Ash: Wow. There’s so much to unpack. I’m sitting here thinking you could be talking about the US except for the fact that many of us who are in theatre and not in the big regional theatres, who also are struggling now, or the commercial theatre, I wouldn’t even know how creating a program like that would be possible at this point with funding. Everything’s just been so slashed. But it’s inspiring to hear and its, “Oh wow, one day we could get to something like that.” But there’s so much. You touched on the lack of third spaces, right? I teach college, and this is something that all my students talk about. It’s too expensive to go out, so we don’t socialize. We only socialize through our phones. We can only really socialize through the internet because there’s no space, especially for teenagers. There’s no space for high schoolers to go where you don’t have to spend a lot of money. So the theatre for young people in the arts, the theatre becomes that space, that free space. When we used to have space, and this is, I know I’m in New York and I’m like, “Oh, we used to have spaces.” A lot of the downtown spaces have been closed, too, and they’ve become pharmacies and banks.
Peter: Do you know we are the other state that’s doing exactly the same?
Ash: Yeah. But your verbatim piece with migrants, what was your process for developing that? Who’s performing it? And you said it’s on tour right now?
Peter: It’s just finished. Yeah, last week. Yeah. That’s interesting because we got another American artist who came to Ireland with her family, Emily Ditkovski, and she recently arrived and she’s very passionate about verbatim theatre. We met accidentally at a forum, a theatre forum conference, a youth theatre conference. I asked somebody with a beautiful scarf and glasses and an interesting walk if she knew where the venue was, and she said, “Yeah, I’m going there now.” We walked together and we started to talk, and I made the keynote address and she was like, “Oh my god, I didn’t know it was you.” And then we adopted her. It became part of our theatremaking family, and she brought with her the tools to do a very strong verbatim piece and research it. And we already had, as I said, those Arab-speaking theatremakers with us who were able to talk to the residents of the—we call them reception centers, but they’re basically places where we hold people who are waiting for their processes to be appealed asylum to be decided.
And so she read through the interviews that our team made with the refugees and asylum seekers, and then made a piece of theatre performed by, in some cases some former asylum seekers, but mostly all migrants with one or two parts performed by Irish people who were performing the local community’s reaction. We just didn’t do the stories of the migrants. It was also how people helped them and what kind of policies they wanted to see enacted, and then how people were fearful of them and what they thought would happen if there were too many coming in. But afterwards, the most important thing after the hourlong show was a post-show discussion, which Emily also curated. And each town we went to, she contacted local people who were active in integration and some people maybe also who had concerns about it, and there was a panel discussion with them and the audience were invited to ask questions. But the focus, which I thought was very nice, was on how can we use whatever works to help integration happen in your community and share some stories from other communities that we visited. So, it wasn’t about a place where you could air your grievances or let loose or anything like that. It was more a constructive space after each show. It was very nice. So that’s how we made it. Emily did that over the course of a year and a half and then toured it.
Ash: Are audiences receptive to theatre as a space for community-based discussions? How will we fix this? How will we change this? What are productive ways of moving forward? Is the theatre a good forum for that in Ireland? Do people show up?
Peter: Yeah, so there’s two things that come up from that. One of them ties back into what we were talking about, with regard to the young people in third space and social skills. So just briefly talk about that for a second. Young people in particular find it very addictive, the process of theatremaking, because they realize it is one of the very, very few spaces where they actually learn now how to be social. They don’t have that opportunity, as you said, anymore a lot. They don’t have it a lot. And they don’t really get it in team sports, places like that. They do to an extent, but not hugely. But in theatre and in some other group art forms, they really do have to depend on having a good set of social skills in order to produce the art. So a by-product is that they develop it in themselves and of course they’re able to be able to better negotiate the world and have resilience and all of that as a result.
So they tend to come to our shows quite a lot because they’re part of the making process. And the second group who come in the different places we perform are usually those who already know the topic and who are interested in this sector in that area or the theme. And they go as is where to get a bit of nutrition and to fuel their activism and to be reminded about the importance of the work that they’re doing. It’s a little bit of a brainwash in the term, literally washing your brain, clearing out some of the doubts, and they’re great.
So you have a lot of people who are working in the field of anti-racism, community development, and community integration who attend the shows. It’s not necessarily the case that these shows are going to change the minds of the people who are against it. It’s more because they probably won’t turn up, they’ll just raise their eyes to heaven and, “Yet another show with the voices of refugees. Go away from me.” But really the people who come are the ones who want to plug into a national energy that’s carrying out the same kind of work that they’re doing or do something that revitalizes them or connects them back. And they go into the community that they’re from and they’re more energized and they carry out the work.
