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Interviews
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What Is Contemporary Britain? Corinne Salisbury talks to Paines Plough's James Grieve about their Latitude 2010 production Highly respected new writing company Paines Plough are this year returning to the model of their previous appearances at Latitude, commissioning a new full-length play for the festival from a top name writer. In the past they have premiered new work by Robin French, Dennis Kelly, Mark Ravenhill, and Enda Walsh, and this year they present Laurence Wilson's Tiny Volcanoes. Wilson is well known for plays such as Urban Legend, Surf's Up, and Lost Monsters which got rave reviews at the Liverpool Everyman last year. But in the context of Latitude, a new, commissioned, single-authored play which isn't a cross-arts collaboration or a hybrid between theatre and musical, is actually a bit of a rare breed. That is not to belittle either type of work, but rather simply points to the variety of approaches to theatre-making that are present at the festival. I asked James Grieve of Paines Plough how he feels about presenting, for want of a better word, a more traditional type of theatre, and he is quick to insist that it's not as simple as that. "Although it is a single-authored piece, it isn't your typical play. It's really a series of very fast-paced scenes, which feature everything from stand up comedy to sketch comedy to video projection to straight theatre, in which the two actors play a range of characters." Grieve explains the origins of Wilson's concept: "It's inspired by David Cameron's now-famous Broken Britain speech. So Laurence wanted to investigate, through this play, what was broken about Britain, and what we could do to 'fix' Britain. …So really the play is a celebration of Britain and Britishness, and also asks a lot of searching questions about what contemporary Britain is." The concept strikes me as having something in common with Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. Grieve agrees: "Ours is a very very different play - but thematically there are some similarities. I think it's interesting that a lot of playwrights recently have been preoccupied with identity and particularly Britishness. Because we have a strange relationship with patriotism in this country, in that people often feel a bit uncomfortable about being patriotic." And, Grieve adds, "this play is also quite timely because it comes soon after the World Cup, which is the one time when we do become the most overtly, passionately patriotic. So it seems like we programmed this play for Latitude quite presciently, as it'll ask the question, are you patriotic, and if you are then why? why do you celebrate when England win?" Whenever that might next happen. Moving swiftly on - I asked Grieve to explain a bit more about how the format of the play has been worked out. "Once you've been to Latitude once, you know that you have to make work specifically for that space… it's such a unique environment in which to bring theatre, and you've got to deal with the lack of acoustics, there's so much noise bleed from the other stages, and the fact that people are sometimes walking out. So I think that it really informs the way that Laurence has approached the writing - you can see it in the short scene structure, it's very funny, it's loud and in-yer-face; and it includes hymns, that we hope everyone will jump up and sng along with." Tapping into our collective cultural subconscious to engage the audience, while questioning those shared ideas at the same time - sounds like an interesting mix. The play had a work-in-progress showing at Liverpool's Everyword festival about a month ago, and after it performs at Latitude in its finished form it will be touring in the autumn to small-scale venues all over the UK. "It's important for us that the show has a stripped-back aesthetic", says Grieve, "not only for Latitude but also when it's on tour. It was essentially written for two extraordinary character actors (Kevin Harvey and Michael Ryan) - so it's a bare stage and those two actors and a few costume changes, and we project certain images to indicate changes of scenes and settings." I'm looking forward to seeing them create a world; and perhaps show us our own world a little more clearly than we've seen it before.
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