Spotlight on: Sound&Fury

The Science Museum's cafe is noisy when I meet Tom Espiner and Hattie Naylor – our talk about sound and language is punctuated by the banging of coffee machines and the shouting of small children. It feels rather apt, actually, as we discuss how Sound&Fury's show Going Dark came into being, what it's trying to achieve, and why the company is keen to take it to other countries.

Sound&Fury was formed in 1998, when Tom Morris (then Artistic Director at Battersea Arts Centre, now Artistic Director at Bristol Old Vic) set up a festival of performances to be staged in total darkness. Interest piqued, brothers Tom and Mark Espiner teamed up with their friend Dan Jones to join in: “My brother and me and Dan Jones all grew up in Bristol together,” explains Tom Espiner. “Dan was working in sound design, Mark had done a degree in Classics and was interested in poetry and storytelling, and I was training as an actor. We came up with the thought of doing War Music, Christopher Logue's poetic adaptation setting of book 16 of the Iliad, the death of Patroclus,” at BAC's festival in the dark. “It seemed like a good way of plunging the audience into total darkness and transporting them to the battle plains of Troy or Mount Olympus or a campfire, using surround sound and live storytelling,” he continues. “Most importantly, it harnessed the audiences' imagination by depriving them of a sense.”

Since then, the company has played with ideas of sensory deprivation a lot, including in its last piece, Kursk, which was performed inside a purpose-built set made to feel like being inside a submarine deep under water. Sound&Fury now has a new show, Going Dark, which also plays with lighting and darkness. Going Dark is about the onset of blindness and it is deeply rooted in scientific understanding. Espiner tells me about meeting with Steve Owens, “a fantastic science educator” who, among other things, has “come up with tactile planetariums – to ask how can we give blind and visually impaired people access to the stars.”

This idea, of using touch in place of sight, is one that Sound&Fury has explored further. Espiner has used tactile planetariums himself, and describes them as “rather beautiful to hold and to look at. It's really interesting as a sighted person to see how you can learn and naviagate your way around the night sky through touch, through this kind of sensory learning.” Blindness, then, is central to the story they are trying to tell in Going Dark, and Espiner is interested in exploring this further: “The show has periods of darkness, and it would be interesting to see if we could take the show abroad with visually impaired audiences in minds, and say, well, there is a way you can access this story and perhaps get some knowledge about the stars as well.” Espiner also feels that the UK is at the forefront of disability and intergrated arts: “We do have an amazing thing to export... it's about how to include, how to enhance, how to harness all of these areas. You realise there's a difference between what we do and what happens in some other countries. We have done audio-described performances for blind and visually impaired people, but we also have a system whereby we can have surtitles for the Deaf on the backs of the seats,” so that the surtitles' light doesn't break the magic of the show.

Plunging the audience into darkness won't be to everyone's taste, and I wonder how much of the decision to do so it about controlling the audience experience. Espiner clarifies: “It's about telling the story that we wanted to tell, with all the tools that we as a company like to use: the use of lighting, the use of sound. It's about how that can transport the audience into a world.”

"It's a poetic act, in some ways, to be able to translate some of these scientific ideas onto the stage"

In terms of process, it sounds like a huge amount of reasearch goes into each show. The company is quite grounded in the scientific reality of things it is portraying. “Oh yes”, laughs Espiner. “We spend a lot of time, there's a lot of reading, a lot of research. Before we can begin to try things out we have to come in with a lot of research material and work out how we're going to implement it into the frame of our story.”

Going Dark is a show about big questions, and the company pushes itself to learn and to grow. “There are these scientific ideas that are quite difficult to grasp,” agrees Espiner. “I mean, people with mathematical minds spend years trying to understand and to grasp these ideas! When they then translate those ideas, though, they turn to visual analogy and metaphor, even poetry sometimes. It's a poetic act, in some ways, to be able to translate some of these things.” Another facet of the company's methodology is its commitment to collaboration – true, generous, supportive collaboration, as Hattie Naylor, who wrote Going Dark, is keen to stress.

Both Naylor and Espiner were struck by a quote they came across during their research period, that “children often ask the best questions”. As Espiner says, “it's not always the nerdy children who ask questions, it's actually just about the enjoyment of the scientific, the open curiosity of them, and that's something that we wanted to bring in to the play.” That open curiosity was displayed by Espiner's son, Jack. By asking Jack questions and recording the answers, Naylor ended up with “a whole arsenal of bits of information to play around with. Because Jack is 6 or 7, he just talks to you randomly about what he thinks the universe is. It's very, very funny. He's telling you things that only a child would say about the universe. From my perspective, coming at this as a writer, it is impossible to compete with that!” To prevent these moments from being “too off-the-wall”, Naylor and the team edited Jack's musings down, rearranged and cut them to feature in the show.

"I never understand why I'm in a theatre unless I'm learning something..."

