“I really believe that creating weird worlds in rooms above pubs is every performer’s right. It’s more evocative if you start with the thing you’ve got.” Veteran interactive performer, and former Shunt collaborator, Simon Kane, is well versed in the pragmatic art of conjuring weird theatrical worlds from the space and materials to hand.
Jonah Non Grata, Simon’s surreal, moving and very funny take on the story of Jonah, is no exception. Kane invites us join the hapless runaway prophet in his futile attempt to escape his destiny, by way of a series of interludes involving – among many other things – a church service, a telephone directory, a Fighting Fantasy book, and a very large sack.
Simon joins us in the Voidspace to talk about Jonah, by way of Hamlet, Norse mythology, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Disney princesses and Taskmaster.
Voidspace:
Hello, Simon, and welcome to the Voidspace. It’s really exciting to have you here.
Simon Kane:
Thank you for having me.
Voidspace:
My pleasure. First of all, I’d just love to know a little bit about who you are and what you do in this interactive space.
Simon Kane:
I suppose, very specifically, you’re interviewing me for two reasons. One is because I came to a night you created and really enjoyed. I went along with my friend Gemma Brockis, who I worked with in Shunt, which has made a lot of interactive work.
And also this year, I’m regurgitating a solo show, Jonah Non Grata – which I made partly as a personal sequel to Shunt – at the Edinburgh Festival, which has interactive elements, to the point of including a Fighting Fantasy book, which was my second experience of interactive fiction after Choose Your Own Adventure. This one had dice.
I thought it’d be very interesting to have a talk with you, because I also spent 10 years working at the London Dungeon. Last year, I had a lot of what I tried to call theme-punk jobs, but maybe a Disney Princess is a better job description. I worked at Phantom Peak. I worked for a bit at the London Bridge Experience. My day jobs are normally performance jobs that are immersive. They’re what might be called out-of-work actor jobs, but I’ve never treated them like that.
I genuinely enjoy getting to perform in front of a crowd in a way that allows me to be quite elastic, as a performer. And with a crowd that exists really outside a certain demographic, which is what you often get in tourist spaces. I love the idea that while I was working at the London Dungeon, this was back in the 2010s, or actually the ‘naughties’. I love the idea that in the audience could be anyone from the planet.
Voidspace:
I totally agree.
Simon Kane:
I love working with a company of other actors. And I love theme parks. So throughout my life, I’ve been really interested in these things that I occasionally work with. And it seems a very good time to have a chat about it with someone who is at the absolute academic and practical coalface of that.
Voidspace:
I love the fact that you mention these experiences that you’ve worked on: Phantom Peak, the London Dungeon, the London Bridge Experience. I think the great thing about this work is that it can engage all sorts of different audiences, if you can get the word out there.
Simon Kane:
The work I did with Shunt was often very abstract, but the fact it was interactive hopefully meant the audience had to be engaged. The audience couldn’t feel alienated. In the best work with Shunt, the audience couldn’t really go, “I don’t get it”, because they were part of it. Yeah, completely.
The other thing I’d mentioned, just in terms of the introduction to us talking together, is I came to a night you curated, and I think what I loved about that, which is what I also loved about The Manakins (A Work in Progress) when I saw it, is that it was so stripped down, firstly, and then also, particularly, what I loved about your night, was it was so text-based.
I haven’t encountered much really good text in interactive theatre. A lot of my work with Shunt was based on working out how to do this with text, what text to present to it, and how easily text could create a context for an audience, create a context for a work.
And create part of the immersivity of it, just the way you spoke, and then taking little bits of speech you might hear in a certain situation, then building on that artistically.
Voidspace:
I think it’d be interesting to put into context what you were saying about the work that you did in Shunt and what you did with text there.
Simon Kane:
I started working with Shunt, a theatrical collective who I knew members of because I visited their cabarets when they had a single railway arch in Bethnal Green. They came to do a show at the tower behind the Oxo Tower, called The Tennis Show, which had already been pretty much planned.
They’re spoken of as an immersive company, but speaking to Gemma, we came up with the idea that maybe what they did was make clown installations. They would find a space and create a journey for the audience within that space, which might sometimes split up the audience.