Ash: That’s what theatre should be doing. Anytime I see your work, I’m always like, “Oh my gosh, look at what’s possible. Yes.” Like, it’s very inspiring. It’s very exciting. And I am curious, this is a podcast that focuses on nonfiction and documentary work. You talked about the verbatim theatre piece. You’ve talked about the intergenerational theatre piece. What are some other nonfiction aspects that you’ve brought into your work over the years and how has it changed? How have those techniques changed for you, especially as we think about ethics and consent? How has your process changed over the years?
Peter: Yeah, good question because they definitely have changed, and if you’re into theatremaking as you are responding to and very sensitive to what’s happening in society, so you know that people’s data and people’s identity concerns that have been raised in the last fifteen years, and they wouldn’t have been there for us twenty years ago really to the same extent. So of course we’re responding to that, and that feeds into what I teach. So I have to make some exercises that work with students and show them the difference between having an interview like we’re having now, something just between the two of us, and understanding these words in a global scale or going out in front of twenty people and hearing them coming back—those kind of differences—and encouraging people are giving stories to say, “This will be public. Here’s what it will sound like. This is what you will look like,” or whatever.
So you have all those options that you have to share with people, which is fine because I really think we base a lot of our ideology on Paulo Freire’sPedagogy of the Oppressed, that people want to name their space, they will sacrifice their identity to name what they want. It’s like putting your name, “Peter was here,” on the blackboard when the teacher goes out. You’re putting your identity in that space, not realizing you’re also implicating yourself as the person who broke the rules, that kind of thing. So it’s a little bit of that, but of course there are many other ways of doing that. So we anonymize, except for people who want their voices to be heard. I’m very influenced by other theatre making methodologies, by practitioners, especially. The person I admire most at the moment is Crystal Pite, who’s a choreographer and dance maker and theatremaker from Canada who works all over Europe and the world. She’s absolutely amazing.
And other people who use physical theatre and who use different ways of communicating information. So we mentioned earlier magic realism, and that’s what interests me most. In the eighties, I was a big fan of Gabriel García Márquez and other magic realist novelists. And over time I began to figure out how can we do this in theatre? So what appeals to me is form or structure. Is the form substantial enough, weighty enough to carry the theme or does it break down? And if so, can it break down in front of the audience, and wouldn’t that be something interesting to see? And that something else pushes up like an earthquake or a volcano through that form and replaces it. At an artistic level is one of the processes that I enjoy playing with, having seismic activity happen on the stage in front of the audience regarding form.
Obviously great people like Carol Churchill have been playing with that for a very long time where her play structure breaks down in front of you and something else happens because the topic of oppression or torture or excruciating exclusion is so heavy that the theatremaking form that it begins with cannot hold it. So that’s interesting. And then within that, I like to employ physical movement music and projected images as ways to complement what the words are saying. The information must be coming at the audience for me in three or four different ways, and very often really complicated information that the audience has to engage with at all four levels rather than what we might call sentimental information that is enforcing the same point through the music, the images, the action, and the words. That’s easy and tempting but doesn’t give the audience more than a pleasant, balmy wash in a way. So that’s what we play with around the structures and the way that we convey stuff to audiences.
Ash: It sounds very Brechtian. It sounds Brechtian in a way that there’s a bit of alienation in there and a way for audiences to kind of sit back and think about systems and systems in place as opposed to the sentiment, like the emotions and the catharsis.
Peter: Well, kind of. I know what you mean, and I can see how it might come across that way, but to be honest, emotion is central in there. And what we’re really thinking about is not giving the audience in a sense time to just think, but to have an aesthetic engagement like an anesthetic engagement where their senses are dulled completely like an anesthesia, and the aesthetic one has to liven them up so that they’re in the middle of a boxing match and it’s only afterwards that they can process it. That kind of way.
Ash: Yes.
Peter: So it’s more like that. Rather than that, you’re able to have time to reflect and think during the performance. You’re busy during the performance. So later you succeed that we do it with And Agamemnon Dead, which was only thirty-minute show, and it was with young people, four young people, about how these young males were very…they just couldn’t say to each other that they were going to miss each other when they emigrated. And very much based on the characters on stage, their stories, their realities, and it was each person performing what they felt about the other person, which was beautiful. But it was fictionalized in a way. We talk about nonfiction theatre, even though this was very truthful and very real, these four people had these issues. One of them was going to London, one of them was staying in Ireland, another one was going to leave and return to Italy, another one was just going away to university.
