Series 2, Episode 1 - The Winter's Tale

Welcome to Season 2 of Cheek By Gels podcast. Not true but useful. I'm your host Lucy Dawkins. These episodes are going out into the world at a time when theatre is in suspended animation, so as an antidote, I'll be chatting to Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerott, the director designer duo behind Cheek By Gels. They're going to share life lessons that they've learned from staging great classic plays, which might help tide us through these strange times. We can't promise that any of these lessons will be true, but we hope you find them useful. Hello Declan and Nick. Hello Lucy. So we're recording today on a really odd day because we've just discovered that some version of lockdown is rolling back into London. We're at the opposite ends of a long table with a set of mics. Getting back into live theatre seems ever more distant. How is that making you think and feel about the job that we're doing or at the moment that we're very far away from doing? Well, I think we're just desperate to get back to doing what we do. I mean, it's very frustrating. The essence of theatre is that you're together with live people, and that's what we can't do at the moment. And we need it. We absolutely need theatre and we need to be together with people. And so Nick and I are watching a lot of television. We do normally any way to relax, and now we have to, you know, and it made me think very much about how in order to do something important with somebody else, you need to be in the same room as them. And, you know, we can laugh and talk about the internet as a sort of new technology that's taken over. But actually, words are a new technology. And we need to really meditate on the big lie. In the beginning was the word. Human beings communicated very, very well for millennia, but for words came along. And we live that with our mothers just after we're born, you know, but there are no words. And you actually quite sophisticated communication in many respects. And so when we're with people in the same space, we have many different ways of communicating with each other, of which we are unconscious. And, you know, there are some sort of science fiction things written about extrasensory perception, you know, as ESP, as if there's some magic thing about having more than five senses. Of course, we have more than five senses. That's why you want to be with a friend, not just zoom it into them. But particularly those of us who love theatre, you know, a film can be bad, TV can be bad, when theatre is bad, it's really bad. It's like when theatre is bad, the assault is much deeper, because the communication is so much more multifarious and profound. And when we do theatre, particularly live theatre, we are in a space and we're affected by, and we affect back what's happening. The performance has to be open to interference from the audience, however slight. And that is, that's like everything. It's not just a small detail. It's actually everything about how we live. It just made us think about how incredibly important life there is to be in a real space with real people in real time is taped, video, filmed, watching that is interesting. It's a completely different art form. It can be absolutely wonderful, but it's no substitute, the other thing. You can't bring up a child and by sky. Our play of the week is Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, which is as good a story as any about the hope that life will go on after a difficult time like this. Declan and Nick have tackled this play in two languages, once in Russian and once in English. In fact, the music that you're hearing in this episode was composed by Paddy Canine for the recent British production. Here's a quick recap of the story. At the start, the aunties in Hermione, the king and queen of Sicily, are expecting their second child. The aunties falls into a jealous mania, suspecting that his best friend Polyxonys, king of Bohemia, is the real father of the baby. He convicts Hermione of treason and she pleads her innocence. The aunties separates her from their son, Memilius, who then dies suddenly from the trauma. Hermione goes into early labour when she hears the news. Her friends, Paulina and Camillo, smuggle the baby girl, called Perdita, out of the castle and into Bohemia. They tell the aunties that Hermione died in childbirth. The baby Perdita is found and raised by some shepherds. Sixteen years pass and she falls in love with a local teenager, Floresel, who is in fact the prince of Bohemia in disguise. In other words, he is the son of Polyxonys whom Leontes had accused of having an affair with Hermione. At a sheep shearing festival, Polyxonys catches Floresel with Perdita, who he thinks is a shepherdess. He orders his son to end the relationship immediately. Floresel and Perdita elope to Sicily, where Perdita's true identity as the princess is revealed. Perdita and Leontes meet for the first time. Leontes and Polyxonys are reconciled and Perdita and Floresel are allowed to marry. In the very final scene, Paulina brings them all to see a statue of the dead Hermione. It comes to life and mother, father and daughter are reunited. So this is a play that you've done not once but twice and what is the thing in it that initially hooks your attention that set your imaginations running and made you really want to put this play on stage? It's hard to say because we've we've played games with ourselves and tricks on ourselves and we think of what is it we could do well that we've got good actors to do. So that's how we, in our conscious mind, we are very practical in the plays that we choose. Then when after, when you're coming out of it and they're doing of it with the actors, you realize that it's actually speaking to something that goes very deep in you. But what slowly reveals itself to you when you do the plays are things that you never knew were there and that's why whenever you do a play, it's always completely different the next time around that you do it. So there's very little that we carried over from the first to the second production apart from the fact that, um, about Mamilius. So Nick, what's so fascinating about Mamilius in this play? Well, Mamilius is the young prince who suffers at the hands of his dysfunctional parents and he dies and that is a hinge on the