Bristol Old Vic welcomes back homegrown theatrical provocateurs Sound&Fury this month with a cosmological adventure bigger than you could possibly imagine. Joe Spurgeon meets co-director Mark Espiner and writer Hattie Naylor.

Ask anyone lucky enough to have caught last year’s majestic ‘Kursk’ – our official Play of the Year award-winner, no less – and you’ll be met with a long stream of breathless superlatives. Opening at Bristol Old Vic, the submarine-set thriller took its audiences to within inches of the action, conjuring the cramped, low-lit tension and tedium of life aboard a Cold War submarine where drama – both acute, human micro-tragedy and larger-scale diplomatic disaster – unfolded with a potent, multisensory punch, all set against the beguiling, all-pervasive presence of the great ocean.

The brains behind it all were Sound&Fury, who have since toured ‘Kursk’ around the world and who are, at the time of writing, just back from performing at the Sydney Opera House. Happily, the Sound&Fury team have deep-rooted local connections – each of the three directors (Dan Jones, Mark Espiner and Tom Espiner) grew up here and launched their theatrical inquisition from the city, as Jones remembered when we handed over the gong in 2010: “We all consider Bristol our starting point and home turf. Theatre [in Bristol] is so increasingly vibrant; the field richer than ever with great ideas, artists and companies. It's humbling and very exciting to think that we caught your eye at such a busy and exciting time.”

S&F’s visceral approach to performance has been long gestated, the stories they favour often exploring the “sound space” of theatre, creating meticulously representative worlds and occasionally immersing audiences in total darkness.

“We like to use total darkness as part of our aesthetic,” says S&F’s Mark Espiner. “Sense deprivation – particularly sight deprivation – opens the imaginative mind up to a different kind of storytelling; if you take away the visual sense, suddenly you’re reliant upon what you can hear. It gives us an incredible freedom; suddenly we can transport audiences anywhere through sound – to sitting on a beach, to the top of the highest building, to floating in the middle of the sea.”

Such a magic carpet ride was key to the claustrophobia of ‘Kursk’, and far-reaching new show ‘Going Dark’ is similarly, arguably more, wrapped up in what – and how – humans use their senses to perceive, as Espiner explains.

“In ‘Going Dark’, which is the story of a man going blind, the periods of total blackout – and we are aiming for total blackout, with no green exit lights or anything – are very important, as it places the focus on what you then see and the importance of light in our world, and where that light comes from. Our primary sense is sight, though there are many other ways of perceiving or understanding the world, and that’s the subtextual metaphor running through the show. The show’s told through one character, a brilliant planetarium presenter called Max, who’s very passionate about his work and cosmology and astronomy. Along the way he meets various people but he has a very close relationship, which is obvious and apparent, with his son, and the story of his progressive blindness is intimately connected to his role as a father. It’s a story about fathers and sons as well as where we come from.”

The genesis of ‘Going Dark’ and a shared lifelong pull towards life’s eternal questions – those of existence, time, space – have been an itch S&F have longed to scratch since first exposing themselves to landmark thinkers like Carl Sagan, whose ‘Cosmos’ TV series dared to ask the most profound and troubling of questions. Having then been introduced to eminent professor John Hull’s autobiographical book ‘Touching The Rock’, which detailed the psychological, physical and spiritual changes he underwent whilst losing his sight, the twin seeds of ‘Going Dark’ were sown.

“It’s a very simple idea concerning an astronomer who’s having to deal with a crisis, which takes him – and you – to a darker place,” says writer Hattie Naylor (whose ‘Ben Hur’ and ‘The Nutcracker’ adaptations wowed Theatre Royal Bath audiences, as did her extraordinary tale of destitution and survival on the streets of Moscow, ‘Ivan and the Dogs’). “And the crisis forces him into an examination of his own consciousness. What is happening to him is so devastating that he’s forced to readdress many things, not just his relationship to his son, but upwards, to the sky, too.

“The Big Bang is probably accepted by most people as the most reasonable explanation of why we’re here, but when you look at when and why that happened, the fact that we’re here at all is very, very remarkable. You can look at that two ways and think ‘Wow, I’m here, what luck,’ or you can think ‘There must be a god or something that got me here because it’s so unlikely that we should exist.’ You can therefore think that what we do and what we think is materialistic and totally pointless, or you can see it as a miracle that we’re here and it’s fantastic and wonderful. I don’t know which way I come down. Does the cosmos have a tendency to produce life or not?”

Pause for breath.

“When you start to explore these things and ask ‘Why am I here?’, ‘How am I here?’, you end up in a sea of ‘Woah!’ You can’t explain these things and you can’t explain consciousness, so everything we are aware of – culture, love, war, whatever – might not be true. That pushes me into some sort of belief in something that I can’t really name, rather than a nihilistic viewpoint, and I hope the play, to a degree, looks at that. It has no answers, but it at least lays those questions out. I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with being too ambitious. We’ve all been encouraged in one way or another at one time or another to not ask those big questions, but it’s really exciting to try to take an emotional story and relate that to something as big as the questions we’re asking. It’s amazingly brave and ambitious to do that.”

Dizzying in scope as it may seem, the team are watchful, thankfully, of letting their story disappear into its own existential black hole.

“Yes, it’s certainly sombre, but it’s very beautiful. The theme, in a way, is wonder out of chaos,” says Naylor. “But it will sound and look stunning – the actor, John Mackay, is extraordinary too. I can’t believe it won’t be gorgeous.”

“The keynote is that it’s curious and questioning,” adds Espiner, “and leads the audience to a place where they might not have been before and gives them a curiosity too. And I hope it’s hopeful too.

“The universe is as complex and as troubling as the human mind. We’re aiming for a new way of storytelling, creating a world using sound in which to fully immerse an audience, and in a way which is fulfilling, and not just immersive for immersive’s sake, which then becomes shallow because of that. Theatre has a unique opportunity to let its audience have a profound experience and I love it because of that.”

GOING DARK WAS AT THE BRISTOL OLD VIC FROM 15-19 NOV. SEE REVIEW.

Copyright Joe Spurgeon 2011