Features Published 24 October 2016

Shon Dale-Jones: “Most people are brilliant when you start asking.”

"You just do what you can, and don't be overwhelmed by how enormous the scale of things is" - as right-wing extremism grows and the refugee crisis worsens, Shon Dale-Jones is touring The Duke, a storytelling piece that hinges on a china figurine. Here, Maddy Costa talks to him about fundraising through performance, poverty, and making work with a social purpose.
Maddy Costa
The Duke by Shon Dale-Jones. Photo: Brian Roberts

The Duke by Shon Dale-Jones. Photo: Brian Roberts

For an unassuming one-man show that hinges on the banal event of an old woman breaking a china figurine, The Duke is remarkable. The day I met its creator and performer, Shon Dale-Jones, his company tweeted that it had already earned more than £20,000 for Save the Children’s Child Refugee Crisis Appeal through donations he collects in a bucket at the end of the show. That was from just 30 of the 50 performances scheduled to happen this year. Several of those are programmed across four London theatres – the Unicorn, Soho, the Royal Court and the Barbican – places where competition otherwise makes sharing a show anathema, all giving their spaces for free. As Dale-Jones says, it’s amazing what you can achieve with the right question. “Most people are brilliant when you start asking. ‘I will give this, why don’t you give that, then the audience gives this, and we’re all in it, aren’t we?’ It’s quite difficult for people to say no.”

Really The Duke isn’t unassuming at all, for all its shaggy-yarn humour and flights of fancy. It’s a big, furious piece about the world – yes, Theresa May, world – we’re living in and the social responsibility we could all work harder to exercise. At a micro scale it contemplates the loneliness of the UK’s elderly population, their isolation and the small efforts it might take to give them company and care; but expands from that to the global refugee crisis, the desperation of people drowning in their attempt to escape the Middle Eastern war zone. Linking the two is a question about the role of the artist, the value of art. The comedy narrative fuelling The Duke has Dale-Jones attempting to write a film script – a blockbuster, he realises – in which the island of Anglesey floats off into the Irish sea. The more that script is co-opted by a Hollywood-style agenda, the less ethical it seems. And although he doesn’t use such words himself, Dale-Jones is clearly preoccupied with the moral principles his work might embody. “Is it worthwhile? That’s the question I put in my studio. If I make theatre work, I really really want it to fucking do something and I want to be able to contribute.”

It’s a thought that has itched at him since 2013, when he was making a show for the National Theatre of Wales, Things I Forgot I Remembered, and already feeling that “it was impossible that the international community was not doing anything about the Syrian crisis”. That frustration wrote itself into the show: “It begins with me, as [his alter-ego] Hugh Hughes, sitting at my desk, trying to find a way to solve all the world’s ills. Then I get a knock on the door from my friend Jerry, who says, ‘Come on Hugh, we’ve got a show to make.’ I tell him I don’t think it’s appropriate to be making a show, I need to get involved in all these things. He says: well, you’re not a doctor, you’re not an engineer, what you are is a storyteller – so maybe you should write a play about it. And then we go on and do the play.”

The Anglesey adrift storyline in The Duke is piquant for me, as a long-term fan of Dale-Jones, because it was my introduction to both him and Hugh Hughes, the wide-eyed, somewhat bumbling, thoroughly charming character he invented a decade ago. Floating was Hughes’ first show, and Dale-Jones made it when he realised that this ludicrous idea was never going to work as a film, not least because no one would finance it. I interviewed him in 2007 and he told me: “I didn’t want to be one of those sad people who walk around for 10 years with a script in their hand, so I thought I’d just make it into a piece of theatre.” In The Duke, he is absolutely that sad person – and so buried in the show there is already a different story, a true one of what can be achieved through taking action. When there is so much in the world telling us that we don’t have the power to make change, I tell him, it’s so important to recognise the small power in the things that you can do. “Absolutely,” Dale-Jones agrees. “My grandmother was a profound influence on me, a very big inspiration, and that’s one of the biggest lines she gave me. On a daily basis she’d say, don’t think what you do is not enough. You just do what you can, and don’t be overwhelmed by how enormous the scale of things is – and try and join in with other people. Now I’m doing it, I think, yeah, that’s all you can do.”

That “all” might start small, but it multiplies, bringing unexpected benefits with it. The Duke isn’t just a show: it’s a crack-capitalism enactment of an alternative gift-based economy, in which the only profit accrued is by a charity chosen not just because they devote their efforts to helping children, but because they’re financially effective (according to Save the Children’s website, 87% of all money donated is directed at services). Dale-Jones required no public money to make it: instead it was financed by his wife, Stefanie Muller, with whom he runs the company Hoipolloi, and makes most of his work, but who also has a career as an actor, and happened to land a lucrative role in the TV show Homeland. (One of my favourite bits of The Duke is when he acknowledges this: it’s so rare for men to admit the support they get from their wives.) The experience has triggered a desire to think harder about the relationship between work and money: “I’d really like to explore how different economic models can work around making theatre, presenting theatre, how audiences purchase that theatre, where that money goes and how that money is received. I’ve been on both sides of the funding system: I’ve had no funding, I’ve had very good funding, now I’m a bit in between, but I’m trying to break it all down in case there might be another way round.” The Duke is also “the cheapest version” of what he does: “I’ve got a suitcase that I travel round with, I get on a train, I turn up, I plug the thing in. There are no costs.” And that’s another excellent benefit: its environmental impact is impeccably low.

