Georgina, you have spent this summer touring with Rude Mechanicals. How has it gone?
It has been wonderful, this is now my tenth summer tour with Rude Mechanicals and I love it.
What was your first production with Rude Mechanicals?
Icarus – and yes we flew! Well, of course you would have to use to your your imagination – but we flew! Icarus was about freedom of imagination and self-belief. And, if you really believe then you can make your dreams come true.
What’s the story behind Rude Mechanicals itself?
So it was founded by Pete Talbot, initially as an amateur company for about thirty years, becoming a professional company and registered charity in 1997. The first tour was in 1999 and the company has continued to thrive ever since. We have a fantastic fan base who get us immediately whatever we do, and we are always attracting new audiences into our larger than life world! This is the Rude Mechanicals’ twenty-third tour and, as ever, we’re all enjoying every minute. We founded with a passionate commitment to bringing theatre to rural communities. So new audiences can be bemused at the beginning when they first see us in action, but after about twenty minutes most audiences find themselves stepping into our world. Rude Mechanicals founder Pete Talbot writes the scripts, all the language on his scripts are phenomenal. Pete has got this knack of knowing exactly how his characters should speak. You couldn’t put it better, it’s just perfect.
You don’t wear masks?
No Rude Mechanical production is ever complete until we’ve got our faces painted white, our faces alone become our movable masks. Pete always says that the audience is always the last piece of the puzzle, and when they watch our plays the audience project what they want to see. So, along with the words and the actions and the movement and what’s going on in the story, our facial expressions are almost magnified. Our acting and the style is most definitely bonkers!! It’s delightfully crazy. Be prepared to think what on earth is going on – but that’s just our style. Our stories are really clear. Our shows are really easy to follow. You’ll recognize lots of types of characters. So there really is something for everyone.
Gods & Dogs
This new comic dystopian allegory is set in 2084 on the fictitious island of Abatina in a world where people are either glamorous celebrities or slobbering dog-like followers of them gripped to their ‘telepafones’ – with the exception of the Nevnops (Not Very Nice People) as the President, Big Al, calls them.
The story follows Tina who enters ‘Marriage Maker’, a ‘telepavision’ gameshow. The idea of the game is if you win you get to marry the super-glamorous footballer, Harry Best, on the Saturday, have a weekend of love, then divorce him on the Monday. ‘All the fun and no ties!’ as the compere, Rich Nobb, puts it.
Unfortunately, Tina makes the mistake of falling in love when she wins and doesn’t want to divorce. Doreen, her best friend, has her own opinion, but then she might be a Nevnop and the Mind Police might get to her first and send her to the wolves on the ‘Other Side’ – a dangerous world over ‘the mountain’ where the inhabitants of Abatina, according to Big Al, must not go, with dangerous free-thinkers & wolves that might get them.
Unlike in Orwell’s ‘1984’ the dystopia isn’t just about keeping to the ‘party line’, but a world where people’s minds are controlled by a trashy Donald Trump kind of reality where love is reduced to a gameshow and marriage a mere ritual convenience and about a lack of independent thinking, a kind of ‘group mind’ controlled by ‘faceless overseers’ through an all-consuming social media. It is very funny but also provocative. We want people to have a good laugh as they recognize things and watch the way characters morph into slobbering dogs, but we also want them to think about what love and marriage really are, and about the way the perception of women especially, but men too, can be warped into this kind of caricatured, crass or ‘canned’ conception of reality. Will Tina get Harry to love her? Will Doreen get ‘disappeared’ by the Mind Police? You’ll need to be there to find out.
