Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson in conversation with Ginnie Stephens

Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson in conversation with Ginnie Stephens about Improbable’s work and process. This interview was held on August 21, 2002 at the National Theatre Studio

GS: What makes you tick as a company, what sort of stuff excites you?

JC: I would say as a company we haven’t got one absolute, clear, method of working. It is quite a fluid thing, I think, that sort of changes all of the time depending on really what’s making each of us tick at that particular moment... I guess there’re some apparent themes that I always realise after we do a play… we don’t talk about it before we’re doing a production but all our shows seem to be about death. (Laughter). It’s not like ‘Oh we must do another show about death’, you kind of decide to do a show and even if it doesn’t look like anything about death, by the time we’ve done it it’ll be about death in some way or other… So death and rebirth – I don’t know if that ‘s what makes us tick but we end up doing a lot of that it seems.

PMcD: There’s a sort of, when getting together on a project, there’s a feeling of being able to have the discussion about what we do and don’t like about theatre… and quite often it’s what we don’t like about theatre, and it’s a sort of journey towards finding a way to remembering that we care about theatre deeply. …it’s an ability, or a preparedness, to have that conversation honestly. Because some of us, you know, don’t like theatre at all... some of us don’t go to the theatre… some of us do and then don’t and it’s strange because it’s like it’s about honesty or something… that’s what makes us tick- that we’re honest about what’s happening to us, we’re honest about the fact we don’t know how to do work on a project or that we’re stuck, or that we’re excited, and a lot of the process is about that I think.

LS: Yeah, quite a long term interest has been around failure, or what is perceived as failure. I think an honesty around that and an absence of judgment, or certainly value judgment about it anyway, and a kind of a real not just a lip service to ‘oh one learns from one’s mistakes’ but an …

PMcD: an obsession…

LS: a kind of obsession with that; ‘failure is our friend’ sort of thing.

PMcD: And to the point where we feel sort of strange at the moment because we’ve been quite successful so we feel like we’ve failed in some way… that sounds really perverse but it does feel a bit like that… because there’s a sort of… I don’t know.. it just becomes another thing of how you deal with that thing of when people start to say ‘you know how to do things’; you immediately feel like… you’re being safe or something- playing safe- and I don’t think we’re interested in that.

LS: I think we all respond to that thing that when people can’t do things very well, they lack skill, or technique, I think we all respond to a kind of beauty in that… whether that’s a kind of visual … or in any medium I think… in fact in life! So yeah, but I agree also with Julian that it’s very much about us as individuals and where we are in our lives… and how terrible we feel about lack of career, or where we live, or any number of things.

GS: It’s quite interesting when you talk about it, because one of the things I was interested in asking you about was do you find that because of the ‘success’ thing that suddenly the stakes change, and the ideologies that you might have as Improbable then are seen- sort of say in terms of like ‘Shockheaded Peter’- do people use that as a value judgment and how does that impact on the work for Improbable? Do you find that you have to shift because suddenly you’ve got this mainstream reputation… how does that affect you?

JC: No matter who you are you never really feel successful; I think, you know, there’s levels way way way way above us and I’m sure even they don’t feel successful or whatever… you don’t walk around feeling ‘well I’m successful now so this is difficult’, I think when we were a younger company- and I think this goes for a lot of young companies- you get a certain amount of fire out of your unfortunate situation. In some ways you’re actually fighting a battle against the establishment and they haven’t recognised you. The hard thing about something like ‘Shockheaded Peter’ being universally recognised is that they take away your easy enemy… it takes away a kind of …

PMcD: A polarity, which gives you a motor.

GS: Does the responsibility of a reputation take away from the spontaneity of what you can do?

LS: I think it’s possible for it to do that… whatever you’re working on you have to trick yourself or create a myth, or a story, or a framework, within which you can be irresponsible… and naughty. And whatever the response to your last show was, or the climate that you’re in- that changes, and so the way you create that space for yourself to take risks and to be irresponsible changes. And so as we go and do each thing we don’t really quite know how we’re going to manage that… trick, that mind trick. But I think it’s important that we do, I think it’s important that each show is as terrifying to put on as the last one and the one before that. The temptation is for it not to be, to go ‘oh come on let’s do one where we’re not shitting ourselves’, because that’s not nice, to be in that situation, but I think we kind of recognise that you actually have to feel that at some stage otherwise you’re probably not taking a step into the unknown.

JC: It’s a weird thing because you create a kind of, or other people create, a mythology about what you’re doing, but you also create your own mythology…

LS: Yes.

JC: …a set of kind of ethics or something…

LS: Exactly.

JC: …which you can’t kind of pinpoint. I think other things have a bigger factor, I mean I would say it’s funny because we were talking about age and I think over the years we’ve been working- we’ve been working about six or seven years as Improbable, but ten- fifteen years before that and we worked with each other before- these two have worked together much longer than I have, I mean I’m the new boy (laughter) but it’s other factors and I think actually age, age and time, is more of a factor. I mean just that thing of your energy and even in my case like having children, or having relationships, and life, and seeing the world pass by; seeing people who you maybe worked with ages ago shooting up to fame and fortune… that has a reflection on my work much more than whether I’ve been successful or not. There’s a kind of, I feel, a different pattern depending on my age…

PMcD: I think there’s something about that story in creating a company …when you start out you can invent the rules, because you don’t know what you’re doing. And then you start to tell a story, which is the story of your own company. And that initial work gets created out of a sort of, like, teenage years something… even if you’re, whatever, twenty eight when you form the company, and there’s a sort of story about how do you grow up as a company? And I think a lot of companies don’t keep going, or don’t know how to go through the puberty, of how to sort of become an adult. And I think probably at the moment, as a company we are dealing with the issues of how do you become an adult, and still create, so how do you… it’s the whole thing of how do you stay spontaneous and irreverent, and playful, when you’ve got responsibility- as an adult? When you’ve got responsibility in the sense that someone might come and interview you and say what do you know about things? Which wouldn’t happen when you’re first creating that work.

