Noises Off 2014 Thursday by Chris Perkin

2014 Issue 5 Thursday 17th April

Noises OFF

Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca

Today’s Contents 2 Reviews - Nothing

6 Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

10 Reviews - Punk Rock 12 Reviews - Road 14 A Class Act 16 Interview with a Rabbit

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Speak Again Natalie Small

That IKEA thing. I shat on his doorstep. This shit was so special that I shat on his doorstep. Nothing began before I had realised it had begun – we were led into an ante-room and then people started talking from different places around the room. Nothing particularly original in that perhaps but it was done so smoothly that it felt as if it might be. I was stood and then sat on the floor twisting and turning in different directions as a series of monologues grew around me so gradually that they didn’t appear to be monologues for quite a while; a patchwork of different voices from different places. These voices would interact and then disappear for extended periods and yet when a voice reappeared, I remembered what it had been saying, remembered that character’s story among the others. What I really want to know is how this production was written. It felt like a collection of thoughts compiled over a long period of time, but all collected in the same mood of anxious social perplexity. A series of everyday monologues which introduced their stories with such care, that built so slowly that by the end I almost felt bad that I’d been laughing along with the jokes at the beginning. Stories of abuse, heroism, disillusionment, displacement and, ultimately, sadness.

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At many points it felt like a well constructed comedy routine told spontaneously by several different people. Well measured audience interaction aided this feeling of spontaneity – laughter was acknowledged, responses requested and dealt with, moments of ridiculous hilarity allowed before diving back into a pool of the human condition and swimming around, diving to the bottom, picking up little curiosities and holding them up, making faces at them.

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Nothing went nowhere and said everything. It was poetic and effective and said those things that everyone’s thinking anyway, but said them well.

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Georgia Snow Written by Lucyna Raczka and directed by Ali Pidsley - who has also directed Road at the festival - Nothing is a series of eight monologues performed in an unrehearsed order. Each of the characters displays a disconnect with the world; the ‘something’ that they feel is lacking is palpable throughout. Raczka sets up an interesting dialogue with the audience by pairing the play’s sense of disconnect with a conscious effort to stay connected with the audience.

somewhere among us, but without costume their presence is but one of anticipation until one by one they emerge from within the crowd, interrupting each other as they go. There is fluidity in the order of the monologues, the sequence in which they are presented is unrehearsed and changes with each show – a testament both to Pidsley’s direction and the cast’s versatility. For the final monologue we are taken outside onto the Spa’s “sun court”, and there’s no denying that the freezing dark sky that hangs above adds an extra They seek to element of poignancy to the instigate the richest occasion.

Reviews - Nothing

Nothing

Barrel Organ Theatre play with the notion of audience, by compelling each cast possible relationship But with an audience of nearing member to come out of the performance not having told 100, and a performance space with an audience a story but having forged a much larger than they are used relationship, and shared an to, there is a greater sense of experience. They seek to instigate the richest performance than perhaps has been present possible relationship with an audience – this in previous incarnations of the show. A smaller doesn’t necessarily mean direct interaction, audience and a more intimate space, which although there is some, but more the idea that by all accounts past shows have had, would the performance is not predetermined, that this create the conversational dynamic that this audience shapes and influences this particular piece thrives off, some of which is lost when the production. audience so vastly outnumber the cast. All the characters are young, which, at the National Student Drama Festival will always have an inflated resonance. While the characters tell us of things that they have experienced, what they are actually doing is telling us about themselves. They are giving us a window into their soul, exposing their vulnerabilities and their flaws in a way that instantly begs for a connection. Some reactions are stronger than others, naturally. Some monologues are comedic, others incredibly harrowing but each actor immediately establishes a relationship with the audience, if only with a glance, or a reaction to a laugh. We are shepherded into the space and left to make our own decisions of whether to sit or stand, to bring over a chair or sit on the floor. It soon becomes apparent that the actors are

Nothing has been performed various times in various places for nearly a year, including pubs, car parks, and even on the phone. The company describe themselves as creating “site unspecific” theatre, and the experiences of performing the show in a multitude of environments mean that each actor is able to react organically to what is going on around them. They are not too precious with the script, and under Pidsley’s direction the cast are so prepared to improvise within the play’s framework that the intriguing performeraudience dynamic it creates is impressive. It is the kind of show you can talk endlessly about, not least because each performance is different, but what will remain constant is Nothing’s sparkling originality and fascinating versatility.

