Interview with Mike Shepherd, founder of Kneehigh Theatre
February 15, 2008
What were your original aims and intentions when you set up Kneehigh?
I called Cornwall my home and I’d been in the sharp end of the theatre business in London and got really jaded with it. So I went back to Cornwall as a place I believe you can make things happen and started Kneehigh as a company for children and their families. There aren’t really any theatres down here – there were quarries, old gunpowder works, some amazing places to tell stories. That was the original notion and if you see ‘Rapunzel’ I think it’s pretty close to those early shows.
They tell a good story, the use of music, colour, lots of humour – it’s quirky and witty as well. People recognise it as being immediate and it gives you a good night out. It’s the opposite of being in a black box studio theatre or behind a proscenium with a metaphorical fourth wall. We grew up playing in daylight and it’s embarrassing if you’re pretending the audience isn’t there, you can directly talk to the audience. Then the story can get darker and more emotional and take people on a journey.
Could you give us the outline of the ‘Rapunzel’ story?
The original story in its earliest form was a teaching story about love and finding your way in the world. Parents told children those stories as a way of teaching. The basic story is about a baby who is brought up by a herbalist. Suddenly she becomes a grown-up and the outside world has noticed so to keep her away from the outside world she is locked in a tower. Her hair grows and grows and the only access to her is by her long hair. It then becomes a massive story: she meets a prince and falls in love; her mother cuts her hair off and casts her into the wilderness and blinds the prince. So it’s an epic like ‘King Lear’ – it’s a quest, it’s a test of their love. Can their love endure through the trials?
I was interested to know if the writer had come across Propp and Todorev and the idea that every story is a basic template of the fairy story and part of that is the prince on his quest?
There are seven different types of story, yes. The other influences are Calvino who collected old Italian folk tales and Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Holocaust and yet talks about the meaning of fairy tales. There is this darkness behind the sweetness of fairy tales. We’re well known for ‘The Red Shoes’ and that is a similar story with a girl who ends up having her feet cut off. It’s about very dark but fundamental things. For ‘Rapunzel’ we really wanted to get back to doing something small and intimate with families sitting on straw bales. It’s a good night out for everyone – it doesn’t condescend to children and it works best when the children are laughing and the adults are enjoying it because the children are.
You use puppetry, physical theatre, live music and animation. What interests you in having this kind of total theatre, this almost holistic approach?
Eclectic could be a dangerous word. We use different tools really and the over-riding factor is that we want to tell a story. The work often does not start off with the script but with a creative space, usually our barns on the south Cornish coast. We’ll fill that with elements of design, music, poetry, text, images, colour, food and then we’ll dip into it like a palette of colours to paint with or as ingredients to cook with. Then you make very sharp choices, otherwise you’re just going to end up with a mess. It’s quite a selective process. We haven’t got a formula.
Could you tell us a bit about the Stu Barker score? Is it folky?
It’s folky and funky, we’ve got a healthy paranoia coming from Cornwall that we don’t become a kind of folksy theatre company. All the actors play, of different abilities, and it includes the mandolin, dulcimer and screaming electric guitar. It goes from a Sicilian warm sunny atmosphere to David Lynch!
Is there a fine line between being an accessible and anarchic or subversive company?
There’s definitely an anarchy in the rehearsal space but I wouldn’t say it’s a subversion. We’re going out to do our absolute best and when you get to the sharp end of the business you realise there’s an enormous pressure on getting it right and that, personally, doesn’t come into my radar. I think we make work with intelligence and instinct. We don’t deliberately subvert, with our ‘Cymbeline’ we weren’t subverting Shakespeare, we were doing our best to honour him and to engage our audience.
- Mike Shepherd was talking to Rich Jevons