LS: Well also in terms that, I mean, we’re embarking on a production which people have put money in to..

PMcD: Yes.

LS: … lots of different people. So, and it’s not their personal money, but it is money and things are riding on it. Theatres are depending on certain things from it, and it’s whether those things kind of inhibit you or make you…

JC: I think they do... I mean they certainly change it and it might be that thing where they talk about observation in science or whatever, that the act of looking at something changes it.. dunna what it is.

LS: Eisen something…

JC: And I think it’s the same thing with money, because I was thinking when you were talking about ‘yeah people give us money now, but we’re not necessarily any better than we were when people didn’t give us money.

LS: No…

JC: …in fact…

PMcD: …we may be worse!

GS: Do you think there is a subversive line through your work?

LS: What do you mean by… what would you say is the subversive... what’s the nature of that subversion would you say?

GS: I suppose anti-expectation or anti-, well not anti-establishment but… it’s to do with can you classify something as successful/ unsuccessful; and by taking on the projects you do are you throwing that in the face of ‘well this is what successful theatre constitutes’. And are you avoiding categorisation and being classified by shifting? ...

LS: When I think about it, if I think about any of our work being subversive in any way, I think it’s connected with something that Julian said, that there’s always two things at work: there’s finding a way of telling whatever story we’re telling, in a way that interests us, or excites us, so often that means things look like quite radical solutions or ‘arty’, but at the same time…

PMcD: Like?

LS: Like ‘Coma’, say, where ‘Coma’ was almost like a, well it was documentary: a lecture, very undramatic, very untheatrical. Which was very different for us at that time. But at the same time, we had a real desire to make it not boring. So you kind of end up also making some decisions which are making this thing not dull; so in the middle of ‘Coma’, this show about people dying, very sombre set with two cellos and stuff, you have this very silly improvised sort of comedy scene about a vision that Phelim has… so it stops you saying ‘well that‘s kind of ‘arty’, ‘performance art’, ‘issue-based’ theatre. Well it’s not quite because there’s these bits in it which seem to be just pleasing the crowd or whatever, do you know what I mean? So it seems to dance into different boxes somehow and I think that can sometimes feel like it’s a subversive thing… cos we’re not really subversive, not radical subversive, really, or revolutionary, we’re pretty traditional really I think.

PMcD: I think as soon as someone is slightly removed from what they are doing, has a slight detachment from the thing- so if it’s an actor, if they said well play that scene yourself, and then play that scene pretending that piece of cloth, or that puppet, is the character, they’re basically much more prepared to take risks and go over edges of what that might do.

PMcD:… one has to accept we’re not in control of it. So even saying ‘we will it to fail, so that then it works’ is like trying to control it. And we will always try and do that, we’ll always try and- there’ll always be a bit of us that wants it to work, and wants it to feel safer than it is- so all you can do is become aware of all your own impulses around it. So it’s about awareness of what’s going on inside yourself, inside oneself. Because we do the same thing: you think ‘the way to do the next Improbable show…’ (Laughter) ‘… is to do the show that’ll destroy the company’- you try and play that game, and somewhere you’re thinking ‘I’m trying to play some weird extraordinary double bluff on myself, but actually I really want it to be successful’. And you can’t. At the end of the day, once you start talking about it, it’s really hard…

JC: I know, it’s the same as that thing with improvisation, I mean I don’t really improvise and those two do… I go out there, well maybe I do more than you…

LS: You do!

JC: … because I am so terrified! (Laughter)

LS: This is actually true!

JC: …and it’s odd because often people will say, sometimes the reputation for the company is, ‘you’re very brave: they’re very brave, they’ll go out there with nothing’… and you realise somewhere down the line that that’s not brave for us. What would be really brave for us would be to write a play… it’s that weird thing which is actually exactly the same as when people talk about… women staying in abusive relationships. Because actually it becomes safe; we’re all mentally ill in a way (laughter), as a theatre company that is our mental illness (laughter)- actually it is safer for us not to be prepared and to take risk. And it’s not actually bravery at all; it’s safety. I think one of the things we’re struggling with at the moment, with the projects we’re doing, is that we’re trying to write them a bit more. And it’s terrifying for us really; you end up facing far more demons I think.

GS: Are you interested in myths as stories?

JC: Myths are absolute foundation stones of storytelling and art, and life really……most of it is about this one picture that we don’t understand, so it’s totally about us creating a mythology. What we are interested in; channelling it through this picture or this world, and I think we spent a lot of time trying to latch in to each other’s kind of mythologies.

PMcD: And those mythologies move: they can go from like that sort of thing, which is about what’s the meaning of theatre, or what are the mythologies of theatre, to a mythology around what things you talk about, what things you don’t talk about, in rehearsal. And often you’re not even aware of what your own mythologies are until someone from outside comes in (laughter) and breaks that mythology; and you kind of go ‘(sharp intake of breath) What are they doing? They’re talking about their character!’ Or whatever. We have a sort of mythology- an unspoken mythology-, which is that often the best work happens in our breaks, rather than in the actual rehearsal. So you do some proper work, then you take a break, and whilst you’re not looking, out of the corner of your own eye you do some work that’s the real work.

