We sat down for an exclusive interview with Joel Baxendale and Heather Ruck whose show Werewolf comes to the Edinburgh Fringe.
This show runs at Edinburgh Fringe at Summerhall – Tickets here.
What’s it like to have to improvise performances in the way you have to in ‘Werewolf’?
We describe it as semi-improvised, because the performance is on a track and there are sections of set dialogue, but the details can change. I love the challenge of responding to the contributions from the audience in a way that is as honest as possible to the context – it’s the game of treating the absurd with deadly seriousness. Sometimes you get to roll with an audience offer and riff off that to motivate the next beat in the story – when that happens it’s a beautiful thing.
What does play allow you to do as a performance company?
Play permeates every part of our practice, from early explorations through devising to the performances, we’re always playing, within a set of rules or parameters that we set ourselves. We talk about finding the game, what is the game here? Often the game is to ‘treat this as if it was that’, and then how you play that game and follow those rules is the interesting part, that’s the performance. Sometimes it’s even simpler, like if the game is to be plunged into pitch blackness, how can you play that game?
What effect does bringing audiences into the game and making them active participants have?
We want the audience to feel like they’re in the situation rather than observing it. Putting them and the actors into the same physical and fictional space is step one, giving them a role to play is step two. The more analogous the audience’s fictional role is to a context with which they are familiar the better, because then they already understand the parameters and how to behave and we can get on with it immediately. In the case of ‘Werewolf’, the roles of theatre audience and citizens sheltering in a safehouse that happens to be a theatre are very close. There’s just a slight twist on their reality, which I think makes it easy for the audience to actively inhabit their role in that fictional setting, so whether they are loudly piping up or not, they are still actively participating in the fiction, becoming characters for each other and making the world of the show more expansive.
Do you think all games can reveal something about society and our relationships with others?
Absolutely they can. At a personal level, games create an unassuming space that allows an individual’s psychology to be revealed, and at a societal level you can witness broad phenomena being played out in miniature. When you put an objective in front of people, and they’re invested in it, you’re immediately going to see all sorts of behaviours, cognitive biases and group dynamics that would normally be under wraps. It’s like the heat of playing the game overrides the ability to curate how you present yourself. It’s endlessly fascinating, and can at turns be hilarious and get quite dark. But the beauty of it is, at the end of the day it’s still just a game.
How difficult is it to combine horror, comedy, and fun, especially in an improvisatory and flexible piece like ‘Werewolf’?
On the one hand, I think horror helps comedy, because it puts people in a heightened and vulnerable state, and then the comedy is the relief with laughter being the expression of that. Also you can’t get away from the fact that we’re all treating this patently absurd situation so super seriously, which is inherently funny, especially when you hear someone ‘real’ in the audience delivering a totally ludicrous line. On the other hand it can be hard to pull the audiences back from too much comedy into getting genuinely scared again. Fortunately for us we have regular and frequent periods of total blackout so dark that you lose your sense of spatial awareness, which really helps to get people nervous again.
Why do you think gaming has always been so important to us?
Games are fun, people will always find ways of playing games. It’s empowering, and gives us a sense of stakes in what is unfolding. It fosters creativity, allowing us to be active contributors in the creation of an evolving story. And it’s social, often in the most comfortable way possible.