Scottish theatre company Vanishing Point tackles Wonderland

Published on 23/08/2012 15:37

TEATRO Sannazaro, tucked away off one of Naples’ busy shopping streets, was once an adult cinema. It’s now a bijou theatre, sumptuously renovated in red and gold, and on a warm evening in June during the Naples Theatre Festival, it hosted the world premiere of Wonderland, by Scottish theatre company Vanishing Point.

Founded in Glasgow in 1999, the company is now firmly established as a player on an international stage, having performed at festivals all over the world. But Teatro
Sannazaro’s shady past adds a layer of irony to its latest project, because Wonderland is a play about internet pornography.

If you had to come up with a phrase to describe Vanishing Point’s style of theatre, it might be something like “surreal and dreamlike”, “darkly beautiful” or “strongly visual”. Contemporary social issues probably wouldn’t feature. But beneath the surface, there is a different story. “Often there is something very real, and social, at the heart of our work,” says artistic director Matthew Lenton. “But that’s covered over with layers of dream or surreality, I never like the thing at the root to be explicit.”

So, Lost Ones, a dark fable about a school trip gone wrong, started with a discussion about the two boys accused of the murder of Jamie Bulger: how much should adults be held responsible for crimes committed in childhood? Fringe First-winning Subway, a father-and-son tale which featured a seven-piece Serbian band, began with residents being evicted from parts of Edinburgh to make room for development.

But Wonderland tops all of this in terms of the challenges presented by the material. “It’s the hardest show I’ve ever done by a long way,” says Lenton. “It’s not a pleasant place to have your head. Every day is a fight with the material, trying to show it in a way that tries to be complex. It’s a subject which people have very, very different views on. When you talk about it, you divide men and women, straight and gay people. What for one person is a dark, uncomfortable, immoral fantasy, for someone else is completely normal, completely acceptable.”

He wants to get inside some of the ambiguities. It’s easy to be outraged by a play which exposes, for example, the plight of women trafficked for the sex industry, and that response would be right and proper. The territory of Wonderland is more grey. “What I’m interested in is the stuff where I don’t know how I feel about it,” says Lenton.

Take, for example, the young British woman featured in Stephen Walker’s 2001 documentary Hardcore, who travels to Los Angeles of her own volition because she wants to appear in pornographic movies. “She goes out with a really clear set of ideas about what she’ll do and what she won’t do, and she gets sucked into this world where very soon she’s out of her depth. After three or four weeks she is doing stuff that she would never have done at the beginning. I was interested in how she gets out of her depth, whether it’s by choices that she makes or pressure that other people put on her.”

And then there’s a man watching TV with his wife, but thinking about the encounter he had ten minutes before on the web-cam with a girl he’s never met. “I was also interested in the fact that you can sit around a table with your family or friends, can go into the next room and engage in very extreme fantasies or activities, and come back and sit around your table again. Your head has been to some very questionable places. I’m interested in what leads people there, and what leads them back again.”

Technology, driven by demand, has raced ahead of any attempt to regulate it, or even understand its implications. In a virtual encounter, where does the power lie? Who is manipulating and who is being manipulated? Does either party have the same responsibilities they would have if the other person was in the room with them? Where do the boundaries between fantasy and reality fall?

Vanishing Point does not have easy answers to these questions, though they have all been explored in the making of the show. The company devises each show in the rehearsal room – which is a laboratory, workshop, playroom – drawing on expertise from a range of creative associates.

“I firmly believe that the way you make work is that you go on an adventure,” says Lenton. “It’s a creative process, sometimes it takes twists and turns that you don’t expect. One of the mottos we have in Vanishing Point is that we always have to explore something we don’t know we can do. That’s the rule – we don’t know if it will work.”

The company has always taken risks. The first project as a company in 1999 was a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck’s existential drama The Sightless, about a group of blind people lost in a forest. But Vanishing Point put its own spin on and did it in the dark. Since then, it has undertaken a work which is almost wordless (Saturday Night), a show inspired by a surrealist Czech movie (Little Otik) and a play performed in a high-rise flat for an audience of six (David Leddy’s Home Hindrance).

Interiors, which opened in Naples in 2009, has been the most successful show to date. Exploring the subtle relationships around a dinner table as the action unfolds behind glass, it has won several awards in Scotland and tours internationally. Later this year, it will be staged in London, Moscow and
Buenos Aires.

But producing a success makes its own challenges: people want you to do the same again. “I think people do want another show like Interiors, but maybe breakfast instead of dinner,” says Lenton. “That is exactly what I don’t want to spend my life doing – trading on an aesthetic. Some directors have a very recognisable style. Whilst on one level I can see how that can give you a trademark, and make you currency on a circuit, artistically it can be dangerous. It can be stifling, because you always want to explore something new.”

So, here Vanishing Point is, taking what may be its biggest risk to date, in the full glare of the Edinburgh International Festival spotlight. It demonstrates how far the company has come, since being a group of new graduates travelling from Glasgow to Battersea Arts Centre in a Transit van to put on The Sightless as part of an In The Dark season. But many home-grown companies have found the EIF a challenge. The work, which is generally untried, is programmed next to international theatre, most of which is well established.

But there is a trace of belligerence about Lenton. He recalls Krystian Lupa’s slow-motion production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at EIF in 2006. “I’ve never seen a show empty a theatre at the interval like that did, more than half the audience left. I thought it was a work of genius. That’s what I think the EIF is about, that kind of willingness to take risks. As an artist, as a director, you have to be willing to put your head on the block, you have to be willing to say: ‘I’m trying this and I don’t know if it will work’.”

Vanishing Point has always looked to European theatre for its influences, and to collaborate across international borders. Wonderland brings together British actors Paul Thomas Hickey, Pauline Goldsmith and Owen Whitelaw with actors from Portugal, Serbia, and Belgium. “There has always been a natural looking outwards. We all love working with people from different cultures, seeing what we can bring them and what they can bring us.” And working increasingly in Europe has given Lenton more confidence as a director. He tells me, with admiration in his voice, about leading Italian director Romeo Castellucci, who cancelled his last show, The Minister’s Black Veil, after two performances because he wasn’t happy with it. “He pulled his tour and asked for more money from the government in order to continue to try to work on it, and he got the money. There’s a sort of defiance about that which I really like.

“I think I’ve learned to be much more defiant since I’ve had the opportunity to work more in Europe. Artists there have a very different opinion about ways of working, and also a different way of reflecting upon work. I’m much happier now to accept the dissent and the people who say, ‘What the f*** was that all about? I don’t get it’, because you want to try something and see if it works. You learn to be more confident as a director in that respect, that sometimes you need to fail in order to succeed.”

l Wonderland is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, 29 August until 1 September.