Meet David Furlong :
Theatre to question the world
INTERVIEW of David Furlong
by Norbert Louis, for Le Mauricien
Published in the Week End, cultural supplement to the main National Mauritian newspaper, July 2009.
A Young theatre director and actor, David Furlong, based in London is a man of performing arts. Moved by a force fed by passion, he has this way of always being cutting edge, outside the box, and constantly connected to contemporary matters. This creates David's theatre. As he's about to present his new translations of Feydeau farces (Feydeau Double Bill) at the Tabard Theatre in London, he takes the time to go back on his coherent artistic journey with his company, Exchange Theatre.
Week-End : How do you conceive the performance in relation to the plot and the dialogues ?
David Furlong : I started theatre with a very classical training. It was about telling stories. But throughout my work, while looking for the meaning of a dramatic work and by exploring deeper all forms and styles, one thing appeared constantly: the story must trigger something in the audience, it's an emotionnal aim. Theatre is unique because it's the only form of art where there is no barreers between the art piece and its audience: instantly, emotions are real; be it laughing, crying or receiving a message. Actors are real flesh you could even touch, so theatre is truly the most immediate art. But the plot is nothing without the direction, the text is not enough: in the theatre, the audience has to be challenged on several levels: eyes, ears, even feelings, especially for a contemporary audience who is used to medias, imagery is very important. There are even non-textuals theatrical forms. For me, i'm quoting French director Patrice Caurier and his designer Moshe Leiser, «a show can be visually anything as long as an audience can see a clear link between the images and the text». I believe that this multidimensionnal vision is too rare and text is too sacred. Theatre must create something that is not on the page. Life. Theatre is an exchange between the script and the actors, between actors and technique, between the actors and the audience and between actors on stage. This exchange creates life.
In The Flies, what were the main themes ?
D. F : In The Flies, Jean Paul Sartre tells the oppression of a whole people through disinformation and ignorance. The Flies symbolize those negative feelings haunting the characters: remorse, fear. The Flies is a play of rebellion, written by a young philosopher against Nazi occupation in France, but this ode to freedom still rings today like a very contemporary one. Especially nowadays where fear of the other or the stanger is the bed for disinformation and dumb masses. Where private interests lead to lies or war like in Irak, in the name of weapons of mass detruction. Actuallym this is where the idea of The Flies come from.
How does your production express a contemporary state of mind ?
D. F : The stage of The Flies is composed by numerous tv sets as a setting, on which a video creation is broadcasted, showing publicity and informations as they are offered to us at the moment; there are cables everywhere on stage, plugged in amplifiers, microphones, musical instruments. This is our set, an ultra modern decor made of what can be seen as the technological debris of an era. It represents the mediatic armada deployed to maintain the citizens of Argos into ignorance and fear. In truth, it's not very far from reality: people fed by mtv and sugary sodas, it's very close to the world we live in. There is currently an awakening happening amongst the people who start doubting a unique way of thinking (la pensee unique, as the French call it) and start questionning the permanent obsession for money and profit. Some initiatives are taken in the fields of economy, or ecology, with green industries, fairtrade or sustainable developmentsont. Artistically too, I think it's important to take part in this questionning of values and there is curently a move towards this. Echange Theatre is in this direction and The Flies has a political side to it, similar to lots of contemporary creations.
Do your company want to merge theatre and other artistic forms like music?
D.F : The company is called Echange because we're interested not only in an exchange of cultures but also, in our practise, by an exchange between crafts. And music does have a special place in our creations. Our sound engineer, Dilan Hookoomsing who is mauritian, is also a musician, (he's the guitar player A Riot in Heaven, the band featured in The Flies). For our first collaboration on our first show, (The Exchange by Paul Claudel) I asked him to change a couple of paragraphs from the script into a song. From this succesful experimentation, we investiagted further in Bal Trap by Xavier Durringer, a show that was entirely performed with live music, not as a transition, but permanently, as a soundtrack. That was quite a unique take on it, we wanted to go away from traditionnal conceptions of using music as a gimmic and we wanted the musician to be playing organicly even during the dialogues. Then, for The Flies, I thought that beyond the fact of being a simple soundtrack, a full electric rock band could litterally create the mood of the play with their music and even beyond that, play sounds that would suggest the settings or the flies. The music triggers the audience's imagination and does create our world so. It's not a part of the show, it's become one with the play. Echange Theatre endeavours to research such theatre, and the same researches are currently being done with vidéo.
What's the place for the text and reflection?
D.F : Text remains the basis of the work. Our primary objective is to make some rare or unknown texts discovered. It mostly consists of a translation work led by our team and for which our bilingualism is essential. We often find older translations that are dated or too approxiamtely done, or sometimes too academic to be performed. Since we want to be true to the original play and use faithful translations, we end up producing our owns. Because we want poetic licenses to be kept or rythm to be more close to the original. So, indeed text is the heart of any project. The direction, the scenery, or every musical or visual inventions are only tools to serve the text. And sometimes it just makes it more digest. Because, beyons the mere discovery, the aim is also to make them accessible to a 21st century audience.
Why pretend to perform ? Is performing a way of making a statement on theatre ?
D.F : Performing is a way of being fundamentally in projection towards the world around us : others, our fellow partners and the audience. There is an old misunderstanding in the perception that people have of theatre in general, seeing it as a pretentious art. It's the opposite. Performing is not really a statement on theatre. Direction does it before, reviews do it after. A statement is then made in the creative process or in the analyse of it. But at the moment of the performance, this should not be visible, or it is self-indulgence. This interview is surely a statement on theatre more than a performance.
Interview by
Norbert LOUIS
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