An Interview with Louis de Bernierès & Mick Wood

Louis: I've always been interested in the idea of personification. What would things say if they could think and speak. A lot of writing is about what ifs. Every object in the world has a story. It's just that the object is usually voiceless. You have to work it out for yourself. Archaeologists do this all the time.

So, this was, I suppose, amateur archaeology. There is a kind of mediumship who picks up an object and uncovers its story. I often think that being a writer is a kind of mediumship where things come through you rather than from you. If I pick up an object and get a sense of its history, it's almost as if it's being suggested to me rather than being invented by me. But I don't know what the truth is. I don't care what the truth is as long as I get a good bit of work out of it.

Louis: An antique store was nominated by somebody called Zerlina Mastin, and we met up there, and she sat in the bar drinking wine whilst I went from the top storey to the bottom. The majority of the objects were far too expensive, but I came on one floor quite lower down. They were cheaper and junkier, which is what I really like. And so that was the floor from which I chose everything. The

speckled ashtray, well, my father had one. I’d also inherited two lovely pieces of Bohemian crystal from my great grandparents, and the red glasses remind me of them. They'll be in the dining room, those glasses, in the posh glasses cabinet. Objects do speak to you. Sometimes they even call to you. I had a bizarre experience once. I suddenly thought there's a really nice old fashioned clarinet in a shop in Lewis, Sussex. I drove down from London convinced that there was going to be a clarinet in that shop. There actually was and I’ve still got it. I imagine it's because of your family history. This reminds me of so and so etc.

Louis: The earrings came through first because they're the sort of thing that one used to see in the Lanes in Brighton. The whole story of them being bought in the Lanes in Brighton came to me straight away. From then on it was a question of working out how one thing might link with another until it looped back to the earrings and you formed a circle.

Louis: It's very hard to write a poem to order. You can write a verse to order. Poems just don't turn up when you want them to. The other writers got a particular sense of feeling from the antique that they had. The poems were all unexpected because they went with their own vision rather than what I had set out in advance. It turned out to be a wonderful piece of theatre, but it wasn't what I expected.

Louis: The challenge is conjuring something up out of nothing where there is no connection. That's really a magic trick. I don't actually know how it's done. You'll get the links if you're just going for a walk or you're looking at the vegetables in the supermarket. You can't make them come on purpose, but they all did occur to me in the end.

Louis: I see no reason why it shouldn't be restaged. Why individual bits shouldn't be rewritten or rejigged. That's the common lot of any piece of drama. To be constantly reworked.

Louis: What I learned was that they didn't like my storyline. What was interesting for me was that I once saw a play called La Ronde, which is about lovers. About how one lover connects to another lover until it goes full circle. It was a very remarkable piece of work and I've always thought it would be wonderful to do something vaguely like that, so this was my chance.

Louis: Yes, of course I would. It's nice to do things you wouldn't have thought up yourself. Because you can feel that you've run out of ideas or you haven't got any inspiration and suddenly somebody else comes along with something and off you go.

Louis: You could have a violinist coming on wearing the Nefertiti earrings. That could connect to something else. Then a painter. Taking it around the arts. Finally getting back to the silversmith.

Mick: Once the decision was made to make it a one person show, I felt I had to put on my storyteller hat. I’ve done a bit of that over the years, under the name James Peacock, and it was important for the cohesion of the piece that we employed storytelling techniques to bring a narrative out of what could all too easily become a straight poetry reading. That meant shifting between characters, developing bits of unexpected business, tweaking linking bits of narrative so that the audience stayed with us for the duration, and, above all, finding an overarching character to tell the story, someone that the audience could engage with emotionally.

Mick: Well, as I said, we summoned up James, my storytelling alter-ego! So I guess I’m going to sound like I’ve got some kind of split personality for the duration of this interview! It’s important, though, to draw that distinction between me as a producer and me as a performer. I’m not the most technically gifted of performers. I can act, but I’ve a very narrow repertoire of accents and vocal range, for example. I knew that I was going to have to find a way of framing everything that would allow me to find different voices for the objects, but that would not require me to be utterly convincing as any of them.

Mick: This is what we were after: One character telling one story, who sometimes becomes ‘possessed’ by an object, and sometimes invites the audience to eavesdrop on an object’s ‘thoughts’. A character who, at the same time, by gestures and exclamations, hints at a very personal subtextual narrative running beneath the main story - another way of engaging the audience, by giving them a bit of a puzzle to solve.

Mick: The framing device we came up with for the piece - a rather depressed and disappointed old antique dealer who, while unpacking a box of antiques from a house clearance, finds objects that remind him of his past - meant that I could relax a bit over the different voices. We made the character into someone who likes a drink, who is playing around himself with the voices in his increasingly inebriated state. The audience plays with you, I think, in those circumstances, if you get it right! So the only character that needed to be totally convincing was the antique dealer. It was all very meta.

