Naima Khan asks Simon Evans director of Madness in Valencia about the craziness in his rehearsal room.
The rehearsal room at The Old Vic under Simon Evans' charge is truly one to behold. Kathryn Beaumont, “the heroine of the story if there is one”, is arguing with the brutish looking Laurence Fuller who wants to cart her off to a mental asylum. Some obscure shouting later, he tears apart his own shirt and the rest of the cast fall about laughing.“Maybe we shouldn't have brought wine gums to rehearsals,” someone suggests. They do all seem a bit sugared up. “The actors all came together on Monday for the first time,” Simon explains. “We're running on adrenaline for the next two weeks”.
Following rave reviews, Simon's huge fringe success, Lope de Vega's Madness in Valencia has just been transferred to the West End from White Bear Theatre. “It's been a hell of a learning curve for me,” Simon admits. “It's a show that is propelled by fun characters doing fun things and getting lost in this whole concept of madness... I think what we had before was a slightly rough and ready, fun fringe show and to make it worthy of the West End we need to tighten the screws a little bit and make sure everything is slick. But never at the expense of the enjoyment.”
Madness in Valencia is the story of Floriano and Erifilia who, in fleeing authorities intent on their capture, wind up in a mental asylum where they fall in love. It's a complex plot with crossed wires and love triangles a-plenty, but Evans is intent on telling a clear story with minimal external influences: “When I first started getting into directing, I took a lot from other directors. But it became cumbersome, weighed down by lots of different ideas. I believe that a good director focuses on telling the story. A company like Propeller, the all-male Shakespeare company, they do that, they put the story first and they tell it in a very inventive way. But the story is paramount.”
“My job is to make sure that a complicated story with 15-odd characters and lots of inter-crossed relationships is told clearly. We don't want anyone leaving at the end going, 'Well! I’ve not got a clue what that was about'.”
Known as The Spanish Bard, Lope De Vega wrote a colossal 2000 plays, few of which have survived to the present day. Written in the 1590s, Los Locos de Valencia has been translated by David Johnson.
“One of the beauties of a show like this is that no one really knows it. If a director undertakes a Shakespeare play for example, there’s a lot of expectation as to what their unique take on it is. That's because everyone comes into a Shakespeare play knowing the story: Peter Brook even wrote about seeing audiences in Stratford mouthing along to the lines. With Madness in Valencia, audiences don't come knowing it. We get to shape their whole impressions of Lope De Vega based on this.”
It's the text's great energy that first attracted Evans: “ think of myself as a very energetic person, and Spanish golden age comedy is so energetic. In the very first scene that we've been working on this morning, the first two characters Floriano and Valerio burst on stage. He's running away from the Spanish army and Valerio runs in from the other side to try and hide him away somewhere. It just explodes! Characters come and go very quickly, they change things unexpectedly, and people have to adapt.”
At first glance the production is a playful saga about love and madness, but there is a philosophy in there too.
“The characters buy much more into the spirit of being fortune's playthings. The idea of people tumbling or falling through life. I would say the essence is one of chaos. Chaos in a scientific way. That is, random events every now and again line up, and something happens. So, at the centre of this asylum, there's this couple that meet and consider each other to be mad. But they fall in love. At the centre of it there's something still, very pure and simple, which is immediately identifiable. But it's surrounded by this absolute storm of hilarious chaos. It tackles that issue – what if you fell in love with someone you shouldn't fall in love with? What would you do? Here are two characters who are prepared to pretend to be mad in order to saty together. It's just insane.”
Madness in Valencia runs from 09.02.10 until 06.03.10 at Trafalgar Studios.
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