With Twelfth Night she’s promising another vigorously contemporary production
Posted in General on 08. Oct, 2010
With Twelfth Night, she’s promising another vigorously contemporary production. “I want to cast it with characters that we see and know.” She’s planning to set the production in “an exotic hot country, as if all the characters have been displaced from their own land”.Her starting point, she says, “was the theme of loneliness and abandonment. Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ became the song that summed up the emotions within the piece: the yearning for love, the romance of unrequited love. It led me to look at people who are abandoned in hotels, indulging and massaging their feelings of desire and yearning.” Which is something we all feel, she contends “We’ve all got that sense of being separated in our lives.
And we’re looking for something that could make us whole.”Bailey talks excitedly about the (still secret) design of the piece, which should make Illyria feel more irresistibly coastal than any previous production. Close collaboration with designers – and indeed the whole creative team – is a source of strength, she says “Collaboration is at the core of my work. If you can make collaboration work, with everybody, then you’re on your way to making a really good show.” But when collaborators pull in different directions, disaster will ensue. At Chichester last year, Bailey was forced to quit her own production of Kander and Ebb’s musical Cabaret, because Chichester’s then artistic director Andrew Welch objected to its sexual explicitness.”He said the homosexual content that would offend his audience,” Bailey recalls “And I said, ‘I don’t believe that for a minute’ But he destroyed the show He took away all the confidence in it Actors walked out I left the show He trashed something that was possibly great. And that was through fear.” Theatre has to be adventurous to survive, she says.
“Safe programming can kill a theatre.”It’s a far cry from the atmosphere of mutual support that Bailey favours. It’s that, not sexiness per se, that she considers her specialism “I do like sexy shows. I feel that everyone’s sexuality is a huge part of their being. Part of my work with the violinists [in The Gogmagogs], for example, is to say: you’re sexy And not in a glib way; not like Bond girls. I mean by having soul, by having a genuine sense of your own body, by having spirit.