They almost made labyrinths, in the sense of a labyrinth in Ken Campbell’s description, a place that changes you as you move through it. And within that, there were performers. In The Ballad of Bobby François, you were in a fuselage of a plane, it was torn apart, and then you watched a clown show about the survivors of a plane crash. Outside of that initial experience, there wasn’t much of what we might necessarily call immersivity. You were watching a show.
Then the second show, The Tennis Show, which I became involved in with other people who continued to work with Shunt, was a real absurdist creation of two spaces that the audience would watch. And then those two spaces came together in a tennis match, and the audience were sitting watching the tennis match, but there were no tennis players, and bit by bit, more of the tennis courts started disappearing.
It was a very simple, basic, absurdist premise. And I started working with other artists, and then we came to do a show called Dance Bear Dance in two railway arches, which is initially based on the gunpowder plot. And with that, the audience came in and were sat at a table, and they realised they were delegates, but they were also plotters,plotting the explosion of the bridge above us.
The first third or so of that show was simply sitting at a table as various delegates made their proposals for how to escape. These were comic proposals, and the audience clearly weren’t actually part of the conspiracy, but they got the impression they were meant to be. And then they found out that there was another plot going on in the next arch, and then it started to fall apart.
Our performance relationship with the audience fell apart, as we realised they were not in on the conspiracy. And within that, I presented a text, as one of the conspirators, but then I was also asked to come up with something when one of the spaces had to turn into a chapel.
And the fact was clearly a type of church allowed the audience to know the role they were playing again. That went to become part of Jonah.
Voidspace:
I love the tension between the cues that the audience are getting about their role, what you think their role is, and the fact that they are, in the end actually still the audience.
Simon Kane:
When Shunt was starting out, it was called audience participation. That’s what it was called in my day. And people hated it. But then I think they were surprised when they would come to Shunt and realise how little they had to do. The relationship with the audience was always a case of mistaken identity. They were always actually the audience.
I like the idea that as long as we know what we’re doing, we are presenting something for which the audience are alien. They can be tourists, and they don’t have to worry about not getting it, because the alienness of it is part of it, and what it fires off in their own head is a personal reaction.
Voidspace:
They don’t have to know the rules of the game to be part of it.
Simon Kane:
I wrote something in my blog ages ago. Because a lot of the thinking about this I did on Chris Goode’s blog, which now no longer has an online presence. And I remember writing something about game playing and being inside of the game or outside of the game when I was working at the London Dungeon.
As a team, there was a game being played, and I was trying to work out what it felt like to not be playing the game, to be outside and still watching.
Parts of Jonah were based on stuff I did at Raw Scratches, which were hosted by Tassos Stevens, who went on to make Coney. I tried out playing a Fighting Fantasy book with the audience. It was the simplest way to ensure that I was going to have some relationship with an audience that would depend on the audience. The easiest way for me to communicate something performative with the audience.
And the motive for me is, so I enjoy it. The motive for me is so I don’t get bored of the show.
Voidspace:
That’s fair.
Simon Kane:
We did Shunt’s Money for 14 months, and I never, ever got bored of it.
Voidspace:
I imagine after 14 months, you’ve probably seen all there is to see in terms of different ways that people can react.
Simon Kane:
You’re not collecting reactions. It’s about the present. It’s about not knowing what will happen next.
It’s not about being surprised. It’s not like getting kids to answer questions and go, “Oh, what a gem!” It’s just that you don’t know what’s going to happen when you go into the room.
Voidspace:
That makes sense.
Simon Kane:
You’re awake and you’re alert and you can play. It’s about playing.
As an audience member, it’s the exchange I value. I really value the exchange, but I don’t value the uniqueness of the exchange. What I’m excited by is absolutely the contributions of the audience. And of course, by the nature of how time and space works, that will be unique. But I’m not enjoying it because it’s unique. I’m enjoying it because it’s an exchange.
Voidspace:
I like that concept of exchange being at the heart of it. We were talking about Phantom Peak – where you’ve worked – before, and questioning how interactive Phantom Peak is.
