Online editor Grace Murray interviews theatre director Jo Bowman. They discuss Bowman’s latest project—the Scottish Premiere of Caryl Churchill’s ‘Escaped Alone’—the role of the director, and the political importance of theatre.
Murray: So I was doing a little bit of research and I read that you like to make theatre that is messy and loud, and I really enjoyed that statement, and I was just wondering how that plays into your work kind of generally but also specifically how it works with this play and with Caryl Churchill’s writing.
Bowman: I suppose the first thing I’d say about that is that this play might be loud but it won’t be messy, because it’s so precisely written. I suppose by messy what I normally mean is that the plays I make, make a mess. I’m quite interested in physical mess onstage and how you might change a space from clean to messy or messy to clean over the course of a production, generally. But that’s coupled with a real desire for precision with both text and image. So while the image may look messy, it’s been sort of stress tested And loud. for me the real joy of theatre is that it’s people sitting in the same room together, and that, actually, if you play a loud noise or surprise people in some way, they’re suddenly made aware of the fact that they’re sitting in a room with you watching a play. And so I’m interested in how sound sort of heightens or changes the way that we might interact with a play. I don’t think you should ever be able to come see one of my plays and sit back, and be, like, well I just watched this nice square of stuff happening. I’m interested in plays which sort of implicate or complicate what it is to sit and watch a play.
Murray: Yeah, I’ve always really liked that element of theatre. There’s always the opportunity to kind of break the line between audience and the actors onstage in a way you can’t necessarily in film, or not in the same way.
Bowman: Yeah, it really matters to me that people have given up their Tuesday evening to come and spend it with us, and I think you have to take seriously the fact that people are choosing to come and share the same literal space with the art or the thing that’s been made. And to sort of take that seriously, and then say, well how can I make sure that my work has an implication or an impact on the audience beyond just sitting back and watching a nice story. Although it’s good if you can tell a good story—or share a good story. Telling is not very interesting to me, but sharing is.
Murray: Something I found really interesting about this play was that Caryl Churchill, when she was writing it, specified the actors need to be seventy and over, and I think that’s interesting because I think quite often in stories, older women – older meaning, like, thirty-five and older – are kind of relegated to the roles of mothers. And even when they’re younger, they’re the wife of someone, or the girlfriend of someone. I think Carey Mulligan said recently [that she had] made a career playing wives and girlfriends.[1] So, I was wondering what your thoughts on that were and how this play was a good opportunity to break that idea.
Bowman: I think one of the things that’s most startling about this play is its casting requirements, which is – not a correction, but a slight shift of what you were saying – is that the characters are over seventy, rather than the actors.
I think it’s a really interesting thing—and actually what is it to have characters onstage who are over seventy?. You know, how would this production be different—we’re not doing this—if we had four twenty year olds, and we just had a sign above them saying, these people are seventy plus? That’s kind of a tangent, but yeah I suppose the thing that’s interesting in Caryl Churchill’s career is that she’s always been really interested in who we put on stages and how we put them on stages. There’s a real tension, for me, in this of the particular bodies and people we’re seeing onstage being four actors in their sixties and seventies playing characters in their seventies, saying these—using these incredibly theatrical and seismic images of catastrophe—in counterpoint of what you might expect women in their seventies to talk about, and how our expectations are sort of subverted and inverted by the play. It’s not a play in which the women sit around and talk about classically—heavily inverted commas here—women’s issues. It’s a play where what they’re talking about is universal partly because of the specifics of who is saying it—you know, the surprise that the universal is said by people who are really specific, I think is something that is really worth interrogating. And what we expect seventy year olds to sit onstage and talk about, and how it’s really different in this play, is really interesting to me. I think as a director you have a responsibility, because whilst you’re an employee, you’re also an employer, so there’s something about materially thinking about who you put onstage and why you put them onstage, and something I’m interested in my work doing is thinking carefully about who and how we put onstage.
Murray: Yeah. I wanted to ask you more about your process as a director, taking things from page to stage, and how you like to work with actors and with the material.
Bowman: I love it. The reason I do this job is because I think theatre is the best medium to think about big ideas in, and I think part of that is the rehearsal room—how you might approach a text—and the other part of that is how do you communicate what you’ve thought about to the audience. There’s that sort of two-ness which I love about the job. I will say the way I work is interrogative and iterative, and the sort of image that I use is like a series of sieves. So in week one you’re using like, a fucking colander, and then by week four—you know those panning for gold things you get at legoland?—you’ve gone from colander to panning for gold over weeks, and you might not notice. I’m interested in the work you don’t notice happening, the sort of—oh, that thing’s just fallen into place! And with a play like this, it’s about clarity. It’s about the actors understanding what they’re saying because it’s so fragmented and elliptical, and then using that understanding to very slightly put pressure on lines to convey very slight, small things which hopefully altogether add up to make something that makes some sort of cohesive or coherent sense. And, you know, I think the way that I work is really collaborative but really specific. I know how this play—the play tells you, the play tells me, how it should sound and what it should feel like and be like, and my job is to sort of shepherd that feeling from page to actor to audience, and that’s through creative team, and design work, and sound design work, and lighting and stage management, you know, there are lots and lots of people who can inspire together to make the thing, but my job is to sort of shepherd loads of brilliant ideas and decide which ones are worth sticking on this production and which are worth saving for a future thing.