Send us your reviews, news and comments: noff@nsdf.org.uk

Reviews - Nothing

Something about Nothing Andrew Haydon

Even just as a piece of “New Writing” Lucyna Raczka’s Nothing announces a serious new talent to British theatre, however, Ali Pidsley’s production for Barrel Organ Productions – made, as I understand it – in complete collaboration with the writer, lifts this already excellent writing to a whole new level. You needn’t know any of the following as an audience member to appreciate Nothing while you’re watching it, but I did, and I think it’s fascinating and brilliant. Basically: Nothing consists of eight intercut monologues. How they are intercut, however, is left entirely to the performers. *And* even which actor is going to play which point can be left open in some performances by this company – some of them know more than one of the monologues, and it’s just a matter of one of the performers starting on the one that they autonomously choose to do that dictate which their counterpart plays. As if that’s not enough, the performance of Nothing that I saw was the first time the company had played the space in which we saw it. And to a crowd twice the size of any to which they’d played before (roughly a hundred). The way it works reminded me a bit of a short, scripted And On The Thousandth Night, or maybe the way that Dominic Cooke staged the second act of In The Republic of Happiness at the Royal Court. Performer could interrupt performer. Monologue could interject, intercut, and interact with monologue.

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That the company completely pull this off, so much so on the night I saw it, that you’d swear blind that this was *the* definitive version, says pretty much everything that needs saying about the talent of the company, both as individual performers and as an ensemble, and about the quality and robustness of the writing. Oh, and the company do all this under the room’s normal lights and with no sound other than the sounds that naturally occur in the room (interestingly and oddly, this being a drama festival, those sounds last night occasionally included elephantine-sounding dancing and noise from a production of Spring Awakening – The Musical, upstairs. These were duly incorporated – brilliantly – into the piece as the sound of rumbling tube trains already referred to in one monologue). Exciting as all this liveness and invention is, though, it doesn’t tell you anything about the content. Nothing is a clear literary successor to Simon Stephens, Sarah Kane and Chris Thorpe. Yes, there are the obvious themes of urban alienation, photo-sharp mental pictures of late nights in uncaring cities, anecdotes involving all too easily imagined friends, exes, abusers or strangers, but much more than that, it’s the way that the notes, themes, or motifs seem to spring nimbly from one story only to recur transfigured into something new in another. A pre-occupation that one character has with the outrageous parents of a friend explaining what a cum-shot was to him when he was ten echoes in the story of sexual abuse Get the latest news and revews: noff.nsdf.org.uk

Reviews - Nothing Photo (c) Giulia Delprato

by a family friend of another speaker’s ten-yearto do when we enter a large empty room, the old self echoes in the story told by a girl about way that we mill around and have to decide the night her best friend forever got raped. A how we’re going to watch “a piece of theatre”, man slumped in an alleyway, his leg just cut off, the way that the performers file in with us and encountered by one speaker recalls the man only reveal themselves, one after another, smashing another man’s head with a baseball gradually, suddenly standing or speaking bat witnessed by a different from amongst us, instead Nothing is a clear speaker. Acts of violence and constitute the political. rape contrast with silly, comic And then, the way that literary successor or callous anecdotes and jokes. their stories never connect, to Simon Stephens, although it feels like they’re It’s interesting that the things all just a thin membrane Sarah Kane and being talked about are mostly away from each following Chris Thorpe. things that have happened to on as consequences the speaker at one remove. We of one another: it’s don’t hear from the man whose like Wastwater with the links not revealed. leg has been cut off but a person who sees Perhaps the speakers are all linked in some him. We don’t hear from the girl who’s been way which is never revealed. Which in turn raped but about her best friend’s impressions perhaps make us think about how all of us of her afterwards. Even the man who has been are *actually* linked in ways that we don’t yet sexually abused as a child describes how he realise or ever consciously consider. And the experiences his own abuse remotely; wanting fact that we’re doing this in a room where we’re to make sense of it, and yet not even being also being asked to think carefully about how able to picture his abuser accurately; and we position ourselves in relation to everyone constantly apologising to us, his audience, else in the room – a place where we have to for bringing it up, and it being a bit of an take responsibility for ourselves and others, as uncomfortable subject. we watch these stories about people failing to take care of each other. What’s fascinating about the piece is how unashamedly political it feels without (as far The picture Nothing paints of the Britain that we as I remember) ever really saying anything live everyday is as bleak as the title suggests. explicit about politics. Maybe it does have one Perhaps the only thing that really mitigates this or two characters actually mention politics, is the fact that there are a hundred of us, all but not in a way that makes it sound like “here gathered together watching it and taking care comes the author’s *message*”. Instead, the of each other a bit while we do. way that we, the audience, are not told what Send us your reviews, news and comments: noff@nsdf.org.uk

Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

Unnerving Without Answers Rachael Murray

In the Kingdom of the Blind opens with a man bounding on stage and skinning a real rabbit. And it’s really quite endearing, the warmest part of the play. But the childlike delight soon fades as the dark reality of the situation becomes a little bit clearer. The characters talk exclusively in short, awkward bursts – to the point where I spent the first five minutes wondering if it was actually the story of two children that had ran away from home. By making both Nick (Kit Spink) and Chrissy (Charlie Howitt) seem so naïve in such a ominous environment, a strong, eerie atmosphere is created. This means that Brian McMahon’s Davies seems not just erratic, but a powerful and sinister influence. While they muddle through awkward intimacies and attempts at romance together, his graphic sexualisation of them, particularly when alone with Chrissy, seems even more brutal. There isn’t much in the way of plot to In the Kingdom of the Blind, nor are the characters explored in depth – there are far more questions than answers. What it does do, however, is create a deep-seated sense of discomfort. A

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reason given for old horror movies not showing gore on screen is because the audience’s imagination would fill in the unknown with worse. In the Kingdom of the Blind seems a bit like this. By showing us empty conversations, unexplained violence and mere suggestions of the preceding events, the world outside of the characters’ camps becomes worse that the one inside. To expand on any of these things would make the play clichéd – if they were to break down and start talking about their homes and love lives, it would just be The Breakfast Club goes camping. Instead, the refusal to fulfil our expectations ends up being an incredibly powerful tool in making us genuinely care and worry about Chrissy, Nick and even Davies. The set is visually beautiful and used intelligently throughout. It’s worth nothing that the scene changes are long, but this would actually contribute further to the feeling of discomfort amongst the audience, were it not for the inappropriate and often bizarre song choices. Ultimately, this is not a show to see for any real narrative or character development, but it is a striking and powerful piece, and at times quite difficult to watch.

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Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

Primitive Promise Adam Foster

How do you start a play? On a leaf littered stage, far from civilisation, three outsiders set up camp, free from society, technology and the realities of modern living. Crouched over a log, blade in hand, Nick severs the skin off a dead hare. It’s a beginning of primitive promise that belies the remainder of this disappointing play. In the Kingdom of the Blind sets out on a road paved with intrigue – what happens when we ditch technology, up sticks, and journey into the forest? Repeated claims of “we’re all in this together” signal a political intent, but there is none. A capitalist critique is not forthcoming, nor, seemingly, are any notable plot points. Created and performed by the company (Kit Spink, Charlie Howitt and Brian McHamon), the piece desperately needs an outside eye - someone to grab it by the ears and drag it from its meandering warren. But having already played at number of fringe festivals, you’d think it would have been dealt with in the wilderness of the rehearsal room. It left me pulling my hare out.

Photo (c) Giulia Delprato

Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca

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Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

Blind Man’s Bluff Georgia Snow

In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king, or so the saying goes. In this kingdom however, there is no one-eyed man. All three characters stumble around the wilderness as blindly as each other, having ceremoniously turned their backs on normal life. None of them really know what they’re doing, learning only from a tattered Ray Mears survival guide. We look set to be in for a master class in how to butcher woodland creatures as Nick (Kit Spink) begins the show with an attempt at skinning a rabbit, eliciting squirms and squeals as he savagely rips off its dank fur and tosses the meat onto a Trangia stove. It turns out to be the only instance of animal butchery, which is unfortunate, as it’s also the most exciting thing about In the Kingdom of the Blind. The three aforementioned characters, little more than strangers, meet online and collectively decide to shed the skins of modern society and its pressures and restrictions in favour of a life in the wild with nothing but each other for company. A predictably naïve plan, they all get pretty sick of each other before too long, and with two guys and one girl an unsurprising love triangle soon emerges.

