A simple tale of life, death and rabbits

May 9 2008 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Philip Key talks to the award-winning playwright and actor who ‘lost’ Anglesey about his new production

LIVERPOOL theatre-goers first met Hugh Hughes when he brought his show, Floating, to the Liverpool Everyman.

It was a bizarre, surreal tale in which Hughes recounted the day in 1982 when the Menai Bridge collapsed and the island of Anglesey drifted off around the world’s oceans.

It was performed in the nature of a strange lecture complete with film, flip-charts and sundry props.

It was also a huge hit.

Now Hughes is heading back to the Everyman, this time with Story of a Rabbit, another of his story-telling jaunts.

He has chosen a subject, however, that seems a curious one for his particular form of surreal story-telling – death.

In Story of a Rabbit he recounts the story of two deaths, a rabbit he was rabbit-sitting for a neighbour and that of his father.

While it has all the strange ideas of his previous show – this one involves props like a potato, car tyre, Apple Mac, telephone and projector – it is both amusing and strangely uplifting.

So why the death theme? I went to the horse’s mouth, Hugh Hughes himself, who actually turns out to be director, writer and actor Shon Dale-Jones. Hugh Hughes is fiction.

Dale-Jones was born in Anglesey and studied in Paris at the Jacques Lecoque International Theatre School. He was later to co-found the theatre company Hoipolloi, under whose name Hugh Hughes appears.

Hoipolloi’s innovative theatre productions have been visiting Liverpool for some years, first at the Unity and more recently at the Everyman.

Indeed, they have become regular Everyman visitors, not only with Floating but the theatre shows The Imposter – an unusual version of Moliere’s Tartuffe – and more recently the oddball play The Doubtful Guest, about a strange creature that invades a family home.

And death? “The whole project was to share personal experiences in order to question what they mean to other people.

“In this country especially, it is hard to encounter somebody’s death and I don’t know how well we do it. As people, we are relatively private and quite inexpressive emotionally.

“I thought it was important to try and make a show about the subject in order to understand it and try and express the feelings that surround it.”

In the Rabbit show, one audience member is offered a cup of tea on arrival. A cup of tea, Dale-Jones (or is it Hughes?) tells me is a regular accompaniment when people discuss death. “There is something comforting about a cup of tea and making it causes a sort of diversion.”

And then it is into his story-telling, the tale of the rabbit, his father’s death and the technical on-stage help from Hughes’s friend, Aled, who plays keyboards and operates all the machinery.

It is an extraordinary evening which combines the power of simple story-telling with all sorts of theatrical ideas.

The show was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival where it won a Fringe First. Edinburgh tends to be a starting point for a lot of the company’s work.

“It was important for us to do something there, because as a company we do new work and the festival needs new work to help keep its identity, otherwise it turns into a big commercial pot.

“So we said, let’s go for the spirit of the Fringe and take the risk of opening a new show, even though there is an awful lot of pressure with something new.”

Although it won a prize, as did Floating at a previous festival, Dale-Jones says they do not go there just to pick up awards. “You can’t go around thinking of awards because that is out of your control. You would be mad to do that.”

But it obviously helps.

Take Floating, which has now become an international hit. “It’s gone worldwide,” says Dale-Jones. “We are doing it in Moscow at the end of May and then taking it to Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Tasmania and all over the USA.”

It was showing it at the Edinburgh Festival that helped, he says. “International promoters come and see the work and then invite you to perform, that’s how it happens. But it takes 18 months or so to get a tour like that together.”

While any show with Rabbit in the title sounds a little lightweight, Dale-Jones suggests Story of a Rabbit is anything but. “We ask serious philosophical questions about what death is, the fact that we are here one minute and gone the next. I think it is saying bad things happen all over the place and not just to human beings. Death is very natural and that is the way things work.”

Reactions to the show on tour have been extraordinary, he says. “People have written and e-mailed, thankful for the experience of encountering their grief again and sharing what they felt with others. For young people, it helps them prepare – they worry about what will happen when their parents die.”

A third Hugh Hughes show is already planned, titled Snowdonia is Not Like New York. “It is the third part of the trilogy and this will deal with the question of how we decide where we live, what kind of environment are we surrounded by, how does it affect us and should we live somewhere else?”

As artistic director of Hoi- polloi, Dale-Jones is now based in Cambridge. He’s not exactly homesick, but wishes Anglesey was a little nearer “because it is so beautiful”.

And he is very happy to be returning to Liverpool as a big supporter of Liverpool FC. “They are my team and I even named a character in one play Inspector Fowler, after Robbie Fowler.”

STORY of a Rabbit is at the Liverpool Everyman, May 13-17.

philkey