Originally published by L.S. Media. October 14th 2010.
One of the most demanding roles in recent times at the Everyman theatre has to be Director of the critically acclaimed ‘Tis Pity she’s a Whore. I was able to catch up with Chris Meads briefly and have a chat with him about the play and his thoughts for the future.
How are you today?
Very well, very well, yes, yes! I saw the show again on Friday night after a gap. It’s really interesting as I’ve got more perspective on it now. I am now more clear about the strong sense of the choices that were made in terms of production but also its feels like the actors have had a gap of time away from this production of ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore and I’ve worked on the Anthology. It feels like they’ve come back to the play and the production invigorated by it and I think it’s partly about the fact that with the Anthology so much for them playing depending upon spontaneity, although there is a is a script with the Anthology, there are other elements that you would expect would bring alive so there is a lot of thinking on their feet that they have to do, spontaneous choices and that feels like that we’ve brought that back to the work because it was the most important part – the playing in the production. I mean, we’re tired; obviously it’s been a busy week…
So they seem enthused by having done the Anthology?
They were being much more playful as actors. They were more spontaneous, more in the moment. It could have really gone the other way, they were all telling the stories in the Anthology separately then they all came back together.
You must be one of the few people involved with two separate productions at the same time. That must be quite a good feeling for you!
It’s quite a challenge, because the team has been together for a long time but when you’re directing in a room you have a designer and composer in the room with you, well not all the time. So while the actors were going off and doing different things on afternoons or doing different sessions I was always in the room. I found it quite difficult once we’d started to rehearse to keep a sense of what else was happening. It’s a huge challenge for me and the actors.
I’m not sure how many actors would have been able to cope with all these demands –
I think it was very important in terms of the casting process for me because Alan from Slomo was very generous in saying that you’ve got to cast a play and you have to cast a world so it’s a play that’s already been written, whereas the Anthology stuff was in response to, so he gave me carte blanche to cast who I liked in ‘Tis a Pity to build up a world but it’s difficult as it’s a play about family so you’ve got to have a brother and sister and a mother and father who physically resemble each other. It’s very important with any production that I do particularly for this one, that the audience feels like it’s a world that’s existed for some time, there’s a history to it, that it’s in the grain and it’s so that’s the main consideration when you’re casting.
The main thing was, it’s partly to do with character, would that person is interesting and could you share with that particular character of such good spirit as that would help them through. It’s really helped that a lot of the actors have an emotional connection to everyone. Many of them are doing it not just because of the Anthology but because they care about this theatre and its part of their story and it’s important to them. Other actors were chosen as they’d particularly gelled with each other. Part of the casting process was about bringing them together and you could see how they were personally connected that the people clicked with each other and cared about each other. I think what’s really helped is that everyone gets along and helps each other out, actually people who connect with each other.
I’m interested in the emotional subject matter they are dealing with, how did the actors approach the ideas behind the play?
Well, we did a workshop before we actually started and I went down to London about 3 weeks before we started rehearsals and I did a two day workshop with Mattie who plays Annabella and Katie who plays Jane to try and get a sense of what it means to have emotional/sexual desires for a sibling and we were very lucky in that I found on the internet of recordings of people who had experienced consensual sibling incest and that really, really helped because a lot of what’s in the play, what the characters describe are reflections of these interviews and certainly the prologue that’s in the production but not in the actual play – the first part of the production when Giovanni comes home to meet them – which we invented is partly as a direct result of that research.
The question I had about original play was how long has this been going on? Where’s it come from? What started it? It certainly feels to me that this is unanswered. A lot of the research described how they’d been a gap in separation of the brother and sister and the death of the mother had allowed siblings to be unusually intimate and emotionally candid with each other and that seems to have resulted in these cases led to sexual intimacy and that’s the play. How it feels to be in that situation and the main thing that helped us was that all the people who experienced this did not regard it as incest, it was more than that it was almost a religious experience, a really profound experience. We start to see them not a brother and sister but as people. The last thing they want to do is fall in love. They can’t help it and they are torn by that conflict. Then you add to that the play’s world as well.
It’s a brave and bizarre production and also inspired!
