Tom Morris is best known for being the director of War Horse, a show that stampeded its way to critical and popular glory on Broadway. He has just returned to this side of the Atlantic with his company, the Bristol Old Vic, to make their US debut with a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. As he did with War Horse, Morris joined forces with his co-creators, puppeteers from South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones.
Both in this interview, and when I watched and heard him in Charleston speak in conversation with the CBS correspondent Martha Teichner, I was struck by his thoughtfulness and also his sense of openness and respect regarding the experiment that was this production.[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]
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[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Susan Galbraith: Let me first say I loved this production. I am delighted we could have this interview. I was able to hear your conversation with Martha Teichner, which was instructive as well as inspiring on so many levels. [/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Tom Morris: It was the best audience one could ever hope to have in one of those interview conversations. It was a lot of fun, and everyone seemed to be up for it. [/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]I would like to continue that conversation here. I loved War Horse when I saw it, and I thought A Midsummer was quite amazing in a different way, and as you say, you broke a lot of rules with this work. Would you say some more about that? Did you start out to break some rules, to do things that hadn’t quite been done this way before?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]
I think there are two things in parallel. With War Horse, the contract with the audience was actually incredibly straight-forward and simple. Everyone on stage was working to try to get everyone in the audience to believe in the horse all the way through. And everything that the puppeteers were doing was to refresh that invitation and to keep the horse alive.
But I was aware at that point, and subsequently talking to Adrian that his imagination was full of a wild variety of images and ideas. And actually, Basil Jones who works along side him also was full of questions about what puppetry actually is and what puppetry can be. Given that I wanted to work again with them on something else, it seemed interesting to work with the bits we hadn’t engaged with on War Horse. Now, I would never have done that if I hadn’t felt there was a match with any play that we might be doing at Bristol.
There’s a theatre director whose early work in London inspired me, a guy called Von Henning, who now works in Germany. He said that in all his shows he was trying to give the impression as when you are in a railway station and you are on a train and a train begins to move, and you don’t know whether the other train is moving or you are. You know that feeling…[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]How did this idea inform your understanding of Shakespeare’s play?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Well, of course the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the imagination and how transformative it is. And it’s about changes of shape and changes of mind, and challenges to the idea of a subject in continuity. But, also, it seems to me, it’s about the feeling when you don’t know whether you are awake or asleep, which is a bit like the feeling when you are in a railway station and you don’t know whether it’s you or the other train moving. It’s the feeling that you have to reset your parameters. And that particular thing is partly why an array of puppetry languages and the movement between them seemed appropriate to the play. It not only allows us to represent things in unusual ways, but it also allows us to map what it feels like when you are reading something in one way and then suddenly find yourself reading it in another way.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””] Exactly. I read that this was a play Handspring Company had done before, experimenting with puppets. Was this production a total reinvention or did Adrian and Basil pull some strands and elements through to this new production? Did they have that conversation with you?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Before we actually finished making War Horse, Adrian and Basil had talked to me about their production that had been done in South Africa in the 1980’s and had shown me some designs, which were very beautiful. And they had said they loved the play. But then, when we came to start working on this version, we had a chat and asked ourselves are we going to try to catch up with the memories of those images from the 1980’s or shall we try to work from the ground up and see what we find anew in the text and in the workshop. And the latter is what we ended up doing. I am sure the experience of working on the play informed their process. But actually, the kinds of things that Adrian came up with, the images, are all new.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]You actually were a kind of groupie for some of Adrian’s and Basil’s earlier productions, and I think one of them said about you that you had fallen in love with a hyena in one production.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, that’s true.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””] It made me think that yes, in the inventiveness of the puppetry, the balance had changed somewhat in the play, and what I came away with were those images, the fairies perhaps in particular, and the original treatment of Puck’s character. It was a way into the play where the special nature of fairies, including their dangerous element, seemed to completely take over.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, you’re right. I actually don’t know how they work. But those fairies, Titania’s group of fairies –[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]The “crew” –[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, call them the crew. Adrian designed them, but when he turned up at the start of rehearsal, although he had designed these figures in response to the play, he didn’t know which role they were going to play. One of them ended up playing the Indian boy, because he seemed to be less, well, unstable. And, in fact, Moth emerged during rehearsal.