Up-se-daisy

Oct 4 2024 | By Thom Dibdin More

Douglas Irvine on Visible Fictions’ UP

UP from Glasgow’s Visible Fictions theatre company, a piece of object theatre about strangers on a crashing plane, plays the last date of its Scottish tour at the Assembly Roxy this Saturday 5th of October 2024.

UP, tangles with the idea that while the odds of perishing in a commercial plane accident might be a reassuring 29.4 million to one, that is no comfort if you are the one…

Amidst a tale emergency masks plummeting, engines squealing and hand baggage flying from the overhead lockers, when two strangers hold hands in the face of their lives flashing past as they face their final moments together, the play explores themes of luck and choice, of fate and coincidence and above all what it means to connect with someone.

Zoë Hunter and Martin McCormick in UP. Pic: Visible Fictions.

Which, it must be said, sounds very much like an attempt to grapple with the ideas of chance, possibility, probability and statistical expectations. So we asked Visible Fictions’ Douglas Irvine how these issues relate to the show?

“Oddly, the idea for the production didn’t start with these notions at all,” says Irvine. “It started from a story idea that embraced something more akin to ‘magical realism’ rather than anything else. As our creation process unfolded, and the piece took shape, the idea of good luck and bad luck became a useful poetic idea from which other ideas of opposites and their respective power and usefulness sprung.

“We follow the story of two characters – Jay, who seems to be incredibly lucky, and Jayme whose life has seemed to be incredibly unlucky, and we see how their lives lead them to be on an ill-fated plane journey together.

ill-fated

“That’s interesting that I’ve just described the plane journey as ‘ill-fated’ as it strangely ties in with how some audiences talk about Jay and Jayme afterwards. It’s as if they have a feeling that the characters are almost destined to meet – even though the piece doesn’t ever talk about pre-determined paths at all – the characters meet due to their choices.

“And by chance. Or is it because something other than choice or chance – who knows?!

“The piece lightly touches on statistics and probability and how ‘luck’ seems to work based on current researched evidence. But actually, at the heart of the production is a romantic comedy more than anything else, and how two people make sense of randomness and powerful forces that are in their lives.”

Zoë Hunter and Martin McCormick in UP. Pic: Visible Fictions.

UP has had a long gestation time – although the first audiences heard if was at Manipulate in 2020. The Manipulate Festival is “an annual celebration of excellence in the fields of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre” and one of Scotland’s great breading grounds for new work. We asked Irvine about that, and the evolution of the production from an idea, to a Manipulate performance to a full Scottish Tour?

“The idea had been in my head and heart for a long time before Manipulate got involved,” he says. “In fact, way back in about 2015 – maybe even earlier, I had chatted the idea through with Chloe Dear whose company Iron Oxide supported some development with Visible Fictions to explore the idea through circus.

“The notion being that most of the play happens in an aircraft, high up in the air. The development time was incredibly useful as it helped me realise that this wasn’t he most appropriate form to work with to liberate the story.

development

“A few years passed and then Simon Hart, the former Director of the Manipulate Festival, had programmed Gare Central, a Flemish theatre company whose artistic mission seems pretty much to explore object theatre. Agnes Limbos the company’s key artist led a three-day professional development session on the art form which I attended, and it was here that I realised that the story in ‘Up’ would be served brilliantly by object theatre.

Zoë Hunter and Martin McCormick in UP. Pic: Visible Fictions.

“Further discussions with Simon Hart led to the Manipulate Festival supporting development of the idea further with Visible Fictions, which then resulted in a 15-minute sharing, presented at the Manipulate Festival in 2020. We had such a positive response to what the artists had been exploring that we knew then that we had to make a full-full scale production happen.

“So after the covid pandemic closed everything down, Visible Fictions committed to making it happen once theatres had reopened and this tour is now taking place across Scotland, with our final performance in Edinburgh at The Assembly Roxy.

Object theatre

As a fan of Manipulate, we are even keener fans of object theatre. But not everyone has heard of it or knows what it is. So we asked Irvine say what it is, why he lieks it and what its possibilities are…

“I love object theatre too,” he says. “And even more so now I’ve had a chance to explore and play with it as a form.

“I guess the simplest way to explain it, is that object theatre uses found, everyday objects to create a story with characters. However, instead of the objects specifically being designed for the narrative, object theatre deliberately uses these everyday objects either as is, or transformed into other things.

“The objects are then integrated deeply into the production and are supported by the performer’s skills and the imagination of the audience to make meaning. In object theatre the objects used and explored, can be just themselves as designed or they can be used as a character/symbol in a story, adding more meaning and significance to them.

Zoë Hunter and Martin McCormick in UP. Pic: Visible Fictions.

“It’s not puppetry – as the objects are never anthropomorphised – the objects only ever function in the way they have been designed and intended to be used.

“I love this form because it so inherently theatrical. It’s a form that celebrates the fact that theatre is not only a text based medium but also a visual one. I love that it feels so deeply connected to all of us – as it reminds us of how we played with toys as children, so the form feels incredibly natural and real and playful.

“I love that it provokes the audience to imagine the worlds, feelings and ideas being presented on stage. I love that it allows a very different type of storytelling – one that strangely feels reminiscent of a film as it more easily uses cuts, swipes, shorter scenes, intimate human moments and wide geographical vistas. It’s really is in my mind one of the most exciting theatre forms out there.

Intimacy

And finally: does the intimacy of the production change the relationships of the design team to those on a proscenium arch production?

“I think it does,” says Irvine. “The form requires a tabletop which then becomes the stage on a stage for the object worlds to be presented upon. The nature of the venues the production performs in has to be taken into account – to visit more intimate spaces.

The lighting desired requires a real focussing in on the space that is used to help direct the focus of the audience. Even where recorded sound fx/music comes from requires a different perspective about where speakers are placed in the space.

Directing it also becomes a whole new challenge – probably some 95% of the production takes place with the two actors sitting behind a desk – and the majority of blocking occurs on the table or underneath the table.

And the remarkable thing is with all this intimacy the possibility of creating huge worlds and events is strangely easier than if we had a full proscenium arch stage to fill. This tension between the big and the small, the intimate and the epic, the real and the artificial, all feed into the design and the audience’s experience.

“It really is one of the most exciting forms around.”

UP plays the Assembly Roxy on Saturday 5 October for one performance only at 7.30pm.