What led you to creating your own shows? And what’s the place of Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel in your career?
I came to writing relatively late, writing my first play, My Arm, when I was 38. It was an emotional and instinctive response to the difficulties and frustrations I was then experiencing as an actor. I felt really out of step with the kind of psychological realism which was then very much in favour, and I felt more and more keenly the need for a real reflection on theatricality—not in terms of spectacle, but of the relationship between an actor and an audience. So I started writing as a challenge to those theatrical forms I found problematic. I tried to make the kind of theatre I would want to see. I haven’t stopped writing and experimenting since. Each play builds on the previous ones to continue exploring the following question: what does the audience need, conceptually, in theatre? Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a continuation of that reflection, doubled with a rebellious intent. This play is my very personal response to the existential crisis theatre has been going through over the past three years. Since the pandemic and the successive lockdowns, theatre venues have been looking for more and more digital productions. But I think the very quality of theatre depends on its material reality: people gathered in the same place at the same time, breathing the same air, seeing the same thing, and experiencing together the interplay between those two spaces that are the stage and the audience. New technologies cannot replace the fundamental need we have to gather. The loneliness of the digital isn’t theatre, or what I want theatre to be.
Here you take on the garb of a Shakespearean character: King Lear’s fool. Why this choice?
For an Englishman, it all begins with William Shakespeare. His influence can be felt in the way all playwrights write, still today—and as a writer, I’m no exception. I think that our understanding of what it means to be human derives from his work. To explore these characters, who are so many archetypes, is to explore our own humanity and that’s why I think it’s important to continue passing on this culture. Starting in 2003, I developed a series of short plays for children, each focusing on a minor character from one of William Shakespeare’s plays: Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Caliban in The Tempest, Banquo in Macbeth… In 2021, when I started thinking about what I wanted to write following the crisis we all experienced, I thought of King Lear’s fool. It’s an interesting character, because at some point in the play, they disappear. I wanted to imagine their departure as a choice. The fool leaves the stage, exits the theatre, and goes on their way. Perhaps because they can’t take it anymore. I’ve felt the same desire to leave, these past few years, when looking at the state of the world: Trump, Brexit, the threat of civil war, the pandemic… At the time, many artists in the United Kingdom did choose to quit their job, because their situation had become untenable. So I wanted to explore the idea of leaving, of deserting the theatre, by making the character of the fool the trigger of the story.
What is this theatre the character decides to leave—and you, Tim Crouch, try to move away from?
For part of the show, I wear a virtual reality helmet. Inside, there’s nothing! No modern technology is used in the show, but by using this item, I introduce the image of a digital world. I invite the audience to imagine that the fool, when he wears this helmet, can visit the performance he just left. He then dissects, for the audience, this other venue where King Lear is still ongoing: a capitalistic and violent place, with a hierarchy based on the price of tickets, indifferent to people and with no communication between the stage and the audience, where a spectator can have a stroke and be evacuated without the show ever stopping… beneath the dystopian surface, this fictional theatre illustrates several very real issues we face today. Through it, I’m able to critique not only digitalisation, but also the way capitalism is killing theatre. The fool says it himself: the form is dead and yet we continue fornicating with it, not realising it’s a corpse—a corpse whose heart is still in its chest, but has stopped beating. This play is therefore about the death of theatre… but its very form refutes it. Because it’s still performing arts! Ultimately, Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a celebration of our humanity and of theatre, as a living form. It was written in the aftermath of the lockdown, with a lot of anger, but there’s also a part of hope. A hope that notably manifests itself in the simple presence of an actor fully invested in this oh so archaic and simple act: to tell a story. At the end of the play, I take off the helmet to tell the audience a story while looking them in the eye; then those three worlds, that of King Lear, of that other theatre, and of the venue for Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel finally meet.
Can you tell us more about the relationship you strive to create with the audience?
I think the place where true theatre happens is inside the spectator’s head. What happens onstage is only an attempt to trigger something in there, and if we succeed, the audience becomes the ultimate collaborator of the dramatic act. But I want them to create those images themselves, to see them, without me having to show them! Several times over the course of the play, I ask the audience to see with their ears. I think that’s the most empowering relationship there is. The audience must listen attentively, and if they do they’ll be able to see, within themselves—a very Shakespearean idea, by the way, which you can find in the prologue to Henry V: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts (…) Think when we talk of horses, that you see them.” My work therefore consists in being as precise as possible in my writing, not so as to orient the audience towards predefined images, but rather to allow theatre to happen within each spectator, in as free a way as possible. In Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel, you see an actor alone on stage, with a VR helmet on his head, and at the same time, through my story, you also see a character enucleated in the most violent way. I like this duality, this superimposition of what the eyes see and what the ears hear. There’s also a scene in King Lear in which one of the characters, Edgar, convinces his blind father that he’s standing on the edge of a cliff and that if he takes a step forward, he’ll die. The father steps forward… and of course he doesn’t die, since the cliff doesn’t really exist. But he symbolically enters a new life. I see that scene as a metaphor for the power of suggestion of language. A virtual reality accessible not thanks to a plastic helmet, but through words! At its core, Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is very simple. It’s about the death of theatre—a rather heavy subject—but above all, it's a moment of connection and playing between an actor and an audience.
Why choose the form of a solo?
Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a very personal play, about my own relationship to theatre and my reaction to the way I see it evolving. That’s why it seemed right for it to take this form. I’m not alone but with the audience, in a common space we share, with no separation. A utopian space. This set up also naturally brings to mind that of stand-up comedy, which corresponds precisely to the status of the fool in King Lear. This character is a comedian whose role is to make people think about the world around them. But he gets absolutely nowhere… His action, his very presence is a failure! If he leaves, it may be precisely because he realises that this world is horrible and cannot be changed through comedy. In the same way, in the context of growing social tension we’re experiencing, I can’t but wonder about the meaning and effectiveness of satire.
Interview conducted by Marie C. Lobrichon and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach