 |
|
|
|||
|
Interviews
|
|||
|
|
Filter and the Lyric at Latitude Corinne Salisbury talks to Sean Holmes about doing Shakespeare at the Latitude Festival Sean Holmes, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, is also a longtime collaborator with theatre company Filter, and this year is directing a piece at Latitude co-presented by the Lyric and Filter: an hour-long Midsummer Night's Dream with almost no set and a whole lot of music. It follows in the path of Filter's innovative production of Three Sisters at the Lyric earlier this year, and their acclaimed reimagining of Twelfth Night, which returned to the Tricycle again recently after taking it by storm last year. If you had to put a tagline on the show it would be "rock and roll Shakespeare", and it's this raucous, irreverent spirit that, Holmes tells me, they're hoping to recreate for their Dream. "We only have ten days' rehearsal," he says, "and with Twelfth Night we only had two weeks, and thought well it's impossible to do Twelfth Night in two weeks, so we'll just kind of go for it, and not really worry about what it's like at the end, because it's bound to be rubbish. And a sort of mad energy and creativity came from that; so we're replicating those conditions for Dream." What are the plans for condensing the essence of the play into an hour - do they know yet what they'll keep and what they'll lose? Holmes laughs and admits he's a long way from knowing this yet. "What I enjoyed with Twelfth Night was that the ideas came from the cast, and especially the musicians. … I sort of take myself out of the equation in the early stages of rehearsal and then respond to what everyone else comes up with - so that you end up with ideas that, if I had my classical director's hat on, I would never allow, or it's more that I would never have them." It seems, I say, like a very collaborative process. "Yes - I think we're all going in very open. Everyone's worked with at least someone else in the room before. So there's a real sense of collective knowledge. And part of the point I think is to walk in and respond to the play and see where it takes us. … I know the play quite well, and I think it's just about holding your nerve, if that makes sense. I don't know if we've got a particular take on the play, or a particular setting, it'll be more what comes out of those twelve imaginations. … And the actors, in their day jobs, have all done Proper Shakespeare, so they're all capable of speaking the verse properly". This is indeed an advantage, given the inevitable noise pollution that the theatre tent suffers from other parts of the festival - the actors need to be audible or the show is lost. With Filter's Dream, there's also, of course, the musical element: they are collaborating with innovative band The London Snorkelling Team, who are currently writing songs to bring to the rehearsal room and weave the show around. So while I point out that this is, as far as I know, the first time that Shakespeare itself has been performed at the festival, and it could be a bit of a challenge to engage bleary and distracted festival-goers with a classic text, Holmes is upbeat about their chances. "It fits with the way Filter work, the kind of amplification that's natural to their work; the centrality of music and sound. And also it's the sense that you can do the show anywhere - we have almost nothing in the way of set - as we're doing one in the theatre tent and then one the next day in the woods. … Really good things can come out of difficult circumstances, and sometimes the restriction can be the thing that releases the show - this was definitely true of Twelfth Night." Finally I ask if he's looking forward to catching bits of the rest of the theatre programme. "Oh definitely. It's like a little condensed Edinburgh festival… I mean if we're honest, we don't really think of what we do as particularly cool, I think we all can't believe it, that somebody actually wants us to come to a festival! So British theatre falls over itself to run to Latitude and have a nice time." As for me, I think theatre, now so plugged in to the heart of Latitude, and with such a promising programme there this year, is getting cooler by the hour.
|
||
|
|
