Chris Monks on theatre in the round and plans for the SJT
March 30, 2009
In the first part of an extended interview, soon-to-be Stephen Joseph Theatre artistic director Chris Monks tells Simon Walker about his time as composer for the Royal Exchange, the future of the SJT and the importance of children’s theatre
“There was a version of Measure for Measure, in which the character of the Duke was into eastern philosophy, so I wanted an eastern flavour to the music,” Chris Monks begins. “The only place you could go to borrow records was the local library, where the librarians used to look at them carefully to check that you hadn’t scratched them and then put them very gently back into their sleeves, and then you’d take them and listen to some amazing music from the other side of the planet collected by an academic. I came across this wonderful instrument called a shehnai, which is an oboe, but it’s from the area around Pakistan, and I decided that I wanted one in this show. I did some research and, eventually, heard that there was one guy in the country living in London who plays it. I went down to see him, his wife cooked the most fabulous curry I’ve ever eaten and he played the shehnai. I said ‘This is fantastic – would you record it for us?’, so we went to a studio. I realised when we got there that he couldn’t read music at all, so I just said ‘Play!’ I’d already got some backing tracks of western orchestral oboes, so he just improvised over them, and it was fabulous. I’d recorded it so that you could have the European oboes at one end of the theatre and the Asian equivalent at the other to get that separation. In a conventional proscenium theatre, you couldn’t achieve that particular atmosphere, so it comes down to the round, which is very important to me.”
I doubt that all Monks’ experiences as composer for Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in the 1970s are as anecdote-primed as this one, but their cumulative effect in equipping him for his new job must be vast. Having composed the scores for over fifty productions at one illustrious northern theatre in the round, he starts his tenure as artistic director at another, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, on Wednesday. “It was incredibly informative,” he says, “because it meant that my first real experience of theatre was in the round. The possibilities for sound are fantastic, so I started to experiment quite early on. I remember going to a scrap yard and finding the biggest water tank that I possibly could – we could only just squeeze it in through the doors – and getting the percussionist to hit it very hard. It could produce seven and a half seconds of echo, so when you set up a rhythm on this thing it was as though the whole place was going to fall down.”
However, Monks depicts his career path to date as anything but linear and logical. “I never made any choices,” he insists. “Choices seem to be made for me. It’s like David Byrne’s ‘Once in a Lifetime’ – ‘How did I get here?’ I don’t know. I had to wait three months between the first and second interviews for this job. During that time I had to set up work for myself in case I didn’t get it. You’ve always got to have another string to your bow – that emergency parachute that goes, ‘Well, I’m not going to run the English National Opera – I think I might do an education project in North Yorkshire instead, until that happens’. Back then I ended up in Manchester, jobless, and then an advert came up in the paper asking for drivers at the Royal Exchange. I spent my entire college time and a year after that driving to gigs, so I knew the entire motorway system like the back of my hand. I got the job not because I’d been in the Manchester Youth Theatre or had any acting aspirations – it was because I could negotiate my way from Cleckheaton to Northampton.”
Nonetheless, Monks’ extensive work in theatres in the round as both a director and composer, at Bolton Octagon, the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme and Richmond’s Orange Tree as well as the Royal Exchange, partly underpins his immense regard for his predecessor. “It’s a great honour to have this job,” he enthuses, “crikey! As someone who’s been brought up with the culture of theatre in the round, Alan Ayckbourn is one of the gods. To actually sit in a room with him and talk about things is fantastic – he’s such a nice, supportive, knowledgeable man. I’ll feel my mouth opening and my jaw dropping so that I look very stupid while he says the simplest of things. I think that, when you work with people who have real talent, they don’t have to say very much – they put their finger on it straight away. It’s daunting, but it’s exciting at the same time.”
His opening programme for the SJT is something of a manifesto for its future: comedy, much of it musical, will dominate. While Monks will direct Ron Hutchinson’s Moonlight and Magnolias (30 April - 27 June) and a new production of his Reservoir Dogs-themed adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (2 July - 22 August), Ayckbourn is to revive his How the Other Half Loves (4 June - 29 August) for the first time since it premiered in Scarborough in 1969. Although Monks opines that comedy is generally somewhat neglected in favour of tragedy, his vision also embodies the approach that he believes that any large theatre in a small town must take. “Alan said to me, ‘You’ve got to be popular’,” he recalls. “His stuff is extremely accessible. Through his 72 plays there is a great deal of variation, but you could never say that it’s not popular. Half our audience members are fish in this catchment area, and they don’t come that often, so we have to really try hard to engage our audience. If you live in Stoke-on-Trent, there are lots more people who would come to see your shows, whereas here we really have to present something for everybody. Tonight we’ve got a film on, we had a dance company last night, a different film the previous night, and we had The African Company Presents ‘Richard III’. That’s fantastic variety, and the more variety we can present, the better it will be for us and the community.”
To an extent, dipping into the vocabulary of inclusivity is pretty routine for any newly appointed artistic director, especially one who holds his first such position during a “downturn” (was that word recognised as an economic term until a few months ago?). However, that Monks can cite examples of his action to that end before his role has even officially commenced suggests that his doing so is more than a stroll through PR formalities. “I’ve set up what’s really a new department to do that,” he tells me. “Rebranding and reorganising the education department was the first thing that I did. When times get hard is when theatres can actually make a big contribution. This goes back to when I was involved with Contact Theatre, in Manchester, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, because that’s when I first came across ‘community’ theatre. When you work with a group of people that have never come into contact with theatre, you see the connection that it can make. That is what makes it special, so I’m going to get work out there and find a different audience, as well as the audience that we already have here.”
Indeed, for Monks, organising children’s theatre is essential as a matter both of principle and commercial practicality. “If you get young people interested in theatre that will stay with them for a long time,” he contends. “When Alan first built this theatre, he wanted the McCarthy to be dedicated to children’s theatre. He didn’t have the money to do that, so it never happened. Children’s theatre is undervalued in this country because it doesn’t make money. I think that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. Young people will want to go all through their school lives if you can catch them at primary school by, for example, bringing them to a Christmas show that they can connect with, so they suddenly think ‘Wow, this is fun’. Then they’ll get to the point when their interest in theatre will tail off a bit, because they’ll be pursuing their careers and having families, but then, when their children have grown up and their careers become less important, they’ll start to come back. If they have that love for it, they’ll come back to us.”
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