Simon Kane:
I was thinking in terms of how an event is structured. That structure is in place in Phantom Peak, so you have something to do in your four hours there. But beyond that, there’s such a lore built up, and people have so many usefully small parasocial relationships with characters who are played by different actors. Outside of that structure that’s in place to give a newcomer something to do at Phantom Peak, there’s huge interactivity within the performance, and that is the real strength of it. But that’s not part of the technology strategy.
The reason I question the interactivity is because your quest is, “do this, go to this person, do this, go to this person, do this, go to this person”. There’s never any branching. It’s simply to get you to the next place. But within that, then there are huge, really valuable unscripted interactions within the performance. And the space allows you to do that.
But I think that’s also true of theme parks. I wrote a blog post ages ago. My friend Neil Edmund, shared a video of a little a girl interacting with the actor playing Gaston in Disneyland and just berating him, and him berating her back. And he said, I think this is how Norse myths worked. The stories had a beginning and a middle and an end, but they were also existing alongside your existence. So even though the stories had a beginning and a middle end, they hadn’t yet happened. And so you are now in the story.
Do you know the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game?
Voidspace:
Yes, it’s impossible. Notoriously impossible.
Simon Kane:
Once I worked out what that was doing, I thought this is incredible because it’s actually subverting what a game is. It’s not a role-play game at all. I think it’s designed to be about creating a very visceral emotional relationship with the technology.
The whole point of it is that it’s almost impossible to play.
Voidspace:
I had always thought of that as a bug rather than a feature, and just said it was early days, and they hadn’t actually got the hang of difficulty moderating it.
Simon Kane:
It’s about how you deal. It’s a copy of the Kobayashi Maru. It’s about how you deal with this unplayable game.
Voidspace:
In the modern TTRPG world, in the art-game one-pager space, there are games that are deliberately unplayable. There are all sorts of things that are interrogating the form and just being fun and weird. It’s interesting if that was an idea back in the ’80s.
Simon Kane:
It has to be.
There’s no reason to make it that unplayable. I think it’s signalled by the very first thing where you have to work out how to turn on the light. That’s unnecessary. And you could die. Horrible. This machine doesn’t understand how a person exists.
Voidspace:
It’s creating in you the sensation of being Arthur Dent, because Arthur Dent hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Everything is alien, nothing makes sense, everything is baffling. And so that ties into the idea of this work being able to create a sense of exchange or a sense of communication that can put you into an emotional state of someone else who’s in the world of the piece.
Tell me some more about Jonah.
Simon Kane:
The question is Jonah. The answer is Hamlet. I played Hamlet when I was 20. I was saying, “What do I do with these speeches?” And then someone wrote an essay about it: You’re asking the audience questions. These are not rhetorical questions. You’re actually literally talking to the audience. And that had never occurred to me. And of course, that’s what’s happening.
When he’s going, “Am I a coward?” He is asking the audience, “Am I a coward?” And there’s no silence. I love stories about the refusal to the call to adventure, which the Book of Jonah is. So even though you might see the show of Jonah and it be entirely abstract, still within that, there’s that basic energy of being on stage, having a mission, not knowing whether or not you want to do it. Not wanting to do it, but also entertaining the idea that you are the Messiah, because you’re the artist, so you can save the world. What do you do with the audience if you’re the Messiah? And what if you don’t want to do that?
That aspect of most narratives or anything I’ve written is the refusal to the call to adventure, and making decisions. And this might go back to the Hitchhiker’s game. How easy it is to make decisions? How pointless or useful is it to make decisions? How much do we matter? The greatest technology for dealing with these questions, I think, is comedy, which is automatically interactive as well. I don’t think Shunt gets enough attention for how funny their shows were and how important the funniness was.
And working out how to create funny, immersive text was a huge part of me for working with Shunt, and people who worked with Shunt.
In terms of power dynamics, something will naturally be comic. One person on stage facing a whole bunch of people could be seen as inherently comic. That simple outnumberedness. If you draw attention to that image and suddenly stand like you’re in the wrong place, that’s funny. The idea of a performer realising they’re in the wrong place is funny, and something that’s very easy to play with.
