Why another one
Why does depression have to be sad? Something to be approached with a melancholic edge? How can theatre crack open conversations about subjects as tough as mental health and depression, especially when the wider public are, thankfully, becoming more clued up on the subject?
Looking over the past year, it’s been brilliant to see that we’re not the only theatre company to bring depression to the public attention. The topic has exploded amongst theatre-makers, proving fertile ground for interesting and exciting new work.
Bryony Kimmings and her husband Tim made their now iconic Fake It Till You Make It, Ruby Wax’s latest offering Sane New World, is on tour, Dogs Of War by Tim Foley was an excellent piece as was My Beautiful Black Dog from Brigitte Aphrodite.
Every Brilliant Thing by Duncan Macmillan and Paines Plough was one of our personal highlights from last year. The Arcola has also recently approached the subject with a series of talks entitled Technically Speaking around the difficult and still shrouded subject of male mental health. Beyond theatre, Matt Haig’s book Reasons To Stay Alive became a bestseller. In February, BBC started a new series In The Mind dedicated to mental health.
Things are moving.
With such a full landscape, why would Parrot in the Tank create another show that takes depression as its central subject? What’s different about our approach?
The power of ridiculousness
With Parrot in The Tank, it has always been part of our process to be playful, anarchic and messy almost, when we discover new material. As a company of 9, founded at the Central School of Speech and Drama, each of our shows has been instigated by a member bringing a poem, an image or another nucleus ripe enough to bring to the table.
What follows is usually many sleepless nights dreaming up new methods of making things float, writing and rewriting monologues that get replaced by a small gesture, and seeing how many things a jacket can become. As described by audiences, what we usually end up with is a show fueled by postcard-esque visual images, a large number of lighting and sound cues dancing in frantic and perfectionist unison with the stage, and a cinematic feel that resembles stepping into a film.
With Black Dog Gold Fish, it was the tale of our fellow co-founder Sam Bailey and his own personal struggle with clinical depression. The subsequent script he’d written cathartically – as a means to confess to the condition to us – provided us with the framework for the show.
The show centres around an aquarium worker who accidentally kills a gold fish in his care. The fish subsequently becomes a misleading, guilt-ridden voice in his mind. And to mirror this totally ridiculous journey, all through the show our main protagonist plummets further towards the bottom of his own aquarium.
Ridiculousness (the word we would most like to patent) and being downright silly has always helped us shine a light on the darker, more tragic truths within our stories.
Black Dog Gold Fish is no exception to this.
Shows about depression often aim to remove the stigma of depression, to lift the veil of someone marked ‘depressed’ – to reveal a perfectly normal human talking about perfectly normal human things. But there’s an individual, unique madness of each of us, which sits at the root of what makes us human.
For us, the only way to remove the stigma was to avoid skating around the subject tenderly. Mercilessly, we threw any small talk out of the window.
Kickstarting it
Instead, as we devised the scratch show of Black Dog Gold Fish last year for the Vault Festival, we plunged straight into visual and physical comedy to crack the topic open.
Well, almost.
We had no idea how we’d make it happen logistically and financially. With just the script and a history of previous shows to hand, and a pedigree of working with great venues such as the Roundhouse, Young Vic and artsdepot, we created a Kickstarter campaign, in which Sam willingly subjected himself to making a show inspired by his life with a bunch of idiots called Parrot in the Tank.
We met the target within 7 days and what followed was 12 days of mounting a show from everything and anything that mildly resembled an aquatic theme and that we could get our budgetless hands on. Working with a stellar cast made of Barrel Organ’s Joe Boylan, comedy actor and film-maker Kyle Shephard and Gaulier-trained journalist-turned-actor Andrea Foa, this culminated in a joy-filled presentation of the first version of Black Dog Gold Fish. It was awarded with a 5 star festival review and Arts Council funding.
Being playful with life
A year later, and we’re discovering new things in the show. Now that we have had some time to approach it as a collective again, we have every intention of upping the game. (Our company high score of lighting cues is 120, we plan to beat this.)
The production is now set in an aquarium with floating, helium-powered jellyfish, heaps of recycled car tyre rubber and a fish puppet dance. We have every intention for it to feel like an eyeball spa, a balm for the heart and a belly workout. And just in case you come to every show of our two-week run, we can almost guarantee you’ll end up with a six pack.
We have also discovered something else. Something much more key through the art of Ridiculousness©.
We have somehow become so comfortable with the idea that depression is no longer stigmatised that the show has moved beyond and far exceeded what we set it out to be. It’s no longer about just speaking up and checking on your loved ones.
It’s about being playful with life. That old adage of ‘life gives you lemons…’ has produced a show that’s as playful and alive as the people who made it, brimming with all shades of lemony depression.
Merely ‘opening up’ isn’t cutting it anymore.
Be brave to be the idiot
Audiences are not interested in just talking about depression in a cause and effect way, they want to see what depression can create, what it can birth in the same way love, joy or fear can. All human emotions can create work, we just happen to always be silly with them.
What existed for Sam prior to starting this journey over a year ago was the fear of judgement but true to our company ethos, if we’re all idiots… well, then no one is.
Our process was, and will always be to immerse ourselves in a visual feast of comic anarchy. We hope we have created a sense of being able to accept our human emotions in all their forms, to be alive and present with them however they arrive to us.
And that’s what makes the feeling of being depressed – chronic or temporary – not sad.
It’s simply human to be depressed sometimes.
Black Dog Gold Fish runs between 15th-27th March 2016 (no show on 21st March) at the Hen & Chicken’s Theatre in Islington, London. Get your tickets here.