Award-winning theatre-maker Chris Thorpe and director Rachel Chavkin reunite for A Family Business, a powerful production that focusses on the human story of the struggle for nuclear disarmament, and the group of people whose business it is to try to stop us from blowing up the planet.
Based on conversations with activists, academics and diplomats, this timely piece of theatre from China Plate and Staatstheater Mainz, about ordinary people who make extraordinarily important decisions, examines what qualifies a person to speak on behalf of huge parts of the global population – and asks why we don’t really talk about nuclear weapons much, even though they accompany us everywhere.
Chris Thorpe, writer and performer, chats with us about A Family Business, showing at Omnibus Theatre from 23rd-25th Feb. Get tickets here.
Can you tell us a bit about A Family Business and why it was important for you to explore the human side of nuclear disarmament?
It’s a show about the people who work in that field – at the level of diplomatic meetings and UN treaty negotiation – so it’s very easy to think of them as separate, and specialist – and that the discussions that go on in their world as ‘high level’ in a way that we don’t really have access to. But actually that’s not the case at all – obviously there are different kinds of expertise, but in terms of the issues and the ‘ordinariness’ of the people – we’re all connected. We all have agency. That’s an important thing for the show to get across – it’s as much a conversation about us, in this room, on this particular night as it is an exploration of people and issues we’re not connected to – it’s all interconnected.
In your creative process, how do you balance the need for accuracy and authenticity when portraying real-world events and figures in a theatrical setting?
There’s a constant battle between accuracy and truth! Sometimes you need to put people together, or incorporate things that were said by multiple people into a simple person. Or even simplify a bureaucratic process because it would get in the way of the flow to explain the whole thing in a way that an ‘expert’ would fully approve of. You can choose to be less accurate for the sake of the ‘art’ but you absolutely can’t choose to be less true.
How do you expect the show to spark conversations about nuclear disarmament, both during the performance and beyond the theatre, especially given the current geopolitical climate?
Each performance of the show is designed to create a strong local connection – a sense of ownership of the issue and in the community of the audience that can only exist with the people in the room, that one single time. And that’s to make the issue feel immediate (but not too terrifying) and graspable. I’d say it’s not about making people aware of a geopolitical situation, but of the constant presence of these weapons and their effects – current and potential – in the world they experience every day. So hopefully the conversation starts from a feeling that the topic can be normalised – that it can be a subject of conversation – and goes on from there,
Before heading to Tobacco Factory Theatre you’ve been touring A Family Business internationally, how have international audiences responded to the work so far? Can you see this differing from audiences based in the UK?
There are different geopolitical situations, national relationships, everywhere you go. Obviously that creates a base level of awareness of the issue (or not) and a prevailing sense of the ‘local’ attitude to the issue. But people also like talking about themselves, and laughing at themselves (and me) and finding stuff out – and generally the audience are ordinary people like us, so we can relate.
The show is the final part of a trilogy that you have created with Rachel Chavkin, how does it feel to have this chapter come to a close after almost a decade?
Ask me when it’s closed! The trilogy thing was something I kind of said one day off the top of my head and it stuck. I guess there’s a nice journey from Confirmation to Status to this show, from the workings of one human head, to a group of heads, to something that connects us all globally. But I feel like these conversations have a while to run yet. A trilogy of more than three definitely feels on the cards.