Debbie Hannan has lost
her voice. Not theatrically, you understand, as anyone who has seen the Glasgow-born
director’s work since she first appeared on the scene a few years ago will
already know from her productions of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground Howard
Barker’s Lot and His God in the Citizens Theatre’s Circle Studio.
Now comes her
production of The Ugly One, German writer Marius von Mayenburg’s play, which
opens at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow next week. By that time Hannan will have
hopefully got her voice back after falling prey to an infection which has given
both rehearsals and interviews an extra edge as she attempts to explain what is
required for an already intense work.
Von Mayenburg’s play
looks at what happens when a seemingly normal man called Lette is told that he
can’t be the public face of his potentially life-changing new invention because
he’s too ugly. Talked into having plastic surgery by his wife, Lette’s world is
turned upside down when the operation is so successful that he is regarded as
too beautiful for those around him to cope. Out of this comes a wild and
fantastical fable of how beauty really is only skin deep
“I love that the style
of it,” manages Hannan. “It tumbles fast and is unrelenting, in a recognisable
but more direct and callous world than our own. The language is brilliant, short,
sharp and direct. And thematically it grabs, then tears apart our twenty-first
century obsession with our own faces with an aggressive wit and deft hand.
“It’s a secular fairy tale with a bit of
a warning hidden under its dry humour. It’s a classic tale of hubris gone
wrong. There’s a fall of Icarus shape to the story. We keep referencing modern
rock stars who go too far and lose themselves, which is probably our twenty-first
century version of Gods who get above themselves.”
Von Mayenburg’s work was last seen in Scotland when Thomas Ostermeier’s production of his 1997 break-out play, Fireface, was seen at the 1999 Edinburgh International Festival. In 2016, Ostermeier returned to EIF with a version of Richard III by Von Mayenburg. The Ugly One was first seen in Maja Zade’s English language translation in London more than a decade ago.
“I’m always interested
in other contemporary playwriting and theatre cultures,” says Hannan, “and
German in particular, for all its audacity, boldness and often quite a caustic
intellectualism. They’re values that find their way into my work, though often
with a fair bit of heart and fun too.
“We’ve spent a lot of
time wrangling around the style of the play. Broadly put, it isn’t the kind of
writing we’re used to, in that it isn’t built with psychological naturalism at
its heart. So we’ve dug deep around what that demands of an acting process. Often
the most counter-intuitive things have worked best.”
All of which seems to
fit with Hannan’s penchant for extremes.
“I think I’m attracted
to anarchy and chaos and structure in equal measure,” she says. “I definitely
love things which bend and break the theatrical form. To me, it feels closer to
what it is to experience the world than naturalism. I love plays that highlight
how the way we’ve constructed how we live is just that - a construction – and
underneath, it’s actually a free for all, if we can break apart the old ways
and forge new ones, which I guess is inherently political.
“I love plays that take the strange or
the othered and push it forward. It’s the reason I love new writing. I’ve got a
bit of relentless drive towards dealing with that right now, with newness, with
expressing the wildness of the present moment. I really want the vast expanse
of humans and stories that are out in the world to end up on stage.”
Next up for Hannan is an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run of Anoushka Warden’s solo autobiographical account of losing her mum to a cult. Hannan is also hard at work on an adaptation of Jenni Fagan’s novel, The Panopticon for the National Theatre of Scotland. She will then see out the year directing Matilda Ibini’s play, Little Miss Burden, at the Bunker Theatre in London, where she is associate director. In the meantime, The Ugly One remains an enticing prospect.
Next up for Hannan is an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run of Anoushka Warden’s solo autobiographical account of losing her mum to a cult. Hannan is also hard at work on an adaptation of Jenni Fagan’s novel, The Panopticon for the National Theatre of Scotland. She will then see out the year directing Matilda Ibini’s play, Little Miss Burden, at the Bunker Theatre in London, where she is associate director. In the meantime, The Ugly One remains an enticing prospect.
“I think our
production sits somewhere between music video, art installation and panto,”
says Hannan. “The play itself is both unusual in form and heightened, but with
very recognisable people and problems. I’d love for the audience to feel like they’ve been drawn, inevitably
but surprisingly, down the rabbit hole of just how absurd our contemporary
relationship to our own face has become. It’s now our first commodity, managed,
tweaked, filled, plumped and sold.”
Matters of gender are
significant here.
“It would be a very
different story if Lette had been female,” says Hannan. “Women are used to this
kind of gaze upon them and the surreal activities that can become normalised as
part of the pursuit of some kind of myth of looking good, and worse, seeming
good, which often translates as being smaller in various ways. The Ugly One
places this pressure on a very normal man, and runs the logic to its extremes.
It’s also a side-eyed look at consumerism and disposability.”
Hannan is aiming high.
“It feels important to do
this play right now,” she says, “because we’re sliding down a slippery slope of
an absurd capitalist endgame, and it feels like if theatre can point at it,
laugh at it, push it far enough till it breaks, then maybe we can break apart
the walls we’ve built so far and make something else entirely.”
The Ugly One, Tron
Theatre, Glasgow, July 4-20.
The Herald, June29th 2019
ends
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