Interview: Brief encounter with a company who threw away the script
The Yorkshire fans of Kneehigh are more used to seeing them at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, in Leeds. So it will be interesting to see how the company cope in more traditional Yorkshire venues, like the Alhambra, in Bradford, and The Lyceum, in Sheffield.
It seems likely that Kneehigh stalwarts will make the jump to watch the company in different surroundings. It seems equally likely the company will win new fans by treading Yorkshire soil where it hasn't been seen before.
There's a refreshing youthfulness and a lack of pretension about Emma Rice, the woman who has masterminded the development of Kneehigh Theatre from its Cornish roots to a much wider stage.
In a series of eye-catching productions, often working in tandem with the RSC or the National Theatre, Kneehigh has established itself as an innovative, vibrant force in the British theatre with a growing and devoted public.
Yet when Emma enrolled as a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, there was no thought of becoming an Artistic Director of anything. She was determined instead to make herself a leading actress.
"I was going to play Hedda Gabler, I was going to work at the National, I was going to be very famous. What happened in practice was that I had to take the jobs I was offered. I did a lot of story-telling in schools, a valuable experience which taught me that you have to be very direct with an audience," says Rice.
She arrived at Kneehigh as an actor in 1994 and suddenly she had found
her niche.
"It was love at first sight," she recalls. "They were like gypsies and a Kneehigh rehearsal room was like no other I'd ever experienced. It was elemental, it was visceral, it was free and suddenly everything
made sense."
It was her colleagues who suggested that she switch sides and take up the director's baton.
"They said that I was so bossy as an actor that it was about time I started directing. I did a production of The Red Shoes, and that was it."
Part of the particular character of Kneehigh has to be their HQ, located on the coast of faraway Cornwall.
Rice is ambivalent about an image that can cast Kneehigh as the Laura Ashley of theatre companies.
"I'm slightly nervous that it all sounds a bit hippy," she confesses. "However, we are certainly all like-minded people and in living in such an isolated location, we do become a temporary community. We work together and we eat together. Living by the sea gives the work its energy and its simplicity, I think. You just have to look at that beautiful grey sea, and anything you want in life becomes possible."
Kneehigh is very definitely not a writer's theatre, much to the chagrin of some writers.
"I find that some playwrights are very defensive about not being at centre-stage," says Rice.
Instead, Rice is inspired by stories such as The Red Shoes, The Bacchae, and Brief Encounter that tap into our primary emotions and which she describes as "folk tales". Therefore she kicks off rehearsals with no writer or fixed piece of dramatic work to depend on.
"I never start with a script," she says. "I drive actors crazy because I work a lot on instinct and the last thing I want to do in rehearsal is to talk for hours about character motivation."
But this is a high-risk strategy. Isn't she apprehensive that nothing of substance will emerge from this journey into the unknown?
"There is a lot of pressure," Rice agrees.
"But I think I must have something of a pressure by-pass. I most hate the moment when you have to hand over the show to an audience.
"It's a bit like showing off your newborn baby and having the critics say how ugly it is. One has to be careful to remember how
the work was created. Change is the only given and the only rule is not to be mediocre."
Rice is addicted to live performance. "I love the smell of sweat on a real human body and I love the fact that theatre only happens on one night."
This production of Brief Encounter seems to encapsulate many of Emma's artistic preoccupations.
"If you boil it down to its most basic level, I think that my work is often about love, the wonder of it and the trouble it can get us into.
It asks how one negotiates the emotions and what happens when you break
the rules."
Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, June 9 to 13, Sheffield Lyceum, June
23 to 27.
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