Mick: No more than other scripts, once you’ve worked out, with the director, how you’re going to do it. I did find it, though, incredibly difficult to learn. Probably because there’s not the logical progression you get in a straight piece of narrative or in dialogue. Very difficult to improvise the poetry if I went wrong. Which I did, a few times. There were some very long pregnant pauses, but I think on the whole we got away with it.

Mick: It depends how closely involved they are in the way the piece has been conceived and produced. As a co-producer and performer I was very lucky to be involved from the beginning, so I could shape the piece to suit James’ strengths. To be honest, from an actors’ point of view, I don’t think the challenges in this kind of work are that different to a lot of the more experimental plays and devised pieces I’ve worked on over the years. If you don’t mind me turning the question on its head slightly - I’d encourage producers, directors and writers to involve performers in the process as early as possible, and profit from their unique skills - ‘what’s my motivation,’ might have become a rather derogatory, ‘luvvy’-bashing cliche, but it is what it’s all about for actors, and a very useful way of approaching any creative work. We all know how difficult that can be these days, though, given all the financial and time restraints on the performing arts.

Louis: It was initially a panic. But there is something quite bracing about deadlines. They actually force you to work. There's something about the sheer desperation that brings inspiration. With some things I do like a deadline, but mostly not. I've got an internal creative clock. It's very elastic, so I can go for weeks without doing anything particularly creative, literary-wise. Or musically. I've been doing other things, like mending a clock. I'm creative all the time. But I'm not always writing. I find the writing comes in waves. At the moment I've got a wave of poetry revision. And next week it could well be back to my novel. I don't really need or even try to control what happens in writing. Until somebody comes along and says, I've only got two weeks. I'm about to rewrite the Nefertiti poem. Do a bit more tinkering. It will be part of my next poetry collection. In that sense, you've done me a favour, because it's given me a nice fat wodge to go to my next collection.

Mick: The limited rehearsal was fine - and really good fun. I would have liked more time to learn the lines though!

Louis: It’s the little burst of energy you get from working with other people. That’s always very nice. That common sense of purpose. Gets you out of your own little world. A film is a different kind of horse. You're dealing with literally hundreds of people, but with an actor, a talented actor who's got their own way of doing things, you're nearly always going to get a nice surprise because it comes out better than you expected or just really interestingly different from what you expected. It’s filtered through somebody else's mind.

Mick: For James - the bar afterwards. Always the bar afterwards. Unless it’s been a complete disaster. Everyone seemed happy with it though. For me - working on bringing out the subtext and shaping the overall narrative, in that tiny rehearsal room at The Cockpit.

Louis: Just the little things that people say on the way out. It's about giving people a meaningful experience, which they might have forgotten in a month, but it still would have meant something.

Mick: I’d like to think of them seeking out the individual poems in the piece and playing around with them in their own heads - seeing if they can make something else of them. I like to think of performing arts audiences (or any art audiences, come to that) as part of the process, not just passive lookers-on, and always hope they’ll feel moved to take something from a piece and re- use/re-imagine it in unexpected ways. I think I’ve just begged that question, haven’t I?

Louis: I think it's always been there. Possibly even in Shakespeare's time, plays were more or less improvised by the actors and knocked into shape by the playwright. It happens a lot in theatre now, where the playwright would attend rehearsals and do rewrites accordingly. In film sets, the scriptwriter is there at all times, constantly having to rewrite the scenes. In the sense that that has always been the past, there's no reason why it shouldn't continue to be the future. I think it's normal. When I'm doing gigs, I often do some experimental changes in my own songs. It's not always a good idea, but sometimes it works. You suddenly think of a new way of doing it, like going really quiet or suddenly speeding up or slowing down. All these things occur to you when you're performing. You just go with them. Of course, it doesn't always work, but often it does.

Mick: I don’t really see it as a linear thing, as if we’re working to create something new or original. Our projects are just drops in the ocean of amazing stuff that’s going on out there, with all kinds of motivations behind it. After all, there really isn’t anything new about poetry and theatre as bedfellows, or what we now call interdisciplinary work. My favourite play, The Tempest, is how many hundreds of years old now? and it really has got it all - music, dance, a masque, clowning, tragedy, magic and some of the greatest poetry in the English language. I do see younger and emerging artists increasingly working much more collaboratively. There’s a big rise in artists’ collectives, co-ops and not for profit arts organisations, and it’s just nice to feel like we’re a part of that move towards a more generous, sharing culture in the arts.