In 1993, theatre-maker Mark Smith came to Liverpool to study Drama at John Moores University. A native of the Bedfordshire town of Luton; notably famous for its hats, Eric Morecambe’s football team Luton Town, of which Mark fondly talks about his trip to Wembley as a ball boy when they won the League Cup in the 1988 and two of the members of Jethro Tull, it seems that Mark was destined to stand out from the crowd.
In 1998 he joined Spike Theatre and subsequently went on to tour the U.K. before joining a Spanish Clown Company, Yllana and touring Europe in their show 666. Since the early days their ethos has to make it challenging and in the last couple of years has made some of the best local productions to grace any theatre. Their production of The Games which also starred the phenomenal Keddy Sutton was greeted wildly and just before Christmas the Lantern Theatre hosted a superb run of A Christmas Carol which garnered rave reviews.
When you meet Mark, you cannot help yourself but fall into conversation with him. Such is wide interest base that you be quite happily talking about music such as Genesis, Dead Belgians and Hawkwind, his views on The Pink Floyd Film and album The Wall. However the desire to talk about music has to be put on the back burner for another time and whilst soaking up the ever relaxed ambience in the café at F.A.C.T. we talk about Spike Theatre’s next venture which is on at the Playhouse Studio, Sink or Swim.
You must be very excited about your new show at the Playhouse Studio?
“It is really exciting, we are very lucky to be working with the Playhouse and the amazing staff there. It is going to be nice to premiere a piece of work there and be working with them to help achieve that. Yes, we are really excited. We did a short version of the show which was very hastily put together but it’s amazing what you can do in a short period of time with plenty of creative people in a room. Everyone was incredibly exhausted after that but I think we saw the potential of what was initially just an idea and turning it into something real and actually surprised all of us. People were asking us if we really wrote it in four days and were like yeah.
We have an amazing creative team and I always think that as long as you have some semblance of an idea and you have a world or a playground for it to sit in and you have a lot of fun, energetic, creative folk, something will happen, good or bad you know. Frankly it came out really, really well so yes it is going to be nice to be playing the studio. I have seen a couple of things in there and really loved it and it has a really nice unique atmosphere.
I remember seeing stuff in the studio when I was a student and thinking wow what an amazing space and then it closed and became a rehearsal space. I was really chuffed when they re-launched it as the studio because I think it offers that small intimate venue and when the Everyman reopens you have got that brilliant space there and then the Playhouse theatre itself, so you have got all these three very unique spaces to go and see quite special work, so really chuffed.”
It is a very strong cast that you have assembled.
“It’s incredibly strong. Probably singularly the strongest that we have ever assembled. Shaun Mason is the best young actor in Liverpool at present, Paul Duckworth who we have worked with on numerous occasions and quite frankly Paul could read a phone book and be brilliant and Graham Hicks who was in Next and who has done a couple of Christmas shows with us and who I have known for a good long while and is fabulous idiot (laughs).
Putting together a cast that complements each other and who also acts a catalyst to spark each other and push each other, I think we are very lucky to have them and we are pretty excited about getting into a room with them and writing the rest of the play with Bob (Robert Farquhar), Toby (Toby Park) and Simon and all of those people inputting and eventually this play will emerge which potentially is a real step up for us as a company.
This is the first time we have worked with a writer in a process and we always try to challenge how we make theatre. The last show we made, The Games, we bought up Toby Park from Spymonkey to deliberately provoke us and our theatre because we want to constantly evolve our work and we have always made work collaboratively. Everyone has stories to tell and everyone has ownership of it and you’re just tapping into the world of theatre, I think that’s quite special to be able to do that. Legally you create a piece of work that seen by people more than six times it has to go and sit in the British library and I like that the fact that our work is in the British Library, it is captured forever. So if Spike Theatre doesn’t exist in the future, we would still be able to go and see our work and it is recorded for prosperity… or not, depending on your point of view but it is there and it exists.”
Where did the idea of the play come from?
“I was on holiday in Pembrokeshire a couple of years ago, it was a very rainy day as the summer seems to be now and I was in an art gallery and there was a postcard of three men in a boat with a single oar and I thought what an amazing beautiful picture. I also thought it was very funny and so I bought the postcard and thought nothing of it. I find that I get slightly obsessed with things. As my wife says I could probably go on Mastermind with specialist knowledge. We Made Top of the World which was about the ascent of Everest, The Games which was about the ancient Olympics and Aristophanes…I got obsessed with naval history and particularly The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and I tend to obsess over things which is good. I tend to know when a show is going to happen as I start to order things from Amazon (laughs).
