We sat down for an exclusive interview with Daniel Bye whose show Imaginary Friends comes to Soho Theatre from 19th May to 24th May as part of its UK tour.
Imaginary Friends satirizes the ethics of entertainment — how do you navigate the moral grey zones when crafting satire that hits close to home?
The moral grey zones are where this show lives!
I personally find myself really compelled by satirical comedy that goes into quite dark or difficult places, or that’s abrasive with its targets. The show stages some segments like that, and I hope that the audience will enjoy those moments in the sort of way that I would.
At the same time, I’m honestly not sure this sort of thing is helping anyone. I’m certain it’s not changing any minds. Maybe it’s ok that it just makes me feel better, and less alone in my anguish or frustration or disillusionment. But does it galvanise any meaningful action? I’m not so sure.
My real worry is that this kind of comedy is just making us all nastier and more cynical – more like the right wing that we’re supposedly trying to oppose. But then ‘if you go low, we go high’ doesn’t seem to be working out too well either. I don’t know where I come down on this. If I did, I wouldn’t have needed to make the show.
The challenge lies in staging the strident satire that I enjoy, and at the same time paying critical attention to that satire, without feeling like I’m having a go at anyone for enjoying it. Or at least, if I am having a go at anyone, it’s me.
The show plays with the fluidity of reality and performance — how much of your own experience as a performer is mirrored in the protagonist’s unravelling?
The story in the show is mostly fictional, but there are several real-life touchstones. In particular, a catalysing experience for the protagonist is grieving a loss that’s based directly on something real in my life. In grief, we can become temporarily unmoored from lots of our usual anchors – moral, behavioural, social – and this makes it much easier to spiral into something damaging. I’ve never gone down anything like the road my protagonist travels, but anyone who’s lost someone dear to them will understand exactly how any of us could.
The protagonist of the show is very close to me in most ways, except he’s been more hardened by the work he makes, which makes him more brittle when the loss comes. There are moments in the show where we are the same person; there are moments where he’s a lot further from me. However far he goes, as the saying has it, there but for the grace of God go I.
In a time when authenticity is so often performative, how do you draw the line between sincere storytelling and self-aware commentary?
For me, this is not so much about delivering a self-aware commentary as it is about creating the space for the audience to make that commentary. I’m not interested in telling you what to think, or even in telling you what I think. In this show, my job is to create the conditions for you to ask some questions of your own. (And more to the point, make sure the journey to that point is compelling or enjoyable.)
At times, the character in the show lacks self-awareness. As a performer – even more as a writer – I’m aware of this, but it wouldn’t serve anyone for me to perform in such a way, winking and mugging, to highlight this gap. I want to commit to presenting his experience and trust the audience to see the gap.
With some of the satire rewritten nightly, how does that improvisational element reflect the chaos and unpredictability of modern moral discourse?
If anything, modern moral discourse is tediously predictable. A terrible majority of people have the things that they say and think, and they’re going to say and think those same things under almost any circumstances. The intention behind regularly updating the topical bits is a bit less high-minded I’m afraid. I wanted the satirical comedy to feel like it has a family relationship with real (TV) satirical comedy, and for that to be possible, it needs to land as topically as possible. I replace material when it feels like its shelf life has passed. In some (intentional) ways the timeline in the show makes no sense, because the entire story plays out over weeks or months, while at the same time, all happening this week.
Your character turns to imaginary voices during a time of grief — what does this say about the way we, as a society, process personal pain in public arenas?
Lots of us are so online that the discourse is happening in our heads even while we’re offline. We’re pre-empting ourselves, checking ourselves, trying out versions but never allowing ourselves enough space to connect with the deeper thing that is our real needs and wants.
It’s worth pointing out that this is no more than the contemporary version of conditioning by social and material realities, and that is in itself as old as the hills, or at least as old as fire. But the devices in our pockets are an accelerant. It’s so much harder now to leave social pressure in the hall when we hang up our coats. It’s so much harder for the mask not to become the face.
So it’s not so much about how we process pain. It’s about how we process reality. Pain just makes it worse.
If you had to recruit one of your imaginary friends to co-host a real late-night TV show, who would it be and why?
The imaginary friends in the show are all without exception terrible people and I’d like none of them to ever be on TV again. Honestly, the least-worst option might be Michael McIntyre, but my god, who needs more of him on the telly?