Preview: Tender Napalm, Wardrobe Theatre

For Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s annual Directors’ Cuts season (May 1-26, Wardrobe Theatre), the school’s four graduating directors each choose a contemporary script in which to direct their acting colleagues.

The last production in the season comes from director Evan Lordan, who has chosen Philip Ridley’s passionate, sometimes brutal Tender Napalm. Here’s Evan to tell us more about the play – and his time at BOVTS.

Tender Napalm is properly, proper bonkers right from the get go. The first few sentences are so brutal that you might end up asking yourself, “What have I signed up for here?” But it’s not long before all the humour and beauty reveal themselves – and then you can just strap in and enjoy the ride.

I’m not a very well-read theatre maker to be honest, because most of my experience has been making work from scratch with my company, Conflicted Theatre. We like to create site-specific, immersive shows and generally we try to work with text by following this rule: if there is a way of ‘saying it’ without saying it, then that’s the way to say it.

This basically means that we don’t start with script: we figure out the story and how best to tell it as we go. Very often our starting point is just a concept, an image – or even the venue that we are working in, since we rarely place our work in an actual theatre.

So Tender Napalm is a bit of an unusual project for me, because with this script word is king! The entire play is made up of stories that a Woman and a Man tell each other and themselves just to get through the day. It asks really interesting questions about what makes life worth living and if the imagined can be enough to give your life meaning and purpose.

It’s a rollercoaster. I’ve had a chance to work with the actors for a couple of weeks now and the pictures that they paint are just incredible. These two actors [Hannah Livingstone and Pedro Leandro] really are destined for brilliant things and it’s a real, real privilege to be working with them before they explode onto the theatre, film and TV circuit. The various locations they bring us to as they spin their tales, the characters we meet and the adventures they bring us on are just a fabulous balance of the fantastical and the mundane.

Actors Hannah Livingstone and Pedro Leandro

The key thing to this whole script, actually, is balance: there is an awful lot of darkness in this play, but it is all countered beautifully with humour, kindness, downright silliness and proper romance.

I met with the writer Philip Ridley before I started rehearsals and he spoke to me about how much of the inspiration behind the piece is the language of love and how it would develop in an even more violent world. The language of love is already pretty violent, but because it is used so commonly we’ve simply stopped hearing it. Just take a moment to visualise the image of someone ripping your heart out and stamping on it. It’s intense, but we don’t even blink when we hear someone say that in a movie or even on the street.

This play is an attempt to bring back the truly intense and visceral language of love. If you want to hear a couple talk dirty – I mean really, really dirty – you will be hard pushed to find a better opportunity. But they do it with love and for the purpose of overcoming the shit things that have happened to them in the past, so that they can move on. They push each other to the limit, push each other’s buttons and twist each other’s nipples.

I once read a review of this play saying that it was so intimate you want to avert your eyes. I would absolutely love to capture that feeling with our production.

Director Evan Lordan

I’ve taken an awful lot from my experiences on the Directing MA so far. I was assistant director to Michael Boyd on Bristol Old Vic’s recent production of The Cherry Orchard, and was also assistant director to [BOVTS artistic director] Jenny Stephens on How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found. Both directors work in very different ways, but what is wonderful about this profession is that you can pick and choose the different concepts, techniques, games and whatever else you like and steal them for your own practice.

Jenny taught me the value of investigating the script thoroughly with the actors and creative team before getting the actors on their feet. It’s not just a director imposing their idea of the play on everyone else, it’s a common understanding of the world that you are trying to create together that makes a show sink or soar.

From Michael Boyd I learned to never underestimate or under-develop a character, no matter how small their part’ and to never, ever judge a character. Michael is also incredibly generous when it comes to listening to everyone’s thoughts and opinions throughout the rehearsal process. I think he is a wonderful artist and has done so much, but still has such humility.

I’m from Cork in Ireland, which is where I have made most of my work in the past, but after this year I’ve fallen in love with Bristol and so I would like to stick around for a bit. I want to get to know more people making work here and put myself out there as a freelance director, but I also don’t see any reason why Conflicted Theatre can’t make exciting events happen here in the near future.

Tender Napalm is at the Wardrobe Theatre from Tue, May 22 to Sat, May 26. For more info and to book tickets, visit thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/tender-napalm

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