THE Q&A: EMMA RICE, THEATRE DIRECTOR

Emma Rice Some estimate that there are around 1,800 regional theatres in America. All of them aspire to have one of their productions make it to Broadway, but only a handful ever do.

Working out of barns on the Cornish coast, Emma Rice and her Kneehigh Theatre Company have created productions that has gone on to captivate audiences in London and New York. This autumn, Kneehigh became one of those rare local troupes to make it to Broadway with “Brief Encounter”, a mash-up of Noel Coward’s play “Still Life” and his screenplay for the 1945 film "Brief Encounter". An off-beat musical that mixes a grand romance with moments of quirky humour, the show was one of the most notable hits off-Broadway last year.

This year marks the troupe's 30th anniversary, as well as the fifth year of Ms Rice’s tenure as the company’s artistic director. Ms Rice sat down with More Intelligent Life in New York to talk about Kneehigh’s Broadway debut, the revival of her 2000 version of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Red Shoes” (which recently opened off-Broadway at St Ann’s Warehouse) and the future of this small troupe with a large audience.

You’ve found a home in Cornwall and recently in theatres all over the world. Where did you begin your career?

I trained to be an actor, so I trained in London. And I did all right—I worked, but I never got the jobs I thought I wanted. I didn’t get big television work, I didn’t get film work. I ended up working with a small company in Exeter, which is in the south-west of England, which I loved. I stayed there for eight years and learned all about Grotovski, Goganichen, Robert Wilson—my eyes were opened to the broader world of theatre, rather than the world I was trained into

How did you wind up in Cornwall?

When I was based in the south-west of England, somebody said, “you should get in touch with Kneehigh, they’re great.” So I auditioned for them. I had never seen their work. On the day that I auditioned I was picked up from the station, and they took me in this rackety old van through the winding lanes of Cornwall to the most beautiful place I’d see on the planet—these barns on cliffs with the sea below, and I was just intoxicated from that moment. So I joined them as an actor in ‘94, I worked on and off with them for six years. I went full time in 2000, and I took over the company in 2005. Do I sound like a Remington advert?

What was the company like when you arrived in 1994?

They were already extraordinary and they will continue to be extraordinary whether I’m there or not. Coming from the world of London, they looked like wild people, they all had crazy hair, and they all played bagpipes and banjos and lit fires—it was a very maverick world. And they had a very strong clowning tradition. A lot of the work was very physical and very funny, and lots of that came from the fact that they’d always worked outdoors. They were a rural company—very irreverent, very naughty and very, as I say, intoxicating.

They have a very strong tradition, aesthetic and style. I think I brought my rigour, my process, my deep need for meaning in the work. That’s where the chemistry happened. I brought a very different aesthetic to match them—not to submerge the work they had already done.

You mentioned, “clowning.” Both pieces running in New York right now have a certain element of vaudeville and pantomime, fused with a very modern, almost Brechtian style. How do you measure the right mix of comedy and clowning alongside formal experimentation and tragedy?

You’re wanting to know the maths—and there is no maths. There’s only chemistry. For me the script is always the last thing…I always say that what people speak is the dusting of icing sugar on top. The story is the foundation. Why we want to tell the story is the next thing. And then I don’t really have any agenda about whether it's design, film, music, dance or words that end up telling that story.

In “Brief Encounter” there are moments of stage magic—like when the two lovers get drunk on champagne and literally swing from chandeliers. It’s a very theatrical moment, but not in Coward’s script. How did it come about?

I love to reveal the mechanics of everything in theatre. It’s been a big deal on Broadway that we see actors lifting the other actors off the floor on the chandeliers. I love that moment. I love the fact that as two people are flying, two other people are using all their body weight [to lift them]. I feel it’s a metaphor for life really: for every high moment we have a pretty exhausting low moment as well. In theatre—and I believe this is the only form where this is possible—there’s the brilliant gap between what’s happening and what the audience sees. It’s an illusion, yes, but the magic happens in the audience’s mind.

Along with your particular brand of self-conscious stage magic, music seems to be a key component of Kneehigh productions: Wagner and Offenbach in “The Red Shoes” and Coward’s own songs in “Brief Encounter”. How does this come about?

With a Kneehigh show, I work with myself; I get the palette of my world in place. I like to get the designer and the composer first, before the actors, and we work on themes. I always try and create a palette or playground of colours and songs and musicality, so when you bring the actors in, you can start positioning it. Because if you position it too early, all that happens is you close doors, you don’t open them.

It’s like landing planes. You get these fantastic planes, and you get them flying, and then you bring the creative team and the actors and everyone learns about the colours. And that’s when somebody can go, “can we try that?” “What happens when you put that piece of music there?” When you work thematically, it’s a very fertile way of finding surprise.

