In Conversation with Justin Butcher

Reading Time: 8 minutes

1. What drew you to choose “One Was Nude & One Wore Tails” and “The Bear & Other Comic Tales” for the Voila Festival? Are there unique aspects of these plays that you feel resonate particularly well with the festival’s vision?

We created this comedy double bill originally for Teatro Filodrammatici, Milan, in collaboration with J.Productions, Milan, earlier this year as a winter evening’s entertainment of short comedy gems by Chekhov & Dario Fo to banish the January post-Christmas blues. It was a wonderful privilege to bring an English-language version of one of Dario Fo’s early farces to Milan – and perhaps a bit cheeky too … coals to Newcastle, if you like! Milan is the home city of this extraordinary Italian playwright, comic actor, clown, satirist & activist – probably the single greatest influence on my work in the theatre. His nickname was Bristin – ‘pepper’ – and in an extraordinary career spanning more than six decades, his vocation was to be the pepper, the irritant, the aggravator, the thorn in the side of the establishment, often at great personal risk. His wife and collaborator, actress, writer & director Franca Rame, shared this costly vocation. The roots of their unique comedy style stretch back to the commedia dell’arte, to the jongleurs and giullari, the satirical storytellers hounded from town to town in mediaeval Europe and ultimately to the comedies of ancient Rome and Greece – but it was always bang up to date. His mission was always to speak truth to power, through absurdity, as the Jongleur articulates in Mistero Buffo:

I am the jongleur. I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh. I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the big shots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and … pssss … they deflate.

DARIO FO, The Birth of the Jongleur, MISTERO BUFFO

We’re presenting one of the earliest surviving farces which Dario Fo created in collaboration with Franca Rame, One was Nude & One wore Tails, as a double bill alongside our production of Chekhov short comedies, The Bear & Other Comic Tales. Anton Chekhov was known first as a writer of short comedies on themes of love, marriage and domestic absurdity. The Bear, Swansong & The Evils Of Tobacco are three of his funniest, finest vaudevilles. Puncturing pretension and absurdity is a common strand in Chekhov’s social comedies as well.

The whole evening lasts 2 hours, including a 20-minute interval. 

2. Could you share a bit about your creative process in bringing these shows to life for a new audience? Have there been any notable adjustments or evolutions in the performances since their success in Milan?

The most significant new development is the new set design, created specially for the Playground Theatre by award-winning illustrator & video artist Damian Hale and scenic artist Peggy Jacobs Strøm (who has mixed British and Danish heritage). Borrowing stylistically from satirical cartoonists such as Ronald Searle, or Edward Lear, the set has been designed and painted as a kind of circus/puppet theatre environment which sets the audience firmly in a light-hearted, playful vaudeville world right from the off. 

We’ve also added new songs – folk songs from the Russian steppes and the Plains of the Po, such as the Troika Coachman’s Love Song, Kalinka, Bella Ciao and operatic arias by Verdi and Gluck, which we sing in Russian, Italian, French and English. Our fabulously talented musical director and composer, Stephen Daltry, has created beautiful harmonised arrangements for these, accompanied live on accordion and guitar. 

Another new element is the movement created by our wonderful choreographer Aidan Treays, working very inventively with our varying abilities in dance to create some delightful comedy tableaux.

Our rehearsal process is hugely collaborative – working out what makes each other laugh, playing around with gags and pratfalls, silly noises, pulling faces and honing and crafting the business of comedy with what I hope is a joyous sense of genre. And there’s constant reference to influences like Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and, of course, Dario Fo himself.   

3. Voila Festival celebrates multicultural and multilingual performances. How do these elements come through in your shows, and what do you hope they add to the audience’s experience?

As I’ve mentioned, we sing in four different European languages in the shows, and our creative team includes artists with familial heritage from England, Scotland, France, Denmark, Italy and Poland, while our Anglo-Italian producer Julia Holden has German-Jewish parents, who came as refugees to the UK in the 1930s, fleeing the Nazi persecution.  

So this is an Anglo-Italian co-production, created in collaboration with Julia’s company, J.Productions, Milan, which specialises in bringing English language theatre and other cultural product to Italy. I’ve worked closely with Julia over a number of years, touring shows and concerts from the UK and elsewhere to Italy, as well as creating many new productions for theatres, festivals and broadcasters across Italy. In September 2021, for example, we collaborated on a huge project marking the 700th anniversary of the death of the poet Dante, whose epic work, The Divine Comedy, forms one of the founding cultural pillars of modern Europe. We staged a live dramatised reading of the whole of The Divine Comedy, over 24 hours in Florence, with a live audience and live-streamed across the globe, with an international cast of 20 including Ralph Fiennes, Helen Mirren, Adjoa Andoh and Jessie Buckley. Consciously echoing the theme of exile – Dante himself became a refugee from Florence during its protracted civil war in the 14th century – the event raised funds and awareness for Italian refugee charity the Community of Sant’Egidio, and the 24 hours of footage went on to become a feature-length broadcast for Italian arts broadcaster ItsArt TV.     

Our leading lady, Léa Desjacques, is half Scottish, half French, and gets to play comedy heroines from Russia and Italy, so she’s a living embodiment of the Voila! Festival’s ideals! 

Having close family ties myself with Italy and Poland, and having worked all over Europe, including Russia, over the past 25 years, I regard myself as a proud European, lament Brexit as a tragic mistake – and I believe the EU, imperfect as it may be, is an extremely important forum for setting and pursuing standards for industry, government and public services, for workers’ rights and conditions, animal & environmental rights, human rights etc. I also believe that the cultural cross fertilisation weaving back and forth across Europe for more than 2,000 years has created a fabulous and soulful melting pot, out of which some of humanity’s greatest achievements have arisen.

