When you were a child you may have owned a book that had numbered dots on each page. You drew a line from the first dot to the second. Then you connected this second dot to a third dot… and so on… by connecting all the dots you made your picture.
With these books most of the fun came halfway through when you guessed what the picture was going to be.
So what is the picture of Imploding Fictions and my new show ‘This Is Your Government Speaking’ going to be?
In the theatre, a playwright filters their ideas through words down onto a page. Then it goes from the page to the performer, before performer presents the show to the audience. This shifting of the material through one model to another does invest extraordinary energy into the work, but leaves the original act of creation somewhat removed… the playwright, while writing, is always trying to second guess what effect they will have on the audience by the end of the process.
So this is our first dot – to make a show whose structure is less contrived than anything we’ve attempted before. A show created in the moment, directly in front of the audience.
This gives us our second dot – building the show on the accepted principles of stand-up comedy. It is a short cut to winning an audience’s trust because they have expectations of improvisation, of creation in the here and now. And we can have lots of fun (in the fashion of Simon Munnery, Stewart Lee, Daniel Kitson) inverting the etiquette of what is normal, assumed.
The third dot? Is a goodbye to all the words I’ve written over the last ten years. I feel it is time to cultivate a fresh movement in my work, re-fresh how I express myself using my chosen platform of the theatre… but it is necessary to say goodbye first…
And the other dots?
I adore the idealistic philosophies of the delicate rogues, the scuffle monkeys and the trench clowns of this world… their mix of anarchism and absurdity, Foolishness and joy. Their influence is running through this show.
The wonderful composer Sarah Kershaw (of The Irrepressibles fame) will write the music… when an artist like Sarah agrees to craft you something, you stand back and give her the space to thrill you.
Summer, of course… the show debuts on July 2nd, a perfect time of year for sitting outside with a glass of wine talking to friends. Not sitting in a dark room, passively, watching a show. But a show we have, and as a thank you to you for coming to see it, and giving up that drinking outside in the sunshine time, we will bring some of the summer inside.
These then are the dots we’ve been connecting while making ‘This Is Your Government Speaking’. And it’s enormous fun seeing, halfway through, what it is to become.
We hope you can join us for its debut July 2nd, at Studio 101…
- Darren Lerigo
‘This Is Your Government Speaking’
Directed by Philip Thorne & Oystein Ulsberg Brager
Music composed by Sarah Kershaw
Written and performed by Darren Lerigo
“Treat your politicians like you’d treat your children. Don’t let them get away with murder.” The award-winning team of Imploding Fictions and Darren Lerigo bring you absurd jokes, contrived randomness and a message from the Gods in ‘This Is Your Government Speaking’, a new work – part theatre, part stand-up comedy – which asks what the difference is between truth and belief…
Performed at: Studio 101, Kingston College Kingston Hall Road, Kingston KT1 2AQ
Date and times: July 2nd 2011, at 5 pm and 8 pm.
Tickets:
Phone – 020 8547 5417
Online – click here
In Person – Tourist Information Centre, The Market House, Market Place, Kingston KT1 1JS