LS: Recently we worked with a chap called Darren West, who’s a sound designer, and we’re going to work with him on ‘Braff’, stroke ‘Braff’s Neck’, stroke ‘Neck’ [This piece of work was finally called The Hanging Man]. And we had a few days working up at The People Show space and he was going to work with us. And he came into the room- we only found this out later- and we were just exhausted and gossiping, which you may have noticed we do a little bit of …(laughter)… and we were just all lying on the floor. Which again, you may have noticed a little bit of.

JC: I don’t think we’ve done much lying on the floor in front of you, have we?

LS: Not in front of you.

JC: As soon as you go out, we’re down there again! (Laughter)

LS: … and he came in, and he was amazed to see us, you know, supposedly in the throes of creating a new project just kind of lying on the floor…

JC: And it’s not that we’re- cos lying on the floor could sound good, like you’re doing like a relaxation exercise…

LS: …Oh no…

JC: But this is just lying on the floor moaning.

LS: So we’re kind of just, well not doing relaxation, and he lay down on the floor with us... and he went back to America and said, ‘Those guys, they’re laying on the floor…

JC: …’they’re really cool…

LS: …’they’re really cool, they spent three days just laying on the floor!’ And when we arrived in America to do some more work and then meet him, we were met by Chuck Helm who said ‘So, I understand you were laying on the floor’ (laughter), as if in this kind of arty community in America, we’d become the company that just lay on the floor going ‘aawwaww’!

JC: They thought it was really cool!

LS: Yeah, they thought we were really laid back…

JC: We were very laid back!

LS: Literally laid back. But I like that; I’m quite chuffed, and I repeat that story because I feel quite chuffed that people think we’re like that.

PMcD: It’s sort of strange…

LS: It’s the whole mythology thing.

PMcD:… because I think each show has it’s own mythology, each one creates its own world, and I think if there’s a theatre show that I respond to, or a piece that you watch, there’s probably a strong feeling of a mythology behind it. That informs how… you might say the same line in a piece can be totally transformed by the feeling of the mythology behind that. And I think that’s the primary thing to create. Again, who knows whether you can try and force that to happen, it may be something that happens whilst you are not looking… But that’s the thing that audiences respond to I think. Most of all. And I think that’s the challenge, again, if you’re coming in to an establishment. That it’s actually really hard to create a mythology because the mythology of the building itself might be so dominant that to nurture a new mythology, or an interesting mythology within that, it feels-

LS: That’s true actually, I hadn’t thought of that…

JC: It can work both ways; I think it can have the opposite effect. I mean, the work we’ve just been doing in Hamburg, me and Phelim, we probably had an enormous mythology around it because the building was so horrible, people were so unhappy, and I think we became like an oasis of work, that actually helped us there. I think one advantage of- the fact that we are a company, like Forced Entertainment are a company- that’s maybe where we have power over solo directors, like most of the others. I think that’s where we gain points over everyone: it’s easier for us. It’s kind of harder to be clear and move forward, and to keep energy at a certain level, but what we gain, I think, is that mythology thing. I think it’s a real plus.

LS: That’s interesting. I think we gain: my perception is that it feels more damaging for us to have a shit show than a solo director somehow… don’t know why I think that, but I think we do gain from mythology.

PMcD: What, if we had a bad show?

LS: Yeah. Or a series of bad shows.

JC: I don’t know.

PMcD: Also, it’s not possible- I mean, there’s a mythology: if it’s the director, then there is a potential for the mythology to be about the director.

JC/LS: Yeah.

PMcD: I think we operate as a kind of subversive element in relationship to each other, and we don’t allow ourselves, or we do allow ourselves, or sometimes we support each other to be… the director, or the designer, or the writer or whatever… we try to do that… but we also spend a lot of our time puncturing the ego…

LS: Yes…

PMcD: … of the person who might believe they are any good!

LS: A great artist! (Laughter)

PMcD: Or a great artist! There’s a mythology around that I think.

LS: Yeah.

JC: I think actually also, each show we do does have its own mythology. So if you think of like the ‘Lifegame’ team, that’s a really particular feel- I don’t know, maybe that’s because I keep bumping into them- that’s a real particular feel compared to like the ‘Sticky’ team. The ‘Sticky’ team has an extraordinary mythology around it in a way because actually the ‘Sticky’ team are people who are normally working behind the scenes, who suddenly are kind of the stars in a way, even though I don’t think they quite accept it… so there’s a real, almost a classical Greek, mythology in there- it feels like there’s an ancient story about them. Everything’s different: like ‘Spirit’, which is like a small group of survivors or something: each one has got a really different flavour. Which I guess is a mythology. Even though some of the people are exactly the same people, they’re completely different… Guy (Dartnell) is very different in ‘Spirit’; his mythology is different in ‘Spirit’ than it is in ‘Lifegame’.

LS: I think ours changes as well. We’re different with ‘Sticky’ than we are with ‘Spirit’ or ‘Lifegame’ or whatever, we’re just … they’re almost like different- if I see them in my head, they’re filmed on different film stock.

JC: Yes, that’s right!

LS: They read differently.

JC: They’re different in terms of colour when I think about them.

GS: Do you think, like you were saying about the idea of doing work in your breaks, because inevitably the thing that I find will work when I’m doing something will be the thing that was a mistake, do you find that there are any sort of, not necessarily rules, but unspoken parameters, that you’ve discovered as a result of the projects you’ve done? Or other discoveries like that you do the work in the breaks?

