Dreaming Out Loud

This interview was held on January 14, 2001 in Columbus, Ohio after the run of Improbable Theatre's show SPIRIT at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Caridad Svich: I wanted to begin, actually, with talking a bit about SHOCKHEADED PETER, which is often mistakenly referred to as an Improbable show, when it is a Cultural Industry one. You just staged it in Hamburg, Germany. What was it like to bring that piece "home?"

Phelim McDermott: It was very interesting. We did a German version with a German cast at the Schauspielhaus. The Tiger Lillies were not in the show for the first time, so the music was orchestrated for five musicians rather than three (the musical director was the same who did Robert Wilson & Tom Waits' THE BLACK RIDER), and the MC character was played by a woman named Wiebke Puls. Basically it was the in-house company of the Schauspielhaus, so we were given a cast to work with, which were selected by the artistic director Tom Stromberg. It was a fantastic company who were hungry to work in a different way than they were used to.

It is, however, a different show, I think. If you look at lots of it, it is very similar but overall it has a different feel to it. I don't think it is as spiky or scary as the British version, but on the other hand it's not as claustrophobic, partly because the Schauspielhaus has a bigger stage and the set is bigger. There are also bits we reworked, and there are new puppets for the Bully Boys. It was quite exciting to do new sections of the piece, but on the whole it is the same show, although the company has the same kind of freedom to play with it. The intention is if it does well, it will stay in
the Schauspielhaus' repertoire.

In terms of the difference of how they were working with the material as opposed to the British company: SHOCKHEADED PETER is about unashamed theatricality. One of the things it seems to me about German theatre is that it is not about being theatrical and charismatic, or being over the top and doing big acting. It's almost obsessively the other way. Contained and cerebral, and about small things taken to an extreme. My guess is that historically there's a kind of edge to being charismatic with an audience and whipping a crowd up into a frenzy. Some of the German actors were resistant to saying, for example, the line "I am the greatest actor in the world!" because it's not the sort of thing you are supposed to say. Of course the irony is that the character in the piece means it, but at the same time he is the worst actor in the world. It is exactly the kind of paradox that makes the show work.

We created a script from it, which has been given to German publishers, and a lot of German companies are doing totally different versions. There's a version in Düsseldorf where there are robots and rabbits and all sorts of things. Producer Michael Morris went to see it and said it was strange to see because it is so very different. In Germany, of course, these stories are part of the culture in a way they were not in Britain.

CS: And now SHOCKHEADED PETER opens in the West End 14 February 2001.

PMcD: After touring the world, yes. And it's strange because it really was a show we thought would last all of three months. We created it at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and we had early try-outs where we showed it, then kept working a bit, then showed it again, but we flung the show together very fast. There was a commitment with the Arts Council of England to tour various venues and that was it. And then we went to London and played at the Lyric, and suddenly the show wouldn't stop. It seemed to click with something somewhere in the audience, which was fantastic and exciting.

What is extraordinary is that apart from the puppeteers, it is the same team still doing the show. It's almost unheard of to keep a company together for three years. I think perhaps one of the ways we have succeeded in that regard is because we have allowed them to continue to play with it and change it and try new things. The people who left, and this is an indication of how we thought the show would last only a short while, were the puppeteers. Co-director, co-designer Julian Crouch made the puppets, but there were also two makers who had worked with him previously Graeme Gilmour and Jo Pocock. They were makers, not trained puppeteers, but we said to them "It's only for a little while. We'll train you and you'll do the show." And then they ended up doing the show for two years, until they desperately wanted to get back to making again and decided not to continue.

CS: Have puppets been always a part of your theatrical vocabulary?

PMcD: 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 in a Bunraku style. 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 DOCTOR FAUSTUS at The Nottingham Playhouse 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 1997 with 70 HILL LANE but Julian and I have 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: Has the element of improvisation always been in your work?

PMcD: Always, even when we've worked with texts. Julian and I directed a production of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM with the English Shakespeare Company shortly after 70 HILL LANE. Julian said, "Maybe we should do the whole thing with Scotch tape." So, we did this large-scale production where we used the tape to create the forest, and the fairies were like insects and built the bowers, etc. That was a situation where we were working with a text and a set design element, which was somewhat, fixed, but still we encouraged the actors to play the text in any way they wanted, so they played it differently every night.