It’s like Taskmaster. You know you’re playing a game, but you don’t know where the game is leading. There’s a lot to say about the aesthetics of Taskmaster, seeing how different creative people react to the same instruction. It’s very theatrical.
Voidspace:
That takes us back to that sense of exchange. You’re not going to get the same reaction twice. And it’s not the fact that you’re not getting the same reaction twice. The fact of that fluidity or shiftingness.
Simon Kane:
Although there’s a great fairytale nature of that, that you are going to see five different people approach a challenge. Then seeing everyone who’s had to go sit in a line and react to each other’s ways of doing it.
Voidspace:
When did you start working on Jonah? 2007, was it?
Simon Kane:
Oh, earlier than that. I did a version without the third act in 2004, and then January 2005 was when I pretty much did this show.
Voidspace:
So you’ve spent a long time working on it, on and off.
Simon Kane:
In fact, it’s very interesting. I was going through the script, tweaking it to work out what to do. And then quite late on, about two weeks before opening, I went back to the 2005 script and found actually a lot of things that were solving problems I’d made for myself over 20 years of tweaking.
Voidspace:
I think you get to a point where you can tweak and tweak and polish and polish and actually wander away from what you originally meant to do, without even realising.
Simon Kane:
Yeah. Although, what the intention is, it changes or isn’t always even clear. But I think there were bits of the draft in 2005 that were just a lot easier to say. Where the joke was clearer.
Voidspace:
Are you a script-first person or a performance-first person? Are you writing on paper, stuff that you’ve been trying out loud, or are you writing it first?
Simon Kane:
When I was doing stuff with Shunt, and outside Shunt too, you’d come in and present something to other people, or you’d improvise stuff with other people, and then I would go away and script that. And even without that rehearsal process, that’s still how I think about writing dialogue.
Voidspace:
A little workshop for the mind.
Simon Kane:
Performance is part of the writing. Being a performer helps you write this stuff. I think a lot of the inspiration comes from music too: listening to tracks and starting to riff along to the tune.
Voidspace:
The music in Jonah really stood out for me. So it makes sense that the music actually comes quite early on into that process.
Simon Kane:
It’s just so evocative, and it’s so cheap as well. You’ve got a room, you’ve got a nice lighting state, you get the right music. So much is already there. And it allows the audience to picture it themselves, I think. There are certain audio cues that just create something, or stop you thinking of something else. It’s the way to direct ideas, the way to direct the imagination.
Voidspace:
Yes, it nudges you into the right space.
Simon Kane:
Completely. It’s a mixtape, in a way. There are seven songs in Jonah. It’s a musical. But also, now you’ve seen Jonah, you can see how interactive it isn’t.
Voidspace:
Let’s talk a bit more about the origins of Jonah. You were saying earlier that a fragment of some of what you’d done with Shunt was one of the things that first led you to the idea.
Simon Kane:
Yeah, there’s a bit in Dance Bear Dance where suddenly we had to pretend we were in a church. The space had become a church, and the audience had to be congregants. And I was asked to write a service for it.
As characters, we have certain amounts of equipment. And one of the things we had was a German phrasebook. And so, rather than just writing it myself I used that. The Oxford Book of German Grammar, I think it was. It had some really great found text, which we could use to do call and response, which just made it sound and feel more like a church.
It was a wonderful creepy found text because there were all these sentences, “They marched through the town”. “It came through the window.” But also the sound of it very much sounded like a church service.
Voidspace:
The cadence of it, yeah.
Simon Kane:
I was interested in creating a surreal church as a space for an audience to understand what interaction was required of them, because a church has audiences, actually. You join in the hymn.
And it’s something where you might not already be familiar with it: if you’re going to see a friend’s service or something, go to a church you’ve never been to before, be part of a religion you’ve never been part of before, and this is your first time in it. It’s a way of joining in.
Voidspace:
That’s awesome.
Simon Kane:
Outside of the opening announcement, the first text you hear in Jonah is a series of phrases on a tape. “The vampire’s dirty beard” and all these other weird phrases, they are found text. I didn’t make up those words. Those are genuine phrases from a tape of American accents that I was lent.
Voidspace:
I like that collage approach.