Both are keen to emphasise that for all of the play's scientific research and rigour, it's also about a father and son. “Everyone can relate to it,” asserts Naylor. “Whether you like science, whatever discipline you're from, it's beautiful, it's funny and it's gentle and it's gorgeous. We're dealing with a lot of science, which is inherently emotionally colder... for me the real challenge for the whole play was balancing the scientific content which we really wanted with the warmth and beauty of their relationship so you stay emotionally engaged.” Espiner chips in: “Yes, it's about trying to work out how to make the science bits work, how to make those moments exist without being too didactic and ramming it down your throat.”

He goes on to praise Naylor for handling the two themes “brilliantly... Scientists who come to see the show will be satisfied by the quality of the science, and they're the biggest pedants in the world. The research is really important, but we also want to allow those people who know their stuff to be absorbed into the story. And the people just interested in the story, and who don't know anything about the science, will think 'Oh wow, we're all made of star dust', and so it's a really fine balance.”

Espiner and Naylor talk a lot about universal ideas of space and place and selfhood. Going to planetariums around the world it's easy to conclude that, essentially, we're all looking up at the same stuff. There's a tension in the work, though, because intertwined with these ideas there is also a great importance placed on lanaguge, in terms of communicating ideas, communicating the story. How might the show work in other countries, then? Naylor is emphatic: “I'd say that's there's absolutely no question of it not working.” Espiner qualifies this, slightly: “You don't get the full experience [if you don't speak English], but you can still follow the elements of the story, and you can still enjoy the sound, light, darkness. All around the world there are astronomers and there are science educators and there are fathers. ”

The lack of visual stimulation is part of the story of Going Dark, and it's interesting to consider how it would work as a piece of theatre for audiences in another country. “Human beings from every age and culture have seen patterns in the stars and told stories about them,” says Espiner. “If we go to the Middle East, to India, that's something that any culture will recognise. What is interesting about this particular story, though, is that different cultures may have different awareness about going blind and what that means.”

"Human beings from every age and culture have seen patterns in the stars and told stories about them"

Moving on from the development process and the academic grounding of the play, what's it like from an audience perspective? What would they say to someone who hasn't seen any of their other shows? “This is the first time I have worked with Sound&Fury,” says Naylor. “Tom is S&F, along with Mark [Espiner] and Dan [Jones], but I'm not, I've got a different perspective. They specialise in pitch-black spaces, and the moment you put someone in darkness or limited light, you really listen to sound. It changes the way we listen to sound. Dan Jones is an extraordinary composer as well as a sound designer. There's been a revolution in sound technology in the past ten years, and the smart theatre companies are using it really, really well. And that's what S&F do. You feel that you're completely inside that world, because there's such muted light, it's intimate. I'd go as far as to say it's a spiritual experience, because it's an installation, you're inside the world. I think they're an exceptional theatre company because they really understand the visual world, the sound world and text, and it's really rare to work with a company that would respect and value all three. Normally a company tends to be weighted in one area.”

Espiner, slightly uncomfortable with the praise, perhaps, returns us to the audience experience. “It is about transporting the audience. Hopefully, they take that away with them and it stays with them. That is a key thing about theatre – it's not just a quick fix, it hits you on lots of different levels, hopefully head and heart, but it's stimulating intellectually.”

Naylor agrees, strongly: “I never understand why I'm in a theatre unless I'm learning something, personally. I don't know if everyone agrees with that, but I feel that's why I should be there. You want the ideas to sit, to register, but you don't want to break people's hearts too much, because then they stop listening to the ideas. You have to do this very careful walk between between keeping people listening to the ideas and emotionally caring about the character.” Espiner's been nodding throughout this: “It's very, very tempting to let emotion take over, to ramp up the music, to go for the tears. But audiences are smart – it's a bit like watching puppetry, when the less the puppeteer does, the more more the illusion comes to life, and the more you can believe that that piece of wood is breathing and living. It's an act of self restraint, and that's hard.”

Picking up on this idea of restraint, I wonder how it feels to put the show in front of the audience, immediately ceding some of that control over it. The performers, the writer, the director, ultimately, they cannot fully control how the audience experiences the show. “Ah,” cries Espiner, “The joy of theatre!” Every time you put it in front of a new group of people, you're going to get something slightly different, aren't you? “That's what we love about theatre,” agrees Espiner. “You do so much to the machinery of the whole piece, and I include text and everything in that, but it's very much about the moment, and it's about trusting the piece, and trusting what it can do and when to pull back.”

You can find out more about Sound&Fury on its Artists and Companies page. Tom Espiner and Hattie Naylor were talking to Eleanor Turney. Going Dark will be at the Science Museum in London from 5-9 March 2014. Follow @UKTheatreDance on Twitter for all of the latest news, blogs and opportunities from the British Council Theatre and Dance team.