Dynamite Davey takes it to the wire

Published on Sunday 23 September 2007 00:04

IF YOU'VE been to the theatre in the past two years, it's been hard to miss the name of Davey Anderson. The Glasgow University graduate first came to wide attention as a winner of the Arches Award for Stage Directors in 2005, writing and directing Snuff, an ambitious two-hander about war, racism and asylum seekers. That play was one of the first to be picked up by the National Theatre of Scotland for a tour in 2006, a year in which the multi-talented Anderson popped up all over the place.

That year alone, he worked as dramaturg on Poorboy's Falling, a site-specific odyssey through the streets of Glasgow; as associate director on Home: Glasgow starring Billy Boyd; and, most prominently of all, as musical director on Gregory Burke's Black Watch, developing the striking soundtrack that added so much romance and poignancy to that runaway hit. The nomination he received for Black Watch in the Critics' Award for Theatre in Scotland wasn't even his first: his lunchtime play Wired was on the shortlist the year before.

All this and we haven't mentioned his role as musical director on three Tron pantomimes - Weans In The Wood, Aladdie and Cinderella - or his work for the Citizens' and 7:84. No wonder it is with a mixture of awe and envy that friends talk of his talents. And, at only 27, he has barely begun.

Admittedly, he had a head start. As the son of actor and musician Dave Anderson (who only last month won best new musical in the MTM awards for Tir Nan Og), he was a child of Wildcat Theatre Company, growing up in the wings while the popular left-wing company toured its musical comedies across Scotland. "Wildcat was a big part of my life," he says. "I was hanging about in the wings annoying actors for most of my childhood. I thought that was a normal thing to do - climbing in and out of trapdoors and trying on costumes."

Although he initially planned to be a musician, it wasn't long before he heard the call of left-leaning theatre. "I became involved in theatre through playing as a musician," he says. "The influence of my parents has been that making things up for a living felt like a normal thing to do."

Championed by the NTS, he is coming to the end of a two-year stint as director in residence which helps to explain, at least in part, why he's been so busy. His activities haven't just been at home either. Earlier this year in a bitterly cold New York, he spent two months shadowing the young Fringe First-winning TEAM theatre company, a kind of next generation Wooster Group specialising in a highly theatrical brand of devised drama that routinely juxtaposes presidents, movie icons and postmodern politics. The company's collaborative working methods rubbed off on Anderson, who returned to Scotland not with a play but with six character sketches. He is now working these into a play called Rupture in collaboration with six actors, a composer and a set designer.

"I like the energy the TEAM bring to their work and the sense of a world beyond the play," he says. "They've all spent years creating the work together, so you never get that point in rehearsal where the actor turns round to the writer and asks for an answer. They have to come up with the answers collectively. That's a very healthy way of existing in a rehearsal room."

The approach calls to mind the work of Edinburgh playwright/director Anthony Neilson, not only in Anderson's willingness to delay creative decisions until the last minute, but also in his stated desire to "shove a stick of dynamite under the audience". Perhaps it is no coincidence that just as Anderson spent his formative years backstage with Wildcat, so Neilson grew up in the rehearsal rooms of his actor parents Sandy Neilson and Beth Robens. "I had a chat with Anthony Neilson after his production of Realism and he told me it was so up to the wire and he was killing himself in the process. I decided I was never going to do that. I was going to make sure there was a good solid first draft before rehearsals. But it didn't happen. So I'm staying up all night writing."

As well as working methods, he shares Neilson's desire to make a direct connection with the audience, even if it means ruffling feathers in the process. "The worst thing you can do when you're making a piece of theatre is to want the audience to like you," he says. "I'd rather the audience came away riled up than give a bland, 'Yeah, it was all right, it was nice'. To be nice is the worst thing. When I talk about sticking a bomb up the arse of the audience, it isn't about sticking fingers up at them, it's about reaching out and communicating. There are so few situations in your life when you can get a group of folk together in the same room and say, 'Listen! I am interested in this and I think more people should be,' and to start a dialogue."

Rupture, he says, is a play he could never have written single-handedly. "We're trying to tell the story visually as much as verbally," he says. "There are simultaneous scenes and you're spoilt for choice about what to watch. If I'd have written it on my own, I'd have wanted to make a very straight, well-made play with a structure that went from one point to the next. In rehearsals we've been saying anything is possible."

This isn't to say Rupture lacks a governing spirit and political purpose. It's a post-Blairite urban thriller starring Brian Ferguson (of Black Watch, Snuff and Falling fame), Molly Innes, Neil McKinven and Gabriel Quigley, in which interweaving stories examine a world of false promises and empty hopes, where a failed businessman keeps returning to his empty office and a Polish immigrant finds she's been sold a job that doesn't exist. "There's so much emptiness in society," says Anderson. "We convince each other there is something there when there isn't. It's all perception rather than substance. When work is taken away from you, what do you do with your life, what are your values and what do you really care about?" v

• Rupture, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-228 1404), Tuesday until October 6, times vary www.traverse.co.uk