It's rock around the prop

Published on Monday 14 September 2009 19:02

ROCK'N'ROLL has never turned up its nose at the thrill-boosting possibilities offered by theatre. An Alice Cooper show just wouldn't seem complete without half a dozen rubber pythons upping the gig's drama quotient. Equally, when budget allows, theatre has not been slow to exploit the tear-pricking potential of a minor key melody or, in pieces such as Tutti Frutti, the gut-punching blast of a live rock'n'roll band going full throttle.

However, in the last couple of years, while carefully body-swerving the more staid associations of musical theatre, theatre companies have started to hook up with rock, pop and indie bands to create an energetic new hybrid in which the musicians and their music are as essential to the drama as the actors.

Vicky Featherstone, director of the National Theatre of Scotland, says: "There is a new generation of theatre makers who have come from a different set of stimuli where music and bands were as important to them as learning about theatre and plays." The stimuli have done their job. Just opened at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre is Vanishing Point's new production of The Beggar's Opera. Performing alongside the actors is A Band Called Quinn, more usually spotted at King Tut's than at the Lyceum.

Meanwhile, next door at the Traverse, Vox Motus are about to premiere Bright Black, a dark, intense new show with music by Michael John McCarthy of rapidly rising indie band Zoey Van Goey.

Shortly after that, the National Theatre of Scotland's Long Gone Lonesome begins a Scottish tour on Orkney. Directed by Featherstone, it's the story of Thomas Fraser, a blues-playing Shetland fisherman, and is told not by professional actors but by Orkney's Lone Star Swing Band.

Ten years ago, there would have been little common ground between gigging bands and theatre companies, but the two worlds are fast drawing together. "Music festivals have become very popular now, and that big arena that the bands play on is becoming a lot more theatrical," says Louise Quinn of A Band Called Quinn.

She adds: "Look at someone like Beck, with a puppet band on stage. Audiences want to see something similar at smaller gigs. The result is that bands are starting to be more theatrical and theatre is starting to become a little more rock'n'roll."

The Beggar's Opera, Quinn reckons, is "very rock 'n' roll in its attitude", appropriately, given the criminal underworld in which it is set. Devised by the cast and creative team, the production bills itself as a gig as much as a piece of theatre, and promises to snarl appropriately.

Featherstone agrees that the rebellious spirit of rock'n'roll can benefit theatre. "It challenges the notion of how we should behave in theatre," she says. "We are able to have a much more visceral, honest experience that isn't about having learnt a play at school in order to understand it. Theatre has to be a vital art form and that should involve the brilliance and the anarchy and the maverick nature of the bands that we are able to work with. There has been a natural fusion of different art forms to make more urgent theatre for a contemporary audience."

Prior to his current involvement with Vox Motus, Zoey Van Goey's Michael John McCarthy worked with the National Theatre of Scotland (and composer David Paul Jones) on Dolls, a stage adaptation of the Takeshi Kitano film. "Theatre companies, like bands, are constantly looking to find new audiences, to get people in to see their work who might not ordinarily do so and that was certainly the case with Dolls," he says.

"Zoey Van Goey were playing in front of people who might not come and see us in Nice 'n' Sleazy on a Friday night on Sauchiehall Street and vice versa. Through our mailing lists and so on, you had people coming to the show who might not have been to the theatre for a very long time." The idea that theatre is high art and that bands peddle populism is an outmoded one, and ignores the diversity to be found in both genres. For musicians like McCarthy, the similarities between the two are increasingly much greater than the differences. He points out that the internet has meant that independently produced music is not as isolated, underground or as niche as it once was. At the same time, "companies like Vox Motus and Vanishing Point are putting on incredibly ambitious work and working on a larger and larger scale but they are still not the mainstream of theatre."

For McCarthy, the bands and companies that were once the fringe practitioners of music and theatre have evolved, moved in from the very edge and found common ground. For the musicians, the question of making a living when fewer and fewer people want to pay for recorded music is also a factor. Diversifying your business model might not sound very rock'n'roll but the smart bands realised long ago that a killer chord progression is no longer enough to pay the rent.

"As funding becomes harder to come by then a willingness to engage in multidisciplinary work and engage in collaboration across art forms is one of the ways to improve your chances of continuing to do this," says McCarthy. "On a creative level, you learn more about what you do yourself in the process of working with people who are coming at it with a completely different perspective. You might be trying to tell the same story but you are both using very different sets of tools. You are learning all the time and, in theory, you become better at what you do."

&#149 The Beggar's Opera is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 3 October, then on tour. Bright Black is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, tonight until 19 September, then on tour. Long Gone Lonesome begins its Scottish tour at Cromarty Hall, Orkney, on 6 October.