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The days are counted by a blackboard tally in the corner of the space, the chalk scribbles seeming more like they are scoring away their days in captivity than freedom, considering the fact that none of them look like they actually want to be there. They seem to know as little as we do about why they are there - which, had it been developed, could have made for a much more interesting premise. The real-life rabbit skinning and a set dressed entirely with leaves and camping equipment promote the play’s ultra-naturalism, which perhaps is why we are subjected to the tedium of the underwhelming reality of this romanticised vision of the great unknown. If that’s the case, it’s done its job; I won’t be running away from home any time soon.

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Billy Barrett

Skinning a rabbit is one way to grab your audience. In The Kingdom of the Blind opens thusly, as Nick (Kit Spink) hacks away at the dead fur bundle until it’s a raw, sinewy carcass. It spurts, it splurges, it smells “iron-rich” according to accounts from the front row. Animal butchery is a fascinating thing to do in an intimate space, and something we’d sooner expect from live art than theatre – the nervous, giggly gasps from the audience point towards some barrier of decency and taste deliciously crossed. Flopsy’s demise is a nice metaphor for the play’s promising premise. Shedding their civilised skins, Nick, Krissy and Davis have unplugged themselves from interconnected, hypercapitalist modernity and gone bush. They met on the internet and now they live wi-fi-less, under tarpaulin and on a diet of rabbit. But our protagonists fail to connect with their animal instincts, and Into the Wild it ain’t. All the trio encounters in the woods is a well trodden path of clichés, bickering about survival techniques, and stumbling into a painfully predictable love triangle.

Reviews - In the Kingdom of the Blind

Undergrowth

Reverend Productions devised the piece together, and apparently went on their own forest adventure to inspire its creation. This process hasn’t led to well-rounded characters or thematic cohesion, and even its one hour running time drags. The most memorable moment of Tuesday’s performance, apart from the rabbit, was the brief illumination of the house lights. Under that strip lighting, for a few hopeful moments it seemed the company were about to take their glorified Duke of Edinburgh expedition somewhere radically, theatrically different. But then it flicked off, clearly accidental, and the cast wittered on – blind to the possibility of something more.

Photo (c) Aenne Pallasca

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Reviews - Punk Rock

Just Because Something’s Bleak Doesn’t Mean It’s Not True Rachael Murray

Performed in the round, the stage becomes a ring for constant verbal sparring between the teenage characters of Simon Stephen’s Punk Rock – every conversation is a competition for who is the wittiest, who can be cruelest, and who gets the last word. Girls are spat on and assaulted, and being so close to this is genuinely shocking and upsetting. The main criticism I’ve heard about this play is that Simon Stephens writes the students as if they are adults, and I honestly disagree. The smarmy, showoff voices are amongst the most realistic portrayals of the worst parts of this age group I’ve seen on stage. The idea that these are wholly inauthentic portrayals sorely underestimates adolescents’ capacity for both arrogance and cruelty. The performances are, without exception, of incredibly high quality – James Wilson’s Nicholas was particularly effective, grounding the other characters by being a really authentic voice of the more typical teenager. It is so refreshing to see a play about Sixth Formers being performed by actual Sixth Formers – both in the sense of giving young people the opportunity to play parts that are appropriate and engaging for them (we’ve all seen enough talcum powder hair and eyeliner wrinkles); also, because the piece is so powerful and provocative, and because of the characters’ ages, having an entirely school-aged cast constantly puts the play into this context for us. The play does suffer from being the cuts made, though. Rather than a slow, sinister decline; William’s attack seems a bit unexplained. However, the sequence itself is stunningly well done, so the audience can still believe in it. Ultimately, Punk Rock is made so powerful because of breath-taking performers that use the space intelligently and confidently. My main criticism is that we couldn’t see more. Photos (c) Giulia Delprato