On that production I became interested in the work of Jeremy Whelan, who wrote a book called INSTANT ACTING. In it there is this great technique for working with text where you sit down and record the script with the actors, and then you stop it, wind it back, and everyone gets up and moves about in the space as the tape is playing. So, for example, an actor will hear his words and interact with another actor. What this means is that you can improvise straight away. You are immediately engaging with inner impulses before you decide how you might speak any of the lines. Then, you go back and record again, and you do this process five times or so, and after you've done this, you tell the actors to "do the scene," with the assurance that if they need prompting it will be given to them. It's astonishing how much they remember. Of course the main problem is that actors don't quite believe that it is possible. The biggest block is their intellectual mind saying "it cannot be," but when they give up, the words just pop out. It's a real body-based way of working. We kept that going into the show, and we told the actors to keep playing with it, even if it was Shakespeare. It was a scary and exciting process. I am actually looking forward to working with text in that way again because I feel I'd only just begun to scratch the surface of what you could accomplish with this technique.

CS: 70 HILL LANE is very personal, but you have also travelled with it quite a bit. How does the connection with the audience occur in that piece for you as you have toured with it?

PMcD: 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, and 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 that if something happens in the audience, you are going to respond to it. In Syria, there was a new theatre school happening there and they were being taught a version of Western theatre, so for them to see something that was different from what they were being taught was exciting.

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 perhaps 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 Scotch tape, so we'd build it like a Wendy house. Then we realised 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." This is an opportunity for the audience to dream. It is in the gap that the audiences dreaming process to become part of a show. 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.

Keith Johnstone has been an amazing source of inspiration for Improbable. I think perhaps the improvised show, which has had the most influence on our work has been Lifegame. I first did Lifegame when Keith Johnstone was beginning to play with the idea in 1987. I did a ten day workshop with Keith and it was the beginnings of my interest in impro. On this workshop we persuaded Keith to show us what Lifegame was. He said that he still didn't know how to do it. It was an unfinished form. I was knocked out by it this was impro that was moving and where real scenes were played not just gags. I vowed that we would do it but knew it needed proper financial support to do it justice. It took me about ten years to be in a position to persuade the Arts council to give us money for an improvised show. It is very simple on one level because it is merely an interview about someone's life however it is in fact incredibly sophisticated and layered as a theatre experience. The guest chooses a performer to play someone for the evening and the other players play other characters from their life. The process of seeing the stories dramatised seems to have an amazing effect on the guest. One of the possibilities is to involve the guest playing people from their life. Say their old school teacher or their parent. Memories emerge for the first time in years. Over three years we interviewed nearly two hundred people and it totally changes your view of people and humanity. To play someone from a totally different culture and learn about their story can be a real honour. To be able to say to an audience I'm playing a six foot tall, black American police officer and for the audience to be totally happy to go with that is an extraordinary experience. In San Diego we used Julian's techniques of building masks on people's faces quickly and we got this guy to play his Great Grandmother who used to tell him stories about the American Civil war when he was a kid. It was spooky.. like she was there. It is the closest I've come to experiencing some kind of channelling experience, being connected to this point of history generations back. I do hope we will continue to do Lifegame. We did a three month run in New York but unfortunately the producers there sold the show rights to a cable TV company without telling us. I'm not convinced it could be put through the TV mill without just creating something that's just for laughs and TV people always know better whatever you say. However I don't think Lifegame has finished with Improbable yet.

We first created SPIRIT about six months ago. We performed it in Glasgow and Brighton and it was quite a hard process because we didn't feel like we had found the piece yet. There was a visual story there but something wasn't right. So, we reworked it very quickly just before Christmas (2000) and rewrote it quite radically to include ourselves in the show in addition to our characters. The show is about three brothers, but we also discovered that it is about us: Lee Simpson, Guy Dartnell and myself. We also realised that we had been working on this idea of conflict and that what we had ended up working on was our own conflict.

CS: How did co-director Arlene Audergon become involved with SPIRIT?

PMcD: It began with the last show we did called COMA. It was based on the work of Arnold Mindell, who does Process Work, which is basically his development of psycho-therapeutic work, but it had expanded into different areas: into work with people in altered states, people in comatose states and communicating with them using minimal signals. It is what he calls "world work" centred around conflict resolution, and field issues like racism, etc. Before the peace process in Dublin, Mindell did Process Work there, for example.

I did a workshop with him which was about coma work, and as I watched him I thought "He's doing improv," because a lot of the work he does is based on play and what we would call "the game", picking up signals that would normally get missed and amplifying them, and also reading incredibly sophisticated signals from the body through different channels - vocal, physical, sensory. I started studying his work because I found it useful in working with actors. Out of this the show COMA came to be. COMA was the story of Mindell working with a man in a coma and my own story in relationship to that work. Arlene Audergon trained with Mindell and also had been doing work with puppetry and we started talking. She had been working in Kosovo and Croatia doing post-war trauma work with groups in places where people had been killing each other. Her job was to try to get them to talk to each other and to try to process the conflict so they could interact again. How to buy bread at the bakery from someone who had just killed your brother? That became the seed of the idea for SPIRIT. And while we began with war as an idea, in the end, what we know best is our own conflicts because the conflicts are inside of us - Lee, Guy and myself - and that is something we can work on.