JC: The gold can be anywhere… where you least expect. I think the biggest thing that I learned even before Improbable, and I think every artist discovers it somewhere down the line, is that the best stuff is in the mistakes. And really creativity is not about how many ideas you can have, but kind of how receptive to that notion you are. And I think that’s just a life thing, and I’m amazed they don’t teach it in school because it’s absolutely universal. You read it everywhere… anyone who’s creative, you read that same thing; whether it be couched in different terms… it may happen in your dreams… but it’s well known most discoveries happen outside the laboratory... it occurs to people in the strangest of places. Often when they’ve given up. I think you need two things: you need to search really really hard, and then you need to fail or give up, and then it happens…

PMcD: You can’t cut out any part of that journey.

JC: … I don’t think you can cut out the work…

LS: …God knows we’ve tried…or I have anyway… (laughter)

JC: … and the failure. Yes, you need all of those things. And to me it doesn’t seem like a radical discovery, it seems like an absolute fact of life that people actually know but you don’t get taught. You don’t get taught it at school.

LS: I think this weird thing’s happening where it’s becoming less… everything’s becoming more and more quantifiable. From education, to health… the value of the un-quantifiable is being quantified… more and more and more. And how much money you get, whether you’re a hospital, school, or whatever you are, a transport system, is based on being quantifiable. So it would seem that there are certain parts of society, if you like, where that thing that it is all in the mistakes is less and less true. But at the same time it seems to me more and more people know it, and that ICI, or Barclays, will pay some-

JC: Will pay someone to make mistakes! (Laughter)

LS: -some twat to come in and teach them- pay five thousand pounds or whatever for some twat to come in and teach them- that the opposite is true. And there’s this weird polarity or divergence or something of those ideas: that they’re more commonly known but they’re less applied.

PMcD: But it’s also that thing of the way that it’s done. It’s taught as if it’s a solution, as if you can cut out the hard work and it’s about how you can learn to be a technical, fantastically good, improviser, and it’s totally uninteresting. In fact it’s the opposite: it’s sort of distasteful.

LS: Yes.

PMcD: …and the bit that gets cut out is the ability to sit in the difficult moment and stay, and feel it. Be prepared to feel it for an audience or be prepared to feel it for oneself, even. To really say this feels like this.

LS: I think, connected to that, another thing that we do, very connected to that, is that if there’s a kind of problem, an unspoken ‘thing’, in a group of people, that that is what you have to deal with. It doesn’t matter where you’re at... we’ve cancelled dress rehearsals- we cancelled the dress rehearsal before our New York debut, well not our debut but the debut for a show, this off-Broadway run of ‘Lifegame’- there was a problem in the group. The producers were downstairs waiting for a dress rehearsal and we just didn’t do it. We spent that time- it sounds like we all get together and love each other- it’s actually more about letting it out. Because that’s where the gold is as well- in the problems. In what’s unspoken. We’ll be so close to shows going on and there’s someone in the corner having a cry because we’re dealing with something or something has to come out. We’ve learnt you can’t ignore that stuff. Because it will out.

PMcD: Well if you ignore it, it goes onstage…

LS/JC/GS: Yes!

PMcD: …and it’s invisible but the audience feel it. It’s like something that they feel that hasn’t been dealt with… or is waiting to be dealt with. And the audience feel strange because they feel it’s their responsibility to deal with it.

PMcD: The whole thing’s a mystery. And I think there’s an illusion, which I think I’ve had myself, which is that you do a show and it opens in front of an audience and you go ‘well, that bit didn’t work’ or ‘maybe that would be better if this happened…’, and so you give a load of notes to the performers, and the next night is either better or worse, but you actually think it was to do with what you did, and of course partly it is to do with what you did; but if you actually leave a show, and don’t cut it, it gives itself its own notes. Which is what we discovered. And the director often thinks it’s them that did it (laughter). That they gave a note and it got better.

LS: Yeah, I know!

JC: And if it gets worse the actors say that the directors did it, it was their fault.

LS: Yeah.

PMcD: So it’s a strange thing.

LS: I don’t know how many times I’ve finally sort of seen it or recognised it, and it’s exactly the same as these two are saying, is that you can give actors notes and they get worse- and it’s not always true, sometimes, and it’s knowing… the last thing I did was very traditional: there was a script, they learnt the lines, they said them; and it was what you don’t do, or don’t tell them, after the first night (and it’s not gone very well or whatever), what notes you don’t give them. Because you know that they’re not stupid, they’ve got brains, and they’re working consciously and subconsciously, on it.

JC: It also needs the audience. This is the thing: we go in to a lot of shows on the whole unprepared, and we’ve usually not run it very much- or at all. Something like ‘Shockheaded Peter’ never even had a run through before it was in front of an audience, we were that far behind. A lot of things, like that show- it was slapped together- most of our shows actually have been slapped.

LS: God, yeah.