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Georgia Snow

Simon Stephens has become a regular fixture at NSDF. His plays are exhaustively performed by students – for good reason – but this is the first time Punk Rock has appeared at the festival. Set in a Stockport grammar school, the usual stakes of schoolyard banter give way to an altogether darker turn of events. Brimming with teenage angst and misplaced bravado, ArtsEd do a commendable job of convincing us that they really are as precocious as Stephens wrote them to be. As the students over-anxiously prepare for their mock A Levels, the arrival of new girl Lily (Eve Perry), and the ever-present stench of hormonal anguish, brew tensions that culminate in horrifying, arbitrary violence. A lack of authority establishes the need for a constant tussle for dominance, popularity and attention. The pacing feels a bit off, as it races towards the climax with a drive that is lacking in the beginning – although no one can accuse ArtsEd of letting the play drag. At only an hour and a quarter it jumps through the original text, omitting the better part of an hour.

The psychological build up that intensifies the play’s violent conclusion is what feels underdeveloped in this version, however there’s a certain power with which the production sadistically plunges into its bloodshed.

Reviews - Punk Rock

Punk Rock

It’s a bold and difficult thing to attempt guns on stage, especially when staged in the round, as this production is. The violence is executed - so to speak - with some stand out performances, particularly from Barnaby Chambers, who goes from class bully to snivelling child in a matter of moments. What Stephens does, by writing Punk Rock about a school, is brilliantly capture the incessant, sniping remarks of playground banter and continual competition so as to create a hyper-sensitive environment of inflated egos and heightened tension, making its unravelling all the more dramatic. But when this slow build up is slimmed down and the necessary atmospheric wadding removed, it makes it all the more difficult to engage with the end result and for it to fulfil its terrifying realisation.

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Reviews - Road 12

Sheer, Undiluted Pleasure Catherine Love

If there’s any one element of a production each fragment of the lives played out in that I’m liable to overlook or undervalue, this community can essentially stand alone. it’s the acting. Not that I don’t enjoy good Combined, however, they offer both a stark performances or appreciate the work that goes image of the destruction wrought across the into them. Some actors – in fact, probably North of England by Thatcherism and an lots of actors – are extraordinary in what they extraordinarily rich range of roles for the actors do. There are performers I will happily see involved. in absolutely anything; I’m convinced Scott There is the danger, when a group of (mostly) Shepherd would make even middle class Southerners the phone book sound There is a get together to do a play fascinating, while Lucy like this, that it becomes theatricality to Ellinson could just shout a queasily patronising at me for an hour and I’d proceedings, without imitation, verging on still be helplessly enthralled distracting from the poverty porn. Warwick’s (see #TORYCORE). When performers escape any grit, humour and writing a review, however, such charges, however, there’s nothing more likely humanity of the lives with an approach that is to get a brief, nondescript simple and understated, yet we are asked to line, buried somewhere in cumulatively devastating. witness. reflections about the text, In this version, it is not the the design and the concept. characters’ social class Warwick University Drama that is striking so much Society’s astonishing production of Road, as their tangible desperation. The delicacy of then, puts me in a bit of a bind. Because the the handling is such that the play manages to performances are, without exception, stunning. remain rooted in a particular time, location and And I mean heart-thumping, kick-in-the-guts, class, at the same time as resonating deeply jaw-grazing-the-floor stunning – plus any other with present-day austerity Britain. clichés you fancy throwing into the mix. I went Director Ali Pidsley has retained the promenade in with no particular love for Jim Cartwright’s staging of the original Royal Court production, play, aside from perhaps a few shreds of but with a fluidity that works beautifully for this nostalgia left over from GCSE drama, but space, even allowing for the practical difficulties Warwick’s blinding performances completely that the form inevitably entails. The setting won me round. In the process, it also made quietly shifts around the audience as we shuffle me rediscover with a sudden jolt the sheer, from scene to scene, rooms suddenly conjured undiluted pleasure of simply remarkable acting. at the corners of our eyes. As a result, there is In lots of ways, Cartwright’s play is an a certain theatricality to proceedings, without ensemble’s dream, making it the stuff of this once distracting from the grit, humour and countless performance showcases. His bleak, humanity of the lives we are asked to witness. angry portrait of a Lancashire community Then there are those performances. Nima ravaged by Thatcher is comprised of a series Taleghani’s Scullery is a swaggering, effortlessly of short scenes and monologues, all situated charismatic master of ceremonies, shepherding along the play’s eponymous stretch of road. us from house to house with a sparky wit that With little to connect them but geography, only occasionally cracks to reveal a glimpse Noises OFF 17/04/14

