When celebrated theatre maker and bewitching storyteller
Chris Goode presents a new show, audiences can be sure to encounter something
extraordinary. From
…Sisters (2008),
his improvised take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, to the charmingly bizarre
Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley(2009,
2011) featuring a superhero born from the pages of a medieval illustration,
Goode’s work routinely lands at some distance from the commonplace. However, in
his new play
Monkey Bars at
Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre, Goode takes as a starting point the most
ostensibly ordinary and everyday of material: the words of schoolchildren. But
by placing these, verbatim, into the mouths of adult actors, Goode creates
something characteristically unique, inviting spectators to listen to the
thoughts and opinions of children as if they actually issued from these more
mature bodies. In this way, Goode raises the question of the extent to which we
as adults really listen to, understand and relate to children.
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| Image credit: Monkey Bars, Chris Goode |
“I wondered whether we would listen differently to the words
if they were delivered by a body with more gravity, more substantiality: an
adult,” Goode explains. It’s a remarkably simple but ingenious concept, which
seems to have taken Goode more by surprise then by planned device: “It was an
idea that came to me fully formed, so in a way it’s hard to know where it came
from. I’m often thinking about who gets heard in our culture, and I was
thinking a lot about the place of children in our society – about the situation
that we put children in, so that it’s hard for us to tune into what they’re
saying.”
The difficulties that adults encounter in truly hearing
children are straightforward but difficult to overcome, Goode explains. “There
are many obstacles: children are physically small, and they have little voices.
Also, the ones you want to listen to most are often the smallest and cutest –
which is not at all what we expect from the adults that we want to listen to.”
These are also the problems that Goode and collaborator Karl
James needed to overcome in collecting the conversations with children. Goode
described how he and James (whose work has included directing The Dialogue Project) went into schools
to interview the children, all aged between eight and ten years old. “We
conducted the conversations in a quiet corner of the classroom or the
secretary’s office. We’d first thought of creating a ‘den’ that they could
enter in order to speak to us – but a lighter approach seemed more sensible. We
created a space that felt removed from the everyday reality of schools, but not
disconnected – so that the children could concentrate on hearing each other
properly.”
Most conversations were conducted between Karl James and one
or two children, but sometimes two children spoke to each other directly.
Working from this collected material to mould a script was, Goode says, very
much a labour for inside the rehearsal room, rather than outside. Over six or
seven days, the actors read through the entire 350-page transcript, taken from
11 hours on tape. Goode, who transcribed every word himself, did not play the
original tapes to the actors, but let them discover the text for themselves.
“Everything that was said we heard, but the actors didn’t hear the recording.
We were looking for things that jumped out because they were powerful, moving,
funny, or good stories – things that kids needed to be able to say. Anything
interesting we kept.” These ‘interesting
things’ varied dramatically from “candid and true facts about home lives and
school lives” to “huge lies”, but a great deal of sifting through the pages was
also necessary. “There’s a lot of surrealism with kids – they talk a lot of
nonsense and gibberish: talking and talking and talking. I was interested in
the idea of finding stuff inside of what they were saying.”
After “gradual refinement” with the actors to distil the
text, Goode took the scripts and notes away to create the final edit. The
result was around thirty independent short scenes. Assembling the different
conversations and stories meant “taking two or three different approaches,”
Goode explained. In some cases it was a matter of translating the text into an
adult framework: “There was a child who loves to write stories as a hobby, so
we turned her into a high-profile author at a literary festival”. For others,
updating the context of the scene was enough to create the adult scenario
necessary to offset the child’s words. “For some of the conversations, going to
a fictional place made it easier to achieve this clarity. Job interviews, wine
bars: recognisable situations, which allowed the scenes to exist in an adult
space. But other conversations are less specifically context-based, and we are
simply watching adults on stage, or sometimes characters are talking directly
to the audience.’
So is what we are seeing effectively an adult version (or
someone that could be an adult version) of the same child? “Absolutely, yes. We
didn’t want to make fun of anyone; we take all of the children seriously. We
just wanted to make what they were saying more audible and clear.”
However, what Goode hopes audience members will gain from
watching the play goes beyond learning to be better at listening to what
children are saying. “It’s not just about hearing children, but also about
recognising that growing up is about developing tools and disguises. What happens when an adult is speaking in a childish
voice? We all have that inside us still. There is a sense of bewilderment in
the adult world, of confusion. Ultimately in the play, the words you hear
strike you as belonging not to children or adults but to people.”
This effect upon an audience is key to Goode’s working
approach, and (with memories of being captivated by The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley at last year’s Fringe) I
ask him whether this relates to his skill and passion as a storyteller. “I’m
certainly aware of wanting to engage with an audience in a way that a
storyteller would,” he answers. “Sometimes that’s in a very oblique way – in a
quite fragmentary way, like Monkey Bars. The play is like a series of
snapshots, but it is telling you a story – an argument – underneath all that.
It’s a journey it’s trying to take you on. I tend to think about things in
quite a musical way: in a lot of the language I use, I am thinking about
composition, trying to shape the experience of an audience.”
In fact it was within a school setting that Goode began to
be aware of working in this way. “A drama teacher said to me, ‘work towards the
feeling.’ I always have a feeling about the relationship I want the piece to
have with its audience. That when it starts.”
It is perhaps this significant but abstract objective – the
intended experience of the audience – rather than a focus on a particular size
of project or type of production, which has led Goode to create such a varied
body of work. But another factor, Goode suggests, is his tendency continuously
to crave the complete reverse of the work in hand: “I’m someone who really
wants to be working on the opposite of what I’m doing all the time – rebounding
from big to small, small to big, one kind of work – such as storytelling – to
another form. It’s like dodgems – or a pin-ball ride. For me, that’s
interesting.” For fans of Goode’s work, meanwhile, it’s a promise that even as
Monkey Bars embarks upon its debut run, another play every part as original and
intriguing might be beginning to form at its pole.
Monkey Bars
is playing
at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until the 26 August, presented by the Chris
Goode company and the Unicorn Theatre. For tickets and more information,
visit www.edfringe.com and www.traverse.co.uk.
