Interview with Michael Fry
Michael Fry is the Deputy Director of East 15, University of Essex. He has worked as director and writer across the country including Liverpool Everyman, Nottingham Playhouse, the Young Vic and the Lyric Hammersmith. His adaptations of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma and The Great Gatsby have been performed throughout England and America.
Prior to East 15, he was Senior Lecturer in theatre at Coventry University and was Co-Artistic Director of NOT The National Theatre, for whom he directed Simon Gray’s Japes and April de Angelis’ Wild East.
Michael Fry’s chapter on Complicite in British Theatre Companies (1980 – 1994) focuses on the first fifteen years of the company.
Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications
- Social, cultural, political and historical context
- Influence
- Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
- Theatrical style
PC: How did the training with Lecoq influence their work?
MF: Simon articulates that Lecoq was the biggest influence on Complicite in its initial years. Lecoq’s ideas on playfulness – le jeu – were very influential. Lecoq really forced his students to be spontaneous, he put them on the spot. Lecoq wouldn’t have said “be funny” but when they were spontaneous and forcing an audience to watch them they tended to go for comedy rather than pathos. Students that were contemporaries of Simon and Marcello say they were always the two that you watched at Lecoq because they were the funniest. I think they learnt their mutual sense of humour through Lecoq. Simon was a stand up but his performance level through Lecoq became more subtle and mature and much more reliant on the body than a stand up is.
PC: Why did they choose to base themselves in Britain after training in Paris?
MF: Probably because Simon and Annabel had connections here and they thought they would start to get money from the Arts Council. None of them were from France. Maybe inside they knew that their work was going to be satirising the British and therefore they needed to begin it in Britain. The British have the ability to laugh at themselves and enjoy being satirised. And I think they got that.
PC: In those early days do you think there was a drive and a need to be popular as that would allow them to continue making work?
MF: I don’t think so. Accessible maybe. I don’t think that they were consciously driven and ambitious enough to know what their endgame was. They are the company that least panders to what they think the audience wants to see or what the Arts Council wants to hear. Of all the companies they are not the least bit interested in doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
PC: How do Complicite find inspiration for their work then?
MF: Now in the last fifteen years or so I think it comes from Simon’s intellect and his huge and eclectic reading and huge and eclectic social circle. A lot of the ideas that he bases the material on comes from an idea suggested by a friend of his: You should read that – you should have a look at that. In the first fifteen years again it was usually Simon who had the inspiration but I think it was slightly less intellectual as such and more instinctive so the second show was responding to the death of his father.
PC: Did their early work have a distinctive style?
MF: All their applications to the Arts Council describe themselves as a ‘physical theatre group’ even at times ‘a mime group’. Their applications for the Arts Council were all about being like Trestle. You don’t see that same physicality in the productions today. They are much more intellectually driven than focused on physicality. Maybe because there are so many physical theatre companies and it can’t be taken any further.
PC: Would you describe their style as distinctiveness then? They set out to be different?
MF: I don’t think self-consciously. Simon is not self-consciously trying to be different and find the next thing. It is just how it works.
Summary
- Lecoq’s ideas on playfulness – le jeu – were very influential for Complicite
- Simon was a stand up but his performance level through Lecoq became more subtle and mature and much more reliant on the body than a stand up is.
- They wanted to satirise Thatcher’s Britain and the British have the ability to laugh at themselves and enjoy being satirised.
- They are the company that least panders to what they think the audience wants to see or what the Arts Council wants to hear.
- The work comes from Simon’s intellect and his huge and eclectic reading and huge and eclectic social circle.