And they had these ideas about their own relationships that they staged as characters. While this was quite based on the truth, and in a sense documentary, it was them performing it in a way that didn’t feel like it was their stories. So universal stories, at least regional stories. In that sense, even the verbatim theatre that we do, it’s very hard to say that it is authentically nonfiction because the fact that we got hold of it, the fact that we shaped it, you know yourself, that we curated it, that we selected, edited, left things out, all of that is in a sense fictionalizing it, putting it on the stage. You know what I mean? But that’s a very common argument, I know. I tend to fall down on that side a bit because I find a lot more sometimes authenticity for young people in something as psychologically complex as Shakespeare, where they can really hang on to Hamlet and use his words, or Gertrude and her identity, to precisely articulate their truth and situation.
The very old-fashioned way of what theatre does in that kind of thing is often more useful, which is why we do a lot of Shakespeare, or if we don’t, we bring Shakespeare into the verbatim characters meander in. This is one of the ways that the form of the theatre plays with itself, Iago or somebody, Rodrigo, looking for—or Jessica in the Merchant of Venice, finding herself completely outcast from both societies and struggling to fit into this contemporary play. Anyway, so it’s that kind of playfulness and experimentation that we enjoy mixing the verbatim truth with the surreal and the rest of it. It’s a kind of a melting pot. It’s very exciting, but it hasn’t settled into a unique style yet.
The people who come are the ones who want to plug into a national energy that’s carrying out the same kind of work that they’re doing or do something that revitalizes them or connects them back.
Ash: That’s okay. It sounds like it’s responding to the world and the moment that sometimes things can’t settle, sometimes things have to remain porous in a way that they can respond and be present, which theatre can still do in this moment.
Peter: Yes, 100 percent. That’s exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. We’d like for just a very simple example, we changed our word outreach, which is what we used to talk about, the work that we do in the community—from Emily’s suggestion, actually, our American Irish playwright and theatremaker—to community response. And I thought, “This is great. That’s exactly what we’re doing. It changes all the time. The issues that the community have are the ones that are going to be reflected back through the theatre.” And I’m old enough to see several of the kind of issues change and develop, from LGBTQ identity to migrant rights to public spaces, which is a big one now, and emerging anti-capitalist feeling among young people, which is great.
Ash: Yes, we’re seeing that as well, especially from the younger generation. I think it’s there across the board, but I think at least in my experience, the younger generation is saying it out loud. I think there’s still a lot of hesitancy and this idea that in the US to be capitalist is to intrinsically be American, and that the kind of Usonian American, if you’re not capitalist, you’re not American.
Peter: For people and you’re not for jobs and not for the greater good, which is…
Ash: Absolutely. But that’s shifting, and with that, the systems have to shift, but I think we’re at a point right now where we’re trying to figure out what’s next. This is the end of the neoliberal model of theatre. What can we make next? And there are exciting discussions happening about that, about what could it look like in the future, but we might be a ways away from that.
Peter: But it’s great because New York where you are, and America still had the capacity to produce the sparks, the Camille Paglia of her day, the people who throw out the wonderfully insightful statement, the new idea that can energize everybody, so does Europe, but that’s the world we are working in. But we also know the other world in Africa and Asia where there are such interesting things happening that are kind of invisible to us, but that are coming from the anti-colonial perspective very often. And radically strange ideas like human rights is pointless because it’s all about an individual, but community rights is what we are talking about in India, that kind of thing, which is wonderful. And that’s our theatre, especially Theatre of the Oppressed. Jana Sanskriti in Northern India are a wonderful Theatre of the Oppressed organization, and they come up with a lot of stuff like this all the time, so that inspires us as well. It’s great, though, because globalization in a way has made it possible for us to see this happen on our laptops.
Ash: Yeah. I think about that, the work coming out of Palestine as well, some of the more recent work that connects the military industrial complex to the climate crisis. Thinking through that, because the climate crisis is also a big, one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue of our time. And there’s been a lot of theatrical responses, but specifically the ones that connect this war machine and capitalism to the climate crisis is imperative. It has to go beyond “reduce, reuse, recycle,” which was the slogan in my time. “Oh, just throw the litter away and it’s fine. Don’t look at the folks in their private jets. Don’t look at your tax dollars being spent on military and bombing and drones.”