JC: The ones we are most prepared for are the improvised ones! (Laughter). I don’t think that running shows not in front of an audience, I don’t think it does the same magic; you also need the audience there. For me, that’s- this is probably a mythology, it’s probably not true, it’s probably just something that helps me understand something- but I believe it is a kind of magic that involves an audience and a group of actors. There’s something about the audience that kicks in this subconscious healing. If you just run a play without an audience, I think you get a very conscious… usually within a company a kind of constant criticism of others in the show. So there’s stuff around that I feel I’ve learnt and become clearer with. The thing is, certainly as an individual and I think it’s the same for all of us, and this maybe goes back to your first question about what makes us tick, for me I have to feel like I’m learning. I have a fear of stagnating, and the best thing that didn’t happen for me is that I didn’t have training in theatre; so I was very conscious in my first job that I knew nothing, and was going to have to blag my way through. It was absolutely a part that I would pick up bits of information, so I really feel I had an apprenticeship rather than a training- just from the company that I worked with- doing lots of different kinds of jobs and for different kinds of directors. And that’s never stopped for me. In the last show I did, I did animation for the first time. I usually feel that I need to be doing something that I don’t know how to do, and I think that’s the same with all of that. I always feel that I can learn. For me that involves us pushing ourselves to do different things.

PMcD: Yes.

JC: But it also actually, for me, involves not working with Improbable sometimes, to get something that is totally different that I would never dream of doing; and sometimes, accidentally, you discover interesting ways of working. In fact just working with the ‘Jerry Springer’ thing, they wanted me to co-direct it with this guy, but because I ended up doing this animation I sat in front of the computer most of the time for rehearsals, for weeks, and I wasn’t really free until the last week. And the way they’d been working was so unlike the way we’d work- a bit more like opera, actually. Being told ‘you stand there and do this and do that…’ and it became apparent that some of the actors- I mean they were fine, they were doing what they were told to do and having a reasonably good time- but some of them just didn’t have a fucking clue why they were doing anything. And so, we had these sessions- and we would never do this, I would never do this normally- we had this cub scout house- and I would end up talking individually to actors about their characters in it, which I would never dream of doing and we would kind of seek to avoid that.

JC: …There was something really horrible about it all. Anyway, where were we?

GS: There was something I wanted to ask you about though. In terms of the work that you’ve got to date, that you’ve toured around the world, how does it affect the show by being in somewhere that’s not Britain? As in terms of being, well, is it culturally specific? Or how do audiences behave; is it just different for every show or is it…

JC: …It’s a weird thing with any theatre show, and I knew this from before Improbable. It’s like if we’re here and then we hear some Russian company is coming here, they immediately sound glamorous and like they should be really exciting, and good, so there’s a kind of … well it’s the most glamorous that it gets, in a way. So there’s always the feeling, even if you don’t think your show’s very good, that if you’re going to do it in a foreign country it sort of has an air of- well, it’s like you’re going to be more experimental and so I think we tend to be more comfortable with our shows when they go away from Britain.

PMcD: Hhmm.

JC: Certainly shows like ‘Spirit’ are better received away from Britain than in Britain. I’m not sure how much of that is just that thing that you are more relaxed performing it- you’re always slightly more paranoid performing it here than you are…

PMcD: I think it’s a little bit of that, but it’s mainly the kind of culture that you take it into I think. I think, when we go to America and there’s that ‘they’re the quirky, eccentric, Englishmen’; specifically with ‘Spirit’ I think that’s what happened. ‘Aww you are so like… do you like Monty Python?’ And all that stuff happens, which has supported the show, really, in that way. Whereas here, there’s a kind of, well the people who come and see us here have seen every show we’ve done, or they’ve seen the whole story and they know the seedier bits of our history; the terrible gigs we’ve done… and so there’s a kind of sense of ‘show us what you can do now’ a little bit.

LS: Yes.

PMcD: Whereas I don’t think we have that in America.

JC: It’s that British thing that you get with celebrities, and I think it is actually true, about the British culture, that they lose us and then they build you up; then they have to knock you down really fast… they can’t enjoy you for any length of time; they have to get in there fast to knock you down. And the opposite: to build you up when you’re down; so it always feels really up and down in Britain. I don’t feel that abroad. Not that same thing.

PMcD: No.

LS: I think theatre is viewed in a very specific way here, so probably the same way that film is viewed in America, or opera is viewed in Italy, or ballet in Russia; that if we were going to be chosen to represent the planet Earth in the intergalactic art Olympics or whatever, it would be for theatre. So, it’s taken a bit more- and possibly too- seriously, so sometimes work- I think everyone’s theatre work- is viewed a little bit in this country through that kind of gauze. And sometimes it’s a relief to go to a place, like Los Angeles, where no-one cares- who cares about theatre in LA? no-one. And it’s so far at the bottom of the pile that there’s something relieving. And weirdly it seems to allow us to enjoy it more, and actually they turn out in enormous numbers: we have bigger audiences in LA. You think ‘LA: who’s going to go to the theatre?’ but loads of them do, because it doesn’t really matter- it’s not important. So it’s odd.

JC: Also within me, I’ve always had a kind of sad romance about touring. I do have a ridiculous- somewhere, within lots of other things- I do have an almost syrupy nostalgia for the kind of traveling theatre troupes.

LS: Yeah.

JC: I also think the way to sort a show out is to fucking just tour it. In really bad places. So eventually you’re laughing as you leave town; you’re winding down the windows going ‘hahahahaha’! I can’t get away from that really, I mean that’s separate from the real drudgery of touring.

PMcD/LS: Yes.

JC: With theatre, it seems right to me that people should live in little places, whether they’re towns or cities or whatever, and some foreign people should come in and do some theatre, and change it a little bit, and then leave town. That seems absolutely right to me, it feels much more right than theatre sitting in the West End for twelve years or something…

LS: Yeah.

JC: I do think that that is what it should be about.

LS: Yeah… don’t tell our partners that we think that though!

JC: No; well it’s very difficult with my children; trying to weigh everything up… although sometimes they do get free holidays as a result. They come with you, and they have a holiday whilst you work.