Murray: I think it’s really interesting talking about how collaborative theatre is, because I think that is a sort of misconception—I think more so in film, but also in theatre—that the director is the one who makes all the decisions and that everyone else is just doing what they’re told.
Bowman: I think that’s really interesting. I think as a director your responsibility is to make a production that is saying the thing you want it to say, and then within that it’s about creating a space. I’ve got no idea what sort of lights will convey the feeling of a beautiful summer’s afternoon; the lighting designer Colin [Grenfell], who’s one of the best lighting designers ever, knows how to do that, but what he needs to know from me is what I want the scene to feel like, and then he will find a way to technically and artistically make that happen. And equally he’ll come back to me and say, Are you sure that that’s what the scene should feel like? What about this? And I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s interesting. And the first job of the director is to pick the right collaborators, the right other artists who are invested in the ideas that you want to make happen onstage, but who will also challenge and test, and make sure those are rigorous and robust.
Murray: And to circle back to what you were saying about inverting the expectations of what women, and in particular older women, would be interested in discussing—I think it’s really interesting that it takes place in a back garden at a tea party, so I was wondering how the setting informs the play, and how you choose to show that; you were talking about preciseness of image…
Bowman: Yeah, I mean there’s something both specific and general. I mean, the stage direction we get is “Sally’s backyard”—Sally’s one of the characters—so we know that one of the characters owns this space, so there’s something about status there. We know it’s not an allotment, it’s not a park; there’s something like semi-private about it but if you’ve got a nosy neighbour they’ll be on the other side of the fence, so there’s something sort of private but also public; there’s something domestic, and there’s something personal about this space. But it’s also almost generic. You know, you could sort of conjure a British back garden—I think you could ask a lot of people what a suburban back garden is like, and you might get lots of quite similar images. And of course, the first production at The Royal Court did that, and did it gloriously; it was a Miriam Buether, incredible design of quite a realistic, but still slightly generic, back garden. And when I was working with our designer, Anna Orton, we sort of had quite a long conversation [saying] that the sort of realised, naturalistic garden has been done, so what, for this—and this is the Scottish premier of the play—so what is the thing that conveys garden to an audience? And for us, it was grass and a particular type of chair, and those were the key signifiers of garden, so that was what a significant part of our design was: real grass and really precise, specific chairs, and that hopefully is enough for the audience to feel both feel like they’re in a heightened garden, but that it has enough of a garden-y quality to be recognisable as such. And that’s always a thing, for me at least: how can you abstract something and make it the essential parts? So how can you gesture to the thing, without giving the whole thing to the audience? How can you make it nonspecific enough that we can all imagine our own garden—I don’t have a garden, I live in a flat—but gardens that we might have been in? How do we leave space for the audience? And in this production we’re doing quite a lot with video design. How does a garden work with a screen? It doesn’t, so we need to theatricalise it in some way.
Murray: You were talking about the version [of the play] at The Royal Court that has already been on, and I was wondering, when you’re approaching a play that has already been staged by other people, how do you go about making it feel like your own version?
Bowman: I suppose any play I direct, I hope I’m always bringing myself to it, and not in a grand, I’m gonna stamp all over the play and put a big fucking concept on top of it, but—I only directed this play because on some level it resonates with me, and it’s interested in needling into something that interests me. So I think it’s about choosing—you know, of course the material reality of a theatre director means you don’t always get to choose—but, when you do get a choice, and I had a choice of what I wanted to direct at the Tron, choosing something that really resonates with you, and from that a version that could only be yours will naturally emerge.
I really enjoy doing first productions of plays that have already happened once, because you know it’s happened, and you know the writer’s been really involved in that first production, so it gives a little bit of critical space, but the plays are often still contemporary and relevant and politically interesting and speak to now in a way that feels essential for all of the work that I want to make, but you’re also not trying to make anything that’s necessarily definitive, or singular, or getting it right for a writer. I also do lots of new writing, and the focus there is a bit different; it’s about showcasing the play in the best possible way, and it not being the first production means there’s slightly more space to interrogate the play, and test where the play’s boundaries are, and what pressure you can, and what pressure you really can’t, put on it. But I’m also not that worried about it being singular or original because, you know, there’s that line in Sunday in the Park with George about “let it come from you, then it will be new”—that’s enough, if it’s a sincere and an artistic response from you, it will be a new version. I think… I hope. It was very good, the first version. I saw it; it was a brilliant production; brilliantly precise, brilliantly well done production. James MacDonald, who did it, is one of my favourite directors, so I know it’s been done really well once, which sort of takes the pressure off, as well. It’s not about doing it really well, it’s about finding how it might resonate differently in Scotland in 2024 with a different director and with a different company.