play and from there after Lyontes goes into an enormous withdrawal in grief, but is finally somehow redeemed and Hermione returns initially as a statue and then is brought to life magically. And then our first conversations about the play was always the death of Mamilius. I remember Declan that you said that this was kind of key and is actually not very strong in the play because it's simply announced that Mamilius, we don't see him die in the play, it's announced from off, but that was the key to designing it to make that much more concrete designs this large crate which explodes and reveals the dead prince. I've said I found that moment totally devastating because that box, the long box that filled most of the stage and made the stage seem much narrower than the actual stage was and that that moment when all the sides fell down and suddenly the literal horizon expanded, you can see all the way to the back and this tiny little body fragile left in the middle of it, you just changed, with such a simple gesture, completely changed the rules of the space. It was like the dimensions expanded in a second, but it also reminded me that there's something that occurs in nearly every Cheat by Gael show that I've seen which is that you both tend to point out a part of the story which we would otherwise overlook. There's no secret to that apart from it's a negative secret, this is about what you get rid of and the important thing is to suspend your judgment, so if you can just delay that like gratification, if you can just delay that moment of delicious judgment and unconscious punishment then actually the world becomes much clearer and we make ourselves stupid by judging too soon. One of the things that happens in the Winter's Tale is that yes the boy dies, but he goes on and on afterwards and like it's still all about him and it's like, it's like Leonty's, his terrible things happen to him, but his son's died, you know, sackcloth and ashes are really easy to do, Haines quite a defence sometimes against actual experience, but Leonty's not only kills his wife, he also kills his son and they kind of forget about him really. It's what I loved so much about the last moment of the play where the surviving members of the family, Leonty's and Perditern, Hermione, are finally reunited and you had them all in this beautiful kind of sculptural embrace in the centre of the stage and the little memelius suddenly appeared in the corner and the only person who saw him was Leonty's and that's a fabulous moment of realising that nothing was fixed at the end of this play. And again, I mean it's something that is a really consistent idea, especially the ends of your productions where you tend to reveal something to us about where we haven't been looking and remember you did it in your production of Twelfth Night where you gave Malvolio, I'll be revenge on the whole pack of you, you took his last line and made it the last line of the very whole play where we suddenly realised that as the audience that we hadn't been looking hard enough in the right direction and the way that you reveal these hidden moments, this negative space, I think calls on our responsibility as the audience a lot more, it makes us complicit in the play. So a very active relationship with the story that's happening in front of us. Yes, of course it can happen in movie and TV but it's the lack of passivity of theatre, the fact that you are involved and that's why when it's not very well done you feel so agreed. Can we talk a little bit about how your ideas change when you go into rehearsal? So I've often heard you say that you throw out ideas as soon as you get into rehearsal, whatever ideas you take in with you, you tend to shed as soon as you find bigger and better ones for the actors. Really ideas are cheap if they're not born organically and what arises from the rehearsal room changes us. So it's not like we change our ideas, the thing is to make sure that your ideas are something that are disposable, otherwise the thing that was a fortress is going to become prison. Now I know particularly in scene one of this production you had a huge change quite late on in rehearsals, he started the scene with a huge waltz with a whole of the court and it changed to a very simple but very effective rendition of the scene where they're sat on long benches facing out of the audience as Leontes presents this sort of psychotic vision of what's going on with his wife and best friend. How did that change happen? Well I think we went in with a hangover from the previous Russian production of having a group scene and we thought we were going to begin with a waltz and we did a lot of work on the waltz. Actually we always while we're waiting for life to break out in the room we do work on movement, music, song, dance, not on the meaning of the words. The worst thing you can do is start a rehearsal trying to fix the meaning of the words because words don't have fixed meaning so you have to find all sorts of ways around and about the play to go in. So we had an idea of starting with a waltz which was going to give us a sense of nostalgia for later on, it's going to give us a sense of passing time but then Nick had this idea, I don't know where it came from, it was quite late on and we brought the act, the rest of the act is on later and the protagonist just faced us from the front row. I have to say at this moment though that we talk, Nick and I talk as if it all comes sort of movely from our collaboration that we collaborate with a lot of people and the Winchester was the last time we'd worked so purely in a way with them, our usual collaborators who are Paddy Cuneen who composes our music and Gibson who does all of our dance and music and pornography and D. Judith Greenwood who does our lights and the ideas arise from these people and what you see on stage is very much what's arisen from them and of course what's come from the company as well. So sometimes things have got rid of so we did a lot of work on an opening waltz that was going to be a kind of sad waltz that came back and back and we felt we could hold the whole evening together but all that work those people have put into it was still there, it's kind of pregnant in those still forms, you know you have to kind of stillness there's movement. How do you digest these changes and ideas