Making A Tale of Two Cities
Artistic Director, Ben Duke, lets us in on what it’s like getting back to making with our new production, A Tale of Two Cities.
Is it good to be back?
BEN DUKE: Yes. The pandemic has taught me that I’m literally incapable of doing anything else.
How has Lost Dog managed to get through the last 18 months?
BEN DUKE: We got through by leaning on each other and meeting every Monday to talk about what we were all doing. There was a sense of activity, even if a lot of that activity was dismantling the tours we’d so carefully constructed, and that sense of activity was important. It helped me believe that there was going to be something at the other end of this strange time. It also made me realise very clearly that Lost Dog was still a thing, an entity, an organisation, even when we weren’t on stage.
Did you make any work?
BEN DUKE: We made a short film based on the idea of trying to explain to an imagined future generation of people who’d never experienced theatre what going to the theatre was about. It was about how the experience of theatre is almost impossible to describe. It was only 15 minutes long but it took me an inordinate amount of time to get it together. I sat in the empty Connaught theatre in Worthing to film it and it reconfirmed how a theatre, pretty much any theatre, is where I feel most at home.
How has the pandemic altered how you make work or think about making work?
BEN DUKE: It has made us realise that we have to work as hard as we always have but we also have to hold things lightly. It feels like the pandemic has swept away that ‘show must go on’ at any cost and I think that is a good thing. Wellbeing, health, are more important than a show; I think art is a huge part of wellbeing and health but a single show should not take precedent over a performer’s or an audience’s wellbeing - that sounds obvious but pre-pandemic we often lost sight of that and so I think that has changed since starting again.
Lost Dog’s new show is based on Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’: a) when did you first read it, b) when did you decide to make a dance/theatre piece from it, c) are you sticking to his story or going off-piste and, if so, how?
BEN DUKE: I first read it when I was 18 and loved it. I think it was a book that appealed to my late teenage sense of a relatively binary world. I thought about it as a basis for a piece probably about 5 years ago but dismissed it as something with too much story. I kept thinking about it and now here we all are trying to make it happen. While it’s a well-known story it’s not so familiar that I can assume people will know what is happening so the problem is how much of the story do we need to tell. In our production we imagine an alternative future for Dickens’ characters and they are looking back and trying to make sense of it.
This show has cameras operated by the cast onstage, how does the use of cameras and filming techniques onstage, as well as the use of text, drive the piece?
BEN DUKE: We have been experimenting with cameras as a way of playing with what is private and what is public. I’m interested in how cameras confuse our sense of privacy. We can talk to a camera and feel as though we are alone or just talking to one other person but in reality that sense of intimacy is a lie because what is being recorded can be seen by a lot of people. So we are experimenting with the idea of a documentary as a storytelling device and the cameras are part of that. Cameras also create a distance between the bystander and the action. Text is the main storytelling vehicle; text is what allows us to set up situations and develop characters. It is what we will use to build the framework and the other elements - the film, and the movement, will hang on this.
Photo by Sarah Weal, featuring Ben Duke, Nina Madelaine and Anna Finkel.