Features Published 31 July 2015

Jonathan Holloway: “We’d been doing the same thing for a long, long time.”

Alex Chisholm catches up with Jonathan Holloway, founder of company Red Shift which toured from 1982-2011, about life after touring, working in Hong Kong and his new version of Jekyll and Hyde.
Alex Chisholm

First, in interests of full disclosure, I have to tell you that Jonathan Holloway gave me one of my first jobs in theatre. Way, way back in the mid-90s (around the time of the last major funding crisis) I was his Assistant Director for the Red Shift production of Bartleby, based on the Melville novella. So this was part interview, part two old friends catching up over a glass of wine.

We started on what he’d been up to over recent years. In 2011, after 27 successful years producing and touring, Red Shift voluntarily gave up its Arts Council grant. Jonathan explained: “I felt we’d been doing the same thing for a long, long time and I wanted to do other things.” They then took the small ‘war chest’ of surplus funds they’d amassed and over the next 2-3 years spent it making completely different kind of work, immersive pieces, headphone shows, for festivals such as Latitude, Westival and Edinburgh Fringe.

With the money all spent, Jonathan took some time to think about what came next: “At that point I didn’t know what I was going to do and I started trying to analyse what I had done over the years that had been successful with audiences and made the company’s name. I realised quite quickly the work that had been consistently successful had been work that been artistically aspirational, had an unusual character to it, had been very strongly story driven and had not made audiences feel stupid. So however peculiar it might be it still didn’t alienate an audience, and you could still come as an occasional theatre goer and not feel put off by it.”

Jonathan did feel that he had pretty much given up on directing. His writing work for theatre and particularly for radio – he won the Prix Italia for his adaptation of 1984 – was doing very well. And, as he says, “after many years your tolerance for all the rubbish that goes with directing gets very low.”

But then the opportunity to work with the Chung Ying theatre in Hong Kong came about. Chung Ying is one of the three biggest theatre companies in Hong Kong. Set up 30 years ago by the British Council to produce a joint programme in Cantonese and English, the English language side had been steadily eroded in the years following hand over to mainline China in 1997. In addition the native Cantonese was under pressure from Mandarin Chinese and the desire to assimilate Hong Kong into mainland China. According to Jonathan the reaction to this from Hong Kong cultural institutions is to look outwards and over towards Europe. So there is increasing interest on the island in English drama, Italian opera, Danish contemporary dance.

Chung Ying had already produced Jonathan’s 1997 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables three times (I saw the original production of this: lots less warbling, lots more actual poverty than the musical). It had been very successful for them so they were interested in him coming over to make a show. He gave them a list of titles and when they got to Jekyll and Hyde they immediately said that’s the one.

I’ve had an earworm for many years about Jekyll and Hyde,” Jonathan explained. “The problem for me with Jekyll and Hyde is that it has been ruined by terrible film, TV and theatre version. What they all get wrong is they follow the structure of the original story and reveal the trick within the first 20 minutes so there is no dramatic suspense.”

One bit of terrible film adaptation did interest him, though: “Back in the late 1960s there was an absolutely dreadful Hammer Horror film, which had a kernel of an interesting idea because it was called ‘Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde’.” Predictably Sister Hyde was a vampish woman whose only desire was to rape and murder men, but the notion stuck with him and later when asked by a friend to work on something for a weekly rep season, he came back to the idea.

The piece started to fall into place when he hit on the idea of Jekyll as a woman, a doctor from Eastern Europe, relocated to London to escape a trauma experienced in her homeland. Keeping the late 19th century setting, and using longer tradition of women in science in Eastern Europe (think Marie Curie), Dr. Henry Jekyll became Dr. Tiamitsa Jekyll. Collaborating with his company, including Olivia Winteringham who plays Jekyll, Jonathan discovered the painful and violent ways by which she was turning herself into a feral teenage thug, the kind of person who abused her. Instead of a tired out, rather hammy, horror story, the play becomes psychologically driven, contemporary and relevant.