Murray: Yeah, it’s interesting—for a play that came out eight years ago—how simultaneously different and how painfully similar the world is.
Bowman: Totally, and the play is about catastrophe, and the thing that is—it feels like catastrophe is politically defining this generation, this period of time, and it feels that things have gotten more catastrophic since the play was written, and some of the absurd register in which the play is written—which I think is an incredible register to write a play in—actually has become less absurd; it’s become neutered slightly by the absurd political fucking context we find ourselves in. So, to me, it speaks even louder to today, because it’s not gesturing to a ridiculous possible future, or a heightened possible future, but it’s gesturing towards an inching closer political reality, and that’s really scary. It’s really scary that a play written to be heightened feels more realistic than it did eight years ago. It’s fucked.
Murray: I remember—it was actually 2016 [the year of The Royal Court’s production]—I asked my dad, has it always been this bad? And it feels like every year since then it has gotten worse and worse and worse.
Bowman: Yeah, and it’s hard – I think making theatre is a really political thing to do, and it’s a really optimistic thing to do. I think to sit in a room with some people talking about a play in a culture that values product and product output and a commercialisation of stuff, to sit in a room for weeks to talk about a thing and take a thing seriously and then say to an audience, give up your evening and come think hard about this thing with us, that feels like an inherently optimistic and political act. I hope that this play is both interested in things feeling bad, but also things having potential to feel good at some points. I don’t know.
Murray: I think, especially in an age that’s obsessed with content, there’s something really unique about theatre as a form—though obviously it does have to make some money, it has to make money for the theatre [building]—but there’s no thing; there’s not a disc or something you can stream, unless it’s a very big, like, National Theatre production where they do have a streaming service—it’s there and then it’s gone.
Bowman: Yeah, totally, except it’s not quite gone. It lives in the memory, and that’s what I’m interested in, I’m interested in making work that will lodge somewhere in someone’s memory, and they might say, God, do you remember that thing? Or they might, when the lights go down, say, I didn’t like that very much, but then three days later they might say, But I have been thinking about an image that was in that, or a question. It just sort of lodges in the back of minds, and I feel excited that a production continues to exist as a memory, as a sort of intangible, but significant, thing in the world… And then if it’s bad, it just goes; it’s great.
Murray: I know the title is a reference to the Book of Job in the Bible—I’m not super familiar with the Bible—but I know it’s about why suffering happens. And I was wondering what you think the play’s relationship to suffering is? Because I know there’s this character [in the play] who describes these very apocalyptic events.
Bowman: I mean spot on, [referring to a wall of the rehearsal space] there’s the Book of Job; there’s Moby Dick, which is used as an epilogue…
Suffering, I don’t know about. The title [Escaped Alone] is about someone living through something horrendous, and then telling a story about something horrendous—for me, for us, for this production, and I think there is something in the need to tell stories. The I survived, or I went through this thing, and therefore I have a story to tell, and that actually there is something, like – narrativising or narrating events that allows us to process them, and allows us space and time to think about things that might happen. This feels a bit like a dress rehearsal—the events that Mrs. Jarrett, the character who does these monologues, talks about haven’t happened to us, the audience, but they have happened to her, so there’s a weird time thing going on there, and she exists to tell us that story. It’s not a Cassandra-ish sort of warning, but it has to ring a bell, either a far away alarm bell or a close alarm bell.
(Note: as Bowman said this, a clocktower bell began to ring outside)
Bowman: Yeah, I don’t know what the play says about suffering. I think there is something in surviving and then telling.
Murray: Yeah, because I suppose that’s what happens to Job. A lot of bad things happen to him, but he lasts through it.
Bowman: Although the quote is not a Job quote, it’s one of his servants. So all of Job’s servants run back and say, My God, you’ll never imagine what just happened to me, and I escaped alone to tell thee. So there is—it sort of precedes the suffering, which I find interesting as well, that the line—the line isn’t about the thing that we think the Book of Job is about, which always interests me, when things are not about the thing we think they’re about. I’m like, that’s cool, I like that, I like to use my brain.
Murray: This isn’t even really a question but I love a Moby Dick reference, and—yeah, that’s Moby Dick. If I remember right, he’s the only guy who survives.
Bowman: Exactly, yeah. And so from that we maybe assume that Mrs. J is the only person who has survived—I don’t know. That can be implied.
‘Escaped Alone’ is playing at the Tron Theatre from 22nd February – 9th March 2024
by Grace Murray [they/them]
@gracefrom._space
Image credit: https://www.tron.co.uk/shows/escaped-alone/ by Mihaela Bodlovic
[1] ‘Carey Mulligan: No strong film roles for women’, BBC Newsbeat (18th January 2018) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-42728572
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