Kings of England on An Elegy for Paul Dirac at SPILL Festival of Performance
13 April, 2011
by: Naima Khan
Naima Khan talks to Simon Bowes of Kings of England about creating a theatre show from silence as part of the experimental SPILL Festival of Performance at The Barbican.
It's near impossible to describe An Elegy for Paul Dirac, soon to run at The Barbican as part of Spill Festival of Performance, and creator Simon Bowes is being pretty shady on the phone. “I have a real problem with silent audiences,” he says. “I normally want raucous shouting, but not in this performance.” No, An Elegy for Paul Dirac is an ode to a famously quiet man.
Dirac was one of the most important theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. The man has equations and measures named after him and there's even a thing called 'Dirac algebra'. He was revolutionary in his understanding of how the world works and Bowes sounds a little in awe of the man he describes as “incredibly reticent to speak unless he absolutely had to”. He goes on to explain that Dirac was bullied by his forceful father who spoke French and insisted Dirac did so too even though the Bristol-born English kid wasn't very good at it. He was punished by being forced to eat despite his sensitive stomach. “This harsh engagement with language so early on may have shaped how he spoke as an adult,” says Bowes. “We're interested in the sparsity of his conversation.” Strange material for a theatre show, but also intriguing.
Bowes goes on to explain his thoughts on this mystifying real-life character. “The biography by Graham Farmelo tries to explain away Dirac's character through analogies with autism or aspergers syndrome, and I guess what we're trying to do is suggest that maybe it's more complex than that. Perhaps it can't be explained and perhaps it's because Dirac is utterly unique and should be taken as such.”
It's a refreshing theory but as Simon explains, “it's not an argument we make on stage – that's just something that structures how we think of him”. It's probably a wise move when dealing with someone so enigmatic. “Essentially what we're trying to do is present this notion of character as something rather unknowable,” he says, “so we don't give our audience very much to go on. The piece is for Dirac somehow as a kind of act of reparation rather than being about him.”
An Elegy for Paul Dirac is the first of a ten-chapter cycle of work called In Eldersfield that looks at many things including our memories and reassessing the heroes of the past and the future. “A ten year project feels unthinkable”, Simon says, “and we're very mindful that the kind of work we make is going to be increasingly difficult to justify, so we want to work harder, we want to ask more of ourselves and of our audience. Risk is hard to justify but it's also increasingly rewarded”.
The idea for the work centres on an incident in 1927: “During an experiment in a lab at St Johns College, Cambridge, someone asked him 'where are you going on your holidays?' and twenty minutes later he said 'why do you want to know?' I want to see if we can create a monument to that moment,” says Simon. “Can we use that silence as a moment of verbatim theatre? We're creating the most undramatic show we can think of to create a silence that no one wants to break. We anticipate a walk out or a fart but there is a slim chance we might complete it.”
For all the avant-garde productions London theatregoers are subjected to, this is still going to be tricky to pull off. But Simon has his own ideas on this. “Why do we go to the theatre?” he asks. “I go to see and experience things that I've never thought of before and Dirac's silence is the most unthinkable thing I can think of to put in a theatre.”
Perhaps a little ignorantly I ask Simon how twenty minutes of silence isn't going to be really dull. “Our work prior to the silence, our work through it and after it will establish a context for it” he replies. “Boring productions absolutely give audiences the right to fall asleep, but this will be anything but dull.”
An Elegy for Paul Dirac will run at Barbican Pit Theatre on 22nd and 23rd April. It's part of a double bill with I Guess if the Stage Exploded… by Sylvia Rimat.
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