Tom Bidwell and Justin Audibert on Company Along the Mile
January 15, 2009
I imagine that Tom Bidwell is fairly confident that a certain former flame doesn’t read his interviews. He tells me that Stella, a character in his debut play Company Along the Mile “is based on an ex-girlfriend of mine. English was her second language, so she used to say things like ‘why do you have to terrorize me all the time?’ There’s something about those turns of phrase that I think is fascinating. I love that you can build characters around one saying and one situation.” Stella, you see, is a transvestite and lifestyle fantasist who insists on having sandwiches cut into triangles and pays the other main character, George, for his company each Wednesday in a Blackpool hotel room.
The play, which is produced by Milan Govedarica in association with the West Yorkshire Playhouse and begins its national tour at the WYP on 22 January, follows what happens when these meetings, amiable encounters during which Stella peruses the obituaries and asserts her granular bigotry, are interrupted by a cluster of unexpected and unsettling events. After a single, inexplicable knock on the door, a strange telephone call and a volley of stones catapulting against their window, they find a dead bell boy in their en suite.
For Bidwell, such tremors of plot are essential to making characterisation as nuanced as it ought to be. “If you put anyone in a situation of extreme pressure, that’s when character comes to the foreground,” he argues, “because they’re in conflict. That’s when you really see the true colours of a person. I think that that’s what this play is about – the more someone freaks out, they more you see of them. It’s the reverse of masking fear. As the play goes on the masks slowly drop and the fear slowly rises.”
Bidwell has entrusted Company Along the Mile to director Justin Audibert, with whom he has worked before. Audibert emits a surge of gratitude on the matter. “There’s no greater privilege than to breathe the first bit of life into somebody else’s script,” he enthuses. “It’s a massive act of trust. Don’t get me wrong – I’d happily direct most shows of good quality, but there’s something extra special about having the first vision of something. No-one can ever take that away from you.”
Though primarily a comedy, the elements of mystery and tension in the play give it overlaps with other groupings. However, Bidwell prefers to isolate influential writers rather than constituent genres. “At the time I wrote it,” he says, “I was reading Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter and Joe Orton. If it resembles any of those, I’ll be very pleased.” After Audibert requests, and receives, an assurance from Bidwell that he won’t be kicked for airing his view, he opines that “the character of Stella, who is a transvestite, definitely has an echo of Tennessee Williams’ tragic heroines. A sort of Blanche DuBois, who’s living her life partly in reality and partly in a sort of fantasy world.”
Bidwell’s penchant for seeing his first full-length play in the context of other dramatists and their work is more fundamental than pure sensitivity to influences. When I question him about why eccentricities are such a preoccupation for him, he highlights the psychology of playwrights as a species. “I think that, as a writer, you like to believe that you understand the secrets of human existence. Tommy Jordan said the same thing – he said that he writes because he feels like no-one else knows something.” After a little consideration, he continues: “I wrote a piece of prose recently and found it really difficult to do. I think the difference was highlighted in an interview that I saw with Robert De Niro. The interviewer asked, ‘How do you go about acting? What brings the magic to your performances?’, and he said ‘I observe behaviour’. I thought, ‘That’s the dramatist’s job – to observe behaviour, and to soak up the almost inexplicable things about it’. When a character can enter a room and sit down and you know exactly who they are just from the way that they behave – that’s what you aim for.”
For Audibert, however, richness of characterisation is important for other reasons too. “I think it’s also true that the more specific characters, location and setting are, in a way, the more universal they are, actually,” he tells me. “The great thing about theatre is that it all works on metaphor – something always stands for something else. The more specific the area that you capture, the more specific a metaphor for something much wider it is. I love that about it – it’s a kind of cheating the periscope. You think what you’re looking at is really narrow, and then you turn it round and see that, actually, it’s a big panorama.”
Indeed detail, as befits his somewhat forensic outlook, seems to be the closest thing that Audibert has to an article of professional faith. It is certainly integral to the way that he plans to depict Blackpool. “I hope that you’ll walk into the theatre and go, ‘I know where that hotel room is!’ The sound of Blackpool was really important to me, too. I’ve worked with a sound designer called Claire Windsor and a composer called George Rodosthenous, and we were all very keen on capturing the sounds of the outdoors, and the Wurlitzer music that you get on the beach.” However, while Audibert highlights Blackpool’s “faded glamour” and “many different groups of people that very rarely mingle”, the man who chose its Golden Mile as the setting is laconic in explaining why he did so. “It’s a place where things happen,” he says. “We went and we saw someone almost get beaten to death and then got wooed by a group of old women.”
It’s a measure of Audibert’s directness that he summarises what he thinks that the play is about without being prompted to; similarly, it’s a measure of Bidwell’s more delicate approach that only says a little when he is. After exacting a third promise from Bidwell that he is safe from Bidwell’s left shoe, Audibert contends that the play is about “the things in the world that change people. You might get changed by a political conviction, for example, or, in the case of this play, love, and the transformative power of love is one of the things in life that I’m most interested in.” Although, when asked plainly, Bidwell just says that it is “a love story”, when asked why he chose to focus on the relationship between two characters that you would not expect to know one another, he perhaps gives a little more away. “I think the message is that you can’t choose who you love,” he reveals. “I can’t stand to be around some of the people who I love. You can’t choose, so sometimes you just have to find a way to be with them.”
-Tom Bidwell and Justin Audibert were talking to Simon Walker
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