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]So did that then come from Adrian or the actor?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]It was a complete collaboration. The actor who played Moth in the first workshop played the role with no costume at all, just by constantly walking into things and falling over. Sadly, we’ve had to cut most of that. And then, I can’t remember when the flyswatters came in, but the fencing helmet came from Vicki Mortimer, the designer, which she found sitting in the shop on the way to a rehearsal because it seemed to be the same materials as the flyswatters. They seemed to belong together. That’s the pleasure of working in a devising process with a creative team of the quality we had on this. You do, all of you, sort of go mad and have this shared framework of reference, which means that instinctively members of the creative team know what’s right for the show. The collaboration then can happen very quickly.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]I learned that with the exception of one, the actor David Emmings, none of the actors had ever done puppetry before. How did everyone discover this new talent?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]So much becomes a composite. The fairy that suckles and vomits and the Scary Fairy are from some bits of Adrian’s imagination, and the objects themselves feel like things left over from some fairground. So the actors tried things out. But then the Scary Fairy is based on a Japanese design. All the fairies connect at some kind of Freudian level with the actors and then the audience. That’s one of the different “magics” of puppetry. Aside from telling the story, the puppets get to hold up a very, very strange mirror to nature, but a mirror nonetheless.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Can you describe an element that you as a director brought in and was morphed in the collaborative process?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]The Puck idea is interesting. We had a week of puppetry training at the start of rehearsal. And on the first or second day, Basil and Adrian did an exercise based on Bunraku puppetry. They made figures out of paper and put the whole company in teams of three. In the Bunraku discipline, one puppeteer is on the feet, one is on the head and right hand, and the other is on the legs and left hand, and that is how three people manipulate the puppet. And so I was looking at that and seeing the company learning to do it. And I asked Adrian, “Do you think you can do a Bunraku style if the pieces weren’t physically connected?”
In Buraku the limbs are connected therefore with some kind of palpable tension between them. And he said, “I don’t know.” And we agreed we’d try it. So, we had a bunch of tools and everyone got a tool and, in groups, again the actors tried to bring to life a figure. Up to that point, the plan for Puck had been entirely different, although the plan had included a shape-changing element with more than one puppeteer. But because of what was happening our Puck, which we’d started to call “Tool Man” and was so good at changing shape, Puck was born. Incidentally, as we keep working on the show, we will keep finding new shapes for Puck to take. I said to the actors at Spoleto, “I think we need to work on a hummingbird.” And they said, “Oh can’t we stop working on this!” But anyway… they probably will come up with a hummingbird at some point.
Puck felt like a very exciting language to explore. Even in the rehearsal room, we were asking ourselves, “Is this too hard to read?” But it isn’t hard to read for an audience when Puck arrives. The anchor point is the same in Spoleto as it was in Bristol, and it’s when Puck turns into a little dog. Oberon has just had his argument with Titania, that’s when perhaps parts of the audience that hasn’t yet accepted him tend to accept him.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, I remember distinctly that moment. It’s the “snout” sniffing but it’s also that the animal is anchored in our imaginations by the constancy of the hammer- handle “tail” wagging. It reminds me of certain modern painters and sculptors who experimented with stripping away everything to its barest line that would still be recognized as something real from our shared experience.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Exactly, and we keep pushing that. There’s the bit when Puck turns into a snail. And there are various other things the actors turn Puck into. It’s almost whatever they come up with if it’s clear and vivid, we can have in the show. The actors pass on the raw materials to another group of actors who create something new collaboratively from their imaginations because they are working together in an extremely focused way. The discipline and lack of vanity that is required by these actors – for instance, to hold and animate a plank whenever you are out of (a named) character, you immediately become part of a constantly moving scenographic puppetry. It’s an absolutely dream company.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Your actor Emmings also spoke about the generosity that was learned by being in this collaborative venture and about the focus that was required. I think of the young man who played Demetrius, whose intent on his puppet made his character as lover immediately memorable –[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Kyle …[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, Kyle Lima. Well, all four lovers all did, is seemed through relationship first through their “dolls” then through their bodies. Kyle, in particular, found a way to communicate so that all of us in the audience could slow down and accept his Demetrius with a fully emotional life. What else would you say you saw the actors learn through this process?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Well, first I am delighted that you mention Kyle because he had never done puppetry at all before this production. And “the lover puppets,” as we call them, are technically very, very difficult. And there was a moment in workshop when Kyle completely understood it after a session with Basil Jones. After that, the others all tease him because he is so good.
