Radio program "The Electrotheatre at the Microphone". 
Broadcast No. 6. Guest – British theatre director Tim Supple. 

 

Boris Yukhananov: Hello, dear listeners! I have a special guest today – the wonderful British director Tim Supple. Tim and I have been in touch for a year, and our relationship has been interesting and diverse. In the last few days Tim conducted two excellent, very interesting master classes for our special training program at the Studio of Individual Directing. We will talk a little about that. And, of course, Tim is the kind of person who is always involved in lots of projects – both in Britain and around the world. So, Tim, I’m interested in hearing about your plans and intentions. I want to know what you are up to these days in your directing and cultural activities. (To Tim Supple.) Hello! Since I mentioned our Studio [of Individual Directing], my first question concerns it. As I understand it, you don’t often give lectures or have large experience in teaching. This would appear to be a new kind of activity for you.

 

Tim Supple: – Yes, it is. Generally in the UK teaching and practice are divided. We do not have this idea, this very healthy idea that you have in Moscow, which is a director, who produces work, should simultaneously teach for their sake and for the sake of students. Healthy! We do not have that. The theatre schools are quite separate from theatres. So, my experience of teaching was for some years in my early career at a very good school called The Drama Center in London. Since then not so much. Of course, the impulse to teach is a strong element of my constant impulse to direct. Indeed I create shows through the process of workshops, which become research, development, and production. Often I involve hundreds of actors in this early stage of work, which is a form of teaching. This kind of context that you have here is rare for me and very pleasurable. It would be very natural for me to do if I was living in Moscow.

 

Boris Yukhananov: Of course! I know you work a lot in different parts of the world with different actors of different nationalities. As such, you work with people of different mentalities. Could you tell us about this open-ended project, which, in fact, is open to the whole world, and about your experience working with these different people and actors?

 

Tim Supple: Yes. I have gradually, over the years, realized that my profound interest lies in this question of “how does an actor work on stage?” This is my greatest interest. This is even of more interest to me than “how do I direct a play” - mises en scene, conceptual understanding, staging, design. This for me is very interesting [too]. But my primary interest is: How does the actor work on stage with other actors through text and story with the audience. That’s one thing.

            The second thing is that I realized gradually that I did not find happiness working in one system, one context. I became restless and bored in London. I felt limited by the habits of our practice and profession. Maybe if I had grown up in Moscow or was living in Moscow, I would not have had this restlessness. Maybe in Berlin also, I don’t know. But I grew up in London and I was very grateful for what I received from British theatre: a good training, but for me limited. So, this interest in how an actor acts combined for me with the need to look elsewhere, to work elsewhere, which grew into a strong curiosity about different ways that theatre works in different places. And that has grown into this open project, where now I create my work in this context: the context of travel, the context of being alone, in a new situation, and in the context where often the actors are naked also. So, when I travel to India, I learn something of a totally different system and tradition of theatre, but not in just one place. I also work with actors from different places within India. So, they are brought together in a naked space, away from their happiness, their certainties, and into a different interaction with me and each other. I have taken that process to India, the Arab countries, and I’m now bringing it to the former Soviet countries. I did research in the Iranian diaspora and South America. It is turning into an even farther-reaching project, that is, my King Lear project, which is about looking across the world at the living traditions and living practices of acting. [These span] the styles and traditions of Commedia dell'arte, the Indian traditions, the Japanese and Chinese traditions, through to the strong methods and systems of realistic Western traditions (that, of course, are best expressed in Moscow and also in North America and so on), and include the less systemized schools of acting, of which Britain is perhaps the strongest, and perhaps France too. So, this has become my journey. This is where I am. That means much of my theatre is multilingual, multicultural, and multinational as a result.

 

Boris Yukhananov: Very interesting. But tell me, do you often specifically offer your actors Shakespearean texts when you work? Not Shakespearean texts exclusively, but do you often choose Shakespeare? Or no, not only?

 

Tim Supple: No, no. I feel Shakespeare. I wouldn’t say I often propose him, but I would say I often end up in Shakespeare’s grand mansions. I try to escape.

 

Boris Yukhananov: In other words, you travel with Shakespeare all over the world. He doesn’t exist as a living creature, but his texts go with you, and you have the experience of interacting with very different acting schools and very different mentalities on the basis of Shakespearean texts.

 

Tim Supple:  Yes. And I’ve given up struggling. And now that has become the King Lear project. I mean I tend to begin my journeys without previewing sections of the text. When I went to India, my interest was in Indian theatre. And I came to the decision of doing Shakespeare after considering many other things. But in the Arab countries I worked only on Aʾalf layla wa-layla,  One Thousand and One Nights. It’s a huge text. In the Iranian project I am working on The Shahnameh. But Shakespeare is somewhere where we find the stories and texts that embrace such vast pictures of human experience and human expression. Perhaps he got into my bones and my body when I was young. But it is not an assumption that I would always work with Lear, although the King Lear [project] is an attempt to do exactly what you say.