and what's the process for that? Under the conditions that we have in Cheek by Job it is possible to change things and people we work with are brilliant at changing things. Angie Burns who does the costumes will take on board total changes after well after two weeks of leaving her only four weeks perhaps two of them entirely redo the costume. Cuneen and Paddy too you know I have many thousands of years in purgatory to face terrible last minute changes that they've said okay and I still can't quite understand why it worked but the more they became attached to the bench the more it seemed to work as soon as they lost that anchor in the space as it were it sort of became a bit fuzzy. Yes I've noticed that too that very often a line is dead but sometimes if the actor touches something like another person or a chair or something or even the proscenium arch that life can come in and you know I've tried to analyse and I've thought oh it means they have to root themselves in space they have to locate themselves they have to be somewhere but at the end of the day I can't really explain it we must be very careful of thinking that anything I don't understand doesn't exist or anything I don't understand is magic actually just because I don't understand something doesn't mean to say it's magic and although you know I need to try to understand it because it's kind of like how we're bred in a way and try to understand things so we don't make mistakes and so on but at the end of the day the best way to understand is to know that if it's in any way important we're never going to have a full understanding so yeah sometimes touching but sometimes not touching you can't I can't make a rule you know. Well we were talking about this the other day about the fact that it would just be so reassuring if we could have a written toolkit directions for directing. I always think that you know Moses was sent up the mountain and he said God says you know you're doing fine they said no we want rules and so he finally comes down with two but numbers one and number two and the people say that's not enough that's not enough we want more rules more rules because we don't have rules how can we live and God says no you're not having any more than two and then Moses sits on the mountainside and he carves another eight out and he says how about ten and they will come we have more about property and sex and he says no that's your lot and that's how it starts and it's to do with how we are we love the rules. It's a permanent human problem to want freedom but not responsibility and that's a very problematic part of our makeup. But funnily enough I think this is a good rule and if young directors want a rule no for auditions actors come with a speech they blunt they stand in the space and they come out at the speech the first thing to say to them is go and touch something go and touch a chair or get a chair or touch the wall and it transforms them it's quite extraordinary. Well that was so what was so fascinating about seeing that first scene that way because the impression that I got from the audience was that he was holding on to this little life raft this tiny little image that he couldn't get rid of he was literally clinging to it because he was stuck to this bench and it's so exciting to hear about a process where there's a hunch about why it works and it creates such a clear image for the audience but it's not an image that's prescriptive I'm sure the person sitting next to me took a different message from that. Yes it's connected with gratitude because you need to be grateful when something works then what we tend to want to do is analyze it so we can make sure we can have it on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday but the problem Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday we'll have to be grateful again because we're not completely sure and you know it's like the aunties can't be grateful that Polyxonese has been there and is now going to go and the pain of that is so awful he'd rather invent all sorts of things as a defense it's a protection mechanism to think that Polyxonese and Hermione are having an affair it protects him from the real humiliation of feeling his incredible pain that his childhood friend is leaving I think I don't know I mean I just assume it but it helps me into it and maybe if we do the play in 20 years time it'll be different seem different again. I think that leads us nicely into our next question which is about leaving room for mystery so this play has got a very famously mysterious moment at the end where we meet Hermione who apparently changes from a sculpture into a living breathing human woman again. Now lots of productions try and sort of solve this they try and create a version where Hermione has actually been in hiding all these years and it's a kind of visual trick that she's doing other productions stage it as an out and out piece of magic what I loved about your version of it is that you don't solve that for us you simply show it to us how did you get there why did you choose to do it that way? I have to say that at the end of the winter's tale and perhaps the tempest and cymbaline and so on there are these extraordinary moments of transfiguration under the kind of epiphanic revelation but actually all Shakespeare works like that it's just very rarely that he puts mystery on stage in such a very clear way with a great big arrow pointing at it as in so what do you think about this but earlier in the play you see we've had the big mystery of why does he think Polyxonnes and Hermione even having sex together and I think it's possibly because he has a psychotic interlude he clearly does I think personally that what precipitates it is Polyxonnes leaving I don't know that for sure I'm not there to judge but I'm there to sort of contemplate the huge mystery of why people can suddenly lose it and destroy their lives forever and that is very very interesting and that's a pretty daily occurrence actually you know when people do things that are self-destructive and don't understand why what's good about Shakespeare is his articulation of mystery which I've gone about Macbeth Macbeth is not just a good thriller it uses that form but actually it articulates enormous mysteries which again like why do we destroy ourselves so relentlessly that's perhaps