Can you tell us about Alistair McDowall and the three texts he’s presenting at the Festival d’Avignon?
Vicky Featherstone: With these three plays, which are three monologues, Alistair McDowall wanted to take a chance and try writing for a single voice. I say “take a chance” because, as a playwright, he usually writes complex dramaturgies which require many actors and actresses. I’d already directed two of his plays—X and The Glow—which are perfect examples of his extremely elaborate and ambitious plays in which he likes to introduce science-fiction elements, even temporal ellipses. Directing his stories is always a challenge. But with this desire to take his work in a new direction, Alistair McDowall found himself answering more existential questions, such as what it means to be a writer, and by extension what it means to be human. He first wrote all of it, which follows a life from beginning to end. A very engaging work on language and poetry, which I staged at the Royal Court Theatre right before lockdown. Then he wrote two more plays—Northleigh, 1940 and In stereo—which he asked Sam Pritchard to direct. Both those works will be shown for the first time at the Festival d’Avignon.
What ties all of it, Northleigh, 1940, and In stereo together, in terms of dramaturgy?
Sam Pritchard: all of it, directed by Vicky Featherstone, tells the story of an entire life, in a linear way. In stereo, which I direct, explores our evolution. Do we stay the same person throughout our life? Are we different at various stages of our existence, and what could be the possible ties between those multiple versions of ourselves? The monologue splits into a polyphony extremely visible on paper, because the text is split into columns. I therefore approached this experimental writing using pre-recorded voices, which are then broadcast in stereo in the theatre. They overlap with the voice of the actress and offer the audience several points of listening. It’s impossible to hear everything, and we become witnesses to fragments of life. We have to choose on which voice, which story to focus, and accept to lose the other, simultaneous narratives. This device projects the image of a woman swallowed by her own story and exploding into different spaces all at once. The sound design required particular attention, and we worked together with Vicky and the actress to make sure the stories align with and clash into each other.
Vicky Featherstone: all of it offers a fictional experience in which a woman tells her story while facing the audience straight-on. We watch as she unfolds her story, but we never think about our lives as a continuum, but always as fragments, in the memories of specific moments, in a fractured way. This continuity creates a sort of shift. Does what she say corresponds to her lived experience? all of it offers a single perspective which emerges out of the woman standing in front of us, while In stereo provides a multiplicity of points of view, or points of listening, which encompass and physically surround the spectators. John Cage’s experimental and random music had a strong influence on Alistair McDowall’s writing, particularly on this play. It’s a music whose focal points are always splitting, incorporating randomness and accidents, doing away with linearity. Your attention has to fracture in order to perceive as much of its complexity as possible. As for Northleigh, 1940, it’s the most historical of the three plays. It’s set in a specific time and place. Alistair McDowall, who lives in the south of Manchester, in Northwest England, wrote this play during lockdown, stuck in his house with his family. He started looking into the history of his neighbourhood, which used to be nothing but factories and was bombed several times during World War II. In this context, Alistair McDowall imagined the life of a female character forced to look after her widowed father. A character trapped, under the bombs, in a routine and difficult life, but who faces it with wild imagination. What those three stories have in common might be to show us three women who created strategies, consciously or not, to escape their fate, or their daily life. Their imagination is a reflection of their complexity.
Would you go so far as to say that a collaboration started to appear as you worked on this Trilogy?
Vicky Feathersone: Yes, it’s a very collaborative work. Sam Pritchard and I work with actress Kate O’Flynn, for whom Alistair McDowall wrote those three monologues. While we’ve worked together for a long time at the Royal Court Theatre, me as artistic director and Sam Pritchard as associate director for international projects, this is our first artistic collaboration. We decided to stage the three plays using a single, modular scenography, which becomes ever simpler as the stories progress, until it almost disappears. We spent a lot of time thinking about the order of the monologues: should we begin with the unfolding of a life in its entirety with all of it and close the cycle with a very localised moment full of references with Northleigh, 1940, or conversely begin with a zoomed-in episode about a very specific step in the life of a woman in south Manchester and open towards the universality of an existence unspooling in front of us? It’s a real dramaturgic question. We’re obviously saying very different things just by changing the order of the plays. However, it was clear right from the start that In stereo would be the central play.
Sam Pritchard: In the end, we decided to open Trilogy with Northleigh, 1940, the most narrative-driven and historical of the three plays, which unfolds like a traditional story with its realistic outline, to then immerse the spectators in the more experimental writing of the two plays that follow. While Northleigh, 1940 showcases a person reduced to living in constrained spaces—from the bomb shelter to her small house—as in a series of small boxes, In stereo fractures the existence of a woman into a multiplicity of points of view, and we end with all of it, which exposes a life without edges or frame. The audience’s theatrical experience transforms from one play to the next as in a landslide, the traditional fourth wall exploding until they feel that they have become part of the space of the narrative.
You mentioned your functions at the Royal Court Theatre. Can you tell us about this institution which sits in the heart of London?
Vicky Featherstone: The Royal Court Theatre as it is known today was founded in 1956 by the English Stage Company (ESC) in order to challenge the conventional theatre of the time, against the blind worship of Shakespearean theatre and the commercialisation of the performing arts in West London. Its missions were therefore born of a desire by artists and playwrights to talk about their times. Since then, the goal has been to promote and to provide a place for contemporary writing. Caryl Churchill’s and Martin Crimp’s early writings were performed here. The first plays by Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett or Arthur Miller were shown for the first time in England here. The missions of the theatres haven’t changed since its foundation: to provide a place for contemporary writing, subsidies and residences for national and international authors, and a stage on which to put their work to the test. We serve as facilitators between playwrights and directors and actors. We read thousands of manuscripts every year. We welcome writing groups and masterclasses. We present about a dozen plays a year, in our two theatres. This trilogy is a perfect example of the opportunities the Royal Court Theatre provides authors: Alistair McDowall started his career with us about ten years ago, we put on two of his great plays, and today, we support him as he embarks on more experimental research. We’ve worked and are working with almost 1,600 authors since the foundation of the theatre. Every year, we commission plays from about ten authors. They enjoy absolute freedom in their work, and their texts are then presented at the Royal Court Theatre. During lockdown, we tried to keep the connection with our authors alive by setting up Living Newspaper, commissioning texts for 3-minute reading sessions broadcast on our website.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach