Forging a hit from a myth

It’s the first time that Rice has adapted a modern novel; the first time she has worked with a largely unfamiliar cast. But though it’s a co-production with the Lyric, this is prime Kneehigh territory: the darkly dreamy tale of a winged Cockney trapeze artist, Fevvers, who causes a sensation in the music halls of turn-of-the-century Europe.

Like the late Carter, Rice and co mix gnarly, adult themes with a childlike sense of wonder. Ten days before curtain up, Rice and her co-adapter Tom Morris are still finessing the shape of the show. And as they run through the third act in the Lyric’s rehearsal room, the mood is well established — a woozy state that teeters between comedy and tragedy — but the cast clutch freshly written lines in their hands. Part written by Morris, part devised with the cast, the script has only slowly taken shape throughout the five-week rehearsal period.

It’s standard practice for Rice, though — and particularly useful for a story filleted from such a promiscuously inventive origi-nal. “It’s no mistake that this book hasn’t been done before,” she says. “It’s pretty much unstageable. So Carter’s estate has given us a free hand.

“But impossibility is a very good place to start the sort of theatre I make. Especially since the story is partly about theatre itself, about the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Before she joined Kneehigh as a performer, Rice, 38, worked with Theatre Alibi, an Exeter company that put on shows for children and adults. She learnt that the two approaches could be closer than people tend to assume — that there is “a universal humour” that appeals to both camps: broadly, the recognition that things go horribly wrong.

She also learnt that fairytales tapped into that idea like nothing else, appealing to our rational and irrational sides; to our intellect and our emotions. Which is why everything Rice creates is, in one way or another, a fairytale.

“They speak to us not of the kitchen sink of our lives,” she says, “not of the EastEnders part of us — which I enjoy as much as the next person — but of deeper themes. And there aren’t very many of them. Love, loss, endurance. Endurance is a huge one in fairytales: life deals us all terrible hands at times, but largely we get through, we do endure, and largely there is some sort of hope. Life is never sealed up.”

Rice should know: she was a decade into her acting career before she tried directing. She had become so opionated in Kneehigh rehearsals that eventually founding members Mike Shepherd and Bill Mitchell told her she had to direct. Her first show was The Itch, a version of Middleton’s The Changeling that was seen only in Cornwall. Did she think she had found her vocation? “Yes!” Straight away? “Immediately.” Her next show was The Red Shoes, which began Kneehigh’s current cycle of touring success.

Rice is quick to highlight the importance of the Kneehigh set-up. The company work in a converted clifftop barn near Truro. Mobile phones can’t get a signal. They socialise together in the evenings. It’s a community. But it’s not a collective. In the rehearsal room, Rice is the boss. “And that is liberating for the actors,” she says, “they don’t want to feel responsible. Acting is a terrifying process, and it’s my job to relieve that fear.”

She controls the mood of the piece — lighting is used from the very first rehearsal — and its meaning. She, not the writer, is the author of her Kneehigh shows. Writers are there in rehearsals, on hand like any other member of the team — composer, designer, production manager. For Nights at the Circus, Morris explains, the early stages of rehearsals were taken up with honing the story. The finished dialogue came late on. But Morris, an associate director at the National Theatre who also scripted The Wooden Frock, suggests that the devised approach can be more rewarding for a writer than lone toil. “I think there must be playwrights whose heads are full of the chattering voices of richly realised characters,” he says, “but I’m not very good at that. I think I’m more suited to being in a rehearsal room, seeing what the actors are doing, seeing what’s needed.”

So Rice’s productions combine the freedom of devised shows with a single sensibility guiding every aspect. In every show she tickles convention — bringing on a blackboard to explain which god is related to whom in The Bacchae; giving out Love Hearts in Tristan and Yseult — to subvert our cynicism. She points out the artifice, but only to strengthen the storytelling.

“I’ve actually got to the point where people trying to pretend to be other people in the theatre is quite embarrassing to me. It’s what most theatre is, and sometimes it’s very well done, but mostly it makes me blush. To not acknowledge the pretence, the game, I find embarrassing. So when I come to make something, I always think, how can I get the audience in on this game? And then once you’ve said ‘we’re all in this space together, you’re here, we’re here’, you can forget it.”

So far, it’s working beautifully. And Rice makes no bones that she wants the work to be popular as well as good. “I’m fearsomely ambitious for the work. I do want it to be seen by lots of people. I want it to make money — I’m Thatcher’s child, in that respect.”

Coming next is a slot in the RSC’s Complete Works of Shakespeare festival. But can Cymbeline — “another fairytale!” — submit to the same suck-it-and-see process? Surely the Bard won’t be submitted to a rehearsal-room grilling in the usual Kneehigh way? Apparently he will. “Everyone says they understand Shakespeare, but they don’t,” Rice beams. “Some of it is incomprehensible, so we’re going to be treating Shakespeare as we would any collaborator. If it doesn’t make sense to us in rehearsals, then it goes.”

This is the second time that Morris has worked with Kneehigh. He’s also one one of the its biggest champions. Rice knows exactly what she’s after, he suggests — for the play and for the company. With another show at the National pencilled in, expect Kneehigh to maintain its remarkable recent growth spurt.

“Their potential audience is huge,” he says. “Normally, if you go to see a piece of theatre that’s really good, you say, ‘That’s a very good piece of theatre’. But there’s a different quality of response when you come out and say, ‘That’s a really fantastic way to spend an evening’. You happily put it alongside film or any other medium. I think Kneehigh’s work does that.”

Nights at the Circus previews at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6 (08700 500511), from Friday, and opens on Jan 26.

Absolutely fabulist

Other companies that toy with convention:

Complicite Simon McBurney and co have mixed comedy, film and physical theatre in hits such as Mnemonic and The Elephant Vanishes.

Improbable They mix impro, puppetry and song. Biggest hit: Shockheaded Peter. Coming soon: another darkly comic musical, The Wolves in the Wall.

Forced Entertainment Director Tim Etchells coined the phrase “the temporary community” to describe the contract between performer and audience. Shows include the six-hour Quizoola! .