"How do you feel?" "Squidgy." "You get used to it."
Towards the end of 2022
I wrote about a few PINOCCHIO adaptations I... hadn't got on with, let's say, and about Gemma Brockis' attempts to explain to me what Collodi's book had originally been about. Yesterday, the two of us managed to catch the very last show of The Globe's Christmas adaptation (a packed Sunday matinée, featuring Lucy McCormick beaming through grief as a blue fairy) and, readers, it was beautiful. It was perfect.
It had heart, and sense, and fun, and painted sets and giant puppets, all perfectly coordinating with the preexisting ersatz marble pillars on the Globe's thrust, and it kept surprisingly close to its episodic source material, with a lucid sympathy for its antagonists (theatre is work, and money does matter) but also an understanding that, at some point, we were owed some real nightmares.
It also did a great job on that winter's afternoon,of drilling home just how great a sacrifice Gepetto makes exchanging his only coat for schoolbooks. I felt every hug.
It was no less cheering to discover afterwards that the extraordinary creative team behind all this was also responsible for the much-loved COWBOIS at the Royal Court, a show whose every choice I'd found baffling, sad, and timid. It was, in fact, healing to discover this. Lively and freeing.
Where I took the stills from.
And talking of the murder of indigenous Americans: among the many Pinocchio adaptations I saw in 2022 was THIS beautiful restoration of a silent film from 1911 directed by Giulio Antamoro that included amongst its narrative tweaks a sequence about half an hour in, in which Pinocchio is rescued from the whale by "Indiani" who make him their chief but also attempt to roast Gepetto on a spit, prompting the puppet to sneak out of his teepee and seek the help of a nearby troop of pith-helmeted machine-gunners. This creative addition stopped me sharing it originally, but I'd always meant to cut a genocide-free edit so that the rest could be more easily enjoyed, and now I finally have, and here it is...
First video with the Newphone. So maybe badphone wasn't bad after all. Maybe me bad?
Look! I'm in Edinburgh, and beginning to lose track of how many Jonah Non Grata-related PR assigments I've shared on here, but – as these italics suggest – there's more. I don't think the video above counts, but the influence of Jeremy
Hardingham’s brilliant Incarnate – the first site-specific show I ever appeared in back in 1997, and whose route I attempted to retrace last night – only occurred to me in the middle of answering a question about "lo-fi absurdity" for Made in Shoreditch.
Exciting new Youtube Ai feature.
Here then is that Q&A in full (although it's a bit weird seeing my speaking-to-a-publication voice on this blog... I'm not sure why. It's all public, innit):
Nearly 20 years after its first London outing, Simon Kane is reviving Jonah Non Grata,
a solo show that merges absurdism, hymns, and a heavy dose of holy
confusion. This surreal, comic exploration of power, extremism, and
meaning feels sharper than ever in 2025. We caught up with Simon Kane to unpack his return to the Fringe, the joy of “failed magic,” and the art of staying baffling.
You’re
reviving Jonah Non Grata nearly 20 years after its first London outing.
What made you return to this gloriously strange beast now?
It’s
tempting to say something glib about the absurdity of religious
conflict, but I think what’s most important about the show right now is
how baffling it is. Good art can get us talking, but really good art can
get us to shut up. There’s a lot to be said for reaching out to people
through a piece that defies demographics by not making sense to anyone.
But the real answer is, I missed it, and I could now afford it.
The
show mixes hymns, failed magic tricks, and audience interaction. How do
you choreograph chaos without completely surrendering to it?
Entropy
keeps the chaos in balance, and a lot of this show errs on the side of
grinding to a halt. I added a line this year: “Waiting is also a way of
joining in.” So it’s not really chaos. Also, all that’s just in the
first third. There are proper scenes and everything later on. It’s like
tapas.
You call it a “clownish mystery play.” What does that mean to you – and how does that genre-bending shape audience expectations?
