Inside the house with the big windows, there’s a dinner party going on. Around the table, the banter is flowing and the party games are happening in-between all the comings and goings to the kitchen and the front door. From the outside, it’s easy to feel excluded from what looks like some fly on the wall reality TV show, a hybrid of Big Brother and Come Dine With Me perhaps. What’s going on in a rehearsal room in which the house has been temporarily constructed for Vanishing Point’s biggest show to date, however, is actually a lot more serious. The starting point of Interiors, after all, was Interieur, symbolist dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1894 embodiment of ‘static drama.’
“We thought it was going to be a show about pornography,” says Vanishing Point artistic director Matthew Lenton. “Basically, we took Maeterlinck’s play and some other ideas down to the National Theatre Studio to develop it. I had a documentary about pornography and some material about two Roma girls who were found on the beach in Naples, and played around with it. Interieur is a play I’ve wanted to do ever since our first show, The Sightless, which is another Maeterlinck play. I always wanted to do it in a really massive space, because what’s important to me in the Maeterlinck play is that as well as the interior, there’s a vast exterior as well. But after two days working on ideas, there was something that didn’t feel quite right for Vanishing Point in the way that I wanted to do it. So what we started to do by accident, was to look more at what happened inside the room. In the original play, there are two men outside a room who talk about the people inside as being like marionettes.”
This is where a clear resemblance to reality TV comes in.
“There’s something in the Maeterlinck play about voyeurism,” Lenton points out, “when at the end a crowd of villagers peer in. There was something about that which reminded me of Big Brother, where you’re watching idiots humiliating themselves. It also reminded me of the whole McCann family thing, where the grief of this couple whose daughter has disappeared becomes like a soap opera. So you’ve got this slightly illicit intrusion into people’s humiliation or grief, but which is enjoyable as well. Somewhere in that there’s a fracturing of empathy, where you’re screaming at the screen what idiots they are, or like on that box opening show (Deal Or No Deal) where a contestant only ends up with 10p, you’re thinking, ha ha. I became interested in why that was, because there’s a sense of there but for the grace of God go I.
“So you tune into the grief of the McCanns, but there’s an excitement and a compulsion to it. Yesterday I found myself trying to watch that German kid shooting himself on YouTube. It’s the gap between knowing what’s going to happen but not being able to do anything about it that’s interesting, because there’s a powerful energy in that gap. It’s like living. You know you’re going to die, but that space between is really powerful.”
All of which is being fed into something Lenton categorically says isn’t a play, but which is more an exploration of behaviour, and how people inter-act in a private domestic space. It’s a risky strategy. As Lenton himself observes, “In a play, if it’s not working, you can maybe juggle with the text, but with this, if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. There’s no safety net.”
This is especially the case in a piece being developed with four Scottish actors working alongside four from Italy. In what is a co-production between Vanishing Point, the Traverse Theatre and Napoli Teatro Festival Italia in association with the Lyric Hammersmith and Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, the Italian connection, as with so much of Lenton’s work, was a happy accident.
“I was asked to do some workshops in Napoli with Timberlake Wertenberger,” Lenton explains, “and something must have interested them from that, because they suggested that we should work on a production together.”
Interiors, which will tour to Napoli following its Scottish and English dates, is the result. Such a casually holistic approach is in keeping with how an eight piece Kosovan folk band came to be an integral part of Vanishing Point’s 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, Subway. The company met the band while touring with their show, Lost Ones, stumbling across them in a bar where they were playing. These international connections will be explored in Crossing Imaginary Borders, a one-day symposium hosted by Vanishing Point during Interiors’ opening run at the Traverse. In keeping with such internationalism, Lenton talks about another point of entry for Interiors, a small Norwegian town which has no daylight for half the year.
“The darkness is hard there,” Lenton says, “and not everyone survives it, but the people who do survive are those who go to their friends’ houses and become part of the community. They need each other. So whether it’s Jade Goody dieing or economies crumbling, these people are sheltering themselves from what’s going on outside. Their world ends at their front door. And maybe, when the ice-caps are melting and the world’s crumbling, the most important things around you are your friends. The ones who don’t survive are the ones who stay on their own and try to drink their way through it. ”
This is a typically opaque image for Lenton to work with. By his own admission, his work for Vanishing Point is rarely influenced by other theatre, but something harder to define.
“Pure little ideas,” is what he calls them, “which are normally visual or about atmosphere. This comes from seeing lit rooms while walking round Glasgow, where people are living their lives inside these little pockets of light, or when you look at a ship on the sea with this light moving along. Where I grew up in Portsmouth you’d see that all the time. Blackness, and then these little pockets of light. That’s what I find intriguing, and incredibly romantic.”