Peter: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it keeps coming back to that idea of the public spaces as well and why there is no money to invest in it because they’re so busy investing in the war machine for the world to make people richer. One of the projects that we’re coming up with that we’re working on now, it’s reaching its, I suppose next year will be its peak, and it is working with people who are not just neurodivergent, but also people with extreme physical, I suppose, additional needs, and people who don’t, from different countries around Europe and bringing them together. It’s a slow process, but the point of the project is not to pander. You know what I mean by that? Not to pander using theatre to people here. That it’s not about holding hands and swaying and just feeling energy and that kind of stuff. It is about radical activism or acts in the theatre in the workshop, doing research at the level that everybody else would do research and to make performances about that with people who are both down syndrome, who have neurodivergence, who are in wheelchairs, who are blind, who have all sorts of additional needs and to not just pander to those needs, but to use them to step up into a more radical way of being in society. So that’s interesting.
Ash: Love that. My mother was paraplegic, and she lived in a bed for about the last ten years of her life. This wasn’t that long ago. But this was actually before the daily use of Zoom and video conferencing, and it was very strange to be a theatremaker in New York for the beginning of my career because my mother had never been able to see any of my work. It was just never accessible. Zoom and having these kind of different interfaces actually was the first time theatre became accessible to someone like her who lived in her bed. The technology’s done wonders in terms of making things accessible, but it’s also really important to be doing this work and to be including people in a meaningful way and not just a pandering like a pat on the head, “This is for you,” but should actually be inclusive.
Peter: Yeah, because there’s great stuff emerging from it about innovations, like you said, Zoom and others that originally became assistive technology or arrived as assistive and are social innovations that help people with more mobility around the outside space that everyone now uses contributes hugely to the capacity of everybody to get about and to communicate. So they’re coming up with new things now in the projects that we’re doing, to new ideas to see what can push further and that this might be a model to develop a society or resources in society at least.
Ash: Oh my gosh, that’s so exciting.
Before we wrap, do you have any stories or moments that have profoundly changed the way that you approach this work or the way that you’re moving forward as we’re moving forward in this cultural or political moment that we’re in?
Peter: I suppose there are many, but one of them is there’s a story of a young person who joined through school workshops that we do and came into our youth theatre and was always very smiley and bright and looked great and contributed a lot and did plays and was really good in workshops, and then signed up to do this play, which was about young people who were kind of facing their own mortality through cancer and various other terminal diseases. Not a happy play, but still it was an important one. And he found it really difficult to be in it, and he was playing the main character, and we couldn’t find a way to help him about it until very close to the performance. No, actually, it was after. He just kept struggling all the way. And eventually through the performance, the audience responded to the play and it was great, and it won all sorts of awards at the time, and he changed and I thought, “Oh, it’s because it was a successful play.”
Later as part of my research, I was interviewing him when he was an adult, and he was reflecting back on this time and he said, “You know what was happening with me was that I was really good at hiding what I was feeling. So whenever there were adults around, I put on the smiling happy face and convinced everyone I was fine, but I had actually planned the date of my death and I was going to take my own life die by suicide, and I was very serious about it, and I had it all planned. And it was to be five days after our show, because I actually didn’t want to let people down.” There’s all this kind of strange value system going on there. He found the play so difficult because it articulated many of the feelings he was having, and he couldn’t believe that a character in a play was saying more or less what he was secretly feeling, and he couldn’t commit himself to going down that road because he thought it was not worthy of being given public speech, of being said aloud.
So the first night of the show came and the audience were so stunned, and they applauded so much and fed back to them afterwards that this was an amazing thing that they saw. And he said to me as an adult later that he was completely stunned by that and that he said that if they felt that this character, who secretly represented me, was being applauded and being held up and appreciated and heard, that then he perhaps was also worthy of some level of appreciation from somebody. And as the nights went on, it got better and so did he. He began to grow in this conviction, and his death date came and went because he thought this had changed his perspective, not 100 percent, but enough to allow him to grow into another perspective as the years went on, or two years went on. It’s not that long ago. It’s only fifteen years ago. So this story is still there, and this person is an amazing artist now with a completely different viewpoint, but I always think of that as something that’s about the appreciation of an audience of the connection and the conversation between both. Because if we’d stopped and not bothered much more with the play or canceled it, he would’ve learned more about his inner world, but it wouldn’t have changed his actions so much. It was what the audience did. They didn’t know they were doing it. That changed him. You get me?
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