I
guess that description is meant to suggest a shabby, human-scale stab
at the unknowable. Mystery Plays were the earliest plays in (sort of)
English – Bible stories played with a realism bordering upon absurdity
by local Guilds. I think it’s helpful to base an absurd work on a simple
story most people already know. Even if they don’t know that’s what
they’re watching, something will chime.
This is a solo show, but
it feels full of shifting characters and perspectives. How do you
maintain that energy and dynamism alone on stage?
I’ve realised a
lot of the inspiration for this show came from simply asking, what do I
want to do onstage. I know why my character does what they’re doing,
and I don’t mind if the audience doesn’t, because as long as I know, it
will still be watchable, maybe even more so than if the audience knew.
Their curiosity provides the dynamism. That, and the songs help.
Power,
extremism, meaning – your themes hit harder in 2025. How have the
world’s changes affected your interpretation of Jonah’s story?
Jonah’s
look of double denim, bare chin and big sideburns was originally based
on me very much not wanting to look like anyone’s idea of a terrorist,
and that certainly changed, but I don’t mourn the passing of that
prejudice. I was a little worried some themes might seem too glib now,
but I’d forgotten how abstract the piece is. Although a personal sequel
to Shunt’s Gunpowder-plot-inspired, coincidentally 9/11-adjacent show
Dance Bear Dance, it’s not really about terrorism at all. It’s about an
abandoned protagonist’s power fantasy, and love is as much a part of
that fantasy as obliteration.
What’s it like re-entering the belly of the beast – literally and figuratively – after so long away from this material?
I’m
incredibly excited. The body has modes, I guess. I’ve just been writing
television sketches for Mitchell and Webb again, and it turns out the
last time I did that was in 2010, but it doesn’t feel like that. Jonah
was never off the table, let’s put it like that. If you want someone to
see your work, and your work’s a show, you have to do it again.
You’ve
worked with experimental companies like Shunt. What role does ‘poor
theatre’ or lo-fi absurdity play in your creative process today?
Ultimately,
all immersive work has to do is acknowledge your shared environment,
and that’s cheap as chips. Working with Shunt was a dream come true,
inasmuch I’d always wanted to make work that was funny in a way I hadn’t
seen things be funny before – because that’s what I grew up loving –
and Shunt were deadpan and pithy and wildly creative and wildly
ambitious, but of course they ended up with a real budget, and every -fi
going, which they used brilliantly. Maybe just as strong then is an
earlier influence: a writer, performer, and director a few Shunt artists
and I had worked with at Cambridge called Jeremy Hardingham. We did a
show with him in 1997 around the streets of Edinburgh called
“Incarnate”, based on the Gospels, and interspersed with interviews with
Drew Barrymore and sound bites from Reservoir Dogs, which maybe makes
it sound awful, but Jeremy’s script was brilliant and beguiling, and his
no-budget, Pop Absurdist pilfering was a huge influence on Jonah. He
never liked the title The Empty Space, because there are no empty spaces
– Who plays in an empty space? – but taking everything Peter Brook
wrote about “play”, and trying it out with an artist who actually knows
how to play… that freedom, that power… making a show up becomes
surprisingly easy once you’ve got that under your belt.
How do
you want audiences to feel when they leave Jonah Non Grata – confused,
comforted, or just covered in metaphorical rice pudding?
Do you
know the Monty Python Confuse-A-Cat sketch? Confused only like that cat.
Newly mobile. Reset. Maybe even like they want to make their own
version. Like they can do anything. I don’t want the venue to hate me
though, so no rice pudding. I want people to have had fun, and feel
they’ve come through something safely.
Yes, I now use wet soap instead of rice pudding so I can walk offstage all clean.
By the way, do you know the Confuse-A-Cat sketch? It's this:
Some of those answers were informed by six to seven-hundred words I'd written for Broadway World UK – before I'd clocked Jeremy's influence – attempting a brief historical rundown of other great immersive masters like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, the York Realist, me, Shunt, you know, that lot, so here's that...