one of them I don't know I can't even say what the mysteries are in it but it's like in the winter still it kind of comes out for stage poor line it says in those incantatory lines it is required you to awake your faith and you have to sit with mystery which involves sitting with uncertainty and it's the last thing anyone wants to do and that's why people like to control mystery and sell it to us in the form of packaged religions because you can make a lot of money out of it but it's not mystery anymore mystery is a kind of huge human thing and all we can do is gaze it together and possibly hold each other's hands while we do and so does this fragment, fragment is me so as we said this is a play that toured all over the world I actually saw it in America at BAM which is a massive stage with a hugely high proscenium arch it's very different from the Barbican stage where I know it performed here in the UK and a lot of the design was playing with dimension and space and changing our perception of the horizon through the use of this this box as the play tours did these different spaces inform the images differently or change the feeling of the production do you think? Yes I mean the space itself the concrete space that that we play in can give huge energy to the whole piece and I remember in BAM at Harvey I mean that that's an amazing space opens up right back to the famous Red Ochre wall. Well we did measure for measure the first English measure for measure in 1994 we used to strip out the whole stage and completely changed the musical sin according to the theatre and once they demolished out the theatre they'd be always wonderful gangways and fire exits and things on stage that people could make exits and entrances through and we love doing that so that's that's kind of like a normal thing that we did very often of actually exploiting the venues that where we've gone to and I've noticed that you often like playing with scale stripping out theatres so that you've got massive cavernous space around these fragile and ardent bodies that you're putting on stage why is it that you enjoy that so much do you think? We don't like the auditorium to be so big that the origins can't hear so as long as the person furthest away can hear what's happening without microphones we're absolutely fine but we adore a huge football pitch stage so that people can really run across it but one of the reasons it's fun enough is to see people run there's something very depressing about a stage that's so small that a human being can't run on it you know if you go to western theatre and see a realistic set taking up the space you think okay there's going to be no explosion of energy on the stage tonight unless something extraordinary happens we'd love to be able to run to the choice to run even if they're going to remain very still the fact that there's a possibility that they might tear across the stage is wonderful. Also what's so interesting about looking at this particular production with both of you because you have done this twice it has changed over time you did it with a russian company and then you did it with a british company and looking back on that process what can you tell about what changed for you in this play? Well I think first of all we were in a city that was changing its name from learning granderson petersburg and so we were very full of what that was like you know in 96 97 the new russia was being formed and being very much one might say ignored by the west so what we felt on the streets was coming in so one of the very few very long discussions we had was that I thought it would be an idea if Hermione came on like Lenin because the whole system's really predicated around the soviet shame of death because a very materialistic religion like the soviet religion can't deal with death so very embarrassed when the leader dies and finally he's in bond and that solves it and I thought it would be very good if Hermione did that and nick didn't and he was quite right you know the director's making a sort of clever idea statement I thought it would be a great theatrical coup I've got a bit beamed off that because I think it would have been rather clever you just suddenly noticed the fell hand of the director in not good way do you remember that conversation? Yes yes to me that's an image of death as opposed to potential life as it were or and a statue isn't portrayed lying down no no quite well in our case in both cases she was sitting yes that's because in both cases we felt that the dramatic actions in the eyes of the people apprehending her coming to life so that you think the centre of the scene is Hermione coming to life but actually it's to do with what that means to the people watching her coming to life that's where the real miracle takes place in a way. Declan could you share with us your favourite line in The Winter's Tale? Well that's very hard because there are so many I do have lines going around my head but mean a lot to me and because they're mysteries but I think occasionally sometimes doing something in a foreign language helps because you realise when you have the translation that doesn't work it helps you realise why the Shakespeare is so profound so the neodytical translation the Russian Winter's Tale of the Four Linesies have my only done she says to Leonty's look she's turned quite cold. Shakespeare original version is look down and see what death is doing and the second one is so much infinitely better because it's dynamic it's felt it's about death as a process. The line is very good at getting us to sort of actually shut up just shut up and see what's happening that's what she's saying at the end when she asks us to be silent and stopping talking is always very important Shakespeare. What about you Nick what's your favourite line in the play? Leonty's welcomes Florezelle and Perditor with the line welcome are you as spring is to the earth I don't know it's some kind of encapsulates the whole redemptive nature of the play I mean it's about life from death and on that hopeful note that's all from us for this week if you want to see images of cheek by gels productions of the winter's tale check out the archive on the website you can find it in the podcast notes join us in the next episode as we dive into John Ford's tis pity she's a whore until then stay well you