You really should have heard of Ben Kidd by now. His name keeps coming up. Actually, it’s often mentioned onstage during his own productions.
Kidd, a man in his 30s and a model of British courtesy, has directed just three productions in Ireland so far (all of them with the company he co-founded with Bush Moukarzel, Dead Centre), but that work has already travelled a considerable distance. Souvenir, Dead Centre's inaugural show from 2012, was a solo performance by Moukarzel that knew how to have fun with contemporary performance tropes without forsaking sombre meditations on memory, heartbreak and the thin line between fiction and reality. (It was "an honest misreading" of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.)
Souvenir became a springboard for their third show, Lippy, at once a more adventurous and a starker piece, which was inspired by a real suicide pact of four women in Leixlip in 2000. Invested in the theatrical and ethical difficulty of putting words in the mouths of these women, the writer and performer Moukarzel appeared onstage as himself to conduct a post-show conversation for a show we never see.
Kidd, always offstage, and invoked frequently, became part of Lippy's arch and coiling plotline. "Actually I worked with Ben on his last project, Souvenir, so I have some impression of his methods," Moukarzel would say.
In person, Kidd seems like the least likely person to seek exposure either through or within his work. And his “methods”, soon to be applied to a new play by Ross Dungan, extend wider than formal experimentation and metatheatrical gags. “It’s always about making something for the here and now – for the people in the room, to use a Bush phrase,” he says. (Friends for many years since they studied together at the University of Nottingham, Kidd and Moukarzel share a few phrases.)
Tides of suspicion
Dungan's play, Before Monsters Were Made, is a two-act naturalistic piece, set in 1960s Mayo, which revolves around a family, missing children and a loyalty eroded by tides of suspicion. At 26, Dungan's quick progression as a playwright suggests someone in a hurry to arrive at dramatic maturity. His early monologue drama Minute After Midday, and the quirkily conceptual The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle, wore their influences heavily, together with a strong streak of sentimentality.
His most recent, a two-hander monologue called Reckoners, offered a more septic and fantastic vision of a rural Irish revenge tragedy. Before Monsters Were Made, for the company 15th Oak, chooses a classic mode for a serious subject. It's not something you immediately associate with Kidd. "I'm doomed, a little bit, to attempt as many different styles of theatre as I can," he says. "I've always found the most thrilling experience to be to try and serve a voice or an idea."
Kidd was born in rural Derbyshire, near Manchester, and he trained to be an actor at Bristol Old Vic before deciding it wasn’t for him. “I didn’t start directing until I was 26 or 27, when I was a bit older and more jaded,” he says. “I liked to be in rehearsal rooms still, and I like actors. The taste in what you’re making grows and changes with the people you come into contact with, the opportunities you’re given, what’s on your mind at the time as well.”
In London, those opportunities have been enviable. Kidd has been assistant director or director at the Young Vic, the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and last year won wide acclaim for his touring production of Spring Awakening for Headlong, starring Aoife Duffin. He is currently based "between London and Dublin", which, geographically, ought to work out as somewhere in Wales, but has instead allowed for a productive slip between theatre cultures. " 'DubLon', is how Lynn, my girlfriend, who is Irish, puts it. I just go where the projects are."
Dublin has offered Kidd new ways of working. When he first came over he was struck by its much easier process. “It doesn’t take 1,000 years to get everywhere, there’s better rehearsal space, that kind of stuff. Because of the way the Dublin Fringe operates, because of the way the community is set up, there is more possibility for collaboration. There’s a genuine interest in work. There’s also a slight difference in the culture in terms of the role that success plays and the role money plays.”
Subsidised world
The enormous industry for commercial theatre in the UK filters into the subsidised world, he thinks. “It means there is more opportunity in London but it also means there’s more a sense you can succeed or fail.”
Dublin also creates different circumstances for new writing. There are, Kidd agrees, not enough theatres committed to staging new writing. But neither are there endless tunnels of process. “If Ross’s play was being produced in the UK, I don’t know if I would have got my hands on it, for a start,” he says. “The writer is very protected. If he’d given that to the Bush or the Gate or the Royal Court, it would have gone through 20 drafts and there would have been loads of stakeholders. There doesn’t seem to be a significant house here generating and staging new plays. New work has been devolved to the Arts Council and certain companies.”
With his first ever "straight new writing piece", Kidd seems to find as much stimulation in deciding how a table will be brought onstage during a scene change as he took from representing the figure of death as a man with a leaf blower in Lippy. When he talks about "plot", it's as though he has hit on a radical new concept in theatre.
Perhaps it is. “A wholly new work is f***ing terrifying, but I also think it’s the lifeblood of keeping oneself excited. Bush is more hard-line than me. He wants a piece of theatre to feel like no piece of theatre has ever felt before. I’m less hard-line, or perhaps more sophisticated, in thinking that every new play is subtly a completely new invention.”
- Before Monsters Were Made runs in Project Arts Centre from April 29th to May 16th