I sort of absorb myself into that world and I think what is the potential for this and this and I find elements start to draw themselves together and it’s either Phelin McDermott or Simon McBurney who talk about antennae which are tuned into listening to the ether of the world. I sometimes think it’s one of those simple things of listening. Then of course we had David Cameron speech at the Conservative Party Conference where he talks of the nation either going to sink or swim. I had already come up with the title but that type of language is around and we try to find parallel worlds to be able to comment about stuff.
The turn of the 18th Century King George is still mad and the Prince Regent is in power and we are at war with Napoleon, it is kind of moving from the Age of Enlightenment to the age of Romanticism in terms of literature and Britain has lost the America’s, these are turning points of history and I realise that it is something that really sparks my interest. You know Top of the World was set in 1953; post Empire, post war and things just happened in that six month period when man conquered Everest, it was the first time the F.A. Cup Final had been televised, there is a new queen and it almost like the birth of Britain again. I like these periods of time. These periods of time when there’s turbulence is ripe for drawing parallels.”
You did the same with your reading of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Lantern Theatre.
“Yes, I do get obsessed with ideas that I can’t get out of my head. So the idea of A Christmas Carol was…I had seen so many versions of the story and what they tend to be is a Disney-fied version because that is what everyone knows and the idea of being a miser or being miserly can happen at any point in a person’s life, in your twenties say. You don’t have to be the traditional version of the miserly old man that is portrayed. Dickens again is in the ether, everyone is struggling and what he was saying is too essentially look out for each other.
I think a lot of the work we have done is about friendship, comradeship and to take care of each other. We try to make funny work but we ultimately at the heart of it there is that driving force where we can say if we can parallel that and people can be entertained and go oh yeah, it can make a difference to someone’s life. In a hippy-ish world, I don’t want to heal the world but I want to make it a nicer place to live in. It is that Humanist idea that we have to look after each other, especially now or we become isolated. If we fall out with each other, we have to be bigger than that and just be nice.
How we present work is down to the story. I have an idea for a Science Fiction piece I want to do this year but it is always about the story, what do you want to say to the world. We have in Sink or Swim tried to make it verbally exciting, visually exciting. Just because it is the 18th century, it’s a whole mish-mash of styles, just because it’s that time doesn’t mean we can’t crash in some Black Sabbath or some Disco or a piece from musical theatre, all the things that people enjoy, why not do them in one play. Just because again we are in the 18th Century means we have to be talking in that style of language unless it becomes a game we play. Our rehearsals are like that; it’s about having fun and making each other laugh.”
Who were your theatrical heroes when you were growing up?
“When I was a teenager I had an apprenticeship to be a footballer but then I wrecked my knee so I went back to college. In Luton unless you do amateur dramatics or pantomime there is a cultural void. I went to the art centre there and saw John Hegley. I loved his work, it’s just brilliant, I love his poetry, just so simple and funny but can be beautifully tragic as well. I went to see a show called Streets of Crocodiles by a company called Complicitie, whose Artistic Director is Simon McBurney. I went along, it was a free ticket and went in and was blown away, it made me go I want to do that. I want to make people walk down walls and tell beautiful stories.”
“So I went back school and tried stuff, I had a really inspirational teacher called Colin Moore who provoked us to do stuff. He wouldn’t tell us what to do, he would say create something, make something good, make something funny. This term of Physical Theatre came out, especially at the Unity Theatre who were championing it and it was right next to where I was studying so I saw a lot of stuff that I would normally have never gone to see and see a production called Sticky by a group called Improbable. They did a show called Life Game which is improvised. I liked people that did work that starts with a text, you then explore that idea and boom, I think it organically creates itself and I like that people can chuck in any theatrical style and you explore it.”
It feels like you are showing that this type of work is a metaphor for Liverpool.
“Liverpool is proactive and fluid. We didn’t have any money when we started so we were making stuff out of nothing. For me theatre is about imagination and there is a place for naturalism. I like that you can walk along the street and see an image or a piece of graffiti and be inspired. There is a really beautiful piece of graffiti which says what is life’s purpose? The purpose is life! Music is a big inspiration, you say there is something in this and say like the Black Sabbath song in which you hear a storm approaching and you think why can’t I use that or find another way of doing the storm. Yes the play in set in the 18th Century but it about now. You just put it back into historical setting and bring it into the real world.”
Ian D. Hall
Sink or Swim is on at the Playhouse Theatre Studio from February 18th to February 23rd. Tickets are available from the Playhouse Theatre Box office. Tickets are priced at £10.