The Big Issue - Theatre For Everyone
September 24, 2008
John Retallack is the director and curator of the Theatre Cafe Festival, which will take place at neighbouring venues, the Unicorn Theatre and the Southwark Playhouse from Monday 10 - Saturday 15 November. The festival aims to give a platform to new European plays which have either been written expressly for young people, or have captured their imagination. John talks to Whatsonstage.com about his role in bringing theatre to the next generation.
Tell us about Theatre Cafe Festival and its aims
Theatre Café Festival is about giving a platform to brilliant new European plays which don’t get enough exposure in the UK.
It is also a theatrical space designed to create an informal, intimate atmosphere where audiences can relax and feel very close to a play. Some of the plays in the season are written expressly for young people, some have simply caught the imagination of young people in their own countries. All of them have won significant prizes in the last 3 years.
Company of Angels will be presenting two full productions, (This Child and Norway.Today) an International Symposium led by Chris Campbell of the National Theatre and staged readings of 5 plays.
This year, four of the five plays are by women – Anja Hilling’s Sense, Darja Stocker’s Nightblind, Esther Gerritsen’s Headcase, Anna Bro’s Sandhold; the fifth play, Bulger is by the Flemish playwright Klaas Tindemans. Company of Angels has commissioned four of the five translations.
What is your role with the festival?
My role is to direct a number of the plays and, with the company team, the event itself. The curation of the programme is shared with Teresa Ariosto, producer and dramaturge at Company of Angels. Teresa is also an accomplished linguist and reads most western European languages.
On 23 May this year, we launched our Angels Associates scheme at Soho Theatre and we currently have eleven young theatre-makers attached to the company; eight of them are directors and there is also a writer, an actor/musician and a movement specialist.< p>
We have two young directors schemes currently on the go (see www.companyofangels.co.uk for more information) and the results of some of this work will also be presented at Theatre Café.
Max Webster and Chris Rolls direct Sense by Anja Hilling, Philip Thorne and Oystein Brager of Imploding Fictions present Norway Today by Igor Bauersima – and we see the final presentations by young directors to win the coveted £20,000 award (in collaboration with The Junction in Cambridge) to direct Invasion! by Jonas Hassen Khemiri at Soho Theatre in Spring 2009.
What are the major differences between theatre for adults and that for young people?
I’m attracted to new European work for young people by the political nature of its themes and the aesthetic boldness of the writing.
Take Invasion! by Jonas Hassen Khemiri which made a huge impact at last year’s Theatre Café festival; it takes the identity of the Arab male in Western Europe – a tricky and controversial subject – and turns it into a startlingly experimental and very funny play that satirizes to brilliant effect the way that we condemn and demonize the outsider through the way we use language. It’s like a nightmare version of Pygmalion happening on the streets of our cities.
Invasion! is the subject this year of two awards; a £10,000 Company of Angels award and a further matching £10,000 from the Swedish Embassy. The author – something of a charismatic figure himself - is coming over to Theatre Café to decide which of several performed extracts should win the award and which director will get to direct it at Soho Theatre, our co-producing partner. It will open at Soho Theatre in March 2009.
Or This Child by Joel Pommerat; this is an hour-long sequence of ten scenes (not one of them related to another except that they all happen on the same estate) about children and parents living together and how much more mature and clear-headed the young sometimes are than the old.
We are co-producing This Child at this year’s festival in a co-production with Pilot Theatre and The Junction in Cambridge; 3 versions of the play, 3 different companies, 3 directors. On November 13th, we will present a unique ‘shuffle’ staging incorporating parts of all three productions.
Both these plays have been major talking points in their own countries (Sweden and France respectively) and it was great to see how much interest and passion they aroused in the audience at last year’s Theatre Café Festival.
Young people want topics and issues like these to be dramatized. There is plenty of nuance and ambiguity in these plays, as well as an unfaltering directness. They immediately want to talk about these plays afterwards.
I see a lot of good theatre for mainstream audiences but the absolute directness of these plays is dramatically impressive and sometimes shows how long ‘adult theatre’ takes to get to the point.
How receptive are the young people you work with to theatre?
They are always receptive, though that might mean they totally – and vocally - reject a play! Powerful narrative helps, but the response of young people to non-narrative plays is also positive. Young people are more naturally experimental than adults. They are also intensely absorbed and concerned with issues of justice. All the old virtues of performance are vital with young people – clear diction, great movement, intelligent ensemble, authentic characterization.
There is less censorship in theatre for young people than there is in television or radio. In a revolution, theatre would be essential because it can be trusted over any other media. It can be challenged on the spot.
These plays respect the inner lives of young people, whoever they are.
And I like how many plays for a younger audience view families from the perspective of the child rather than the adult.
What can we expect from the future of the project?
Theatre Café is unique because it brings European work and young directors together and shares this with representatives from all over the British theatre industry.
We hope that it brings a lot of interested people together in 2008 and that it grows each year until by 2011 it becomes an indispensable way of moving plays and artists between different cultures and languages.
The other key factor is that we succeed in presenting plays that producing theatres want to perform in Britain as a result of seeing them at Theatre Café. We are already seeing three different major theatres responding to the texts that we have commissioned in 2007 – this is very important to us.
-John Retallack
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