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It is the extended closing scenes of the two acts, however, that really give the piece its raw, breathless force. Before the interval, we are invited to witness the futile resistance of young couple Joey and Clare, for whom the only available protest to a relentlessly hostile world is to simply leave it behind. Starving themselves in Joey’s bed, the pair rail weakly yet furiously against a society that has robbed them of all hope. Charlotte Thomas offers us a hollow shell of what Clare must once have been, skilfully hinting at the ambition that has been scraped away bit by bit. But it’s Ed Franklin’s Joey who punctures the heart, quivering with frustrated rage at the multiple, insidious forces which have driven him to this bitter resolution.

If this is a lesson in despair, then the play’s final sequence offers a fragile splinter of optimism. [SPOILER ALERT] The scene starts out ordinarily enough: friends Louise (Beth Holmes) and Carol (Victoria Watson) have gone home with a couple of blokes from the pub (Angus Imrie and Tom Bulpett), who promptly try to get them into bed. Once the girls make it clear that they are looking for something “different”, though, events take a startling turn. After feverishly necking bottles of wine, the four of them listen to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in its entirety, before spewing out their thoughts in an angry, poetic tumble of words.

Reviews - Road

of the vulnerability beneath. The rest of the chameleonic ensemble take on several roles apiece, ably flitting from one to the next. Daisy Gilbert is brimming with defiant energy one moment as the party girl snogging her way through life, before visibly crumpling into a worn down housewife; Angus Imrie makes a terrifyingly intense Skin-Lad while elsewhere becoming utterly, heartbreakingly helpless.

It’s an absolute knockout of a scene. All four performers are quietly exceptional, pulling off the considerable feat of remaining totally compelling for the length of Redding’s gorgeously apt song, before joining their voices in a determined yet tentative statement of hope: “somehow I somehow I somehow might escape”. The moment is charged - magical, almost. And it is that rhythmic chant that echoes in the ears long after the lights have come up, its spirit thrillingly and movingly animated by Warwick’s outstanding ensemble. “Somehow I somehow I somehow might escape”. Photo (c) Giulia Delprato

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A Class Act Billy Barratt A couple of plays this week have made us sit back and think of England. Well, walk around and perch awkwardly in the case of WUDS’s Road, which alongside Jerusalem by Minotaur Theatre is consciously state-of-the-nation stuff. One’s about urban poverty under 80s austerity and the other the decline of the British countryside. But both are united in their foregrounding of working class characters, living lives a world away from NSDF’s black-box spaces and bright, soulless bar. I can’t speculate on individual student’s backgrounds, but the festival’s chief demographic seems depressingly in tune with the rest of higher education and the arts. Most people here are middle-class kids. This came up in Wednesday’s discussion about the two plays, continuing a critical thread over the week about diversity, representation and our capacity to imagine and create characters beyond ourselves; a panel of professionals on Tuesday decried theatre’s dearth of decent female roles, and tensions rose earlier in the day when Hungry Bitches Productions were asked if they’d been to an American high school. So Jerusalem and Road at NSDF invite uncomfortable but necessary questions. When the national narrative is staged, whose story gets to be told – and does it matter who’s telling it? Poverty’s knocking on as many British doors today as under Thatcher, and student theatre has a duty to reflect that. Ali Pidsley’s decision to stage Road now is a sharp and conscious

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one. But student theatre-makers in a position of class privilege have to negotiate a delicate line between “opening their imaginations” to marginalised people (a phrase someone used on Tuesday about men writing women) and indulging in forms of cultural tourism. After enjoying Ali’s brilliant Road at Warwick last year, I was left with a nagging sense of the gulf between the social milieu conjured so achingly in the studio and the flashy corporate campus gleaming outside. The actors – my friends who’d so dazzled with their performances – were mostly southerners of comfortable middle class backgrounds, performing to a similarly educated tuition-feepaying audience. It left a slightly bitter taste. So what’s the solution? ArtsEd’s Punk Rock is pretty good, but if student theatre’s doors remain closed to less advantaged people, can we only palate plays about middle class mores and fucked-up poshos? Discussing the problems of representation with Foucault in Intellectuals and Power, Deleuze coins the phrase “the indignity of speaking for others”. No director or cast wants to misrepresent someone else’s experience, but at the same time theatre is inherently about speaking for others; formally, it’s ventriloquism, it’s ghost-