Simon Kane:
Then there’s the church thing – that’s from Latin. The first song you hear is me doing a direct translation of O Fortuna, but in a way that sounds stupid. It’s just funny.
Voidspace:
I mean, it is funny. But there’s something there about what that humour is doing – and I’m probably over intellectualising it – but it’s taking the strangeness of that stuff, the strangeness of what’s already there, and just pushing it that little bit further.
Simon Kane:
I don’t think that’s over-intellectualising it at all. That’s what comedy does.
Voidspace:
I’ve read so much about Dance Bear Dance, and I didn’t even know there was a church service until you started talking about it. I knew it started with a fake conference set up, and then it turns out that there’s all this terrorist stuff going on, and that there are switches of setting, but I didn’t know about the church.
Simon Kane:
Halfway through, we suddenly had to disguise the two spaces into something else. And the rough idea was, we’re disguising the spaces as things that normally you’d want to keep disguised.
So one half for the interval – which wasn’t so much an interval, because the audience stayed in place and we were also performing – but at this point everyone went into a casino, basically. And I stayed in the other half, which was a church on my own, in a confession booth listening to traffic reports in the other half of the booth. I made a recording. I just made a recording of traffic reports. I would take that as a confession.
At the end of the interval, the audience has moved from the casino They would step into the church. The intent was to make it feel as much as possible like a church. I had a little echo on my mic. As a child, I’d been to church, so I knew the vibe. I knew what it would sound like.
Voidspace:
One of the nice things you’re saying about the interaction that’s expected is how at the base of it, it’s very much a communal experience. There’s a line in Jonah that speaks to it.
Simon Kane:
This is one of the times I went back to the 2005 version. The line is, “I am a double act. Half of that act is me, but it’s also more than me, it’s us.” So we are one half. That was the 2005 version. What I’d been playing for a while was, which I don’t think is as funny and it’s harder to say, is “I’m a double act, half of that act is me, who, tonight, will be played by us.”
I went back to the 2005 version, which just sounds more conversational and friendly. It’s still baffling, but as a voice, it’s more of a character voice. It’s a bit cornier. It was nice to be reminded, Jonah’s corny. He’s not in charge of the thing, but he’s got all these ideas of how to talk to people and how to speak.
Voidspace:
At one point in Jonah you go through the Choose Your Own Adventure book. Obviously, one person is doing the reading, but you’re inviting a group participatory moment. I guess depending on the original page number the audience chooses, it changes. But the night I was there, there were people shouting for a booty call because we wanted to get the treasure and get the booty. It was just a really nice little moment of people making their own fun a little bit within the bounds of the show.
What led you to bringing in the Choose Your Own Adventure book?
Simon Kane:
I just thought, it’d be good to continue to do stuff with an audience in Jonah, so you’re not wasting an audience, so every show is different. And a Choose Your Own Adventure book was simply the easiest go-to method to do that.
It gave me a book to hold, and it presented the nice idea that Jonah is a hokey hero. That Jonah is taking you seriously. And it just set the story up very easily: because it’s also that participation of the audience that Jonah runs away from.
The way it works now is a result of me losing my eyesight a bit. Initially, I would read from the book, and then I’d hand it to a member of the audience so that I could escape, and that would be the end of that interaction.
Now, because I couldn’t actually read the book, I give it to the audience member to begin with. That level of interaction just makes that bit more interesting, I think, than having me try to perform a Choose Your Own Adventure book as a text.
And then crucially, later on, when I’m on my mission, I can’t read the phone numbers, so I have to hand the phone book to the audience and get them to read the numbers, making the audience complicit again. That wasn’t in any previous version. And I think it worked so much better, and it’s so much funnier as well, if they’re reading the numbers out to me as I’m calling people up.
Voidspace:
You have the quite dry listings in the phone book, and somebody who’s not actually done that before trying to read it for the first time, it makes it even drier and even more stilted.
Simon Kane:
Although the audience member, when you went, was really good at it, and also American, which is not something I’ve considered, when I get everyone to try and do an American accent.