Do you worry about anachronism? Your production of “Tristan and Yseult” mixed jazz with opera. And here in New York, some people have found fault with your use of Coward’s 1962 song “Go Slow Johnny”, which rhymes “rallentando” with “Brando”. Do you worry about breaking the mood of a 1940’s period piece with modern references?

I celebrate anachronism, I hold no truck with “rules”. I’m a storyteller. I make fiction. The first thing I do is not read the play, not watch the film. Instead, I remember: “what did I think about, what is my emotional imprint of this, why do I want to tell this story, what’s the scene I remember, you know, is it the train going through? Is it the soldiers in the café? What do I feel?" What I express on stage is the memory of it—not the reality of it. On Broadway they’ve also said, “you know, these hairstyles aren’t historically accurate. And I go, “I don’t care. It’s 2010.” Nobody’s saying its historically accurate, absolutely nobody—but that doesn’t mean its not true. There’s a real truth in our emotional memory.

How did you choose this project?

It chose me, not the other way around. David Pugh, the British producer, said to me “come to the office I’d like to talk to you about an idea.” And I remember I thought, “Whatever this man asks me to do I’m going to say no. I don’t have time. It’s a diversion.”

Went into his office, steeled against whatever he was going to say, and he said: “Emma would you like to do 'Peter Pan'?” We had a very nice conversation, 'cause there’s nothing wrong with Peter Pan. [But] I said “well, I’m going to pass on this one, because its not really my thing at the moment, I’m very busy.” Literally as I turned to say good-bye I turned round and I saw a DVD copy of “Brief Encounter” on the shelf, and I said “now if you asked me to do 'Brief Encounter', this would have been a really different meeting.” He said: “Do you want to do it?” and I said “yeah.” That—honestly—is how it happened.

Had you wanted to do it? Were you familiar with the original Noel Coward play?

No, I knew nothing. You see, I call it the itch. You always have to listen to the itch when it happens. We’re all so busy thinking and in this society it’s what we reward: the academic search for ideas. It’s very easy to ignore the itch—which is the instinct telling you what to do at any given moment. That was a classic moment of the itch. I honestly don’t believe I thought about “Brief Encounter” before. Ever.

But you had seen the film, no?

Yes, but certainly not as an adult. You don’t go to the pictures and see “Brief Encounter”. It's something you watch on a Sunday when it's raining when you’re a kid and your mum and dad want to shut you up for a while. I don’t even remember when I saw it. It’s in the DNA somewhere. But when that itch happens, it’s a very precise moment. I was about to turn 40 and my marriage had failed. My work was getting deeper. I absolutely know this story. I really know this story. You just have to notice when those things drop into your head, because if you think too much you’ll end up doing "Pygmalion" by mistake.

Did the producer have the rights?

I actually don’t know the answer to that; I think it was on his shelf because he was thinking about it. He made it happen. The Noel Coward estate has been absolutely amazing. I think they were nervous in a brave way. I can speak more assuredly now, because I know them very well after this process. I think the estate is wise enough to know it was good to have a fresh look at the work, but at the same time they were wincing that I would take the piss out of it. They’ve kept a close eye on it, but very supportive.

What’s next?

We’ve just built this big tent, which is a huge thing for Kneehigh because we’re a touring company. With our success, we’re under quite a lot of pressure at the moment. It would be a make-or-break time for us, so as opposed to it being a break time, what we’ve done is we’ve built a huge home for ourselves, a big mobile tent. It’s beautiful, landmark and irreverent, and we opened that this summer. That’s our baby for the next few years—to make work in that and tour that as well. That’s the big challenge.

I’m about to do my first musical, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, which I start in January—not in the tent, but on a similar model as “Brief Encounter”. We don’t have the resources to really put on shows that big. It’s aiming for the West End.

There’s a wonderful quote by Miro that your company uses: “The more local something is, the more it becomes universal.” Given your success outside Cornwall, are your sights set on the West End or beyond for all new work?

There’s the question. I would say that. The biggest challenge for me now, as the artistic director of Kneehigh, is not to lose what is different about us. Kneehigh has had that Miro quote as long as we’ve been around. It's just who we are, we live and work in Cornwall and we travel the world. I do know the local café in my village; I do know when the cricket season starts, and I do put shows on Broadway. It’s my life, local and universal.

I don’t wish to try and replicate the journey of this show. I wish to keep being a living, breathing artist that surprises myself as well as the people around me.
And the thing is, the best “hits” are the ones that surprise everybody. So in many ways all you can do is keep looking inside, and say, “what do I want to say?” Every now and then in your career you’re going to strike a universal note, but in the end the job is to keep searching, not to try and replicate.

"Brief Encounter", at Studio 54 in New York through January 2nd 2011

~JAMES C. TAYLOR

Picture Credit: Joan Marcus, Kneehigh Theatre