What was so very important to me was that it seems that the setting of the play in Catholic Italy at the time allowed the writer to get away with much more. On one hand, the play seems to be saying something about organised religion….. just to digress a little – one of the most exciting and important things about the play for me from the off there were two things in the play that were really provocative and interesting subjects to me to talk about and they are one – consensual incest and secondly what happens if God does not exist? The character Giovanni expresses this, so that felt very important to keep that in there and but at the same time it’s about organised religion and it’s not knocking faith, which is a totally different thing.
We made very conscious decisions before the show when you first see the Cardinal that his costume is not non-denominational but muted like the obvious Catholic references in the play. That feels to me like it diminishes the overall effect on the audience and also there’s a lot of evidence that the writer was a deeply religious man but that he’s challenging particular aspects of his society’s approach through organised religion and the hypocrisy to it.
It’s a fantastic play, it’s shocking and not what some people might expect but I’d like to congratulate you on it – just a couple of more questions – what’s next for you?
Here at the Everyman I’m doing a job where I’m charge of future strategy when the Everyman reopens. When it does re-open it will be the natural place to be, to be inspired to have ideas, to stay up late until the wee small hours and just over the next few years m y job will to try and make that happen to make all those links between the universities, LIPA, community groups around the city.
I’m also doing something with the Northern Stage at the end of November which is all about their 40th anniversary, it’s called Northern Stages and how the North is represented internationally and the reason I’m doing it is a project called Northern Spirit. I’ve basically collected my favourite plays and story’s those articulate peoples’ perceptions in a Northern landscape. It’s all fantastic!
What inspired you to take on ‘Tis a Pity with all the other projects you’re working on?
What’s really helped with ‘Tis Pity was that I thought it was a restoration comedy but then I read it and I was amazed by the speed of it and it felt like a television script and then it was like the writer was leading you through the scenes. We had to spend a lot of time at the beginning of rehearsals stripping away at the words to get to their meanings, because the drive of the play is so strong. Also, what was really brave was that you felt that you had an archetypal two young people against the world which is really rare to find in a play particularly of that era and the language didn‘t feel very alien, it was very immediate.
I’m also a big believer that if you go to the theatre peoples’ time is precious and I get angrier if people have less time to go to theatre than they do to go to the cinema. I think it’s about what you invest in theatre as you are more involved. The most important thing about the play is time – it has a tightly wound clock on it and it’s almost in every scene where a character will quote time, stop time or time’s ticking – the frequency of the amount of events that happen in this play –how high the stakes are for these characters.
The hardest thing is about preparing for a play is that I’ll read the play from every character’s point of view and in this context was nine characters because it’s easy to think you know the play but at the same time I’m ploughing through it putting all my marks in there on the computer so I can say I can feel the world they inhabit and eventually they’ll be distilled down in to distinct images. It felt to me what was really important about this play was it felt like that what was very important to the writer from the research, was that he set the original play 50 to 100 years before the period in which it was produced and the writer said he believed that an audience would invest more in tragedy if you believed the events actually happened and twice in the play, Giovanni separately Annabella say you people who are watching this in the future, celebrate what we had or don’t do what I’ve done.
So I think to set it in a historical period was to suck people in. He felt that the audience had to be let off the hook when it was written in 1630, that these people could empathise with these people as they were a world away from their own one. You’ve got this young man who has come back from university from a more metropolitan city than his own, he’s had his horizons broadened and he’s come back to this small town to see his sister who has been completely sheltered from learning. She’s basically taught the Bible by rote and she’s got to prepare herself to get married from a very short list her father’s drawing up. What was it like to Annabella? What was it like to be Giovanni?
It felt very similar the energy that was coursing across Europe in the early 1960s so it felt to me like it had to be like Northern Europe in the early 1960s – the emotional rebellion so I did a lot of research into films and also what was really important was the atmosphere that Annabella created – strained emotional environment, which a lot of young people must have felt at that before teenagers. We tried to conjure that up. So we had to invent a world that was like that with reference points so we weren’t too heavy handed.
What I particularly noticed at the Everyman was that people were being vocal with each other, whispering about what was going on in the various scenes. It was very odd but the people are also laughing at a various points but in a very honest way. It shows that the actors have done a very fine job and they are expressing their language in a very clear way.
Ian D. Hall