow up?” But I’m, just sort of emerging from that younger child cocoon.
What was your favourite vintage video game?
I knew you were going to ask that but I don’t have one because I always played these games at my friend’s house. I didn’t have a computer, so I don’t remember the names of these different games. I just remember that feeling of looking at live glowing green text on a black background and how that could evoke such an amazing world to explore.
There were also books where you could choose your own story, weren’t there?
Yes, I had loads of Choose Your Own Adventure books which I loved dearly. They gave you a slightly different sense of interaction. They gave you a choice of A, B and C, whereas in the games you could type in anything and only some would get a response in terms of advancing the narrative. It was really up to you to figure out what you were going to do. I must warn you against using the term Choose Your Own Adventure too freely. A few years ago a theatre used that phrase to promote a different show I was doing and got rapped over the knuckles by the American company who own the copyright. It’s a trademarked phrase.
If you could work with anyone on the planet and money was no object, who would it be?
One of the central ideas behind the company Rules and Regs was imposing restrictions on all artists and then finding creativity in working your way around those restrictions. Restrictions breed creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention. So in my own practice I’m very much a cut-my-coat-according-to-my-cloth kind of guy. Having said that, Brian Eno, a previous Guest Director of the Brighton Festival, is very interesting in that he was one of the architects of Oblique Strategies which is a restriction system where you pick a card and then let that influence your artistic process, so he’d be quite fun to try something with.
You say you’re not an actor but your performance bears relation to stand-up, right?
Yeah, it’s not dissimilar to that. There isn’t a culture of storytelling outside of that for children. So I try to avoid using the word “storyteller” which, in a way, is what a stand-up comedian is, except all their stories are skewed for laughs. When we view something live that’s not comedy it tends to go into this narrative tradition – “I’m going to pretend to be a soldier” or whatever – so somewhere in that cultural gap I tend to sit, storytelling not for children. Like any story it depends very much on the audience. I’ve formalised that. Instead of just tailoring my delivery I actually ask the audience, “Ok what do you want to do now?”
The word storytelling also has connotations of hippies at festivals…
This is why I avoid that word, because it either conjurs a nice guy who’s going to really entertain a six-year-old, or kind of “Hey, man, let’s all sit cross-legged in a circle and just work things out”. Cool if that’s what you’re into but this is something completely different.
So what is it?
A House Repeated is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you’re there. It’s super-easy to understand, but whenever I do any press or write publicity copy it’s difficult to communicate quickly. Without trying to be pithy, here’s how it works. Zoe and I are standing on a bare stage between two banks of audience, so the audience is seated traverse, one half of the audience is facing the other half, and we’re in the middle. After the intro and all that, I turn to my half and I describe a place: “Imagine you’re standing outside. In front of you is a building.” That kind of thing. Then I give some options about where they might go and ask them what they’d like to do: “You can go through the door; you can go upstairs?” Go upstairs. Turn to another another member of the audience: “In that room you’ll find this.” Maybe there’s a bottle on the table, what do they want to do? They can interact. Zoe’s audience are also giving her instructions as to how to explore this imaginary environment. Now, as they navigate their way through, maybe a narrative or an implied narrative starts to unfold. Two different audiences are each controlling a different explorer, an avatar, and might see what the relationship is between them. That kind of thing. It’s hard to get that down in less than 50 words for a brochure.
What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?
Last night when I was in a show! Actually, it’s been a very busy beginning of the year where I’ve been performing a lot myself so the last thing I saw was A Christmas Carol at The Spire in Brighton, a church converted into an arts centre. My family were over from the States so we all went and it was a really enjoyable seasonal thing to do.
“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Hang on a minute, Tytania, there are no flowers. Instead, as Britten’s ominously low strings slither and tremble up and down the scale, the curtain rises on a huge, near-acidic emerald green hilly slope lying against a seemingly fathomless International Klein Blue cyclorama broken only by a glowing crescent moon. Except it’s not just a hill: it’s also a giant bed; the perfect bed, in fact, in which to spend one wonderful midsummer’s night.
Very well, so ENO's latest Gilbert and Sullivan spectacular was originally to have been The Gondoliers directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. But that Venetian fantasia has already been seen at the Coliseum in recent years, and Iolanthe - which I can't remember experiencing live with a full orchestra since the declining years of the D'Oyly Carte - ranges wider.
To misquote Marx (Karl, not Groucho), comedy repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second time as a tragedy. The early days of broadcasting bred comedians whose work lives on in the nation’s marrow. But being Frankie Howerd or Kenneth Williams or the Steptoe actors was no laughing matter.
Jabberwocky is all the more enjoyable once you get past what it isn’t; Terry Gilliam’s 1977 directorial debut is a medieval romp starring Michael Palin and a short-lived Terry Jones, but audiences shouldn’t expect a Monty Python film.