Preview: Playing Pretend
Scarlett Ryan
‘Can you call it a modern fairy tale? No… maybe a forgotten fairy tale.’ Jake Fenton’s Playing Pretend is on at the Corpus Playroom, opening this Wednesday (8 February), exploring issues of ‘memory, loss and grief’. Following his success with the collaborative dramatic project of In Black Water last November, Jake, who wants his last piece in Cambridge to be special and personal, has returned to the script he wrote a year ago.
It's all about ‘growing up – that shift from childhood to adulthood – nostalgia, and not knowing what we had until it is gone.’ Building on a theatrical tradition going back to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jake’s play sees time become ‘tricky’ as we navigate two worlds – the naturalistic and the surreal of imagination and play. These two worlds – reality and fantasy; human and fairy – are held ‘in uncomfortable proximity’ as Playing Pretend unravels. It is a play about the importance, and complexity, of time – for children who had to grow up quickly, to the difficulty of dementia. If Playing Pretend can be placed in a genre, Jake sees it as pulsing with ‘dark magical realism’.
Lighting and costume are an integral part of building these two worlds. The lighting designer, Lily Brough, explains:
‘It has been a joy to think about how to create visual representations of the worlds Jake has constructed in this show. Because the story is so surreal, it allows for real experimentation in lighting, with asymmetrical shadows, patterns and bold colours. The use of colour is especially important in distinguishing between the real and fairy worlds, but also to slowly blur these two worlds together. Taking the abstract concept of the fairy world and trying to translate it into a tangible lighting rig has been challenging but really rewarding. I think especially because the whole production team was involved from the beginning of the show, we have a strong collective vision which translates across all areas including set, costume, sound, and lighting.’
The costume designer Thalia Witherford, who has developed the play’s visual aesthetic, speaks of the various textures of ruined scrap, moss and bark, exploring ‘these structures that are becoming kind of relics of the past even though they are non-natural. I'm not just talking about like an old lichen or moss-covered stone wall; I mean, now we can see metal and evidence of industrialisation that has actually begun to blend in with the natural scenery. You see it on brutalist buildings where there's a deliberate incorporation of plants and that blend is very post-apocalyptic, very dystopian.’
Yet Thalia stresses this isn’t a dystopian show, continuing ‘I actually wanted it to feel extremely natural, I wanted it to feel like the fairies sort of emerged from the scrapheap.’ But there’s also a sense that ‘this was once a much more rich land, a land of imagination and creativity, one which the boys had poured their souls and their free time into building in their heads … there is a kind of opulence to that and a sense of what once was.’
We meet the fairies in a state of decay: ‘they’re infected, they’re decaying, they’re falling apart, they've actually gotten almost like a pox, their skin is kind of mottled and has actually changed its substance entirely – transformed towards the plastic that is rotting around them.’
Yet Thalia stresses the ‘whisper of opulence’ that remains as crucial: ‘We distressed the organza […] trying to give this sense that this was once a gorgeous, stunning, full ballroom outfit and that it's shrivelled up and it's been torn apart in the ferocity with which these beings have tried to remain alive as though they’ve almost been shredded by their by their attempts at living.’
Jake discussed Claudia Vyvyan’s invaluable help as script developer and co-director, pushing him ‘to create a world that held water’. Claudia talks of how the two of them ‘have been building this world (or worlds, I should say) of Playing Pretend; it feels like the worlds really have stakes and logic that the actors have learnt to buy into and invest in for their character work. I really wanted to make it feel like the audience are entering into the world of the fairies when they come into the Corpus Playroom. I created a soundscape which is literally one whole track for the whole play. The music is original, made by a composer called David Cottle – I worked with him before in London and he kindly allowed us to use the music he made for the last play I did with him. This was a godsend! We were able to skip a million steps in the process and cut straight to working on movement with Ella Palmer from the beginning of the rehearsal stages. This made a huge difference for the actors, especially the fairies Sophie, Francesca and Flossie who have worked a lot on physicality and choreography with Ella to show the other-worldly nature of the fairies.’
Claudia continues by discussing the script’s development around the theme of masculinity, exploring ‘what it’s like to grow up in the city as a boy, failed male role models, misunderstanding of responsibility and what masculinity can do to people, how toxic or confusing it can be, but also how interesting and beautiful, and how difficult it can be to relate to people when you never were taught how to articulate your emotions. The masculinity theme is offset by this story that explores what happens to your imaginary friends when you grow up and the idea of losing friends to the other world as you transition from boys to men in a chaotic environment. There is definitely a queer undertone to the relationships which the theys and the gays among the audience will probably notice!’
‘Everyone in the cast and crew has been crucial to building these worlds. I couldn't be more grateful to all the people involved. Drama at its heart is play,’ states Jake, ‘playing a part, a role, playing pretend, and everyone has been doing just that for the last month in the best possible way.’ It may be hard to return to that notion of play in the adult world, but drama certainly lets us access it, through those ‘fictional landscapes with their own rules, internal logic and rubric, their own language’. Importantly too, drama is of the moment, lost once performed – a powerful idea for Playing Pretend, a piece so interested in loss, grief, and memory. Time, indeed, is getting tricky…
Jake Fenton’s Playing Pretend is on at the Corpus Playroom, opening this Wednesday (8 February) until the 11th. Get your tickets here.