One of the ways you can deal with conflict is to go into it with awareness, so that even though you go in, you are also outside of it. Mindell calls it "stepping off the wheel." It is the Buddhist idea that you can be within and outside at the same time, which means you can support your own enemy as well as stand for your own side and then be outside both positions in a position of awareness. Not just identified with your own role. By doing so with awareness the potential to transform the conflict into something positive becomes possible. The opposite idea is that you can create wars by trying to make peace happen. So, for example, someone with more power might walk in and say, "Okay. Everything's at peace now," which might repress the conflict and creates the potential for conflict to cycle when it bursts out again later.. Whereas if you go in with awareness...

One of things we developed in COMA or from years of being on stage as improvisers together is a kind of possibility to stay in something: to stay in the silence which might be uncomfortable, to to go into a difficult interaction within an improvisation. There is a search for beauty in that, which is alchemical. The beauty is in the dirt, grit and in owning up to being terrible to begin with and then transcending it.

CS: There is a moment in SPIRIT where Guy is scatting and you and Lee are racing up and down this ramp that evokes so much partly because it is about pure motion and also pure sound because it is a section without words although there are vocalizations. In that moment I was suddenly transported to my own memories of sliding down a hill when I was a child and the complete feeling of it in a sensory way, and yet at the same time I was and felt absolutely present as an audience member watching your work. The ability to create a moment on stage where you can both send the audience into their past and at the same time have them be right there with you is a magical thing, and quite rare.

PMcD: In SPIRIT the set is a huge ramp. The set is the promise. On some level if you don't explore that, the audience doesn't get what they dreamed about. So, when they see the moment happen they think "Oh yes, a part of me imagined that already happening in the show," and something is fulfilled. There is a kind of beauty in that. Also, over the years you create your own kind of language for working. Even if at the start of the show you start to speak, the idea that you might do something movement-based within it becomes foreign. You start to become a prisoner or your own limitations. We all have our own specializations within the company. Guy is voice and movement based, so by going into his area of specialisation we push each other and take each other into different worlds, which is a necessary and exciting thing to do.

CS: How do you build a piece? Does it begin with a solid idea, or do you start from simply a place of inquiry?

PMcD: We build them together and usually from an idea. We are getting braver, though, about sharing our ideas and obsessions. In making a piece there is the sense of following something and not quite knowing what it is until it presents itself. In making the decision for the set for SPIRIT, it happened from the space where we were rehearsing. There was this little ramp in the corner of the room and we ended up improvising on it and we just decided to make a big version of that for the set. There's a sense of trusting the wonderful unexpected things that happen, the Tao, that says, "This is what we are supposed to be working on. The strange flirts and impulses which we could ignore trust them and the answers will present themselves."

CS: How much turn-around do you allow between the creation of pieces? Is it open or do you have a set time-table?

PMcD: 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. I feel divided about this because there are things, which are good and bad about this situation. Things, which have kept me going, have been SHOCKHEADED PETER, and doing improvising gigs at The Comedy Store, which is where Lee also makes his wage. Julian does other design jobs, which is healthy for all of us, but also presents difficulties. Our office is paid for basically by touring in the US. We are not that well funded in the UK at the moment. 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, CINDERELLA, COMA, STICKY (which is on going project) and now SPIRIT - but we don't get much time to do any kind of seeding or dreaming, which is so important. And 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 recognise this as a company, so if we're going to do something, we have to be interested in it.

CS: How do you stop for dream time, or do you steal it?

PMcD: We have been grabbing it in bits. At the moment I would say we need time for other people to have ideas for shows. One of the things I get frustrated a bit with is that you can get categorised. People just assume "that's what you do now." I mean, I don't get asked to be in plays anymore. I suppose there's something intimidating about a person who walks into a rehearsal room who is also an artist outside of that room.

CS: I always think that would be the reaction here in the US, but in Europe I always feel people are allowed to be different things: dancer-actor-director, etc. if that is where your energies lead you.

PMcD: A lot of it is about perspective. I remember before we brought 70 HILL LANE to the US I really wanted to come here. Part of this was the dream of being alongside a Spaulding Gray or Laurie Anderson. There seems to be a kind of respect for people as theatre artists and as creators, which doesn't really happen in the UK. You have one or two, but on the whole these individuals are not treasured or looked after in the UK. In Europe, though, as opposed to how England sees itself, there is a respect for these artists. You see, the UK has this massive weight of tradition, which is a text tradition. I mean, we do carry Shakespeare on our backs. We are doing SPIRIT at the Royal Court when we complete our US tour and the Court is a text-based building. Yet one of the people who inspired me is Keith Johnstone, who started there with the writers' group and doing improv work, but that legacy isn't there anymore.