I guess it’s for the actors to say what they learn or not, but there’s a process of training in the rehearsal room which is entirely about listening. It’s about developing an instinctive feel about ensemble. And that involves, at a technical level, working the periphery of your vision, as if you were doing a physical workout by taking your attention to the very edges of what you can see. It’s very hard work to wake up those bits of your perception that we tend to neglect. And also, once you’ve done that, it involves developing a kind of contact within the group, that Temple Grandin would say that that is connecting with the mammal part of our brains, which is the part of the brain that allows a herd of bison to charge coherently. And we’ve all got it, we’re mammals. And I believe that the development of that kind of awareness is incredibly useful for any ensemble doing any play. But we’ve discovered and evolved it by doing this sort of work, which you can’t manage without it when working with puppets. You can’t remember, for instance, where your plank has to go in isolation of others. You always need to be playing the contact with the group.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]I don’t know how much of a rep company you have at Bristol, but I imagine that these actors will indeed carry this over in anything else you would conceive with them.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]We don’t have a rep company in Bristol. The theatre is the oldest working theatre in Britain, and it was the first subsidized theatre outside of London. But even so, it got in trouble earlier this century, and it closed for a bit. So we still feel we are a new company. We only got going in 2009, and we still are working out how to run the theatre and how to set ourselves up. We have a huge opportunity really to be doing it, as it were, from scratch. But I have been looking for ways to draw on the strengths of the old rep system. And, in fact, in Charleston, I was talking to this company, that I want to do one or two other shows if I can with exactly the same people. I am intrigued, like you, to see where they might take this connection that they have, if we were to do something entirely different, something without puppets.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Bravo. I think that in abandoning the rep company as so many companies have done on this side of the ocean too, something both of depth and trust is lost, not only in the compact amongst performers, but between company and audience.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]I think that’s true.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]But let me ask you one or two more questions about this production. One of the things I found challenging is, if the puppet was too far away from the actor, playing in a scene with an actor, I would at times, lose some of the actor, his or her communication, because I couldn’t let go of the puppet.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]We talked in Charleston about that aspect of puppetry, where the audience can get more invested in a puppet, such as the big horse in War Horse, than in something live. I said it was because of your imagination that actually created its reality. But can you remember which actor? Which moment?[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Well, let’s say in an early scene Theseus is talking on one side of the stage, and Hermia, as a lover puppet, is kneeling across the stage on a little platform. And the actor playing Theseus, David Ricardo Pearce was a fine actor, but Hermia-Puppet had the upper hand theatrically. It was like putting a dog on the stage, I wanted to watch the dog. Did you find staging live with puppet at times challenging? [/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, well in this production, there is a series of quite extreme experiments. The Puck experiment is one; using parts of the carved objects to represent Titania and Oberon is another; using the planks is another; and obviously the Bottom character is another. Then the fairy puppets arrive in a language all their own.
But the way the lovers have and relate to their puppets is another. I couldn’t predict before the show opened because in this kind of work, where what goes on stage is avowedly incomplete, you have to respect the audience’s creative response to it. You simply can’t predict which of those experiments are going to work best – or not going to work for at least some portion of the audience. There is no doubt that the most challenging one in both Bristol and the States is the group making up “the lover puppets” and that double identity for the lovers. In fact, I have tweaked that bit from when the show first opened.