It turned out Jonathan’s proto-script wasn’t suitable for weekly rep. It had a couple of outings: First to plug a gap in the Courtyard Theatre’s programme and then taken up to Edinburgh Fringe and transferred to Southwark by director Jessica Edwards and her company Flipping the Bird, in association with Red Shift.

When the offer from Chung Ying came in, it gave Jonathan the opportunity to re-visit the play himself and create what he calls “a Red Shift show on steroids”. The creative team is all Red Shift: Jon Nichols composer/sound designer, Neil Irish design, Jonathan adapting, directing and lighting design. The company is a mixture of UK performers, picked by Jonathan for their skills, versatility and interest in collaboration, and members of the Chung Ying 30-strong ensemble. Jekyll and Hyde was a cultural exchange and teaching opportunity, as well as production. The company were running workshops for other members of the Chung Ying ensemble through rehearsals.

The result he says is a show he is really proud of: “It’s a genuinely disturbing take on a classic, which had become dead air – a rejuvenation.” The production combines elements of “big Victorian melodrama, cabaret theatre of Frank Wedekind, the performances have angularity, archness, gestural, using facial masks. It is non-naturalistic but very, very truthful. It is Jekyll and Hyde, but not the one you think you know.”

Jonathan, very refreshingly, has no truck with the notion of being ‘faithful’ to the book he is adapting.

This is how I do adaptation: I read the book, then I close it and I write a story which has oblique references to the book but isn’t actually the book”. In answer to my question of why he wouldn’t just write an original story: “Because I was interested in fugue-ing on the themes and content of the book. I have been working on A Tale of Two Cities [also for Chung Ying] which is the least respectful adaptation I’ve ever done. I read it, left it alone for 2 months so I’d forgotten it again and then sat down and wrote a new thing called Tale of Two Cities which happens to have some characters that share the same name with the novel’s characters and some incidents which are the same but essentially is a different thing. It’s set in the early twentieth century among bare-knuckle fighters.”

About the time we were working together, it was fashionable to be very sniffy about adaptation. It was just as the New Writing juggernaut was getting going and adaptation was seen very much as a lower art form. This is thankfully changing, has changed, with adaptation of classic books and plays such as 1984 adapted by Duncan McMillan or Spring Awakening adapted by Anya Reiss seen as no less part of their creative output than ‘original work’.

Adaptation, certainly as Jonathan practices it, isn’t going through the book with little post it notes checking off incidents and plot points. He reads it, leave it alone, comes back to it and sees what has stayed in his head.  And then somehow connecting those things up with completely new material, and taking small characters and making them the point of it, and taking principal characters and pushing them into the next room. That’s what I find much more interesting.”

It’s 10pm by this stage and time to head off into the dark, rainy 21st century London streets. I loved working with Jonathan and learned a huge amount from him: how he combined lighting, sound, stage design in unexpected ways, his passion for performers and what they could bring to the piece. It sounds obvious but it wasn’t so much 20 years ago. It has been wonderful to catch up with him and re-discover all his passion and originality undimmed.

Jekyll and Hyde is on at the Platform Theatre until 8th August: you can buy tickets here

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Alex Chisholm

ALEX CHISHOLM is a director, dramaturg and Co-Artistic Director with Aisha Khan of Freedom Studios in Bradford. As a freelance director, productions include Nine Lives by Zodwa Nyoni, and Consciencious by Adam Z. Robinson. Alex was appointed Literary Manager at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 2001 and Associate Director in January 2006. Productions for West Yorkshire Playhouse include Schoolboy/Lover by Richard Cameron, Dust a community play by Kenneth Yates, Mela by Tajinder Singh Hayer, Scuffer and Sunbeam Terrace by Mark Catley, Tender Dearly and Non-Contact Time by Jodie Marshall, Huddersfield by Ugljesa Sajtinac, English version by Chris Thorpe, and two radio programmes in co-production with the BBC: Night Lights and Writing the City. In January 2005 she was invited by Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade to direct the Serbian Premiere of Huddersfield which ran for over 10 years. She is a (very) occasional writer and still exhausted mother of three.

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