The interview
I’m fascinated by the name, Kinkens.
It’s an Old Scotch word, yeah…
How did you stumble across it?
I found it in a book called The Meaning of Tingo which is a book full of words from around the world with long, cumbersome meanings. It was given to me by my friend actually after our first year at drama school, when we’d spent ninety percent of the time in silence and both of us were really missing language. I wanted to make a show about the meaning of life and I stumbled on that word. Did you see what it meant?
If I recall, it’s the evasive sort of response parents give to their children’s too-probing questions. So how did it all come about? You say you wanted to make a play about the meaning of life?
It was more that I wanted to set myself the challenge of why humans ask questions about the meaning of life. I’ve no idea where that came from. Why have we been given this little bit of whatever it is in our minds in our brains capable of asking useless existential questions.
It seems quite a cruel thing for nature to do to us.
Cruel, really cruel. Really pointless. Which part of evolution created it? It seems idiotic and a stupid waste of time. It’s a little bit of a curse.
Talking a little bit about your show. My understanding was that is was a sort of prismatic exploration of, not the subjective experience of depression, but the experience of being beside someone with depression and an inability to know how to deal with it. It was quite unnerving because it begins with a sort of light amusing tone. It’s a very endearing performance and the performance evokes a lot of titters, but then it slowly grows into something more malign, alarming, without being overtly dark. And then all of sudden, in the final few minutes, it becomes really very powerful.
It’s funny you said it’s not got a subjective viewpoint. I really wanted to allow people to project what they wanted to onto it, for it to be sort of specific enough and yet open enough so that people could bring their own stories to it. I make stuff from my own experience but I’m not an autobiographical maker, which probably relates to my love of mask.
If I’m relating it to any part of my experience, it’s that moment when the world seems to demand that you know who you are and feeling like you’ve got no idea and then the stress of that. And social media! I got Facebook in my first year at university. There’s that comparison, the constant judgement.
Then I found this little piece. It was a paper by the Royal Society of Public Health called #statusofmind about young people with mental health related problems and social media and there was this statistic that there’s been a 70 percent rise in depression, which I found really astounding. But probably technology has got a lot to do with it. It was also linked to the wider conversation and it being something that is already more part of our social fabric and the presence of it being more talked about.
I was going to say that! When I was at university I didn’t know what depression was and I think I experienced some of it without knowing that’s what it was. I think someone going to university now would be far more likely to identify that what they are experiencing is clinical, so I think that could be part of it!
So I was going to ask you about the process of bringing it together. One person in a room, producing a show of that nature, must feel a little mad?
It’s quite a laden word, ‘mad’. But it’s definitely a way to describe solo working undoubtedly. I’m so glad there was very little evidence of some of the things I did alone because I worked through the body a lot and then you improvise from that some of the stuff from pure emotion and then you carve out from there, so for a long time it remained very kaleidoscopic, multi-stranded.
I did some work with a sound advisor with jingles and I also worked with Kid Carpet who wrote the soundtrack for it. Probably 90 percent of the time I spent on my own and then I invited different outsiders to come in and have a look and reflect, and then right at the end a lady called Cath Johnson came into my life and did some proper dramaturgy which is what it needed. We just took it all apart again and then gave it a structure and that came literally right at the end.
It’s quite a light piece despite the potentially heavy topic and I think a superficial audience will be superficially amused and entertained but a deeper audience will also be entertained at that level too because they can impose their thing on it. I think it will also be popular with student audiences. I think it’s quite cleverly constructed in that respect. I don’t know if that was a conscious part of the plan?
I never wanted to say anything particularly clever. I’m always conscious of how much has been said and all the millions of references I leave out. I also think that in artistic responses to themes there’s a lot of space for a more personal voice to emerge and I guess I journeyed through a lot of current debates and thoughts and dialogue.
I spent a long time reading and rereading The Other Side of Silence by a psychiatrist called Linda Gask who also suffers from depression and that’s a story that really took me: this idea of somebody who’s in a supportive professional role but then also suffering from the thing that she’s helping people with. I think there’s something really interesting about starting to move power dynamics in the way that we look after each other and the way empathy works or doesn’t work if there’s one person who says "I’m going to look after you".
There’s a main thrust to the show which is about moving away from advice giving and moving towards a state of listening, and taking down hierarchies in health care which I think is really important.
How much do you anticipate it will evolve in Edinburgh?
I don’t like to say anything is fixed but I think there’s definitely a structure there in terms of the story but I didn’t exactly stick to the script last Friday. If you noticed you’ve tapped into something with a particular audience, you might sort of work that.
I also know the value of having worked with Golem the value of just doing what’s been done. And how much joy you can find in slight changes every night and how much you can feel the intricacies if you keep the show the same because, compared to some shows that I’ve done, it hasn’t got as much space for improv. But who knows? I’ve only done it once.
After Edinburgh... where next?
Actually I got an e-mail yesterday from The Gathering which is a touring network in the Highlands and Islands, so I’m going to do a showcase there so there might hopefully be a bit of Scottish rural touring which would be fantastic. I’m doing another little showing with Theatre Orchard, which has two spaces: one in Weston, and one in Clevedon. I’m interested in seeing if it could be part of festivals about mental health. We’ll see what kind of conversations come up in Edinburgh!
And beyond Kinkens?
I have this ongoing collaboration with Brú in Galway. We’re doing another mask show. We’ll be at the Galway Arts Centre in July and then we’re starting a new project together—another maskey—in October and then there’s ongoing stuff with the Chimera Network as well. I’m not going to make another solo show for now!
The whole process of managing and touring, the business of carrying a solo show around. What’s your experience of that?
Luckily I find my own company fine. I’m not the most exciting when I’m on my own but normally we can find a way to make experiences fun. Me and myself. And I’ve got a few other friends who will be up there this year and Cath who helps me with the dramaturgy is coming up for the first week and I’m also going up with my housemate who’s got a show called Queen Cunt, which is more difficult to sell to rural audiences apparently! But we’re going to stage manage each other’s which is really nice.
That’s the support you need!
It will be fun. I’m seeing lots of other shows!