Voidspace:
In the original story, Jonah gets dropped off the ship after the sailors draw lots. And the thing about a Choose Your Own Adventure, and it’s the thing that frustrates me about choosing your own adventures, is that you’ve got a choice, but you also haven’t got a choice, really. It’s a choice, but actually it’s going to lead you to probably the same place.
Simon Kane:
I think part of the narrative of Jonah is like, you choose to run away, but you’re not allowed to run away.
Voidspace:
Yeah, that’s true. You think you’re pursuing your own course, but actually, you’re not. You’re still going to end up in the same place.
Simon Kane:
But you’ve chosen to do it, and that’s the thing that’s being dramatised.
But I think, as I understand it, these are Fighting Fantasy books. But they’re an adaptation of something that was much more free form. In Dungeons & Dragons, you’re not given a choice of action, you’re just asked what you want to do.
Voidspace:
The thing about Dungeons & Dragons, though, is that you are sitting around a table and telling a story together at the end of the day. You’ve got certain structures in place to help you tell that story. But that’s basically what you’re doing.
You’ve got LARP, which is then taking that idea of telling a story together, but also acting it out. Not everyone I know agrees, but for me, there’s still a distinction between even a very, very, very interactive piece of theatre and LARP, roleplay, D&D. If I go to theatre, even if I get loads of choices and get to do cool stuff, I still want someone else to be in charge of the story. That’s the deal.
But in LARP the story is generally created in a different way.
Simon Kane:
I think the purest form of actual play is 48-hour improvisation marathons, which you would go and watch. But the improvisers in that are making up a narrative as they go along, and it could go anywhere.
Voidspace:
48 hours? How does that work? I mean, the same story, I’m assuming people drop in and out.
Simon Kane:
It’s improvised.
Voidspace:
Yeah, but for 48 hours straight? Does anyone sleep? That’s wild.
That’s like the dance marathons of the ’20s, but more so. And then you can bring in your sleep-deprived hallucinations into it, and it all gets very fun.
Simon Kane:
Yeah, I think 48 hours is the limit. I don’t know if anyone’s done an improv marathon longer than that, but that is where you will get, where there is no story initially, and you can just take it anywhere.
Voidspace:
And it will be one ongoing story for the whole event?
Simon Kane:
Yeah, it can’t help but not be because I think everyone has to build on what everyone else is doing.
Voidspace:
I would love to witness one of those. That’s a whole new thing.
Simon Kane:
So it’s not interactive, but you are watching the performers interact and create something completely live.
Voidspace:
I suppose the interactive element or the playful element is from the performance perspective as opposed to the audience perspective.
Something I think that’s very interesting about that long-form narrative improv is that it has to be collaborative.
I did an improv class for a while, but I hated it because it was so fucking competitive. Everyone was just trying to out-funny each other, and it felt to me like the absolute antithesis of what I was looking for, which was a collaborative creative process.
Simon Kane:
Yeah, improvisation should be collaborative. And all interaction is improvised.
Voidspace:
Very true.
Something I was really struck by in Jonah was how you create a structure or a space where the audience feels safe to join in. I think that’s quite an art to that.
I think interactive performance often gets a bit of a bad rap when people have tried to do that in a way that is more alienating than inclusive.
Simon Kane:
Picking on the front row is such a typical power dynamic in comedy, isn’t it?
Voidspace:
Exactly. When you’re trying to get the laugh at the audience’s expense as opposed to bringing them in.
Simon Kane:
Very early on in the show, there’s an almost completely unscripted conversation with a stranger about where they think they’re going to go when they die.
Voidspace:
That was lovely. There is one book, Gareth White’s Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, all about the invitation to the audience to step into interactions. White goes into a whole, analyses in great detail of all the different social, physical, psychological hurdles that you have to overcome to create an atmosphere, so that by the time you make that invitation, it feels easy and people feel safe and able to join in and participate. Probably it’s actually something that people who are good at it possibly haven’t even necessarily sat down and thought about.
But I feel like you’re doing that anyway.
It’s about creating a structure in which we feel like we’re all in it together. It comes back to that whole communal interaction thing, where there’s something about the delivery or something about the whole set up that means that by the time you make that invitation – even though you’re doing it quite early on in the show – it feels like something that is communal. And so people feel safe to be part of that.
