A quartet of gifted comic actors have devised a show about a stag do that ends up getting very weird indeed in the remote Icelandic wastes. A Viking ‘Deliverance’, Steve Wright wonders?

We’re playing with the idea of the modern, middle-class stag do, where men still want all the traditional elements – drunkenness, debauchery – but they then temper it with something educational and cultural. So you do the wild drinking, but then you go to a museum. Or you go to a strip club but then you go and… see some waterfalls. There’s a slight hypocrisy there.”

Speaker Neil Haigh is a comic actor whom you may have seen cavorting about with companies such as Mayfest faves Cartoon de Salvo. And he’s telling Venue about ‘The Summer House’, a “comedy thriller” he’s devised with fellow performers Will Adamsdale (he of the splendid motivational-speaker skit ‘Jackson’s Way’), TV comic actor Matthew Steer and John Wright, founder of companies Trestle and Told By An Idiot.

The premise is this. At the fag end of an epic stag weekend in Reykjavik, three men (including the groom and best man) travel through the dark, featureless Icelandic countryside to a remote summer house, apparently owned by one of the trio. What seems to be on offer is some first-rate lotus-eating, with stacks of beers in the fridge and the hot tub on full blast. What actually ensues is… well, something very different, involving a clash between the men’s high-tech, cosseted lifestyles and the ancient myths and spirits of Iceland.

“These three are the last ones standing at the end of the night, not wanting the party to end,” Neil explains. “My character’s a kind of drifter, unlike the other two who are much more conventional: careers, family, so on. On this night, though, this other world he comes to personify seems very attractive to them.

“He takes them out to it his ‘summer house’ – although, in fact, we’re in the middle of winter so there’s darkness and snow everywhere, which adds to the thriller angle. As the evening goes on, you realise that there is more to this character than first meets the eye. The myths and pagan past are still very much alive in the landscape around them.”

Audiences will get a slow drip-feed of revelations about Neil’s character and this strange ‘summer house’ to which he’s invited his friends, so he doesn’t want to reveal too much about what actually happens. Suffice it to say that a string of Viking myths and characters – including Thor, hammer-wielding king of the gods, and the mischief-maker Loki – begin to hover about the house, making merry with the men’s modern notions of masculinity and bravery. “The house and the surrounding country wake up and take on their own personality,” Neil hints. “We wanted to do something about modern men and all their hang-ups, and although it’s well-trodden territory in one sense, we thought we could get a lot out of it comedically. We thought it’d be interesting to set these three guys and all their modern male hang-ups against the Viking belief systems and stories, and to clash the two worlds together.”  

In and amongst this myth and unease, though, the show is, says Neil, “basically very silly… It’s three middle-aged men pretending they’re still young and fannying around in swimming trunks. They are modern blokes with mobiles cast adrift in an uncertain wilderness, trying to tread that line between modern and traditional masculinity – between media expectations and women’s expectations of manhood, and their own competitiveness with each other. I suppose it’s asking, what are we chasing, as men? When is enough enough?

“None of that is explicit, but it’s suggested in the clash between modern and ancient worlds. For example, we tell the story of one particularly berserk Viking tribe, the Jomsvikings, who used to do stupid things while extremely drunk, like decide to invade Norway the next day. Because they were so fiercely loyal and their word was their bond, even when they woke up with horrible hangovers and could clearly see what a disastrous idea it was, they were honour-bound to carry it through. So off they went and tried to invade Norway – and duly got completely routed.” 

The show’s being staged in a minimal, visually inventive style, true to the heritage of Cartoon de Salvo, Trestle et al. “The Norse sagas, in particular, are done in quite a playful style, with direct address to the audience, whereas the other [modern] strand is more naturalistic. With the staging, we are using very little, but doing simple things to try and make the earth come alive – we create earthquakes, for example, and we have a lone raven who spends the whole play flying around inside the house, a reference to a the mythical raven whom Thor used as his spy.”

Things also get more playful and fourth-wall-breaking as the evening goes on. “It becomes clear that even these actors telling the story are not in control of when their effects are happening. We sow seeds in the audience’s minds and leave them to unravel mysteries and make connections.”

THE SUMMER HOUSE WAS AT THE USTINOV, BATH FROM THUR 17-SAT 19 MAR, AND WILL BE AT BRISTOL OLD VIC STUDIO FROM 12-14 MAY AS PART OF MAYFEST. 
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2011 

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