Grid Iron on Doppler: 'Theatre people are incredibly intrepid'
The theatre company Grid Iron has a long and involved history with the Edinburgh festivals. In 1997 their second production – an adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber – unearthed the buried Edinburgh plague street St. Mary’s Close, now a popular tourist attraction. The following year’s Gargantua did the same for the warren of vaults and corridors off the Cowgate which subsequently became the first Underbelly venue. Their plan in 2020 was to adapt Norwegian author Erlend Loe’s 2004 satirical novel Doppler, about a man who rejects the city – and his family – to live a simple life in the forest.
For Grid Iron too, Doppler was intended to be a return to basics, a break from large, complex shows under the wing of the big August festivals. But the effects of the pandemic and their determination to put the show on resulted in a long, semi-public gestation as plans were vetoed and reworked. Ahead of its debut – finally – Grid Iron’s Judith Doherty and Ben Harrison lead us through the timeline of bringing Doppler to life.
Early development, late 2017 to March 2020
Ben: This show was the idea of Miljana Zekovic, a Serbian architectural academic, and a friend of ours. I was visiting her in Novi Sad, and she had just seen a production of Doppler at the National Theatre of Serbia in Belgrade. She said, I think this would be great for you and Jude, it’s exactly your aesthetic. This was December 2017, and when this beautiful little hardback book arrived three months later, I read it in one sitting and mentioned it to Jude. Bizarrely, I was initially thinking of it as an indoor show…
Judith: I finished it and thought, I see tents. Tents and forest. In terms of where we were as a company, I think we were hungry for something that would take us back to nature. Just a wee jewel of a thing, a wee treat, and a step away from the huge engine that is making theatre during a festival. We wanted to go straight through the Fringe office, like we used to back in the mid-1990s, and see if that could still work.
Ben: I was drawn to the book’s simplicity – trying to live a simpler life, to fly less, to be less materialistic about things (Harrison wrote and directed Grid Iron’s adaptation from Don Bartlett and Don Shaw’s translation). It was also very funny and outrageously counter-cultural, in a similar way to our adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s writing (Barflies in 2009). Jude and I immediately thought of Keith Fleming (who played Bukowski in Barflies) as perfect casting for Doppler. This character has got everything, but he has an accident and decides it’s all essentially bullshit – that we’re all alone, we die alone, and actually you need to connect things on a slightly deeper level.
Jude: The thing is, the bump on the head doesn’t suddenly make Doppler a nice person. It’s like Bukowski, I hated his approach to women, but I could still totally see why we should make a work from his book. That’s the interesting thing about Doppler, as well. He brings good things to light, but he’s still deeply selfish.
Ben: He abandons his wife and two kids, goes and lives in a forest and adopts an elk as some sort of surrogate child / therapist! I mean, it’s unbelievably selfish. When his wife says, I need a break, he accuses her of being Ibsen’s Nora, who abandons her children. It’s very knowing in that way, but very interesting, because I think we should be allowed to represent difficult people. It’s a nice challenge to set yourself.
Pressing ahead during the pandemic, Spring 2020
Jude: We were ready quite unusually early. We knew who we wanted to cast, we’d secured a location – not the location we’re going to use this year – and we’d put together the entire team, although nobody was under paper contract yet. In fact, the last face-to-face meeting Ben and I had was with our designer at our original location, the day before we went into lockdown. We used our time wisely to get everyone to see the scene that needed to, so we could carry on – we didn’t know we were going to be doing Zoom rehearsals, though.
Ben: There was a scary moment where I thought, oh god, we’re going to have to do normal rehearsal days – seven hours, plus a break – on Zoom. We were careful about the team’s mental health, though, in terms of the amount of time onscreen. We scheduled regular breaks, we started at 12, we had lunch, then 1.30 until 4 – which, funnily enough, is more or less the equivalent of what the Norwegian equivalent of Equity demand for their actors.
Jude: We used the foundations of what we do every time to allow us to better cope with the fact that everything was different. Everything had to be looked at forensically in terms of possibility, affordability and safety – we spent a lot of time talking about how to make it safe for people to go to the toilet, for example. Hand sanitiser melted our puppets during rehearsal, so they had to be cleaned before they could be left overnight. Theatre people are incredibly intrepid and massive problem solvers anyway, but we do site-specific work, so we and the people we work with are equipped for things like, how do we deal with the weather? How are people going to get to the location? There’s nowhere for dressing rooms, what are we going to do? What are the audience going to sit on?
The show mustn't go on, August 2020
Jude: Having to cancel Doppler last August was a big disappointment, but nothing to do with Covid and the pandemic is ever a surprise. If you count your chickens, you’re only going to be disappointed. It came down to the fact that we couldn’t get the last tiny bit of permission in place that we needed. It just couldn’t work, but we gave it to the very last minute – literally, there were people sitting in two vans full of equipment, ready to move onsite. We had kept in the back of our heads that we needed a Plan B, and that was to move to a filmed version.
Ben: I remember a feeling of relief to have something certain (the film). Obviously there was disappointment not to do it live, but at least we knew what we were doing.
Storm Francis cancels film production, August 2020
Ben: Then, of course, the storm descended upon us, and basically sat above Gifford, where we were filming. We were working with a really good film crew, but I’d never made a film before, so there was a very steep learning curve for everybody.
Jude: The fact of the matter is, had we been able to do the live performances in Edinburgh last year, Storm Francis meant we would only have done maybe six or seven. We would have had to cancel the opening night, press night, definitely the night after. Was somebody up there actually looking out for us (when the live shows were cancelled)? Imagine the huge disappointment if you’re one of the 14 people we were able to have in the audience, and you’re getting a phone call from me to cancel when you’re on your way to the show.
Doppler: The Story So Far, released March 2021
Ben: The intention of the film was to capture the entire show digitally, but actually I think the film we did make (part show footage, part behind the scenes documentary) was a more interesting document. There’s about a third of the show in it, but it’s a lot more than an extended trailer, you get some key contextualisations from people like Joyce McMillan and the directors of the Fringe and Festivals Edinburgh. It became a record of that time, and the process we had to go through.
Jude: As we couldn’t film the whole show, the storm gave us more room to come at it from different angles. We’d recorded our production meetings on Zoom, we’d taken good photographs and recorded rehearsals, so we had this bank, this archive of background material.
Live performance goes ahead, and the tale of Doppler becomes even more relevant, August 2021
Jude: It’s for a cast of four – three actors and a live foley musician – and we’ll have two new performers and two performers coming back. Keith Fleming will still be playing Doppler.
Ben: There’s an ecological theme, and I suppose with the pollution clouds dissolving above China during the pandemic, that theme became particularly strong. Sometimes I’ll say Doppler is about a guy who self-isolates in the woods – but it’s his choice to self-isolate, it’s not imposed by a national health emergency. We were more equipped for this than the average company, because we always work in unusual circumstances, but we love the physicality with our audiences, we actively encourage that, we cast them and ask them to move bits of set around. Whereas here there’s a very simple scene where two characters meeting for the first time shake hands, and of course no actor is closer than two metres. It’s now one of my favourite scenes, because that space between the two hands is very charged. A dancer friend of mine said the thing she misses most about performance is the smell of the sweat of the other dancers, and of course that’s right. On Zoom you get the visual and the oral, but you don’t get the energy and the kinaesthetic sense of being in close proximity with live performance. That’s what a lot of theatre’s about, and certainly what Grid Iron’s about too.
Doppler is at Newhailes House and Gardens, near Musselburgh, 6-23 August (not 10, 17, 19). gridiron.org.uk
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