Ahead of her new show, Epic at Soho Theatre, Chloé Déchery talks to Naima Khan about history, identity and how to retain our memories.
Over a regretfully bad line, Chloé Déchery is describing to me an intimate collage of a show soon to run at Soho Theatre. “What should our generation do with our legacy?” she asks, highlighting a question that arises in Epic, a very personal production full of history and warm humour. It's touring the UK and drawing in the crowds, not least for the team of creatives behind it.
Chloe, for starters, generally finds herself preoccupied with the nature of performance and ideas on culture, foreignness and what it means to be an outsider. For Epic, she's teamed up with Lucy Foster, an associate director of Improbable Theatre, the company responsible for the innovative, hilarious show Lifegame which draws on the most personal events of the audience to create something uplifting.
Foster and Déchery appear to be mining the same vein here but instead of looking to the audience for their material, they've turned a mirror on themselves and their history. “We explore the twentieth century by re-exploring our grandparents' stories and memories,” says Chloe. “In Epic we try to re-stage certain moments in their lives. It's a look at our heritage and our history and how we connect to it. How has it shaped us?And what should our generation do with our legacy?”
We may only be eleven years into the twenty-first century but, says Chloe, “somehow there's a sense of urgency”. This is partly because community dynamics have changed (“there's a kind of rootlessness we get used to”) and partly because, as Chloe puts it, “our generation faces a common difficulty in accessing history”. While the elderly are living longer, their memories don't often last as long as they do. “Illnesses like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's mean our grandparents are less able to convey what they've been through and it's quite inspiring to look at their lives”.
The show takes a lot from Brecht's definition of epic theatre and marks a change in scope for Foster and Déchery. Not just in performance style but in content, as Chloe explains: “we've been doing autobiographical works for a while and we wanted to embrace a topic that could be pretty much universal. We wanted to create something that resonates with different people, different cultures, and different generations. And we wanted more people on stage.”
They have their wish granted in the form of artists Pedro Ines and Ed Rapley. Rapley is known for making his audience feel like the only people to see his work. Although they often travel to many different theatres, there's no sense of Rapley's shows being reproduced for someone else at another venue. Pedro brings something international, Chloe says: “he is Portugese and based in Amsterdam. What he brings to the show echoes my background a bit because neither of us are English. I bring something about French history and Pedro explores colonialism and wars of independence in Africa and the dictatorship in Portugal that ruled into the '70s.”
“Lucy, who's English looks at the English obsession with World War Two. That period is so often seen as the richest period of history, as though British history reached its most interesting point at that stage. England reached its peak of glory after World War Two, and then that was it?”
Through, film, interviews, and performance art, Epic highlights the protests in the '60s and dips into American history too but “there's no one angle, it's multilayered,” Chloe assures me. “There's a sense of the great journey that the four of us have been on. It's an attempt to embrace and re-experience history and perhaps a failure to do so. But it doesn't stop us. That's the pattern of the show – attempt and failure, attempt and failure.”
Epic runs at Soho Theatre from 26th-28th May.
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