A SHOW performed entirely in the dark. A show without words. A show featuring a live seven-piece Kosovan band. A show based on Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Vanishing Point never was a theatre company to shirk a challenge, but how will it keep bettering its own record? By adapting a surrealist Czech movie and creating its biggest show yet.
Next month, the company will join forces with the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) to make Little Otik, inspired by Jan Švankmajer’s 2000 film Otesánek. As I ask artistic director Matthew Lenton if this is his most ambitious show to date, I consider that I could have asked that question about most of the projects he has undertaken in the last decade.
“I think everything we do has the same amount of ambition, otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in doing it,” he says, on a break from rehearsals at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre. “A lot of the things that would have been considered ambitious in Subway (the company’s award-winning previous show), we don’t have in Little Otik, but what we do have is a set of new challenges.
“Each show is by necessity different from the last, because it’s all about the story. We find a story and then try to find the best way of telling it. People ask me whether there is a Vanishing Point style. I don’t think there is because we try to make a new show for each new story that we like.”
He was immediately drawn to the story ofLittle Otik, about a couple desperate for children but unable to conceive. When the husband digs up a tree root shaped like a baby, he gives it as a present to his wife, who comes to believe it is a real child.
“The first half could be kitchen-sink drama,” Lenton says. “It feels visceral to me, it feels claustrophobic, rich, funny, f****d up. And that’s even before the baby comes to life.”
The story’s surreal twist shifts it towards dark fantasy, but it still has plenty to say about parenting. This is the kind of tale at which Vanishing Point has proved itself adept: finding a theatrical language in which to convey the surreal while rooting the story in real, raw human emotions. There’s a nod to Tim Burton or Edward Gorey in the way that the fantasy is all the darker for never fully taking leave of reality.
The chance to work with the National Theatre of Scotland has enabled the company to enlist the skills of artists such as puppeteer/animator Ewan Hunter, projection designer Finn Ross and sound designer Christopher Shutt. It marks a coming-of-age moment for Vanishing Point, which is now entering its tenth year.
Started in 1999, with the aim of staging “plays which couldn’t just be on TV”, its first show was Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Sightless, a play about a group of blind people lost in an alien world. But Vanishing Point brought a new, ingenious twist: by performing it in the dark.
The Sightless was co-opted into a season of plays in the dark at Battersea Art Centre, and Vanishing Point’s next project, Last Stand, was a hit at the Traverse. “It was all an accident really,” says Lenton. “We didn’t set out to start a theatre company. We had a play that did well, then another that did well, then two or three that didn’t do so well, and it took one that did terribly for us to realise we needed to go back to doing things well!”
The one that did terribly was Sauchiehall Street by Iain Heggie in 2004, described by one critic as “the least inspired staging of the year”. It doesn’t even merit a mention on the company website.
Since then they’ve returned in force with shows such as Lost Ones, Mancub and Subway, all of which mixed the real and surreal to great effect. Mancub was picked up and toured by the NTS, Subway won a Fringe First Award. Like other companies, such as Suspect Culture, Vanishing Point is reshaping itself as a loose group of artistic associates working together on projects as well as independently.
Sandy Grierson, who won last year’s CATS Award for best actor in Fergus Lamont, joined the company in 2002 and is now an artistic associate. He admits he “fibbed” about the standard of his violin playing to get the part in his first Vanishing Point show, Invisible Man. Now his fiddling days are behind him, but his work with the company has done much to help him make his name as one of the country’s top young actors.
His non-traditional training, from Tadeusz Kantor-collaborator Zofia Kalinska and David Johnstone from Lazzi Experimental Arts Lab, seems ideally suited to Vanishing Point’s sideways take on realism. Grierson says: “When I got the part for Invisible Man (which was almost wordless), I was studying corporeal mime, so it came at exactly the right time. Thereafter, the process made absolute sense to me, whether it was with a script or not. I never felt daunted by it.”
As with most Vanishing Point shows, Little Otik has largely been devised in rehearsals. Grierson says: “As always happens, there’s never a set script when we start rehearsing, it’s a provocation for everyone in the room to take the bits they like and flesh them out and leave the bits we don’t like.
“The company works like a wigwam, you have the text, the lights, the set, the performances, and the audience reaction. If you take one thing away the whole things collapses. That’s quite liberating, because the emphasis is not just on you as an actor, the whole thing is interdependent.”
It’s a collaborative trial-and-error process that is vibrant, creative and occasionally nerve-racking. Lenton is sanguine about the fact that less than two weeks from opening night, they are still not sure which scenes they’ve rehearsed will be in Little Otik. All involved in the rehearsal process are expected to come armed with plenty of ideas.
Lenton says: “Every time you’re in a rehearsal room, you’ve got to be working and forging ahead. If you’re just going through the motions, you’re not exploring possibilities. You need to be engaged all the time, concentrating.
“It’s a battle sometimes. It’s not what a lot of actors expect a rehearsal room to be like. Sometimes, when they come in they’ll say, ‘Hang on a minute, what’s going on here?’ To which my response is, ‘Well, it’s a good job you’re not a bloody miner!’”
&149 Little Otik is at Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 21-31 May; Eden Court, Inverness, 3 and 4 June; Perth Theatre, 6 and 7 June. For more details see w
ww.nationaltheatrescotland.com
The full article contains 1181 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