I think there’s a matter of actual delivery as well. There can be a harshness of delivery or a gentleness of delivery. I think you lean into gentleness.
Simon Kane:
Yeah, and I had to learn that. There was a recording of a show when I did it as a promenade at Shunt in 2008. At times I’m shouting at the audience. They’re quite drunk and wild, but it was really wrong.
At the time I was thinking, well, I am quite an extremist. It was Lewis Gibson who pointed out, the material is already dark enough. You don’t need to bring any darkness to your characterisation at all. Keep the characterisation light. And that was such a good lesson.
Voidspace:
Just shows you how all this stuff can be learned.
Simon Kane:
Especially if you don’t actually have a rehearsal or a director. So you are learning on the job. And you keep inviting your friends.
Voidspace:
Invite the people who will give you some genuine feedback.
The way you handled interaction in Jonah really stood out for me as something that would bring the best out of people and create that sense of collusion rather than competition.
It’s like, are you going to bring down the barrier between the audience and performer and extend beyond the idea of a fourth wall? Whether or not the performer can see you or acknowledge you in the room, the barrier is actually caused as much by a whole bunch of things.
There are a whole bunch of theatrical conventions, are you going to lean into them or are you going to break them? But also the sense of where the status difference is or the relationship between your character and the audience and the expectations that you’re setting at the start.
Simon Kane:
This definitely does relate to status, but with Jonah and with Shunt, we’re outnumbered, but we know the terrain.
The audience are going to be bamboozled and lost. And the people on stage aren’t lost (although there is also the sense we might be lost in a way, because we’ve misidentified the audience). There’s only one of me, but I know where I am and you don’t know where we are.
Voidspace:
That’s such an important thing, though, to understand, particularly as an immersive or interactive performer, that you don’t have to act high status and literally assert power and control dynamics over the audience in order to hold them in place.
You actually have that power already just by, as you say, knowing the territory and remaining in control of the narrative.
Simon Kane:
And I think you have a responsibility to recognise that you have that status as well. I think it’s definitely possible to play too low status, and the audience is going to go, “What? I don’t even know. It’s your show. You tell us what we’re meant to be doing”.
Voidspace:
But I’m not sure that your control over the situation in reality necessarily correlates with your status as a character.
Simon Kane:
I think ultimately your character does have to step up to the bat and say, “We’re doing this.” Your character needs to have the final veto. You are leading the expedition.
Voidspace:
This is much about delivery and all the other things that correlate to status. You can play it with gentleness or with an appearance of confusion at the right point, but it’s knowing which point you should be letting go and which point you should be drawing back in.
Simon Kane:
I think you can be high status and gentle. I don’t think status is necessarily about aggression.
Voidspace:
That’s good point.
There’s a point at the end of Jonah, when you did encourage us to follow you out and look out to the street. That sense of guiding us physically out of the room, but without making a big deal of it and just presenting that moment.
Simon Kane:
What I’m playing there is, “Oh, the world hasn’t ended. What was the point of all that?”
Voidspace:
I like the way that you found a way of inviting the audience. You weren’t just telling us that, you were inviting us to come and see it for ourselves.
Simon Kane:
That is a logistics thing. There are some venues where you can just go into the street and the audience can stay in their seats and watch you interact with the outside world. There are some venues, like Soho Upstairs, where they have to leave their seats. And it might actually be better if they have to leave their seats.
When I did it at Shunt, we all went out into London Bridge Station at two in the morning, and that was amazing. But that was the luxury of having that space. The music is uncued – that’s just a track that runs. There’s time enough in the music for an audience to move and then come back into the space.
Voidspace:
However you organise it logistically, you are always at the point where you are giving direct access to the outside world and the actual scene. That’s the bit I think is really powerful and immersive. I love it.
Simon Kane:
I think I saw a rotozaza show in the Lion and Unicorn, and at one point, they just took down the black boards that have been over the windows, and you suddenly saw the outside world. I thought, “That’s amazing.” It feels like magic. It was such a simple, incredible thing.