LS: Yes, but sometimes they suss that it’s not really a holiday, is it?

JC: Well actually my lot do have holidays; it’s just I don’t- ever! I don’t know…

GS: Do you think there is anything specifically about the Australian sensibility towards theatre that, either appeals, or… I’ve seen a few Australian productions and they’re certainly- on a very general basis- nothing like what you’d expect to see in Britain- and I don’t know if that’s because I’ve only seen X number of shows or…

PMcD: What shows have you seen?… That soap opera thing?

GS: Yeah, I saw ‘Cloudstreet’ at the National, Snuff puppets… I’ve seen a few of their shows… another puppetry company…

PMcD: I don’t know enough about Australian theatre really. I mean my guess about it is that there’s less of a, what we were saying earlier, there is less of a kind of weight of history around what it is performed in relation to, so there’s probably something quite young and refreshing about it in comparison to…

JC: It’s weird. I guess I’ve done more work in Australia.

LS: Yeah.

JC: I don’t know why it’s happened. It’s odd. I don’t know why ‘Sticky’ is in with all of these shows…

PMcD: I think it’s because there’s a sense of a beginning, there’s a cultural thing happening in Australia.

JC: Yes. I guess so. I guess also you kind of get- I mean Australia’s a small town, and word gets around. The first director I ever worked with, a guy called Nigel Jamieson (‘Theft of Sita’), went out to Australia, and he had a very hard time here. He did a certain kind of theatre; it was very visual, quite emotional- it was more emotionally-based than writing- and he wasn’t taken seriously here at all. In some ways quite rightly- there were things wrong with his work- but basically, deep down there was a snobbery about the work that he was doing which tended to be emotional, non-verbal, visual work. And he’s sort of become enormous in Australia, he’s on his way to being a millionaire, he’s incredible. There seems to be a lot of people with skills out there, like circus skills etc- they’re at a much higher standard than you get over here. A lot of adventuring spirits, who bungee jump, or build massive things. It’s a bit of a cliché, but there’s a kind of feeling that they’ve got the skills and the weather, but they haven’t quite got the inspiration. There is still a kind of colonial feel; which is a mixture. You could go around Australia, and a lot of people are really fucked off with British Art, they’re anti it in a kind of political stance there; but also a lot of them still slightly bow to it and then think it’s ‘the real thing’. And I think in some ways our- well, the blurry nature of what we do, which isn’t even clear in this country- it’s like they can kind of accept us as having the inspiration that they want from Britain, but I don’t think we’re painfully stuck up or ‘old theatre’. It’s odd because my experience of it is that it’s a very new place; but as a result of that it’s also a very old place. I was brought up in west coast Scotland in a seaside resort, and if I go back to my home it’s all changed, and all the same as here- Britain’s all the same now. You go to Australia and I see things from my childhood, because they’re a kind of immigrant population, in some way they’ve held on to parts of them that are more British; or certainly more Scottish and Irish (the people who went there weren’t the middle class or English, they were more working class). You used to get paid to go to Australia, so a lot of them used to go…so there’s also an incredibly old-fashioned thing about Australia as well. And I think- we were talking before about our work being a mixture of quite new and incredibly old-fashioned at the same time- and there’s something about that mix that I think the Australians seem to respond to.

PMcD: Yeah.

JC: Yes, and it’s just something that seems to hit right with it. Another thing; the Australians are just incredibly interested in the rest of the world, in a way that we’re not and the Americans aren’t actually, but they really are. They travel far more than the Americans; it’s part of their lives to come and do Europe. In some ways they are a conservative people, but they’re not conservative about wanting to see different things; they’re very curious.

GS: Do you think there are motifs; do you stock-pile ideas that don’t work in other shows, or things that don’t get through for whatever reason? Do you find that you’ve constantly got, say: like in rehearsals we all constantly write on the walls- with paper on the walls- and then the ideas sort of get chucked out, if they don’t re-surface then it’s usually because they are not strong enough; but sometimes you can be doing something later on and something will re-emerge. Do you have anything like that, that sort of re-emerges, or is it thematic rather than in-house…?

PMcD: I think we’ve used up all our ideas that’ve been hanging around.

JC: Difficult.

PMcD: There’s also probably a sense that they’re just there.

JC: It also depends on what you mean by ideas. I mean I find myself, partly as like devil’s advocate; if I go in to colleges, or teach, or whatever, I almost deliberately say that theatre is not about ideas. Everyone always seems to be obsessed with saying things like ‘well what this show really needs is more ideas’

PMcD: Better ideas

JC: …Or people will write a job application saying ‘I am full of ideas’…

LS: … Whose idea was it to?…

JC: …Yeah. My experience of that is that the skill actually seems to be in how few ideas can you have? So something like ‘Shockheaded Peter’ where people say ‘oh, it’s full of ideas’, well no it’s actually…

PMcD: …got one…

JC: …it’s almost absent of ideas. Which gives it a clarity and a character, because it is maybe just one idea, pushed and pushed and pushed. So yeah, when we start projects we have- not here, but certainly with ‘Braff’s Neck’ we generated fucking thousands of ideas, and we do with a lot of shows- and a lot of them just sort of go. But I’m not convinced that they actually do go, I do think that everything, that you put a show on, everything in everyone’s lives that’s on that stage, and everything you’ve written down, is somewhere in the show. So it’s difficult to be sure about that. It was interesting with ‘Braff’s Neck’ because in the last three Improbable shows, that have been not the improvised ones, the devised ones, we would improvise a lot, talk about dreams, I would draw pictures, and somehow we would almost use none of it. And we would forget about it in the panic of ‘oh fuck we have to put a show on’. And so actually end up almost working in a very traditional way where ‘you stand there and do this and do this’ all in the last ten minutes, and in ‘Braff’s Neck’ we started spinning the pen- so if we did an exercise and came up with some material, we would somehow log that material like, with stick-it notes or whatever, and so we came up with characters who’d write their name down and they would join the wheel of characters. And we would constantly be spinning the pen to randomise what we were going to do; and it sort of meant that none of those ideas went away. Pretty much everything we did was written down and kept in some kind of way, as a conscious effort to not lose touch with some of the earlier stuff. But there’s no guarantee that that will work any better than the way… it might be worse.

