Musical Hysteria devised for the Fringe
Play on modern sexuality is ‘questioning everything and answering nothing’
Jill Raymond knew what she didn’t want when she set about creating Hysteria. The Richmond-based playwright had been in, and seen, her fair share of Fringe theatre shows.
“There’s nothing wrong with one-woman shows about your dating life, I suppose, but there have been rather a few haven’t there?” said Raymond. “It all gets a bit self-indulgent and I wanted to do something about the incredibly more complex topic of modern sexuality and society. And I wanted it to be with a cast and for us to devise it.”
Devised theatre, or collective creation, was something the U.K.-raised and Bretton Hall Conservatoire-trained actor has done quite a lot of. It’s a way of theatre-making where the script, score and movement is arrived at from ensemble collaboration.
Devised theatre — frequently called collective creation — is a method of theatre-making in which the script or — if it is a predominantly physical work — performance score originates from collaborative, often improvisatory work by a performing ensemble. Rather than improvised theatre, where the work is always spontaneous but typically based around a core statement of purpose, a devised theatre piece will develop from any and all ideas that the creators come up with and want to work into the piece. In the end, unlike improvised work, the final product of a devised theatre creative process is a hard copy.
“The previous year, I had done a show at Pacific Theatre called Still the Kettle Sings, where we did interviews with important women in our lives and then brought them together for a piece,” Raymond said. “I really liked the process and thought we could do that kind of thing with our experiences. The music I had composed by myself awhile ago, but we took real stories from the performers for the song lyrics.”
After selecting four other actors following the casting call, Raymond and Kimberly Ho, Isa Sanchez, Lauren McCraw and Ariel Martz-Oberlander came together as the Direct Theatre Collective. Hysteria, a musical theatre piece “questioning everything and answering nothing” was born. Raymond says that the look at “modern sexuality, social constructs and cultural bias” is both funny and biting.
“Amazingly, I’ve never worked with any of the other cast before and I was, initially, terrified at that because of concerns around if we could all work very closely around a subject that was certain to be really uncomfortable at times,” she said. “I’m really very fortunate and grateful for how we have worked together, because we have people who have been assaulted to those who really don’t have much to report on the subject. A lot of great people came out for the casting and had so much to offer, it could have gotten out of hand.”
Being both the playwright behind the initial concept and composing the music, Raymond is also performing in Hysteria. To make sure that there was a clean break between the actors and the direction, an outside director was needed. Raymond had someone very specific in mind, too.
“I really wanted Eleanor Felton to come, but she was in the U.K.,” she said. “Fortunately, the team behind Inside Voices: A Musical in the Key of P, which plays at the Firehall Theatre, also wanted her. So we split the cost to fly her over and do our two shows.”
If this sounds like a considerable expense for a play at the Fringe, it is. But Raymond is adamant that Hysteria was never going to be “the Me Show” with the artist writing, acting and directing. She wanted someone she trusted to come into the process with an outside voice and make the show better, funnier and more professional. Reflecting the general social consciousness around #MeToo and other movements, there are a lot of shows about contemporary sexuality and relationships at the Fringe this year.
“I was way too invested in the thing to be able to do anything objective around the show, so I needed Eleanor,” she said. “It was really important that it never veered into a theatre lecture — ‘OK, sit down, and let us tell you what is right and wrong to do with sexual politics today’ — as that’s not at all what this is. I think we’re different with our fusing of both comedy and drama, and collaborating with around a dozen artists to make the piece.”
Hysteria runs 70 minutes and comes with an 18+ warning for coarse language/violent content/sexual content and nudity.