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Can we only palate plays about middle class mores and fucked-up poshos?

summoning, it’s – well, pretending. Still flushed with the revolutionary zeal of May ‘68, Foucault argues that “the masses... are certainly capable of expressing themselves”. This is true, but culture continues to advance certain voices at the expense of others. It’s therefore the responsibility of the privileged theatre-maker to try and break those doors open, in order to speak with rather than for them. It’s a difficult thing to do since the problems I’m describing are structural, but sensitively telling a diverse range of stories is a decent start. Sade Banks, Producer (Next Generation) at the Lyric Hammersmith, spoke in the Road discussion about the show’s success in not patronising or sensationalising working class life. She described often feeling unwelcome in theatre spaces as someone from a working class background, but very much invited into Road. Ali’s production of the play – as I suggested in my review – has developed enormously since its Warwick run, throwing out some finely crafted performances and cultivating a real emotional core. We can only hope work like this can challenge, as well as reflect, the structures that keep people out.

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Interview with a Rabbit Richard Dennis

Flopsy the rabbit has been a professional performer for three years now. She started off on Springwatch in 2011, where she was born live on television. Since then she has appeared on Blue Peter, Animal Rescue and Emmerdale, as well as directing a number of all-animal casts for the RSC. Here she talks to Noises Off about her career, and how she came to be involved with In the Kingdom of the Blind. So how are you finding NSDF so far? It’s been brilliant. Everyone here is so positive, and I’ve learnt a lot in a short amount of time. The workshops have been really interesting – Alan Lane’s one on finding your inner animal, especially. It’s also great to see shows like The Duck Pond highlighting the plight of animals in captivity, although obviously it would’ve been nice if they’d cast an actual duck and owl in the show. But yeah, overall the whole Festival has been amazing. When did you know you wanted to be an actor? Ever since I was born, really. My mum gave birth to me while she was on Springwatch, so I guess you could say that showbiz has always been in my life! Then as I was growing up, I became aware of these great rabbit figures in popular culture – rabbits like Bugs Bunny, Peter Rabbit, Thumper – and I just knew deep down that I wanted to be a performer like them. What’s it been like as a rabbit trying to make it in the industry? It can be tough at times. There aren’t many roles for rabbits at the moment, and those that do exist tend to be the stereotypical “carrot-muncher” kind that can lead to typecasting. But it’s changing, slowly. There are more opportunities for animals now than there ever have been before, and I feel proud to be at the forefront of that change. How did you get involved with In the Kingdom of the Blind? We met in the woods. In order to devise the play, Kit, Brian and Charlie actually went out into the wild and spent time there, learning what it would be like to survive away from society. I bumped into them and we got chatting, and it just sounded

like exactly the kind of project I wanted to be involved with. They’ve got this bold idea of using a different rabbit in the cast every night, which adds a level of improvisation and spontaneity to the performance that I’ve never experienced before. So you don’t know what your role is in the show? No, not exactly. The cast call it Need-to-Know theatre. The idea is that I’ll find out what my role is at the last minute, and I play it from there. They’ve talked to me about the themes of the show, but I haven’t been allowed to any rehearsals or anything. I’m told that my role is one of the highlights of the piece, but part of what they want to achieve is the surprise of bringing me onstage and seeing what happens next. I’ve got a few ideas planned for what I might do, but you don’t want to think about it too much – just get out there and do it! What advice would you give to young animals who want to break into the industry? Don’t give up. Society will give you a million reasons why a rabbit can’t be an actor, but it’s not true. Be confident, believe in yourself. If you really want to do it, you’ll find a way, even if that means only having a small block of wood to gnaw on sometimes. What’s next for you? I’m heading back to London after tonight’s performance. My agent has got me an audition with the National for their upcoming revival of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which I’m very excited about. I’ve yet to try out comedy, so it’ll be a nice change of scene for me. Other than that, I’m just dead excited about life. I’ve got this incredible opportunity, and it’s up to me not to waste it. Flopsy, thanks very much. Thank you.

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