We sat down for an exclusive interview with Arden Fitzroy whose show CVNTCLAVE is coming to Edinburgh Fringe.
This show runs at Edinburgh Fringe at Greenside – Tickets here.
Was it difficult to balance being inspired by Conclave with making a show that didn’t need audience members to have seen the movie?
The starting point is a conclave: a pope has passed away, and a new one must now be elected from, and by, the College of Cardinals. And some of these divas are not here to play, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. But everyone has secrets, and everyone is ultimately a human being in the running to represent the divine.
This has been happening since the 13th century. The drama, conflict, and contradictions presented by the context of this ancient process were just too delicious. The film alerted me to the potential of the setting, and led me to research conclaves and Vatican politics, both historical and contemporary. Some of these stories are wild. What tends to get left out is the humanity of the people involved. CVNTCLAVE takes on these dynamics and applies it to an original cohort of cardinals. However, there are definitely Easter eggs for fans of the film!
Fanfiction has a long history of queering narratives- how does CVNTCLAVE fit into this heritage?
The maxim is that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’: every story is transformative of all the stories that came before it, informed by the teller’s background, influences, and style. Alterations and reworking are part of the fabric of most of the stories we know. Here’s an example: think of The Lion King, Hamlet, the Saxo Grammaticus that inspired Shakespeare – which itself came from the oral tradition… so in the academic sense, every narrative is a queering of another in some way. With this in mind, the use of the word ‘fanfiction’ connotes more about the positionality of its source/writer – usually non-hegemonic. So much fanfiction is queer (as in LGBTQIA+) as a direct result of this non-hegemony: where is the representation? And when the source is queer – as Conclave is! – this is celebrated, and expanded on.
Meanwhile – exegesis is a critical interpretation, usually applied to Biblical texts, which tries to objectively draw out its meaning given its original context. But how objective can anything ever really be, where humans are involved? The paradox is that whenever a story is told in a variation from the original, it is actually a retelling: no longer the original.
So: Conclave, the ancient institution of actual conclaves, and other inspirations led me to CVNTCLAVE in the same way that various inspirations led Robert Harris to write the original novel! If I wanted to be really cheeky, I could say that the Bible itself is a transformative written compilation of oral retellings.
CVNTCLAVE is not fanfiction – the only thing it has in common is a setting that has existed in the real world for centuries – but it may be a form of exegesis: a take on what happens in a conclave, if you’re someone who has to repress who they are, who has to hide and can’t be fully themselves for fear of reprisal.
What do you think the links are between religious community spaces and (usually online) fandom spaces?
All community spaces come with their own culture. This can include clothing, jokes, way of speaking, tacit codes, sets of rules – spoken and unspoken. These can seem very distinct across different communities at first glance, as totally separate ways of existing.
I think there’s a lot of nuance involved when it comes to the overlap. The Venn diagram is not as vastly separate than we might believe. I think that what is significant here is the existence of the recognition for a need for group cohesion within an individual that leads them to identifying as a member of a community in the first place.
In a WIP of the show, the person who laughed loudest at a joke that subtly referenced fandom – and it was a bit of a deep cut! – was someone I know who actively engages in religious community spaces. People are not just one thing.
Conclave (the film) was so relatable to me in a way I didn’t understand at first – what relatability is there in a cohort of older cardinals in the Vatican? It was only on a rewatch that I realised that they were all acting with a modality, aesthetic and code that is congruent with queer subcultures in which I have both participated and observed. In other words, they’re not totally unlike a group of messy queer artists in behaviour. Or, even more to the point: it’s Mean Girls.
What’s the power of silliness today?
Silliness is powerful because by its nature it refuses easy categorisation in a world where what is prized is efficient, uniform, routine. It’s boundary-blurring, which is a threat – which make it something to be minimised. And silliness does imply that something is frivolous, unimportant, marginal – marginalised.
It’s the marginalia in illuminated manuscripts. But we are drawn to the doodles of snails attacking knights more than we are to the text itself – and it gets us thinking more about the person who wrote it, and their actual life and experiences. This is the power of silliness: disruption.
How do the campiest of narratives effectively explore serious political or social ideas?
When we remove things from a familiar context it gives us a lens through which we might see things more clearly. Cardinal Cvntvs, as one of the most powerful characters in the Vatican of the show, appears to be a larger-than-life character. The things he says are at times sensational, and often wild. But he realises he’s part of the joke that is the illusory, fragile nature of that power.
Horror and comedy are two different sides of a coin – the only difference is the punchline.
It makes me think about Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp – there’s no camp without something serious at its core, something that compels expression. It’s all in how it’s expressed. Camp uses that veneer to expose something about what is being critiqued. And there’s a long, long history of this in religious art in particular, even in the Sistine Chapel itself!