ICIA, University of Bath presents The Festival, the third piece in Lone Twin Theatre’s The Catastrophe Trilogy. Each show works as a stand alone piece. Here Lone Twin Theatre tells us more about the approach to their new work: 

 

It’s called The Catastrophe Trilogy – why is this?

If you look up ‘catastrophe’ in Wikipedia you find: ‘a catastrophe is the final resolution in a poem or narrative which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close’. The title came from the first two pieces, which have something very dramatic in common, they both deal with death.

In 2005 we had the idea of making three pieces of work, but not necessarily a trilogy. We wanted to try out different approaches to storytelling and autobiography. When we started working on the third piece, The Festival, we were conscious there wasn’t going to be a dramatic event at the heart of it, or any death. However, you can find catastrophy in the small things in life, in the personal - the fact that something doesn’t happen, for example.

 

What is The Festival about?

It covers a year in someone’s life. The first piece in the trilogy, Alice Bell, is a life story, the second, Daniel Hit By A Train, is about the last moment in someone’s life, The Festival is about a women considering her life, and what’s good about it. It uses everyday language, the songs are celebration of the everyday, and the simple things around us.

 

Is The Festival inspired by a particular source as the first two pieces of the trilogy are?

The Festival, like Alice Bell, (which was inspired by Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion) also has a literary background - the short story Alice Monroe offered a shape and a context for the performance rather than specific characters. Alice Monroe is about a woman who visits an annual festival, meets a man, and then returns to the festival a year later. In that year she reflects on that incident, and what it means to her.

We took the loose shape of the story and improvised around it. Setting it in Australia came out of these improvisations, using the Alice Monroe story as a framework. We liked what Australia meant to us, the mood of the country, the idea of a bright sunny environment, connected to leisure and the outdoors. You don’t see much work in the UK set in Australia. It became a good setting for the character of The Festival, her friends, job etc.

 

Your work is often described as optimistic - why is humour so important to you?

The three shows are about overcoming difficulty, two of them deal quite explicitly with death. We have humour in life to combat how terrible things are. If things weren’t terrible we wouldn’t need Lenny Bruce or Noel Edmonds. We need to laugh. When we made the trilogy everything we did felt very serious, and at the same time properly hilarious.

 

Storytelling is important to you – but why the songs?

When we started making the shows we wanted to tell simple, uncomplicated stories in a theatrical setting. Nobody in the ensemble had any experience of writing plays or acting so we had to invent a way of working with stories. We all knew a lot of songs and we can all sing (everybody can - who cares how it sounds?) so we started singing sections of the stories. Which meant the shows turned out like wonky musicals.

In The Festival the songs are there to celebrate that particular moment in the story, they don’t bring the story forward as they do in Alice Bell and Daniel Hit By A Train. We used instruments in the first two pieces, for example a ukulele in Alice Bell, and a drum in Daniel Hit By A Train. In The Festival we wanted to strip the instruments away, and just use songs. We worked with a musical director for the first time. He put together harmonies, and we use playbacks to songs.

 

How does your work as Lone Twin Theatre differ from your Lone Twin 'duo' work?

When we work as Lone Twin we think less about how things are different and more about how things are similar. But at the heart of all our work is the importance of the act of storytelling, people experiencing and sharing something together, a celebration of the everyday, and what surrounds us.

Lone Twin Theatre is a different process because we have other people working with the two of us. With Lone Twin Theatre suddenly there are eight people in the work, each bringing things into the space that we wouldn’t have done. Lone Twin now invite specialists in on projects, this has grown out of our work with Lone Twin Theatre. With Speeches we collaborated with a professional speechwriter, and for Street Dance, a major community dance project, with a choreographer.

 

Who is the work for (who are your audiences)?

The work really is for everyone. We have our families in mind when making work. We know that they will come and see the work and that they should be able to understand and follow the devices we use and the stories we tell. The style in which the story is told may sometimes be peculiar but hopefully people are able to join the dots up. The stories are always told with an element of humour that people can understand. For the trilogy we perform in traverse, so that people can watch each other watching.

 

Are you going to create more theatre after the trilogy has come to and end?

Yes, we will. We have all sorts of ideas… we could make a solo show, work with our five cast member and extend it into a much larger group, do one-off events, site events… there are various possibilities of where the work could go now. We might still want to work with a play text, either an existing one or a commissioned one. We were looking for an existing play for the third piece, but didn’t find the right one.

 

 

Box Office 01225 386777

Tickets £9 (£7 concessions)

www.bath.ac.uk/icia