Back when Shunt – the theatre collective of which I’m an associate
artist – started, we didn’t call it “immersive theatre”, we called it
“site-specific” because we took what we were given. One of the reasons
for choosing the Gunpowder Plot as an inspiration for DANCE BEAR DANCE
back in 2001 was that our venue was a railway arch. No rumbling of a
train overhead needed to be ignored now. All attention was rewarded. As
the collective grew, and designer Lizzie Clachan
could afford to create strange new spaces within found spaces,
acknowledgment of every detail of our environment remained crucial. The
site was the text.
Twenty years after first performing the thing most resembling the
shape it’s now in, I’m taking my solo show JONAH NON GRATA to Edinburgh.
I consider it very much a personal sequel to that work with Shunt but,
not wishing to give too much away, the logistics of the piece are those
of most other solo shows: me on a stage, and the audience in their
seats. Nevertheless, I still think of it as immersive, and here’s a
brief, cherry-picked history of what I think immersiveness is, to
explain why.
We could start with the Ancient Greeks. While I’ve not seen the
dramas of Sophocles described as immersive (and of course back then, you
could easily differentiate actors from spectators because, in a kind of
reverse Punchdrunk, the former wore masks) when Oedipus first steps
onstage to demand of his subjects through the hole in his face – at some
length – if any know who’s responsible for the curse fallen upon his
city, every citizen watching would already have known the story of
Oedipus, and known it’s him. Their silence wasn’t simply that of an
engaged audience; there was that added tension. They were complicit.
Permission to be complicit is a staple of immersive work. The
Mediaeval Mysteries are probably the earliest play-texts in (sort-of)
English: short, open-air adaptations of biblical incidents staged by
Professional Guilds. In one York Pageant, local “pinners and painters”
are seen hunched over a particularly slippery assignment, and it’s only
when the job is finished and erected, that the audience can see they
were roping and nailing Christ to the Cross. The author of this piece is
known simply as “the York realist”. Realism is also a staple.
Then there’s the Elizabethans. I’m old enough to have learnt – by
which I mean, old enough to have been wrongly taught – that
Shakespeare’s actors originally were rubbish, and crudely bellowed their
lines because the Globe was an open-air space, with no special lighting
to tell you who to look at. “Wrongly” of course, because once Sam Wanamaker had the thing rebuilt, its first actor manager was Mark Rylance, stammering and standing like Stan Laurel
wondering what he’d done with his keys, captivating audience after
audience with his brilliantly studied vulnerability because, in the open
air, they could see he could see them back. It wasn’t just
soliloquies that were played out to the audience now. Everything had to
be, thought and speech balloons alike. Numerous mob scenes, which had
proven such a headache in beautifully lit black boxes regardless of
their dimensions, were now a piece of piss at the Globe where the
audience was the mob, happy to be whipped up by whatever demagogue
stepped up. We didn’t call it “immersive” when the Globe reopened
either; that was still a word to be used in opposition to the idea of
“traditional” theatre. But the Globe Experiment proved Shakespeare’s
plays had been both.
Then theatre went indoors, and theatrical spaces stopped basing
themselves on the courtyards of inns. It became too expensive to light
an audience for the duration, and the relationship between performer and
spectator couldn’t help but be affected. Over two hundred years later,
in Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, the young Konstantin’s awkward rebelliousness
is exemplified by his attempt to stage his work in front of a real lake
beneath a real moon. Not a realist piece, but a hugely ambitious,
abstract poem about the beginning and end of all things, it’s still
immersive, albeit fictionally – it’s an attempt to recontextualize his
audience’s experience of their environment, like the rumbling of the
trains in DANCE BEAR DANCE, or the fleeing green figure in the EXIT sign
my reluctant prophet of doom can’t take his eyes off in JONAH NON
GRATA.
