Naima Khan talks to director Nadia Latif about the image of "political theatre" and how Theatre 503 are shaking it up.
Nadia Latif would like to meet at RADA. I like RADA, it has lots of glass doors. Nadia, alumni of the academy and curator of Theatre 503's latest ambitious project Coalition, sits down to talk about hooking up some remarkably creative couples and the politics of art.
“Our duty as artists,” she begins, “is to show the widest range of political experiences. I think people are a little wary of the moniker of 'political' theatre. We're trying to show that the topicality of doing plays about the coalition is not as important as the fact that as artists we're pushing ourselves to do something different.”
“Different” is probably the best way of putting it. Impressively, Latif has paired ten writers with other creatives from a medley of backgrounds including dance, cabaret, comedy and journalism and tasked them with creating a twenty minute show. The brief, she tells me, is unspecific and the one requirement is only that the show must be inspired.
“Ella Hickson, for example, decided very early on that she wanted to write a piece about David Cameron.” Ella Hickson is the writer of Edinburgh Fringe hit Eight, and “her first challenge was to get as much sympathy within herself for his person. Here's a man who lost his father and his child in the space of six months and was then expected to lead a party and a government of which he was not necessarily in control, and actually, what does that do to you? In America, you get eight years as President, two terms. You're only ever going to get eight years. In this country, you're Prime Minister until you fuck up so badly that they have to get somebody else to replace you. I think that's fascinating for what it must be doing to David Cameron. How strange that must be.”
But it's not all so direct: “Across an evening you get a range from the ones that are overtly political to the ones that are a little more human and beautiful. We didn't want it to end up being a bashing of the coalition because that's not interesting and it's also not reflective of opinion. People's votes resulted in this coalition so let's try and find the virtue in it.”
With contacts in every field, the creative collaborations came together as Latif puts it “quickly and organically. Some of them wanted to be paired up with whoever I wanted and some of them were a little more specific, like they really wanted to work with a dancer. A lot of them were really fortuitous.”
“The only ones where we thought 'we really don't know any of those' were puppeteers. We got Ronnie Le Drew. I like him because he worked on The Muppet Christmas Carol – quite frankly my favourite film of all time. He was also Zippy. Do you remember Rainbow? Yeah, yeah he was Zippy!”
And who gets to work with Zippy, err I mean Ronnie Le Drew? “Nimer Rashed who's a film-maker as well as a writer”. Rashed's collaboration with a puppeteer demonstrates what Latif is trying to show with Coalition. As she explains: “I think more writers should write collaboratively. The way theatre is moving I think there's more call for this kind of stuff; it's happening all over. People are working together with different art forms.”
Nimer is the man behind the film Baghdad Express, about a young girl's battle between her dreams and her duty. He also wrote the recently acclaimed Wild Horses. “For him to say 'I want to work with a puppeteer'! We kind of expected him to maybe do something a little more conventional, but he said I want to work with puppets. He's doing a really theatrical piece and their collaboration is beeyootiful...”
Coalition runs at Theatre 503 from 23rd November until 5th December.
Click here for more Fringe Theatre in London
Click here for more London Theatre
Click here for more Things to do in London
Add an event
Frieze Art Fair to launch new section for young galleries in 2012
Frieze have today announced details for the 2012 edition, their tenth art fair in London. Taking place...