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Interviews
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The Bush at Latitude 2011 Corinne Salisbury talks to Hannah Dickinson, director of The Flooded Grave. The Flooded Grave by Anthony Weigh was first performed in the Bush's Broken Space Season back in 2008; in an ingenious reaction to being plunged into darkness by a broken lighting desk, the theatre commissioned a group of writers to produce plays to be staged in near or complete darkness. Now the Bush are reviving the piece in a late-night, site-specific show at Latitude. I spoke to the show's director Hannah Dickinson, about how she envisages the performances working. She explains how she wants to embrace the uncontrollable nature of the festival setting to add more atmospherics to the play: "It's inevitable at Latitude that there'll be acoustic problems, noise, people coming in and out of the play as it were - they might arrive ten minutes late… and I know the comedy and cabaret tents will be still going when we're performing." The more "background sights and sounds" there are, and the more people that can be heard stumbling through the trees nearby, the creepier the setting for the performance, thinks Dickinson. I mention that the tone of the piece sounds not too far removed from the RSC, rather famed for their late-night shock-fests at the festival for the last couple of years, and while Dickinson is quick to insist that she's "certainly not wanting to try and outdo them", it is the same sort of vibe that she's aiming for. But she's eager to stress that the play is "not spooky exactly, it's not a ghost story - it's an unsettling story about a man and his faith and psychology". Ideally she wants her audience to go away not just titillated by the enjoyable fear factor, but genuinely thoughtful and unsettled. There's a specificity to the piece - "some references to the land that we're on, and the local area" - which she believes makes it particularly shiver-inducing; and also that it's "sort of a modern gothic piece: watching it, at first you think it's something that happened 100 years ago, but then a modern reference will come along, which is strange and a bit terrifying." It's quite a departure from the Bush's previous work for Latitude - the big, sketchy, comic, multi-authored shows like 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and Sudden Loss of Dignity. Artistic Director Josie Rourke says, "We decided it would be exciting to work outside of the theatre tent this year. It so happens that Anthony Weigh's haunting and atmospheric piece was the perfect piece for such an adventure. We think it's great to vary the type of work we present at Latitude, and to bring something new to festival audiences." Dickinson observes that the theatre programme in general this year seems to be veering more to the dark side - she wonders if it's "something in the air". "And," she adds, " there's so much comedy and cabaret and that sort of thing at the festival, it's good sometimes for the theatre to be a bit darker". Doing an atmospheric and psychologically perturbing play that was literally born out of darkness, the Bush are surely leading the field this time around.
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