If your environment – audience included – is visible, and
acknowledged, a show cannot help but be “immersive”. And if it’s not,
you might be better off putting whatever you’re doing online, and giving
yourself the evening off. “Come and ignore where you are” is still the
default tradition when going to see a play. “Or don’t” is all
“immersive” really means.
I open tomorrow. My technical rehearsal was Monday, and everyone was lovely but the venue still hadn't been built, so I don't entirely know yet what there won't be to ignore there. But, just to prove my inspiration for Jonah changes every time I'm asked, here to play us out is a Q&A for Hinton magazine in which I add to the mix of Shakespeare, Shunt, Jeremy, Deburau and Chris Ware, not only Sulayman Al-Bassam, but the artist I finally, actually realised probably did inspire me to do a show about Jonah: Alasdair Gray, in his little Canongate Introduction to books of the Bible. These interviews have proved really useful. I hope it's not telling tales to say the one below originally went out under the headline "A Whale of a Mid-Life Crisis" but I do want to broadcast public thanks to my PR and her phones today for handling that narrative. I should probably also state explicitly that – apart from Voidspacezine in the previous post – all the Qs in these Q&As are based purely on a single press release (basically this). Maybe you knew that already. It's a new dynamic for me though. Take it away, liminal beings!
Rooted in the Book of Jonah but constantly spiralling into stranger territory, this solo performance is silly, profound, and as Kane puts it, “a temporary reprieve from having to be right.”
You describe Jonah Non Grata as “a clown take on a modern-day mystery play.” Tell us a bit more about this.
The first show I wrote on my own, rather than co-devising with fun people like Shunt who’d actually studied theatre, was a modern-day prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello, because I really wanted to play Iago, and had also just been to Cairo with Sulayman Al-Bassam’s “Al Hamlet Summit”, so any work seemed fair game. For my second play I wanted to go even further back for inspiration, to the old Mediaeval Mystery plays: rough, semi-realist adaptations of old stories from the Bible. Initially, I considered adapting Jesus’ awkward goodbyes on his return from the dead as described in various Gospels, but then I came across Alasdair Gray’s little Canongate introduction to The Book of Jonah, which he described as “a prose comedy” about “an unwilling prophet” who just “wants God to leave him alone”, and realised this should be the next show, and also that it should be – if not a clown show – at least a show where people felt very comfortable laughing at me.
The show originally debuted nearly 20 years ago. Why revive it now - and what’s changed?
In the show? My eyesight’s got worse, so there’s more audience interaction, as I have to ask people to read stuff out to me. Also, I received a very helpful note, after a late-night performance in 2008, to never let my character lose their temper. The technology that was lying around in 2005 is rarer to source now too, and you can’t just light candles onstage. Bits have been added. Bits have drifted off. But the biggest change is that stupid, evil, wrong people are even more of a problem in the world, and making sense doesn’t seem to be enough to diffuse that. So the show’s absurdity maybe seems more of a radical kindness now – a temporary reprieve from having to be right.
There are hymns, bungled magic tricks, a hotel room, and someone who might be on the moon. What’s your method for weaving such a mix into a cohesive narrative?
Bit by bit. I worry that the more I go into my inspirations for the piece, the more I risk closing off how people might enjoy it. It’s intentionally abstract, but the narrative’s there, in The Book of Jonah. I don’t want audiences to think it’s necessary for them to know that to enjoy the show though. Treat it like a concept album, or a cabaret. Music helps. A lot of the show was made to accompany the music I wanted to put into it. It’s practically a musical.
How does audience interaction influence the tone or outcome of the show if at all?
I’ve realised, in many ways, the show is simply about a character trying to work out how to talk to other people. And those other people are, for the most part, the audience. But because the audience is real, and the character is not, and we know that’s the deal when you come to see a show – a bit like Hamlet’s soliloquies – nothing will ultimately be sorted out. So I think probably the outcome won’t be affected at all. But hopefully watching that failure play out will be something, and maybe even itself feel like a connection.
