“Talking to Jeremy Paxman, he was doing these mind-bending gymnastics of language to manipulate the interview,” says the actress, who has appeared in Braveheart, Midsomer Murders and Heartbeat. “He was talking rubbish, but it was very convincing rubbish about how Iraq didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction but the allies were making sure it wasn’t able to produce more weapons that it wasn’t producing in the first place. It’s the kind of mind-blowing nonsense that sounds plausible until you think about it.”
The subject of language is dear to Stevenson right now. She is directing Communicado theatre company’s production of Havel’s The Memorandum, a satire of office bureaucracy gone mad. Behind the surreal comedy, the play offers a chilling vision of the way people in power — be they Powell, Blair, Bush or your boss — manipulate language to disguise their intentions.
Set in an anonymous communist-era office, the play follows the torments of the managing director, Josef Gross (played by Gerry Mulgrew), as he tries to get to grips with a new language, introduced in an effort to bring order to workplace communications.
Known as Ptydepe — pronounced in Stevenson’s production as “pet-id-ipy” — the language has been mathematically constructed to avoid sound-alike words, thereby ensuring maximum precision.
Free from ambiguity though it is, Ptydepe is also impossible to learn. That doesn’t stop its zealous advocates snatching power from Gross and forcing the gobbledygook onto their colleagues.
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“It’s funny and disturbing,” says Stevenson. “It’s a great play, very classical in its writing and incredibly carefully constructed. On the page it’s quite dense, but you put it on the rehearsal room floor and it reveals itself. The craft is there in the play.”
Written by Havel in 1965 for Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade, The Memorandum was an absurdist howl of outrage at the contradictions and contrariness of a centrally planned communist system.
Such attacks didn’t sit well with the authorities and, three years after the play’s debut, Havel was banned from working in the theatre — a move that pushed him into underground politics and led to a five-year prison term. In 1989, as a figurehead of the Velvet Revolution, he was elected president of a democratic Czechoslovakia and, later, of the separated Czech Republic.
A play written in such dramatic circumstances with an aim to remind us, in the playwright’s words, of “how we are living without hope”, might seem a far cry from the Britain of 2006. But when Stevenson picked up the script for the first time, what struck her was its topicality.
“I recognised this place completely,” she says. “It’s written from a communist background, but it speaks to me now here in Britain. We can’t pretend to be Czechoslovakians, but the play is much broader than that. It has layer upon layer of meaning.”
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The new language, like “new” Labour or any other “new improved” innovation, is only a smokescreen to obscure what’s really going on. “Power structures are similar the world over and throughout time,” she says. “It’s fascinating how the meaning of the word “new” has changed. It has a certain cachet that we think means something, but does it? Language is being used to control instead of to express meaning and communicate.”
She recalls the battle of words between the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan and the government communications director Alastair Campbell over the journalist’s report about the government’s Iraq weapons dossier. “We know that probably 99.9% of what Gilligan said was true, and yet they somehow managed to turn it around through this brilliant manipulation of language.”
For this reason, Stevenson is making the made-up language of The Memorandum as ridiculous as she can. “I’m trying to get the actors to crunch the consonants in their mouths,” she says.
With forceful echoes of communist bureaucracy, the office in Havel’s play is gripped by inertia. Nothing can be done without the right forms being signed. No signatures can be given without the appropriate permission granted. So circular is this buck-passing chain that even the orders of the managing director count for nothing.
It is, says Stevenson, a metaphor for the way any of us can become trapped in a web of powerlessness. “Havel doesn’t demonise any of the characters because one of the things he’s saying is that we’re all susceptible. These power structures are self-perpetuating. We’re always seeing politicians resigning, but the system continues in the same way.”
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Her own experience of British arts bureaucracy doesn’t seem so far from the old communist system. Communicado, the company responsible for hits including The House with the Green Shutters, Jock Tamson’s Bairns and Cyrano de Bergerac, imploded in 1997 after a fall-out between the artistic director, her colleague Mulgrew, and what he saw as a “gang of box-tickers”.
If he thought the paperwork was taking over then, he wasn’t prepared for the wilderness years that followed. Despite being one of the most influential and acclaimed directors and actors in Scottish theatre, he has been able to secure funding for only one production at a time. Instead of putting on shows — the thing he is good at — he has to spend days filling in forms to satisfy a “culture of bureaucratic middle men”.
As a co-director, Stevenson has suffered the frustrations first-hand. “Gerry and I have decided that next time we apply for a grant we’ll apply for it in Ptydepe,” she says. “You look at these forms and they just drive you nuts. There are so many criteria that you’ve got to fulfil and so much box-ticking. You’re very aware of bureaucracy and the whole consultancy climate that we live in where language is so manipulated. It’s not just the arts: the whole world is consumed by it.”
Dutifully attending seminars to learn about good ways to run arts organisations, Stevenson has been left amazed by the jargon.
“The language is utterly bamboozling and often completely meaningless,” she says. “At the last conference I went to, on the subject of leadership, a marketing guru stood up and said that research has shown that marketing does not broaden your audience. This didn’t seem to be a problem to her. She didn’t see the absurdity. It was like being in The Memorandum.”
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The Memorandum, Perth theatre, February 218 and on tour