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Interviews
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Letting the Audience Call the Shots Corinne Salisbury speaks to Simon Muller of The Factory about their show at Latitude 2010, Round Two After a year off, experimental actor-led collective The Factory are back at Latitude with their new show Round Two. The company are perhaps best known for their offbeat version of Hamlet - performed in unusual places from parks to abandoned office buildings, and with the casting decided by the audience moments before show start - and their improvised retelling of The Seagull. But over the last year and a half they have also been developing a strand of new writing performances, which stick to the same principles - what matters is the liveness, the spontaneity, and the audience calling some of the shots. So often actors will learn both or all parts in a piece, and then leave it to the toss of a coin or an audience member's whim who ends up playing which part. They will also often perform a short piece one way round and then flip the casting and perform it again straight away - and the dynamic has changed utterly. The main aim is to ensure that no piece is performed the same way twice; whether that be through changing the casting, or simply through the actors making a different decision in the moment, every time they play the part. It's never final, it's never definitive, each performance is the only time you'll ever see it done that way. The Factory pioneered using this approach to new work with Round One, a night of new short plays that they performed in various venues last year. More recently they have developed the initiative into Round Two, a weekly performance night in Shoreditch, for which they have an open submissions policy to ensure that they keep getting a steady flow of new pieces of writing with which they can play in front of an audience. And now they're bringing the show to Latitude - with a pre-selected handful of pieces from their Round Two "repertoire", and a couple of brand new short works as well. Simon Muller enthuses about the festival atmosphere, and how it suits the company's aesthetic. "The year before last, we did our version of Hamlet as a promenade performance in the woods, and we were amazed actually by how many people stayed with it for the duration." "So you're not worried about being outdoors again, and dealing with a drifting audience?" I asked. "No, we're quite happy to be outside - the indoor theatre tent can be tricky, the acoustics are difficult and there's so much noise pollution… I think as long as you acknowledge that you have to perform in a different way at a festival, and just embrace that fact, then you can really make it work for you." Plus, I would imagine, being outdoors may suit the style of the Factory actors, who enjoy their freedom more than any other thespians I know. Let them loose in a space and they'll instantly go exploring round every inch of it, and find a way to use it in performance. So I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up with actors dangling from branches overhead and delivering their lines from there. Muller explains that some loose plans are being formed - some of the pieces they're performing will have been in the repertoire for a while and so, though it wouldn't be right to call them well-rehearsed, they'll be quite well-known by the actors - but ultimately "a lot will depend on how we feel on the day and in the moment, what we feel like doing. Because it's important that we surprise ourselves as well, in performance." And what about the content of the short plays themselves? Muller explains that they're keen to have variety in the pieces they perform - from rude and outrageous, to surreal, to quietly thought-provoking. "We feel it's important to have a range of tones to the different pieces: not only the loud crowd-grabbing pieces, but the quieter more poetic ones as well… We can't guarantee that people will stay with us for the duration, but for those that do we want to give them something with some depth."
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