A thought-provoking, entertaining theatrical experience that will leave you talking long after the final bow.
TICKET LINK: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/event
1.The Event explores the invisible relationship between performer and audience — what continues to fascinate you about that connection after so many years working across stage and screen?
I was fortunate enough to be a company member in a two or three repertory theaters when I started out, working in different productions, watching and reaching a live audience, where you could grab an audience, lose an audience, and get them back over the course of a night. It was a great training ground with amazing, experienced actors, and the power of a company to engage in an agreed fiction with a group of strangers, shifting, surging together was invaluable.
When you are in a well-directed production of a well penned play, and that day’s audience is focused on the stage, and you are lifted by the words, the other actors, and the audience, in real time the ritual becomes powerful, and transcendent, it is thrilling, and as much as I appreciate the deft skill and focus, the patience that film and television require, you can’t beat live theater. A simple stage slap is more powerful than a giant, digitally created explosion, any day. Why? Because it’s live.
2. John Clancy’s play blends humour with philosophical questions about performance and reality; what drew you personally to this material at this stage in your career?
Personally, it was John Clancy and his writing. John’s ability to be verbally rich and ridiculous, deep and devilish with words is hard to resist. It’s also, frankly, a test of my memory and concentration, so I needed a challenge, and he’s the man for that!
3. Much of your work has involved improvisation — did that background influence the way you approached a play so rooted in audience awareness and theatrical unpredictability?
I’m acutely aware that my success as an improviser in “Whose Line Is It Anyway”, something televised and edited, is ironic and kind of perverted. I believe I panic well with others. I also had a “message from the universe” experience when I was young, I was waiting for a light to change to cross a street in Los Angeles, when on the other side of the crosswalk there was a derelict house being emptied out, with a skip parked in front filled to the brim with broken dirty furniture topped off with a mattress frame jutting out of the top, and spray painted on it was, “If you want to go fast go alone; if you want to go far, go with a group!!” I took it as prophecy. So I guess you could say I’m a pervert and my life as an artist has been influenced by discarded furniture.
4. The show examines the “contract” between actor and audience; do you think modern audiences engage with live theatre differently now than when you first began performing?
Yes. The contract has a cheap, myopic, furtive broker inserted into it now- the mobile phone. Stop it, people.
5. Having worked in everything from Doctor Who to Assassins and Seinfeld, what does returning to an intimate Fringe setting offer that larger productions sometimes cannot?
The opportunity to strip spectacle down and retain its potential for breathtaking work, you can feel each other, touch each other, and in some instances, smell each other.
The Creator made an animal, and I am an animal, as the Snotty Nosed Rez Kids say, and I like rooting around with my pack in tight spaces.
6.Directed by David Calvitto, The Event balances comedy with existential reflection — how did you collaborate to keep the production intellectually playful rather than overly abstract?
Dave has performed it so many times, and that means he’s found a lot of twists and turns and links in the rhetoric. It was essential to me to have him as a director. It’s so helpful having another actor as a guide. It’s kind of a tradition- artists forging an approach and passing it on to the next person who inherits it, that artist discovering new elements, and it grows, becomes fuller, until another generation of artists finds it and adds to it.