Interiors, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews, April 3-5, then April 7-11, then on tour. Crossing Imaginary Borders, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 8, 2-7pm
www.vanishing-point.org
www.teatrofestivalitalia.it
www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, March 31st 2009
ends
“We thought it was going to be a show about pornography,” says Vanishing Point artistic director Matthew Lenton. “Basically, we took Maeterlinck’s play and some other ideas down to the National Theatre Studio to develop it. I had a documentary about pornography and some material about two Roma girls who were found on the beach in Naples, and played around with it. Interieur is a play I’ve wanted to do ever since our first show, The Sightless, which is another Maeterlinck play. I always wanted to do it in a really massive space, because what’s important to me in the Maeterlinck play is that as well as the interior, there’s a vast exterior as well. But after two days working on ideas, there was something that didn’t feel quite right for Vanishing Point in the way that I wanted to do it. So what we started to do by accident, was to look more at what happened inside the room. In the original play, there are two men outside a room who talk about the people inside as being like marionettes.”
This is where a clear resemblance to reality TV comes in.
“There’s something in the Maeterlinck play about voyeurism,” Lenton points out, “when at the end a crowd of villagers peer in. There was something about that which reminded me of Big Brother, where you’re watching idiots humiliating themselves. It also reminded me of the whole McCann family thing, where the grief of this couple whose daughter has disappeared becomes like a soap opera. So you’ve got this slightly illicit intrusion into people’s humiliation or grief, but which is enjoyable as well. Somewhere in that there’s a fracturing of empathy, where you’re screaming at the screen what idiots they are, or like on that box opening show (Deal Or No Deal) where a contestant only ends up with 10p, you’re thinking, ha ha. I became interested in why that was, because there’s a sense of there but for the grace of God go I.
“So you tune into the grief of the McCanns, but there’s an excitement and a compulsion to it. Yesterday I found myself trying to watch that German kid shooting himself on YouTube. It’s the gap between knowing what’s going to happen but not being able to do anything about it that’s interesting, because there’s a powerful energy in that gap. It’s like living. You know you’re going to die, but that space between is really powerful.”
All of which is being fed into something Lenton categorically says isn’t a play, but which is more an exploration of behaviour, and how people inter-act in a private domestic space. It’s a risky strategy. As Lenton himself observes, “In a play, if it’s not working, you can maybe juggle with the text, but with this, if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work. There’s no safety net.”
This is especially the case in a piece being developed with four Scottish actors working alongside four from Italy. In what is a co-production between Vanishing Point, the Traverse Theatre and Napoli Teatro Festival Italia in association with the Lyric Hammersmith and Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, the Italian connection, as with so much of Lenton’s work, was a happy accident.
“I was asked to do some workshops in Napoli with Timberlake Wertenberger,” Lenton explains, “and something must have interested them from that, because they suggested that we should work on a production together.”
Interiors, which will tour to Napoli following its Scottish and English dates, is the result. Such a casually holistic approach is in keeping with how an eight piece Kosovan folk band came to be an integral part of Vanishing Point’s 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit, Subway. The company met the band while touring with their show, Lost Ones, stumbling across them in a bar where they were playing. These international connections will be explored in Crossing Imaginary Borders, a one-day symposium hosted by Vanishing Point during Interiors’ opening run at the Traverse. In keeping with such internationalism, Lenton talks about another point of entry for Interiors, a small Norwegian town which has no daylight for half the year.
“The darkness is hard there,” Lenton says, “and not everyone survives it, but the people who do survive are those who go to their friends’ houses and become part of the community. They need each other. So whether it’s Jade Goody dieing or economies crumbling, these people are sheltering themselves from what’s going on outside. Their world ends at their front door. And maybe, when the ice-caps are melting and the world’s crumbling, the most important things around you are your friends. The ones who don’t survive are the ones who stay on their own and try to drink their way through it. ”
This is a typically opaque image for Lenton to work with. By his own admission, his work for Vanishing Point is rarely influenced by other theatre, but something harder to define.
“Pure little ideas,” is what he calls them, “which are normally visual or about atmosphere. This comes from seeing lit rooms while walking round Glasgow, where people are living their lives inside these little pockets of light, or when you look at a ship on the sea with this light moving along. Where I grew up in Portsmouth you’d see that all the time. Blackness, and then these little pockets of light. That’s what I find intriguing, and incredibly romantic.”
Interiors, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, previews, April 3-5, then April 7-11, then on tour. Crossing Imaginary Borders, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, April 8, 2-7pm
www.vanishing-point.org
www.teatrofestivalitalia.it
www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, March 31st 2009
ends
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