And of course there are big benefits as well. There is something extraordinary for instance – God bless him when David Emmings, in the Spoleto talk, did that little improvised demonstration with the bottle.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, you gave to him a plastic water bottle and the challenge to make it come alive. And in a matter of seconds we saw the water bottle breathe, look around, stand, and begin to explore its world and us.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]It goes back to the change of nature in the objects. In the play, there is something that happens when Lysander and Hermia go to sleep, and they start performing as actors through their puppets. The audience is enjoying the proximity of the puppets, and then the two people on stage start looking at each other as actors, and then Hermia gives her puppet – as an object – to Lysander.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””] I took that to mean as lovers they were “changing faces,” switching their alter egos as they took each other in at a deeper level in the woods.[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””] I am not sure I designed a literal meaning. But most nights there is indeed a frisson in that moment. Because the audience have gone from reading the puppet as alive and instinctively understand that one puppet is feeling that another puppet is too close to it, to then seeing the puppeteer as alive and seeing the puppet as a precious object, which they know is precious because the characters on some level know and respect these puppets as somehow alive. At least that was my reading of that. So there are little moments like that which are quite rich.
But, to speak to what you were finding, in a scene where you have a human interacting with a puppet it is tough. It’s because of the way your brain works in the audience, and you are given Brechtian prompts to not suspend your disbelief but actually disbelieve. Again, different audience members may overcome it at different points in that first scene. But it is a tougher theatrical language, so the work we did on it was to simplify the scene from its more complicated form when we first devised it and opened it in Bristol. The audience that would stay with it would be rewarded more to start with, but there was some sort of platform for variations of that language as the show progresses. One of the points for me in the collaboration with artists that I have been lucky enough to collaborate with in this show is that I can’t predict A) what they’re going to come up with and B) if one allows the production to be experimental what the audience will make of it.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]So what would you advise others who might wish to explore similar territory with a mixed production of live actors and puppetry?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]To absolutely back your instincts. If you see something that instinctively you can’t make the imaginative leap, then don’t do it. Vary the language until you find something that you want to explore.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]The possibilities you have given us are so much to think about. One last topic – which it would be impossible to overlook in your production – is would you speak about your depiction of the character Bottom. Was the contraption he rode in on built as part of Adrian’s and Basil’s original conception, or was it again found in collaboration during rehearsal?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Well, that contraption is a serious bit of “kit.” It was an idea that I put to Adrian when we started talking about the show. And then he started sketching out how he could design a puppet that was part human and part machine. In fact, it was delayed in the shipping, but it arrived soon after we started rehearsals.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]So, would you admit that this idea is your Scary Fairy coming out?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]That’s right, yeah. And Miltos is still working on that role. It goes back to where we started out, about the experience of not knowing if it’s your train or the other one that’s moving. When Miltos does that scene as well as he can, the audience sees him then sees a donkey. And if his donkey ears are at their best and most expressive, the audience sees double, as it were, the animal and him. It keeps switching.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Exactly. A fifteen year-old sitting in front of me was with her mother, who was getting quite nervous during Bottom’s transformation, but the girl piped up and saw a donkey. And later, when questioned by mum, she piped up with, “That Bottom was a lovely donkey.”[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Oh, that’s lovely, I shall tell the actor that. And that’s it. She had created the donkey. That’s what she did with her imagination. That’s the magic that’s in the play for me. She’s now my favorite audience member, whoever that little girl is.[/wpcol_1half_end]
[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Is this lovely piece of magic and imagination going to go anywhere else?[/wpcol_1half] [wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Yes, it’s going to New Haven directly after Spoleto and then it has a rest. Then it plays in London. But it returns to America to play in Washington at the Kennedy Center on its tour next year.[/wpcol_1half_end]
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The Bristol Old Vic/Handspring Puppet production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be performed during The Kennedy Center’s International Theatre Festival which takes place March 10 – 30, 2014.
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