Phelim McDermott, one of the directors of UK’s Improbable Theatre, is currently at Australia’s Sydney Opera House, co-ordinating workshops in preparation for the company’s large-scale outdoor spectacular, Sticky – involving fireworks, a 100-foot tower and miles of sticky tape – which opens the Sydney Festival tomorrow.
Although the company has previously used the sticky stuff to create puppetry and sets for smaller-scale productions, McDermott describes the creation of a four-storey tower using a crane and rolls of sticky tape as ‘a celebration of a ridiculous idea’ – an impossible dream for a building that has eventually been realised.
Kind of like Joern Utzon’s world-famous opera house itself, he reckons.
‘I have to say, it’s thrilling to be here,’ he enthuses. ‘What I like about looking at that building [the opera house], is that it is someone’s extraordinary idea of what a building could be. It’s been seen through, to actually being manifested as something real. And, on a smaller theatrical scale, that’s kind of what we’ve done – we’ve dreamt about creating an impossible building [and] we’ve managed to create it.’
Using a crane, people and a whole lot of sticky tape, Sticky begins with the creation of a spider’s web, an enormous spider, and the walls of a tower – before the building dissolves in an explosion of fireworks. While Improbable tours with their own technical team, they also employ a local crew at each event who train for about three days prior to the performance.
Julian Crouch, director of Improbable along with McDermott and Lee Simpson, originally realised Sticky back in 1998. Since then, it has toured the UK and around the world. ‘Sticky is a “Chinese whisper” of a show’, Crouch says on the company’s website – which certainly seems true of its success in Australia. The work’s inclusion into the Sydney Festival programme marks its third appearance at an Australian arts festival in 12 months – astounding audiences at the Perth Festival back in January 2002, before returning for the Brisbane Festival last September.
But McDermott is clearly inspired by the relationship between Sticky and the particular place where it will be presented in Sydney. ‘I think it’s a fantastic space to do the show,’ he says, over the phone from the Opera House forecourt on Bennelong Point, jutting out into the city’s famed harbour.
Indeed, this thought process has been in place since the project’s inception. ‘It’s interesting because the original idea – and we haven’t really dropped this – was that Sticky would be a show we would do site-specifically so it would respond to each space that we went to,’ McDermott explains.
The first time the show was staged, in Stockton-on-Tees in 1998, there wasn’t a tower. The following year, in Glasgow, Sticky was invited to be shown as part of the celebrations for the Year of Architecture and Design. The creation of a temporary three-story tower was in response to the exhibition space. According to McDermott, the production has continued to evolve and the tower has now grown from three stories to four.
It may come as a surprise to some unfamiliar with Improbable Theatre’s work that a company which can create such a phenomenal outdoor event also produces performance with a strong emphasis on improvisation.
Improbable was established in 1996, following McDermott and Crouch’s collaborations on a number of projects in the four years prior. The company has since staged seven productions, including the multi-award winning 70 Hill Lane, an autobiographical piece written by McDermott which won the Time Out award for Best Off-West End Theatre; the OBIE for Outstanding Achievement in Off Broadway Theatre; and the Best Performance at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. Coma, also created by McDermott; the completely improvised show Lifegame, based on memories from the audience’s past recreated on stage; Animo; Sticky; Spirit and Cinderella followed.
Crouch and McDermott also co-directed Shockheaded Peter, which has toured nationally and internationally, and also raked in the awards – including an Olivier Award in 2002 for Best Entertainment; TMA Best Director Award and the Critic’s Society award for Best Designer.
For McDermott, the progression of the company’s shows is quite logical. The adhesive properties of Sticky emerged from a number of smaller-scale productions – including 70 Hill Lane and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which McDermott and Crouch worked on for the English Shakespeare Company. Meanwhile, shows such as Coma and Spirit came about through a chain of events which has now led to McDermott receiving nearly £70,000 from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to research a relationship he has identified between conflict resolution and theatre – with the possible outcome of exploring a new form of theatre.
McDermott will collaborate with Dr Arnold Mindell – whose work with people in comas influenced Improbable Theatre’s Coma, and, indirectly, Spirit – to explore conflict resolution work.
‘It’s a bit like Sticky’, McDermott reasons: ‘You think, how on earth did we end up doing a show… creating a building from sticky tape? But if you look at the progression from show to show, it actually makes very clear logical sense.
‘What’s different about our company is that we are not a company [which has] a long tradition with doing outdoor stuff. Our tradition, in a way, is from improvisation. This [Sticky] is a show where we’ve kind of taken the improvisation and work we’ve done with materials, for instance we’ve used newspaper in some of our shows to create puppets – and we’ve just done it on a much larger scale. I think if there is something unique about our company, it’s that we don’t just do one particular kind of show. We keep surprising people.’
For more information on Improbable Theatre, visit: www.improbable.co.uk