LS: Yeah.

JC: Personally I’ve never been a great note-taker. If I look back at my notebooks, they’re usually full of notes when I’m watching a show but very few creative notes and very few creative drawings. And I almost force myself to do it more, so I certainly have always believed that yes, ideas will survive like the survival of the fittest, but I’m not sure about that at all… don’t know. It’s actually a complete mystery to me how we put our shows together.

LS: Me too. I mean I know that there’s the legend of ‘Don’t/ Stop calling me Vernon’, is The Right Size used all the bits they hadn’t used in their other shows and put them into this show: I don’t think we could ever do that, I don’t think we ever have…

JC: We never have any bits!

LS: …bits. We just don’t have any bits. I mean I think that’s the idea that that show was, that they had little routines that they couldn’t fit in to other shows… and we certainly don’t. That’s dreamy… that sounds like a wonderful… but we don’t have anything as clear cut or as neat as that. (Lee had to leave now).

GS: If you were in a situation where, say, you were responsible for new people… say someone like me was coming out of a context where they’ve basically been learning about how to collaborate, make theatre, and devising theatre, that sort of thing; are there any things that you think should be taught to people, that they won’t learn themselves as a process? Is there any way of improving thought processes of people as they come out of that kind of context, or is it just about making loads of mistakes?

PMcD: I think the thing is that it is the process of doing it that is what trains people, or is how you develop your curiosity. So the way that you find out how to do theatre is to get in a room and begin doing it. Be honest that you don’t know what you’re doing and that you’re there to find out, and that along the way you might find some things out, but they probably won’t stay true all the time. And there’ll be useful things that will be useful but always have the danger of becoming habits. And it’s like a practice; it’s in the doing that you find out, and there is no substitute for that doing. I think on one level, myself and Lee, and Julian probably in a different way, were lucky that there was a sort of place where we just did stuff, so Lee and I did a lot of improvisation, and sometimes that was comedy improvisation. And sometimes we got interested in how you might make improvisation more like theatre; and telling stories and things. But it was just out of the doing of it that you develop that interest; so it’s the same advice as for ‘how do you become a writer?’ and the answer is: whatever someone tells you, all the things that you are told about it, there is no substitute for the fact that at the end of the day you have to sit down and write. That’s the only way that you learn how to do it. But not just write once or whatever, you have to write as a practice, you do it again and again and again. People go to impro classes and learn how to improvise and they say ‘well I’ve done all those exercises, what do I do now?’ and the only answer is go away and do two hundred and fifty shows. And then you’ll know something about improvisation. There is no substitute for that.

JC: It’s interesting, I think, as a company I often think, about what we can pass down as a company. One of the reasons why we wanted to do these two projects was because we wanted to work with more actors. Because what we found out as freelancers, us two particularly go away to Germany and work with a group of actors, who really you are sort of teaching although they know a lot of stuff- they know a lot more than us in some ways- but you’re teaching a new sort of style to them. And we hadn’t been doing that with Improbable really, but I’m not really sure… ultimately I think I’m not sure that there’s not much… we can teach you useful little things but they’re things that only that person can apply themselves. And I think if anything is useful, I think we have defied a few opinions about how theatre is done. When we first, and we still get a little bit of it now, but people seem to be far more accepting that we are a company with three directors, and actually it is not clear cut who does what, they’ll make up their own idea about who does what. Which you constantly read about, and they’ve just totally guessed. Or even made an assumption. And I think there was a kind of feeling when we started that actually you couldn’t do shows that way, and I think somehow we’ve…

PMcD: …stuck with that.

JC: … yeah. And so I think there’s a kind of political thing there, that in a way we’re an example that it doesn’t have to be the way that everyone says it has to be. And I think there’s a good example there for people to do what they want to do, and make it in to art… well there’s no rules about it. It’s funny because (a friend) was saying she’d read an article and it had a big debate and a poll because someone had said you cannot do art about September 11th, and I just thought well that is crap. It might be difficult, but the whole thing about art is you can’t make statements like that about art! So it’s sort of, whether you’d want to do something about it is a completely different discussion, but it really annoys me- it REALLY annoys me- how theatre has invented rules for itself, and the way our buildings work and have invented rules for themselves, and people really believe them, and people really believe that if you have more than one director, you’re going to and up with chaos. And it’s ignorant, isn’t it? I mean you might, but you might end up with chaos with one director; so I don’t think we can teach but we can set some kind of example that it is at least possible to survive for seven years in chaos! Whether we’ll split up before we do this or whatever I don’t know…

GS: Do you think that if you had a dedicated theatre building, you’d be able to push things the way you have? Would it be a totally different story?

PMcD: A different thing really.