In all this beneficence, has he experienced any negative challenges with The Duke? Immediately Dale-Jones recalls a woman, he won’t say where, “who appeared to me to be in her late-60s, early 70s; she walked past me on the way out of the theatre, and as she passed me she said: ‘Perhaps next time you’ll do something for the British.’ It wasn’t just the sentence and the words, it was the tone of her voice: there was a proper meanness and harshness, where obviously the atmosphere in the room is not that, and it just fired in. It was a real hit and run. And it’s weird, because it doesn’t undo everything, most if not all other experiences have been brilliant, people have been so encouraging, so enthusiastic, that’s why we can’t give her too much weight. But in the context of everything that felt really alarming: that’s the voice we’re up against, that’s the voice we need to have a conversation with. That’s what upset me the most, was that she didn’t stop or wait in the bar; not only was it barbarous, what she said, and the tone of what she said, but it was frustrating that she didn’t even stay. I would have loved to engage in a conversation, because I do think that’s the kind of conversation we need to have, and we need to figure out how to have it.”

His way of trying is to keep making theatre, and he’s already working on his next project, Me and Robin Hood, which will have its first “try-out” performances in December. “It’s about poverty, and the division between rich and poor; I want to talk about what we think poverty is and what we think wealth is, and why it’s become so divided and so unequal and so unjust and so unfair. All the obvious stuff but it’s another huge thing, this country’s been really up against it, most of us probably think that was a major contributor to the Brexit vote. It’s a really meaty subject.”

Like so much of his work, particularly that made as Hugh Hughes, it has its roots in autobiography: “The town I was brought up in, Llangefni in Anglesey, in the late-1970s and early 80s was in the top 5% for worst affected areas. I lived in a town that was full of poverty. You don’t really know that when you’re a kid, but the truth is I lived in a town where people were poor, and I know that I was given a leg up, I know that I ended up going to university, and I now live in Cambridge, and when I go back to Llangefni, that journey isn’t just from one town to another, it’s a journey from affluence and aspiration and opportunity to a complete opposite place. And that really disturbs me.”

In fact he’s making two shows, one for adults and a family version aimed at fives and up. As part of his research, he says: “I’ve started doing this simple exercise where I ask children and grown-ups, can you tell me what a poor person is? And it’s terrible and comic how they describe them. The more I do it, the more I think, we don’t even know how to talk about poor people, it’s just fucking rubbish. But creatively that’s a really exciting journey to go on.” There’s a clear connection between this work and The Duke: “Really it’s about how poverty and migrants interact. People have moved around the planet for ever, and they’ve moved because they need to, because things run out in one place, or they’re aspiring to something. That’s the nature of us and we just need to understand it, because when we fight against it, that’s when weird hatred starts to erupt.”

He hopes to tour these works in tandem – but admits he doesn’t yet know what financial model the Robin Hood show might operate under. For instance, he’s already formed a relationship around it with another charity, Street Child United, but has discovered that there are legal restrictions on Arts Council funding that means “it’s hard for them to pay for a show to be made that will then make money for a charity”. Nor does he know whether theatres will continue to programme his work without financial benefit to themselves. But, he insists, “you have to find a way of bursting through, or it’s not helping anybody”.

This social purpose feels like “a new chapter” in his life and work – and one he’s determined to live out in company. “If there was another line in my studio that goes along, ‘Is this worthwhile?’, it would be: ‘Who else are you going to do this with?’ I’m really really really keen to see how it’s possible to connect. I’ve always said the show is just a vehicle for all the other stuff: I need to talk to the journalists, we need to talk to politicians, we need to talk to the charities who are so good at lobbying, and we need to talk to other community members – because otherwise we’re all fragmented. We want to use these shows to connect up the political work, the charity work, the artists’ work and the audiences, and if we can keep those connecting up then I think we might be on to something.”

He has a rising sense of urgency in this. “Right-wing ideology is becoming so prevalent and so powerful and so cynical that it’s forcing people who aren’t in agreement with right-wing ideology to be increasingly alarmed and into a position of going, OK, well, we’ll fight a bit. We’re not best at fighting, we’re good at being caring and generous in our thoughts, and aspirational at how beautiful our lives can be – but right now we need some fighters on the front line, and what I’m trying to say is that needs to be us. The well-educated, middle class – we know who we are, whatever language I try to use to define it, and I really believe it has to be us, because we are the powerful ones at the moment, whether we like it or not: we are well-equipped, we are well-networked, we are clever people and we are generous people, and together we could do awesome things and we could stand up against this tide.”

I’m in, no question. What about you?

The Duke is on in Cambridge from Oct 27-Nov 1 (various locations, bookings through Cambridge Junction), followed by a run at the Royal Court from Nov 28-Dec 2, and the Barbican from Dec 15-17. To read more about Shon Dale-Jones’s work, visit the Hoipolloi website. Maddy Costa has donated her fee for this article to Save the Children’s Child Refugee Crisis Appeal.

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Maddy Costa

Maddy Costa is a writer, dramaturg, researcher into socially engaged/participatory/community arts, daydreamer and fan of dogs. She works in collaboration with other artists/writers, including Andy Field on the Tiny Letter project Criticism and Love, and Mary Paterson and Diana Damian Martin on Something Other and The Department of Feminist Conversations. Things she likes making include zines, prints, spaces for conversation, cakes and 1950s-style frocks. She hosts a pop-up “book group for performance” called Theatre Club where she has all her best conversations about theatre.

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