When I left college there was a whole band of companies like Impact, for example, companies who were experimenting in a radical way. Now all the people who were in Impact are either TV actors or film directors. They've all gone on. And then there are people who were casualties because companies fell apart, and there was no artistic home for these people. And the next wave? Well, there's Forced Entertainment, who were inspired by Impact, and Frantic Assembly, but there are few and far between. There's not much of a sense of community. It's strange for me to find myself in a position where people go "Oh yes, Improbable... I'm excited about their work" when I'm still looking for people to inspire me. It's a strange situation, and sometimes quite lonely.

CS: Because you feel a lack of support?

PMcD: Because the work doesn't seem to relate to the buildings.

CS: Ah. The Edifice Complex.

PMcD: Yes. It doesn't seem to relate to how the work fits into a building. The repertory system is fucked in the UK, because that transition never knew how to incorporate what might be called "alternative" work and to educate an audience about other possibilities. So, if you're someone like Rose English, what do you do? You're a performance artist. How does that fit into a rep theatre? It doesn't.

CS: Director Nick Philippou and I have talked about when he was remaking THE TEMPEST for Actors Touring Company and he asked Rose English to play Prospero for him and how flattered she was to be even thought of, because she said people just didn't think of her anymore.

PMcD: In some ways it's about control. You're allowed to do your work, but only in one place. And you're given money to do it as long as you don't go somewhere else and muck up. It's difficult. We talked to the National Theatre about doing something there and a part of me felt like "At last. I'm being treated seriously," and another part of me sees the people going into see shows at the National and thinks, "Are these the people I really want to be speaking to, performing to?" It's also a little bit like the people at that level in positions of power don't quite know how to talk to people at this stage of their development. And there's a choice whether you become one of them, especially when you need to pay the rent.

The route I should have taken officially was to do my fringe shows, then direct in the reps, then direct at the National, then be given a rep to run, and then be considered a proper director, and then get to do a musical in the West End, and then make movies. It's part of theatre in crisis because people don't stick around. One of the things I'm lucky to have is a kind of support. One of the major funding bodies has been The Comedy Store. Lee does it twice a week and he makes more money doing that than he would ever doing this kind of work. And that has been an actual source of paying the rent in order to do the work I want to do. It's also been a training ground because if you can deal with a hard-nosed, cabaret club audience, it teaches you a lot. It teaches you about fluidity of roles and reminds you the work is about the audience and not the critics or a building's reputation. There was one time I was directing a show at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and on weekends I would travel back and do the Comedy Store on a Sunday. When you're worrying about a show and you travel back and think all I have to do is make some people laugh, it's really scary and suddenly everything is clear. It shifts everything. It is one of the healthiest things about existing in different worlds and which I'm lucky to have: to direct in buildings, do improv gigs, do strange radio improv gigs, and then do this kind of work with the company.

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 am being true to my heart, but I know the question often arises "Aren't you supposed to do just one thing?"

PMcD: 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 who are not part of the shrinking, globalised marketplace. I think artists have a responsibility to keep an awareness that there are other people on the planet that 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.

PMcD: The same things that present opportunities also means 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 because everyone around them is denying their experience. There is racism against dreaming, in this world there is this marginalization of the experience of dreaming and these people are doing necessary work for us. If you work with the person who is in the coma, be with them, go into the same kind of state as them, pick up their signals and communicate with them, they can actually process what is happening. What then happens is that they go on their journey and often come out of their coma and perhaps have visionary messages for us. Mindell tells a story about a man he worked with who had leukaemia and was in a deep coma. Mindell had been working and communicating with him using minimal signals. The doctors were not convinced of this. They were ready to administer more morphine so Mindell asked for a strong signal or he would have to go. The man sat up, looked at everyone, and then went back to sleep again. Before he died, the man became totally present again, he woke up and said, "I found it". I found the key to life," and you could say it sounded like nonsense, but it was a vision of the world based on the Zurich transit system and it was this fantastic, visionary thing about how people connect around process. And this is the work with altered states that is not happening in our communities.

I think when you talk about the artist being responsible, that is what they are responsible for. They are responsible for the dreaming and bringing the dreaming to the people so that it is not left. One thing theatre can do is honour that part of life. More than cinema. Because in the process of being in the theatre, there's the possibility of what you described before: to watch something on a stage, to be somewhere else, to be in all your memories, and still be present at the same time. In cinema it tends to happen less, whereas in theatre you have people on stage and then these images and dreams happening on top of it and that's where the beauty is, in that potential. I don't see it that often in theatre but the potential is still there. That's why I think I still do it. I feel I have to. I don't have any choice. It was decided by the gods.