JC: You (Phelim) have an interest in that. I think it’s something that divides- I would say actually is one of the…it touches on something that we have very different opinions about. Because we’ve never done it; it has been talked about- there have been times when you’ve been offered to, you know where they’ve asked Phelim to be considered to run buildings and there’s been a lot of debate around that. There’s been a time when you were really pushing for us to try and get a building.

PMcD: Hhmm.

JC: I personally am not very interested in buildings, but just because I don’t see any good role models… I see a lot of experimental, daring, theatre directors, who’ll end up with buildings and they’ll seem to be unhappy and stagnated and actually quite jealous people to work for; so often we’re collaborating or we’re doing something that’s co-produced- WYP, or Nottingham Playhouse, or Lyric Hammersmith- and you sort of feel these shadows over your shoulder, of people who- they’re kind of a bit jealous of you- because you don’t have the building and you can run away. And so for me, I’m definitely someone who wants to run away.

PMcD: I wouldn’t want to run a theatre but I get really frustrated with the sense of not having a home, where you can just go and do the practice. We’ve managed to do that, but at times when things aren’t happening, it then feels that one has to create a project in order for something to happen. And I’d like it to not be quite like that. I’d like it to be a situation where we had a- well just a room, really. Where we could go and do some things, we could invite some actors in to do stuff.

JC: Yeah.

PMcD: …and that would be different. And maybe that’s in the future, but…

JC: Yeah. I mean I think that’s right, and in a way we have got an office and we have got access to a room that we can sometimes use at Paines Plough, you know that room along the corridor?

GS: Yes.

JC: And there’s something about that, but I would actually rather… when we went to Columbus, we were given Chuck’s (Helm) theatre, and this equipment, and I feel that ideally I would like there to be facilities. I mean it’s partly… well we’re very lucky to have this room, but it’s fucking horrible really; airless, there’s not like a bit of outside garden space that you could use, and I actually do think that one of the major cities in the world should have facilities for theatre… I mean, there’s actually quite a lot for artists in London, the east end where you can get a studio or whatever, but there’s fuck all for theatre companies and I actually think… when I dream about a building, I dream about some kind of almost like shared facilities.

PMcD: Yeah.

JC: Maybe not just for us but for a group of…

PMcD: Absolutely.

JC: or a place fucking in Brighton, or somewhere…

PMcD: Yeah.

JC: … that you could go to if you wanted to do what we’re doing, which is work in a concentrated way- actually, we’re not doing that, but we’re meant to be doing that. Work in a concentrated way on a project and I actually think I would rather there was an infrastructure there than actually we had our own place.

PMcD: Yeah.

JC: Because I know if we had our own place I would start feeling guilty about not using.. I’m already feeling guilty about the office, you know, and we’re going to get a very expensive computer, and I’m already worried that I’m not going to be there much. Cos I look at the diary and think ‘oh that’s such a waste of’, you know, and I actually don’t want to think about- I’d like to have my own- I’d like to have a house big enough to have my own studio and a study- something- and then I’d really like to go to a place where someone’s job was to… I mean, Tom Morris kind of does that- but you know, he’s got the problem of having to make money, and run a staff, and all of that kind of thing. I feel there’s something missing in the infrastructure. And in some ways something like that would be better than giving companies lots of money when they’re young

GS: Yes…

JC: …actually to give some kind of access to somewhere to work- somewhere to work in the city, somewhere to work in the country, and I don’t know what that would be, but I would want someone to run it! (Laughter) Not me.

GS: Do you think something like the Lanternhouse would work in London?

JC: Oh right. You mean like John Fox’s thing? It’s funny because you know I used to work for them?

GS: Yes.

JC: I was there a long time, but hardly anyone ever talks about them now. I don’t know, because to be honest I’m a bit out of touch with them, I don’t exactly know what they’re doing- well I can absolutely guess what they’re doing up there- I don’t know. My suspicion about that, and I really like Welfare State and what happened there, but they’re a little kind of monarchy and I think a lot of that is self-promotion; I don’t think that is an idyll for artists to go and work, I think it’s got a very very strict agenda. I guess what I’d like to see is Tom Morris running a place like that… but that is the real fault of Britain: it’s not directly the amount of money that companies get, but the kind of early encouragement… there seems to be absolutely no investment in that, and I don’t think it should be in the form of money, I think it should be in the form of free rehearsal spaces, access to-

PMcD: Equipment.

JC: You know, computers, or video stuff, or whatever. With someone intelligent running it, but I think that again you see, it’s a kind of attitude towards education… is that we’re all geared up to want to be famous film directors or … we’re not really part of a legend to be a great facilitator, so they are very few and far between. Because actually, if they are any good, they get sucked into running some enormous building and they all get tempted, to want to do bigger and bigger things. So that’s how I feel about buildings; I don’t think at this stage I would fight for an Improbable building, I don’t think… I’d really like to encourage someone else like Tom Morris to set something up. We should get Nick to do it, he lives out in the country…

PMcD: Hmmm.

JC: It seems mad though doesn’t it, really?

PMcD: It’s crazy… in a way that’s what the Jerwood space is like, but you have to pay for it; you have to…

JC: Well yes but actually I’m not sure, I think they do invite young people, don’t they, sometimes, to go there, and I think I had a conversation with them and they won’t invite us anymore because we’re too well subsidised.

PMcD:Hhmm.

JC: But it’s like watching that Sckriker thing yesterday, that space, for example, that would be great.

PMcD: Yes.

GS: Well thank you very much. It’s been extremely helpful and I’ll type it all out and give you copies…