As Dario Fo puts it –

Even before Europe was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries … the arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe. 

4. The previous reviews mention slapstick absurdism, outstanding performances, and brilliant costumes. Can you tell us more about the cast, the design, and how these elements contribute to the comedic and absurdist tone of the productions?

I vividly remember my first encounter with Fo’s work, as an undergraduate watching a student production of Accidental Death Of An Anarchist. There was a wonderful moment when a section of the set fell down, and the actor playing the Maniac ran over to catch the plywood flat before it hit the floor, simultaneously turning to the audience with a huge grin – ‘Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, our set appears to be falling down …’

It was pure Fo – that glorious incongruity between how things are meant to be and how they turn out – which is the engine of all comedy. Humanity aspiring to touch the heavens … then slipping on a banana skin. Or, as the old Japanese proverb says, ‘The higher the money climbs, the more you can see of its backside.’

In Fo’s zany slapstick farce, One was Nude & One wore Tails, this engine is in full throttle, undressing the social hierarchy in 1960s night-time Milan. Two roadsweepers philosophise about the illusions of life, their lowly status and their proximity to the sublime. Waiting for Godot meets Laurel & Hardy. Then one of them finds a naked man in his bin – an ambassador who’s escaped from a compromising situation with only his top hat – and the shenanigans begin … undressing the social hierarchy in true commedia style.

There’s quite a bit of ‘undressing’ going on in Chekhov’s vaudevilles too. In The Evils Of Tobacco, he exposes the quiet desperation of conventional bourgeois existence in a hilariously embarrassing confessional ‘lecture’ delivered by a hapless, henpecked husband, disclosing the misery of being married to a domestic tyrant. In Swansong, he sends up the whole business of theatre in a piquant blend of comedy and tragedy, as an elderly actor wakes from a drunken stupor in his dressing room and finds himself alone in a darkened theatre in there middle of the night. As he gazes out into the blackness of the auditorium, he looks back on his long stage career, veering back and forth between self-aggrandising vanity and melodramatic despair. It’s an exquisite piece, superbly acted by Rupert Mason. Then in The Bear, Chekhov us arguably European theatre’s first feminist heroine in the feisty, glamorous widow Popova, whose self-regarding determination to mourn her dead husband for the rest of her life is exploded by the invasion of a rude, bear-like angry neighbouring landlord demanding repayment of a debt. Provoked by his incensed ranting, she abandons her devoted widow persona and pitches into the fray. A great comic role played with poise and stylish fury by Léa Desjacques, fresh from her West End run in Mamma Mia!

5. Small venues like the Playground Theatre offer a more intimate atmosphere. How does performing in such a setting influence the dynamics of the show, and how do you think it impacts audience engagement?

Well, there’s nowhere to hide! I think what we’re always seeking when we go to a live performance is an authentic sense of connection with the performers, and of course this is so much easier to achieve in a more intimate setting. Every wink, look, sniff or twitch is visible close-up, which is a wonderful opportunity for comedy performers – as well as being quite exposing and vulnerable! Whether the venue’s large or small, it’s very important for comedy to get the audience feeling as comfortable and relaxed as possible from the outset, and I’m hoping that our beautifully designed and painted comedy set will create an environment which will make people chuckle as soon as they enter the auditorium. The first two pieces, The Evils Of Tobacco and Swansong, play very mischievously with the framing devices of performance itself – the wretched, henpecked husband giving a lecture to an imagined audience who are in fact us – and the elderly, drunk actor gazing out into the darkened auditorium of … a theatre.   

6. What are you hoping audiences take away from your performances at the Voila Festival, and what impact do you hope these shows might have on the support and appreciation of multicultural theatre in smaller venues?

Romanian-French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco coined the term dépaysement – literally ‘losing your country’ – to describe the process of theatre itself, in which the familiar is made strange and experienced as if for the first time. I love this idea – that our imaginations, our souls, our spirits – are stimulated and thrive as a result of experiences of dislocations, strangeness, upheavals, new encounters. I hope that our audiences will feel thrilled and intrigued to encounter comic works by Russian and Italian writers, which invite us into comic universes which are wonderfully strange, new, different, but … somehow … in the end, recognisable. 

With Europe still reeling from the impact of the biggest refugee crisis since WW2, there’s a lot of fearful ‘Fortress Europe/drawbridge mentality’ talk and trends in politics, building bigger walls, fences etc. But many if not most of our great cultural advances in human history have been precipitated by exiles, displacements and upheavals of population, leading to new cross-fertilisations and innovations that otherwise might never have happened. In comedy, vaudeville, clowning and slapstick, there are clear links across European traditions, almost like a family tree of derivation radiating outwards from the Middle Ages and earlier. Following the late 19th century Russian-Jewish diaspora westwards, you can trace the connection between Chekhov’s vaudevilles and some of the earliest 20th century American comedy entertainers, such as the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin. 

As Dario Fo himself said, 

It is extremely dangerous to talk about limits or borders. It is vital, instead, that we remain completely open, that we are always involved, and that we aim to contribute personally in social events … Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts.

We’re living through some pretty tragic and absurd times, and in many parts of the world we see people’s fear of ‘the other’ fuelling the rise of demagogues and extremists and hateful political creeds. So, I guess we hope that these shows will not only delight our audiences with the joy of immersion in comedy from very different cultural eras and settings, but also spark a few new chemical reactions.   

Dario Fo’s maxim was that the best creative response to injustice and oppression is laughter. Tragedy gives an audience a nice catharsis for an evening out, and then flushes all your rage through your system and you go away and do … nothing. But to make people laugh at injustice – in Fo’s metaphor – engenders a ‘bubble of wind in the gut’, and you go away discomforted, provoked, activated … and this disruption leads to change. ‘Comedy,’ he said, ‘makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.’