Concrete Playground

Tim Spencer is a chameleon who brings an endearing, vulnerable energy to his stage performances. His latest solo work, Words They Make with Their Mouths, is playing for a brief season in Sydney before he tours it down to the Adelaide Fringe in February...

This was originally workshopped as part of Shopfront's ArtsLab residency - how did this process shape the project?

Tim Spencer: Shopfront's ArtsLab residency is structured in a way to allow work to emerge over a period of 6 months. Each week I would go to Carlton to play around with the knowledge that Michael Piggott, the program's mentor, would be looking at what I had come up with during the week. Essentially this meant that I was writing right up until the final performance season in October, constantly tweaking the script after it was tested out each week in rehearsal. It was a very therapeutic process, I must say. The result of this is a show that doesn't accept boundaries; it keeps building with a breakneck speed because of the fear of what will happen otherwise.

Why multiple characters played by one performer? What were the challenges you encountered in this style of theatre?

I was sure I wanted the show to be about many characters being played by a single performer, because it shows very effectively how individuals work within the group. It’s also really lonely to watch. Many of the characters in the show seem to be trapped in their heads, and certainly the way they speak shows a tendency towards imagination and isolation. The single performer is a very potent symbol for that; the visual story of what you see is very different to the story that you are hearing. I was certain I wanted to play around with that from the start - playing sight and sound off each other. I don’t feel lonely performing it though, I seem to have plenty of voices to play with.

I suppose the difficulty is finding a way in which to keep the performance dynamic and the audience interested. That's about not giving too much away, of setting rules and then bending them. It’s a really fine line about how much you give to the audience to keep them interested. If people are too confused they give up and stop trying to price the story together. The show asks a lot from the audience, but in a way that rewards their imaginative journey. I hope.

The story is set within a short distance of road. What drew you to this style of snapshot detail?

The idea for the show came to me after seeing a group of kids walk down the street. It was clear they had been drinking for hours: they were stumbling all over the place, laughing, kissing and riding a shopping trolley down the street. It stayed with me as a really great image and one where a lot of ‘everyday life’ drama existed. There's something magical about getting wasted, going nuts and waking up not remembering it. I love exploring the detail of everyday life - of finding the nuance of what a character thinks as he or she walks down the road, and then going to town with it. Within a hundred meters a lot can happen, and this show is about saying: "Hey, that's actually pretty interesting about what happened there. What is all that about?"

What artistic influences did you draw upon as inspiration for this project?

There were a few plays that I had seen beforehand that played around with characters narrating their actions and speaking almost in a confessional tone to the audience, like Roland Schimmelpfennig's Arabian Night and Tom Holloway's Beyond the Neck. There was something that really appealed to me in the immediacy of the dialogue, and the ease in which the style expresses flights of imagination. My characters can slip from narrating what they see on the street to what they imagine they will look like in 50 years time. In terms of the performance, I have been interested in vaudeville and mime for some time, and it was great fun to juxtapose a very literary and wordy play with movement that borrows from really over the top and expressive styles.

What kind of world do your characters live in? Will the audience find parts of their own world therein?

Each of these characters had their test in my own performance, which meant that if it was at all uncomfortable or awkward, I changed the writing and started again. I think what this means is that the world they inhabit is the world as I see it. I learned this year that the more specific you get with your action and characters, the more people will recognise themselves within the story. I think that's a brilliant idea about all theatre - you just can't try to please everyone. The more you say "This is how I see the world and if you don't agree, well bugger off", the more people really appreciate the detail and honesty. I think honesty is the great bridge between an audience and a performer. And this show couldn't get more honest if it swallowed a polygraph.

Is there something here that you'd like to take on into future projects, whether thematically or stylistically, or do you envisage something very different in your future direction?

I really like the self-narrated style as I think it opens up a lot of possibilities and just seems to suit the way my brain works. The idea of mixing a visual and aural story to create something very different is also an extremely dynamic way to work and something I'm only just starting to get my head around. As for subject matter, I don't think I’ve even nearly exhausted the trials and tribulations of my generation. It strikes me that we have a lot to say, but for whatever reason are just a little bit embarrassed to give any weight to the things that are sending us up the wall or making us fall in love or driving us to drink. It’s true we are extremely privileged, but that doesn't mean our opinions count for less. It’s a very interesting age we live in, and it’s vitally important that artists in this country don’t pretend that we live somewhere else or fail to see the depth of our own imagination. In the end, this is all we have, and I intend to make the most of it.

Images by Alex Vaughan