 

Boris Yukhananov: How do actors respond to the narrative? Shakespearean narrative is very intense, by which I mean that the story itself is very important. When you work with Shahnameh (this is Ferdowsi’s famous poem, if I’m not mistaken) or with A Tale of One Thousand and One Nights, these are essentially epic texts. They aren’t constructed in dialogical form. So you need to do a staging or interact with this type of text in other ways. In this case, Shakespeare does everything for you: there is dialogue, there is a compressed story, and there are the situations themselves which Shakespeare describes. Have you noticed any particular difference in the way Shakespearean texts are perceived in different countries, in India, Russia, North America or the Arab countries? Is there a fundamental difference, or are people, in the end, all the same? Do they interpret Shakespeare in a common, marvelous manner and perform his texts similarly? What’s your experience?   

 

Tim Supple: This is a beautiful and mysterious question. Let me talk about my experience in India as an example. Superficially or initially, I was most struck by the differences. In the UK we are obviously most connected to that part of Shakespeare who is a realist - psychological, political, social, realist. UK productions tend to plug into this. So with a play like A Midsummer Night's Dream we struggle to find the true essence of the fairies and supernatural characters. We make of this something either sentimental, or pictorial, or kitsch, not something deep. We also struggle when it comes to expressing a very simple part of difficult things to portray on stage: sex, violence and sleep. It can be very boring. We also struggle in the UK with certain aspects of Shakespeare even within the realistic tradition, because we are largely a bourgeois society, a middle class society. The great inequality between the aristocrats and the working men is hard for us to access.

I found in India, for example, both of these aspects were more immediately possible. The actors could access supernatural characters, because the Indian theatre is so much more based on a similar idea. Gods and demons, characters outside normal existence. And they have more access to the aspects of Shakespeare’s play which are more ritualistic, ancient and narrative. They also had a formal language, a stylized language, with which to make sex, violence and sleep very interesting, very surprising and alive for me and for each other. What they did not access so easily were the visceral experiences of emotional, sexual and psychological processes. This I have to insist on, to teach [as we continue] investigating them. Also text. Indian theatre has no disciplined relationship with text. So this was something.

These were the differences, but in some deep way there is a place within the place, which is accessed in a way that communicates… for example, when an Indian cast meets an English audience, an Australian audience, an Italian audience, an Indian audience, pretty much the same things will be responded to in the same way. That’s a really interesting thing. So now I am investigating this question with a King Lear project by taking [on various] individuals. My last work was with an actress from Korea, a traditional actor from India, an actress from Moscow, a master of the Commedia dell’arte, an actor from the Peter Brook company, and so on, and I asked this question more closely: “How do you see this?”; “How do you approach this?” And I looked at how they [go about] making their work.

One more example. The actress from Korea was able to access the Fool in King Lear with more lightness and clarity than I have [ever] seen. I want to understand more closely why this is.

 

Boris Yukhananov: That’s interesting. Tell me, please, when you worked with epic texts, say, with fairy tales or with Ferdowsi’s poem Shahnameh, did you find that the action and story were, somehow, imbedded in the dialogue, allowing the actor to latch onto it immediately, as if it were Shakespeare? Because this is a narrative tale. Did you do special textual adaptations or did you combine the story itself with the acting in some special way? How did you work with these texts? I’m interested in the relationship between epic and dramatic sources, that’s why I ask.

 

Tim Supple: Yeah, it’s been a big part of my work, with the text of the Grimm stories, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, One Thousand and One Nights, and Shahnameh. I’ve explored many different ways of using narrative directly, of combining narrative and dialogue, of making dialogue out of narrative, so that the words, “he took the glass and threw it in his face,” become an action, of finding a form that sits between narrative and dramatic theatre or epic and dramatic theatre.

I feel I am still learning and looking for this, and one of the reasons I keep going back to Shakespeare is I feel, of all the dramatists, he is the one who most successfully incorporates a kind of narrative energy – [though] not as directly as Brecht - who tries to make a narrative, folk, epic theatre. Shakespeare digests the epic into the dramatic, which is quite magical.

But I am very interested in the epic form and I will always go back to it. Next time I think it will be Shahnameh.

 

Boris Yukhananov: That’s very interesting to me too. That is why I am now working actively on Apuleius’ novel, The Golden Ass, and actively engaging this problem of the epic-dramatic origin.

Dear friends! I must now conclude our dialogue with Tim. Time has run out. But I do this in hopes of continuing our conversation in my next program. I hope you will join us.