Andrew Quick on Kellerman
April 10, 2009
Eric Fischl is a 60-year-old American painter and sculptor famed for his paintings of suburbia. So what possible connection could he have with Kellerman, a new work by a British experimental theatre company, which opens at West Yorkshire Playhouse on April 22? The answer: 10 years ago, a group of Lancaster University’s Theatre Studies students wished to build on the success of their production of Einmal ist Keinmal at the National Student Drama Festival at Scarborough by setting up a more permanent company. Searching for a name, they decided that Fischl’s paintings reflected the sort of the theatre they were creating: “Realistic, but with a surrealistic edge, scenes of suburban life, comfortable on the outside, but with a dark interior,” according to Andrew Quick who, as lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster, directed Einmal ist Keinmal.
The Fischl painting that they particularly admired was titled ‘Imitating the Dog’, and it is as imitating the dog that the company now has five major touring works to its credit, including the acclaimed Hotel Methuselah. Despite its Lancaster origins, imitating the dog was actually founded in Leeds and, though Nuffield Theatre in Lancaster is one of the co-commissioners of Kellerman, West Yorkshire Playhouse stages the world premiere.
Essentially, imitating the dog consists of the three remaining members of that original Fischl-admiring group. Alice Booth is in the cast of Kellerman, as is Simon Wainwright, who is also responsible for the technical and visual aspects so essential to the company’s work. Quick, now senior lecturer at Lancaster, is co-writer and co-director (collaboration seems to be in the air at imitating the dog). A further key figure is Pete Brooks, a founder member in the 1980s of Impact Theatre Co-operative, who has been working with imitating the dog for the last five years.
Kellerman is “by imitating the dog, Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks” – written by? devised by? Quick describes the process of producing a definitive script, a stage which had just been reached at the time of our conversation some three weeks before its first night:
“We work very slowly. We started with the idea some two years ago and developed it via some early improvisation sessions. Then I would go away and write something that Pete would edit, and he would write something which I’d edit, and we reached a script by a process of continually editing. A year ago we were ready to try out a first version in London which went well and put the structure in place, but the final script contains only about 30% of that version.”
Laura Hopkins, possibly best known for the National Theatre of Scotland’s acclaimed Black Watch, has provided a magnificent two-storey set with all sorts of technical wizardry, and design is integral to the creation of the performance. Film is a constant inspiration: Hotel Methuselah reflected the black and white European and British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, and Kellerman incorporates film, animation and live action, with back and front projections from Wainwright. However, the main design inspiration this time comes from graphic novels, with drawn backgrounds alongside the film techniques.
Quick’s explanation of many uses of the notebook motif illustrates the fact that the design is anything but an add-on. The story of Kellerman centres on a mathematician who is in hospital apparently suffering from delusions, but determined to convince the world of what he believes to be the tragic truth. Thus his notebooks, filled with calculations, are central to plot and characters. With Hopkins working alongside the trio of Quick, Brooks and Wainwright, the notebook has become an integral part of design as well as narrative.
“Narrative” is, in fact, a word that frequently recurs in Quick’s analysis of imitating the dog’s theatre, often in conjunction with “experimental”: he feels that he and the company are (hopefully successfully) treading a fine line whereby they can hold mainstream audiences at the limit of their enjoyment of experiment while not becoming too conventional to lose the “experimental” audience. Similarly, though he applies the word “intense” more often than any other to describe the experience of Kellerman, he also comes up with “playful” and doesn’t demur at the idea that “it sounds like fun”.
Kellerman’s themes – mental disintegration, loss of identity, the persistence of memory and so on – do not suggest a cheerful evening at the theatre. For fun and playfulness we will have to rely on the originality, exuberance, even wit, of the performance style and design concept.
-Andrew Quick was talking to Ron Simpson
Kellerman is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from 22 to 25 April, Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, from 28 to 30 April, Bristol Old Vic from 11 to 13 May and The Lowry, Salford on 1 and 2 June.
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