I have this thing with dogs – a kind of ‘saw this and thought of you’ thing. I don’t know when I went from being a person who likes dogs to a person who conspicuously likes them, but at some point in the last few years, people started sending me photos. Links. Telling me when they’d seen a good dog in the street. I’ve never even had one as a pet, but somehow it became kind of my thing, an unassailable fact about my personality.
@lozopus yo: https://t.co/VtF2yM3yBT
— Duncan Gates (@Duncan_Gates) September 23, 2015
I guess the ultimate ‘saw this and thought of you’ was a friend saying to me, in the pub, that someone she knew was looking for a producer for a show about dogs. She said she’d put us in touch.
Saw this, thought of you.
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Kandinsky – formed by director James Yeatman and writer Al Smith in 2005 – had its ten year anniversary this year, but the company hasn’t made a show since Limehouse Nights in 2010. James directs and assists all over the place, and works a lot with Complicite, while Al writes a lot for television and radio, and just had a play open at HighTide.
Dog Show is kind of a comeback for the company, which I liked. I know that there’s never a point where you feel you’ve ‘made it’, but basically Kandinsky work in the industry doing the things they did as Kandinsky, and they’re keeping their company alive anyway. I guess something appealed to me about producing that kind of work, made for the love of making it.
And then there were the dogs.
“I was living in Hong Kong and I was studying loads of courses on cities,” James explains, “about how people live in cities. There was loads of stuff about ‘what does it mean to live in a city where nobody’s from there?’ – Hong Kong is particularly pertinent for that, that sense of a kind of homelessness…and there would be weird manifestations of it, of which that article seemed to be a classic example.”
‘That article’ means a few inches of print James clipped out of a Hong Kong newspaper, a strange story about some unknown man or woman who was leaving poison on popular dog-walking routes to murder strangers’ pets. Nobody knew why they did it. They’d been doing it, uncaught, for twenty years.
“And I thought, this is a weird story,” says James. “Let’s take it.”
The loneliness of the killer and the companionship of dogs got all tangled up with Hong Kong’s strangely alienating quality, at a time when James was beginning to be “interested in how you can put the city on stage – which I’m still very interested in. People lived in these tiny, tiny apartments and yet they would have dogs, and it just felt like the most dog-unfriendly city in the whole world…”
He came back to London with the newspaper clipping in his bag, although as ideas for Dog Show began to take shape, it seemed inevitable that it should be set here instead: “Dogs seemed to be just as much a part of people’s lives in London as they were in Hong Kong, and in equally weird ways. And when you get talking to people and their dogs–” he catches himself, laughs. “Or rather, to people, about their dogs…they just seemed to be the key to loads of people’s hearts.”
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This isn’t the first play about dogs and it won’t be the last. They’re uniquely rooted both in and outside of the experience of being human; they’re an intrinsic part of millions of families but also, essentially, wild animals that people put little coats on. I used to joke when I was younger and people asked me why I liked dogs so much that I wanted something soft and stupid to love me, but of course the reality is that dogs are somehow both more and less than that.
In Major Tom, Victoria Melody used her Bassett Hound (the titular Major Tom) to discuss the madness of his dog pageant career and her simultaneous beauty pageant career, and the odd similarities between them. She kept him on the stage with her whenever she performed the show, but what he did varied night to night. He didn’t know or care that we were watching him; often, he just lay slumped in his basket, asleep.
We wanted to put dogs on stage too, but we were a bit more demanding about having them do the things we wanted them to.
“I had the idea of actors playing dogs on stage, partly because of – have you read Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill?” says James. (I say yes, but a while ago.) “There’s a whole thing in that where there’s an adult playing a baby… I thought, people playing dogs who are the same height as humans – if they can be as present a presence as the humans, then that’s really interesting.”
Ahead of a work-in-progress at Shoreditch Town Hall, the company spent time with people and their dogs, “and went out and met people in the park and followed people and their dogs around and that kind of stuff. We tried to find a way that we could make a kind of ‘dog language’ – make a human pretending to be a dog be clearly a dog. It became all about the legs and the sniffing.”
For a while earlier this year, ahead of Dog Show’s one-off performance at Incoming Festival, we referred to it as ‘War Horse with dogs’, joking about the cuteness, the innate appeal of having animals on stage. People playing dogs “turned out to be really fun. It turned out to be very theatrical, and putting a dog in a scene is a fun thing to do.” But Dog Show has also become something far knottier than that.
“In the way they’re bred, dressed up in clothes, co-opted into human life… There’s a way of looking at that which is: that’s an example of humans fucking up the world,” says James. “So are dogs an example of how bad we are with the environment or are they our friends that connect us to nature?”
Set in and around Hampstead Heath, the show follows four very different people (and their dogs) from four corners of the Heath, and toys with all of the above – the natural and unnatural, the park as a communal space, dog ownership, companionship and love.
“And actually it’s turned out,” James notes, “that a lot of the show is people by themselves, spending time with their dogs.”
We joke about the War Horse thing less now, perhaps because the show has become so much more lonely, more complex. But James sent me a text the other day that read, ‘New catchphrase: Eleanor Rigby with dogs.’ Which – yeah. That about sums it up I guess.
Dog Show runs at the New Diorama Theatre from 29th September to 17th October. More info here.