Chris Goode claims he hates most theatre. A strange statement for the director of a theatre company, Signal to Noise, which is just starting rehearsals for Goode’s new play, Il Padrino Express (above). This is a 12-minute, semi-improvised comedy based on the Godfather trilogy (that’s seven hours of iconic film history) and performed to diners at Pizza Express restaurants. His cast of four stand anxiously contemplating an empty table and chairs.
Signal to Noise’s performances in people’s homes, such as Kiss of Life and We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg!, have gained cult status at the Edinburgh Fringe, so Goode seems the ideal candidate to develop this new addition to the pizza chain’s patronage programme.
“I’m not interested in the content of theatre but in the structure,” he explains. “In how we can change people’s experiences. It’s about leaving them with the sense that you don’t always have to do things in the same way.”
Goode has been doing this sort of thing for 12 years, since he was at university. “Peter Hall said that you couldn’t do Shakespeare in a small space. At the time I was making it my business to disagree with everything he said, so we did The Tempest in students’ rooms in halls.”
And what exactly is wrong with conventional theatre? It’s quite popular, isn’t it? According to Goode there’s a lot wrong with it — and it’s not just he who thinks so.
“Big theatres are closing because they can’t fill the seats,” says fellow performer Adrian Howells, “and studio theatres are opening up all over the place.” Howells is best known for his work with Leigh Bowery and Nigel Charnock and, more recently, for his charming cross-dressing creation Adrienne, a domestic goddess of the most prosaic kind. His shows such as Adrienne’s Dirty Laundry Experience and Adrienne: The Great Depression, in a darkened room at the Great Eastern Hotel in London, have been pulling in punters for about five years.
“Why would you want to sit in row R at the Olivier Theatre? They have to do very ‘big’ acting to fill that space; it’s terribly declamatory and you just sit there thinking, ‘Stop shouting!’ And you pay £25!” Add to that the gaggle of giggling sixth-formers, the queue for the bar (and toilets) and you have to admit that he has a point.
Cressida Brown, the director of another site-specific theatre company, Offstage, doesn’t think it’s much fun for the performers either: “There’s no subtlety. If you’re going to be sexy, you have to steam for the old lady in the very top who can see only a bit of you. You have to be a porn star.”
And there are many additional advantages to intimacy. Offstage’s last production, Home, was performed in a squalid council flat in a doomed East London tower block to a maximum audience of 15.
Determinined to involve all the senses, Brown made sure that while the main action took place in the living room, somebody made toast in the kitchen; as the smell wafted through the tiny flat, the audience were made acutely aware not only of the performance in front of them but of the whole space.
And when an actor ran up the stairs, it was left up to the audience to decide whether to follow. “When you’re that close to the performers, you can feel the weight of a hand when it’s waved in the air, the vibration when someone slams a door,” says Brown. “Everything becomes relevant.”
Other performances can be even more interactive. Christopher Green, whose drag act Tina C regularly performs to large audiences, has just finished a one-to-one 15-minute show for the RSC as part of its complete works season. In The Dresser, Green plays a Shakespearean actor about to go on stage who is in need of a dresser. You, shown in to an RSC dressing room by an attendant, have been brought in to help him out.
“Hi,” says Green from where he sits in front of the mirror, draped in a horrible silky dressing-gown, “thanks so much for coming, I’m really sorry you got roped into doing this. It’s such a nightmare, Harriet Walter’s really pissed off.”
Immediately, you realise that something is required of you. You also have to perform because, behind this closed door, the story that you and Green concoct together is real. It’s hugely enjoyable and there’s a sense of complicity that is impossible to achieve in conventional theatre.
“It’s the variation and the freeness of it that I like,” he explains afterwards. “Interesting things happen once people understand that they have a responsibility. If I go with what people give me you get to some very interesting places.”
One woman spent most of her 15 minutes telling an astonished Green about her breast cancer diagnosis. With another, Green found himself singing music hall numbers and had to get dressed in a flurry at the end. “I was screaming at her, ‘You’ve made me late, I can’t believe this!’ and she was practically in tears going, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve been really silly!’ ”
But you don’t need to be a good performer to be a good audience. According to Green, the only unsuccessful performances are those where the audience gives nothing back, or insists on undercutting the conceit. One man kept asking, “Are we in a play? Are we acting?” Green sighs: “I had to say, ‘Well, I’m not acting, what are you doing?’ ”
This type of performance works for practical reasons, too. As Brown says, it’s “bloody expensive” to hire a theatre. Finding an unconventional site to fit your work into eliminates this headache, though it isn’t without its problems.
Much of the discussion at the rehearsal of Il Padrino Express centred on the practical concerns of being in a restaurant. How would they avoid getting in the way of the waiters? Deal with the unbelievable level of noise? Get the show done without the punters’ pizza getting cold?
And it’s not easy to make a living when audiences are so small. Being commissioned by a pizza chain is obviously one solution, but that has resulted in some loss of artistic control: the PR company promoting the event insisted on the occasional inclusion of an actor referred to during rehearsals only as “him off the telly”, Tamer Hassan (who has played assorted hoods in films such as The Business, Batman Begins and Layer Cake). “I would be happier if that were not happening,” says Goode, carefully, “but that’s how it is, so we do it.”
Another charge levelled at sitespecific theatre is that it is indulgent. Surely only a few trendy types are likely to see it? This isn’t altogether untrue.
“While this stuff is indulgent, I think it’s interesting,” says Green. “No performance is the same — each time the audience invests something of themselves the outcome is unavoidably different, so you go away knowing that what you have just experienced is unique to you.” It’s also no more excluding than most conventional theatre. It costs up to £49 to see Mary Poppins in the West End. The Dresser set me back a fiver.
And that’s the beauty of this intimate form. As Brown says, because the restrictions and the costs are so much lower, a company can take a piece of work to interested people — both more adventurous and, hopefully, new theatregoers. You do have to be a little intrepid to cope with this sort of thing, but not as much as you might think.
“Theatre tries its damnedest to ignore audiences,” says Goode, “but theatricality is about liveness. People just want a form of theatre that can say hello to them.”
Order Il Padrino Express at www.ilpadrinoexpress.co.uk