A guy from university, who I first made stuff out in the streets with, called Jeremy Hardingham, was great. He was very against the idea of the empty space. He said there are no empty spaces. This idea of just using the space you’ve got, that’s a really useful part of theatre. You can transform that, and you have every right to transform that.
I really believe that creating weird worlds in rooms above pubs is every performer’s right. It’s more evocative if you start with the thing you’ve got.
Voidspace:
Because actually, the magic trick works almost in reverse, because what you’re doing, you’re putting the story into someone’s head, and then when they see the reveal and they see the connection to the real world, you’re turning the real world into the story.
Simon Kane:
The bit where I’m just in a tight blue spotlight, that came from Jeremy’s work, where all the lights were blue suddenly. And I just thought it looked incredible. He was just doing a piece on stage, and then he lit a light and there was just the orange glow surrounded by blue. I thought it was so simple and so extraordinary.
Every room has some tech that you can do something with. Again, this goes back to the use of music. Just playing that track as someone’s reading out from the Fighting Fantasy book takes you somewhere.
Voidspace:
You’re taking Jonah to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time this August. I would love to hear what you are looking forward to about that, what you think might be challenging.
Simon Kane:
I’m looking forward to continually playing it in front of a quite big house full of different people. That didn’t happen when I did it at the Camden Fringe. And that’s partly just because everyone’s at Edinburgh, but that’s also because I was doing a very long run at the Camden Fringe, and it was 2011, and there had been riots. So I think people weren’t so keen to go out on the streets. I’m keen to see what people think of it.
Voidspace:
Do you find that you can get a read of the room as you’re doing as to how it’s being received, or is that unreliable for you?
Simon Kane:
No, I don’t think it’s unreliable at all because there are so many laughs. I think what will be interesting is if I get an audience that doesn’t laugh but still turns out to have loved it, that won’t be something I expect.
Voidspace:
Your marketing is that Jonah is “a biblical epic brought to stupid life”. That gives you a pretty decent clue what to expect. You’ve definitely set your expectations there.
Simon Kane:
What was your favourite bit of Jonah?
Voidspace:
The phone calls and then the bit immediately after that.
Simon Kane:
The soliloquy.
Voidspace:
Yeah, I really love that. That hit really well, because I guess it was just the climactic bit after everything that had been building up. It was built up so beautifully for me. Because you can get so far in building something in different ways.
And then there’s always the question of, is it actually going to deliver the punch at the bit that you wanted it to. And it did.
My other favourite bit was the bit we discussed before about leaving our seats and seeing that it didn’t work. Or rather that Jonah’s prophecies did work, but we share his sense of being disappointed by the fact that God didn’t smite anyone after all. Nothing changed.
That’s actually the punchline of the story of Jonah, isn’t it? After the drama of all that light and the scourge and everything. It then undercuts itself. Which is absolutely true to the original story, just pitch perfect, and we are really able in that moment to feel it from Jonah’s point of view.
Simon Kane:
One last thing I’d like to say is that everything I do, the instinct comes from what I want to do as a performer. I’m not doing anything on stage that I don’t want to do as a performer. That’s the initial seed of that show.
It’s “what do I want to do on stage for an hour?” Rather than thinking in terms of form or innovation, it’s just like, “what would be good?” And I think that’s quite important to point out in terms of understanding where any of this came from.
Voidspace:
Plant that little seed and see what blossoms.
What advice do you have for aspiring creators in this space?
Simon Kane:
Go to stuff, hang out with people who make this stuff. If you see something you like, follow them, see what else they’re doing, see what they recommend, go to that.
You will see where the spaces are, where you can maybe participate and join in and make your own stuff. It’s really important to have a space. I think. Find where the spaces are where you might be able to do something and see something. Is that too obvious a piece of advice?
Voidspace:
No, I think that’s a great piece of advice. Find the space that is going to give you the oxygen.
Simon Kane:
Also my only personal advice is you can do anything on stage. It’s just a bit of a thing where you can do and go and show your stuff. Don’t worry about what’s proper. Enjoy the opportunity to do whatever it is you want to do.
Jonah Non Grata is playing at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, from 31 July to 24 August 2025.
You can get tickets here