“There are three clowns in the room in some shape or form,” Carmel Winters says cheerfully. At first I think I have misheard, because she has gone outside to take my call and the wind is snatching at her words, but no. Clowns it is. She is describing the rehearsals, in Youghal in Co Cork, for The Maestro & the Mosquita, her new play.
The family-friendly show, which is on next week as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, is described as non-verbal, but it absolutely isn’t silent. Or quiet, for that matter. The Maestro, who is played by Louis Lovett, is a conductor fallen on hard times. Haunted by dreams of long-lost fame, he is being tortured by a mosquita (only female mosquitoes feed on blood) that won’t leave him alone.
The springboard for the piece, which has a score by the Oscar-winning composer Stephen Warbeck, was Winters’s interest in the enemy ideation she sees in contemporary politics. “That polarisation between viewpoints creates such a sense of enmity ... When there’s an unpopular political sentiment I often want to investigate: what’s really eating the person?
“What I’m exploring is how we can come together,” she explains. The Maestro has abandoned the natural world, and it has now come back to bite him. (Literally.) “We have to see where he learned how to be a monster, where he divided himself up and where he left the parts of himself that kept him connected and kind.”
Winters says she knew from the outset that Lovett would be the perfect man for the role. “Louis’s area of really rare expertise is that he is somewhere in between clown and cartoon.” She was very keen to get Warbeck on board too. (As well as composing the score, he is directing the play with Muireann Ahern of Theatre Lovett.) They had worked together on her award-winning 2018 movie Float like a Butterfly, a process she found “joyful and really easy and natural”. Warbeck, she says, “has a wonderful ear, and a wonderful sense of humour, and that’s the biggest thing. Really, at heart Stephen is also a clown.”
Cartoons were a huge influence on Winters as a child. She also loved watching Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy with her father, who was deaf in a hearing family of 12 children. “He could rarely catch words. So if you said something, unless you aimed at him, and he was watching your lips, he was not going to hear it.” She is precise with language as a result. “I’m always trying to refine my communication, and it really hurts me when something intended to communicate one thing is misinterpreted or received on the other end as something else. I suppose that’s a constant human struggle. Our capacity for misunderstanding is extraordinary. It’s endless.”
I speak to Winters, Lovett and Warbeck separately, and I’m curious to hear if they will each identify completely different challenges in their collaboration. Lovett admits that, when Winters first proposed the piece to Theatre Lovett – which is him and Ahern – he was unsure how it might work. “Muireann arranged for us to have a three-day development where we threw the script up into the air in terms of my physicalising of it. We’re very lucky that Stephen came to Youghal, and Muireann, myself and Stephen just picked up the script and said, ‘Okay, let’s go!’”
The concept of the piece immediately connected with Lovett’s sense of play. “One of my raisons d’être as a performer is to show adults what children do naturally when playing in an empty space.” He believes children find huge validation in seeing a performer conjure up imaginary worlds. “I love to have that triangle between the person up on stage, the adult in the audience and the young person in the audience ... The child can look at the adults chuckling along to what they’re seeing. If anyone leaves the show just reaffirming their happy belief in physical play, before we hand all of that power over to computer-generated graphics, then I’m happy.”
The team of four explored the script through music and physical performance. “All theatre for me revolves around the idea of give and take, the passing back and forth of ideas,” Lovett says. As one might expect, he is an animated speaker, every gesture considered and meaningful. “Carmel has given us a scenario in the script. I build the architectural framework of that on stage out of thin air and physicality and voice. Stephen takes what’s happening and puts music to it, and then I can respond musically to what’s happening.
[ Louis Lovett and the dark heart of children’s dramaOpens in new window ]
“I was a musician before I was an actor, so it’s lovely that there’s a fluidity between the music and myself while I’m performing. We’re soundtracking what’s happening in the moment.” Ahern has sight of “the overall picture”, as Lovett terms it. He has complete trust in her directorial eye, adding, “When you are up there as a gentleman in his 50s, pulling things out of the air, you can easily go overboard.”
Lovett describes The Maestro & the Mosquita as “a non-verbal show with lots of sound coming out of the actor. There’s a lot of vocalisation. There’s singing. There’s song.” He uses the rather lovely phrase “I create pictures on stage” to describe his role. He believes that his imagination can never compete with the imagination of the audience. “So what I try to do is create this space for them to see what a mosquita looks like in flight, or what this graveyard looks like. They can bring to life the grassy hillock, the gravestones. I’m not bouncing all over the stage creating hills and clouds and sheep; they can do that if I create the physical space on stage for their imagination.”
Warbeck, whose many screen credits include the scores for Shakespeare in Love, Billy Elliot and The Man in the Hat (which he also directed), recalls the workshop period by saying, “We went berserk. We started a wild three days of invention and ended up extremely happy – but not knowing exactly what we had.” He hugely enjoys Lovett’s humour and imagination. “He is very, very inventive; very musical as well. We were improvising bits of music together, or making up songs together in the room. Some we’ve actually persisted with, and obviously fine-tuned them, but they found their way into the show.”
The score for The Maestro & the Mosquita is recorded; Lovett’s vocalisations and sound effects are live. Some elements remain flexible and fluid during performance so Lovett can carry on inventing, Warbeck explains, but others have been rehearsed and tightly fixed into place. “Any show that has one performer, a lot of responsibility piles on to that person. Every single bit of the rhythm and performance lands on one person. It’s huge. Louis has to keep himself very fit and very alert.”
The score effectively becomes another character, Warbeck says. “The music exists as the memory of what he used to be when he was a conductor. So it can be very sad, his missing of the past, or it can be boisterous and active.”
I suppose the cliche is we’re all killing each other. But we’re not. We’re all at a stage in our lives where we’re just so glad to create together
For Winters, the show’s biggest challenge is Lovett’s performance against the timing of the score. “It’s tightrope stuff between where the score is recorded and Louis. It requires a mathematical precision on his part.” It says much about Lovett as a performer that he is totally precise yet capable of improvising in the moment. “When Louis is in front of that audience, there is no end to the ways in which he is inspired to respond to an audience, enchant an audience, play with them ... There are so many things that happen in his body, in his voice. He loves reacting to people as well in the space, so we’re making provisions for the unexpected.” She wants the audience to leave happy, having had a shared experience.
For a creative collaboration to be a success, Winters says, “you need the best of everyone to show up, the best idea to win ... I suppose the cliche is we’re all killing each other. But we’re not. We’re all at a stage in our lives where we’re just so glad to create together.”
The Maestro & the Mosquita, staged by Theatre Lovett, previews at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, on Thursday September 12th, then runs from Friday September 13th, to Sunday September 15th
