Joe Spurgeon meets the man behind ‘Fairymonsterghost’ – a trio of plays each of which give a new slant to a Shakespeare favourite.

Tim Crouch, deep-rooted Bristol alumnus last seen round these parts in the unforgettable, audience-implicating, baby-abusing ‘The Author’, (“…doesn’t provide easy answers… the writing is meticulous, the phrasing and timing verging on poetic… an intellectually stimulating piece that brought up all sorts of questions about the meaning of theatre and violence” said we in a four-star review at the time), returns to Bristol Old Vic this week with a trio of self-contained one-man shows: ‘I, Peaseblossom’, ‘I, Caliban’ and ‘I, Banquo’, each retelling a Shakespearean play (‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘The Tempest’ and ‘Macbeth’ respectively) as seen through the eyes of an ostensibly ‘marginal’ character, splicing Bardic quotes and modern English monologuing. Tim won’t be performing this time around, but will be touring the fourth part of the series (‘I, Malvolio’) to Bristol later this year (22-26 Nov) as well as taking his dance theatre piece ‘May’ to Mayfest from Fri 13-Sat 14.

Tell me about ‘Fairymonsterghost’ then.

I’ve written four pieces inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, three of them – ‘I, Peaseblossom’, ‘I, Caliban’ and ‘I, Banquo’ – have toured all over but this particular outing [in Bristol] is a big departure in that they are being produced independently from me. I know the [Bristol Old Vic Associate] director John Retallack, he’s a director and a man I’ve admired for years and the thought of him taking on the plays felt absolutely right and natural. We’ve been in touch a bit, but I’ve also been learning how to let go. I will however be taking ‘I, Malvolio’ to Edinburgh, Latitude Festival and eventually Bristol later this year [November].

I’ve given John free rein to do something different to what I do in these shows. There’s an issue with how closely my writing is linked to my performance and I’ve been talking to John about releasing the presence of ‘Tim Crouch’ from the text, which feels really important. I want them to stand up independently of me.

They must begin with you, though?

Yes, they do. I didn’t start writing until I was 38 – I am now 47 – when I wrote my first piece which was called ‘My Arm’, and I’m still doing that show, and soon after that show came to be ‘known’, I got commissioned by the Brighton Festival to write a piece for young people about Shakespeare. And that’s when I proposed to tell the story of ‘The Tempest’ from Caliban’s point of view. It was always the intention that I would perform it.

It feels perfect for a young audience, it feels right, it’s about challenging the Great Man theory of history – history isn’t made by the kings and queens, it’s made by all the other people, the ‘lesser’ people, and to hear their stories gives us a clearer idea on history, so let’s  hear ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ told from the point of view of a single character who only has one word in that play.

I’ve been helped by my choice of characters – Caliban is fairly supernatural, Peaseblossom obviously is, and Banquo is dead; so Banquo can say some things that Banquo alive was not able to say and that makes it easier and puts an exciting filter onto things. It’s a simple premise and an invitation to the audience to imagine a friendship slowly going wrong; plus, there’s a lot of blood in ‘I, Banquo’, it’s pretty full-on. I did have some students who famously had to be escorted out of the room because they had issues with the blood… it’s a delicate one.

And also rather famously, you were banned from Brighton’s Catholic schools…

The difficult thing is around young people and adults. Adults feel very protective of young people; young people don’t feel remotely protective of themselves. Young people in my experience – having had three children and having taught extensively – is that young people want ‘that stuff’; but what happened in this particular case was that we performed ‘I, Peaseblossom’ in a school, and if you take anything into a school, you have to be respectful of the culture of that school. The kids had a fantastic time but the teachers felt it was challenging the culture of the school – Peaseblossom is instructed by Oberon at the end of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to bless the nuptials, and the conceit of ‘I, Peaseblossom’ is that it’s four o’clock in the morning and Peaseblossom has spent the whole night blessing things and is knackered out of his or her mind and turns his blessings away from inanimate objects onto the audience. The message from that particular headteacher was that they took blessing very seriously. So what do you do? I understand children are in a highly receptive state of development – and I’m writing these pieces for them, not the adults who ‘look after them’ – but I think they thrive on stuff that pushes a little. ‘I, Peaseblossom’ is the most innocent, asexual, inoffensive piece of theatre there is.

Does an audience of children demand you work harder?

I don’t think you can lie to an audience of young people. I think we can lie to an audience of adults – a young audience will know if they are being lied to and there is no fixed protocol of behaviour as there might be in an audience of adults because they’ve matured, they’ve solidified. That enables you to be more experimental or certainly not feel like you have to inhabit previous forms because young people play all the time and construct and reconstruct forms all the time; so these pieces honour that. Peaseblossom is an invitation to play, he/she will gently involve audience members and there is a great sense of interaction, children aren’t invited on-stage – I feel quite compromised when those things happen – but there is an engine to include the audience.

I also have a pedagogical drive that I can’t get rid of and probably inherited from my parents which is why I teach and work with young people. If you work only with grown-ups you can get very po-faced and self-reflective and working with young people stops you from doing that.

How does the language you use differ?