What’s the strangest or most memorable reaction you’ve had from an audience member?
I think it’s my duty to out-weird the audience, and the richness of an interaction is not in its uniqueness or anecdotal worth, but in the simple fact it’s a reaction. In other words, I don’t remember. Honestly, what I find weirdest is just that so many people get it.
What do you hope to take away from Edinburgh Fringe this year?
Apart from all the stuff you’d expect me to want to take away from performing a show at an International Arts Festival – like love and respect and glory and validation and happy memories and job and book offers – I hope to take away with me some idea of what to do next. I’ve never really made anything as a means to an end, and I have the CV to prove it.
In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose.
My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.
Here's the famous windmill scene.
King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.
Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.
I pity the Fool.
"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of
us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had
an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something
else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...
... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.
Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...
... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?
Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...
Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.
But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...
Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling
on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake
of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.
Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...
.
Before the Globe reopened and this could be tested, it was taught for
some reason that open air theatres in Shakespeare's day required a broader and bellowier, more unrealistic performing style to compete I
suppose with the visible bustle surrounding the actors, but this theory never considered the possibility it might actually be easier to connect with an audience you can see than one sat in the dark,
no matter how hermetically sealed, or that broad daylight might actually require greater realism. Mark Rylance, the Globe's first
actor manager in nearly four hundred years, proved this beautifully. He
was not a bellower. He mumbled. He even stumbled. I last saw him at the
Globe playing Richard the Second as a man who, like Alfred Ill in
Dürrenmatt's The Visit, realises long before everyone around him that they're going to have to kill him (The Visit's very good), and he was superb, and there was
a flub: As the King's world suddenly collapses around him he feels
compelled to admit to his followers "I live with bread, like you" but when Rylance played the scene Richard, apparently in a state of shock, said instead "I
live with Fred..." and I still remember that flub seventeen years later, a mistake made completely in character, a sign of craftsmanship. So when I found the speech on youtube yesterday I admit I was surprised to see, three minutes and twenty-eight seconds in, Rylance making exactly the same flub. "I live with Fred..." It's possible I saw him on the same night this was recorded. But it's not likely. What an artisan. Here's me bellowing, and
Bolingbroke being a cock...
1. "To be... To be? Ay... to be. Or not to be." A line from -
a) All's Good As Far As It Goes
b) Hamlet the Fifth
c) Any Which Way But Loose
2. The Globe Theatre is so called because -
a) Shaekspere's plays were originally performed on a globe.
b) Globe is Latin for "Weirdly-shaped".
c) It's named after the Globe Theatre.
3. Shaekspere's what is buried beneath Aldwych station?
a) twin
b) skin
c) earth
4. How many ghosts are there in "Julius Pacman"?
a) One
b) Four
c) Trick question. One.
5. Which of these words did Shaekspere NOT invent?
a) Ginormous
b) Bubblelicious
c) Dangermouse
6. In the "Seven Ages of Man" sort of speech thing, which age does Jacques leave out?
a) The terrible twos
b) 16 to 24
c) The zombie
7. "Henry IX" was never performed in Shaekespere's lifetime because -
a) They forgot.
b) They lost the head.
c) Henry IX had not been born yet.
8. "Et tu, Brute? Kudos. Muchos Kudos." Who is Brute, and what has he/she done now?
a) Nintendio's servant - obtained the potion.
b) Nintendio's dog - spilled the potion.
c) Nintendio's dog - eaten the potion.
9. "Though not with bag and baggage/ Yet with scrip and scrippage" is funny because -
a) baggage means fanny
b) scrippage means fanny
c) I mean, really, it's just the one line, plough on.
And finally...
10. Which of these Shaekspere plays has NOT been turned into a musical?
a) The Git of Pisa
b) Measure IV Measure: Even Measurer
c) Annie
"How do you feel?" "Squidgy." "You get used to it."