Having just read ‘I, Banquo’ again, what struck me is how much Shakespeare is in it, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it, I’ve just taken all the best bits – and the bits I think are easily understandable too, because the language can be a sticking point. It’s not necessarily all Banquo’s lines either – there are some of Macbeth’s lines and imagery too. I don’t want to lose my audience through language, so Peaseblossom has a series of dreams in which I use archetypal dream a narrative – at one point, all Peaseblossom’s teeth fall out, at another she/he’s in a play naked and doesn’t remember the lines, then she/he’s falling – so any young kid who dreams, and they all do, has immediate hooks into it.

What’s the priority for each piece?

The first priority is to tell the story of the play. That’s fundamental. So I would want someone who came to see these pieces and didn’t know the Shakespeare play, to come away with a pretty clear understanding of what happens in the play. I don’t want to stand and tell you the story because that would be very boring. With ‘I, Malvolio’, ‘Twelfth Night’ is so ludicrously ploy heavy – there are maybe five different subplots – so my task was not to get bogged down with that. It’s much easier with ‘Macbeth’ where there’s a very clear energy through the play. I’m tying it all in with the conceit of my play, with I hope is honouring the conceit of the original play as much as possible.

Is Shakespeare fair game for constant – or wholesale – reinvention?

I tussle with this. In addition to ‘Fairymonsterghost’, I’m directing a shortened version of ‘Taming of the Shrew’ for the RSC later this year, at an hour and ten minutes for family audiences. How do I make ‘Taming of the Shrew’ more accessible for a young audience? Well, I’ve made some dramatic cuts, I’ve removed a subplot, I’ve removed some characters, but every word of that play is Shakespeare’s. This is different. Shakespeare’s plays should be mucked around with till the cows come home, I think that’s important, I think that’s what Shakespeare would have wanted. Most of his plays are bowdlerised versions of other people’s plays. I’m also a passionate devotee of the language. I wouldn’t necessarily approve of totally eviscerating the language; the place of Shakespeare in our culture is so fundamental and he informs how we feel about character, motive, relationships or behaviour. To some degree, it’s a bit of a weight around our necks, particularly around character. My adult work challenges how we have taken Shakespeare to be the only way a dramatic character exists. I’m aware that Shakespeare – like the bible – is a seminal text that young people should have some connection with and any way that that can be achieved is all right by me! My way is just ‘a way’ which prioritises story.

These’s an amazing critic called Harold Bloom who wrote a book called ‘The Invention of the Human’ about Shakespeare and he says that Jesus, Hamlet and the Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, are the three dominant literary characters in our culture and it’s kind of true.

I’m not a Shakespearean scholar, I have some views on it, I have an extreme respect for the language and what it does, but I feel lucky to be making contemporary theatre as well. I would be mad to say that I’m not influenced by Shakespeare in some way, but I’m also able to move away from Shakespeare, partly because I know him so well.

Who else might you tackle in the ‘Fairy…’ series?

I feel moved to do a woman! The nurse in Romeo in Juliet would have some things to say – ‘I, Nurse’ – and I would like to do ‘I, Osric’ if I was ever to tackle ‘Hamlet’, someone living in that castle with all that stuff going on.

I had Malvolio in my mind for a long time and there was a gap of several years between him and Banquo was the last one previously. I’d like to think there’ll be more, but I don’t know what they’ll be.

Is there something of the mischievous agent provocateur in your work?

The spur to my work came about through frustrations I was experiencing as an actor; it’s really clear in ‘The Author’ – a kind of love song to actors – which says ‘look at what these fuckers can do to you!’; the abuse that I experienced and the abuse that is still perpetrated in the name of art, in the name of theatre – that’s something that I still feel fired up by. Abuse inflicting on actors, in terms of power ratios, how powerless an actor can feel – I feel there’s a drive in my work about celebrating what an actor can do. ‘An Oak Tree’ is a play of mine in which the second actor doesn’t know the play, and I get excited by that because it’s giving an actor a chance to find their instinct; they haven’t spent six weeks with a director and can just be present and celebrate what might be possible. Then there are larger things in terms of how art represents our lives and particularly in ‘The Author’ that was about violence and how artists don’t feel connections with those things because they think that by being an artist they are somehow above all that – it’s a ‘subject matter’, not real. That’s why with ‘The Author’ we placed the audience inside the experience and placed the actors inside the experience without artificially generated character names, I wanted them and the audience to understand how close we all are to this stuff. I don’t sit down to write that challenge and be an agent provocateur but the way my brains is wired makes it happen. I’m lucky sometimes to be able to push an idea as far as I want – I try to avoid commissions, although ‘The Author’ was a Royal Court commission – I work on my own when I write so that gives me a freedom to explore things a little further and not hide behind previously existing forms. That happened with ‘My Arm’, I wrote it entirely for myself, I had no notion of it every going anywhere beyond me performing it in people’s front rooms and because I was so free when I wrote that, I found my voice with that piece and that has shored up future work and given me the confidence to keep exploring my voice. I think every piece of work should be experimental; no-one should revisit a track previously visited. I don’t understand people doing that. That doesn’t feel like a creative act at all.

FAIRYMONSTERGHOST WAS AT BRISTOL OLD VIC FROM 17-21 MAY 2011. FOR REVIEW CLICK HERE

Copyright Joe Spurgeon 2011