Make-believe
“This is beautiful work, delivered like a new-born baby into the world with discoveries to make and places to go.”
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, November 2009
With extraordinary performers including a 2 year-old boy and his parents, Make-believe asked some tricky questions about birth, death and everything in between. How do we decide what’s true? How do we manage to live together when we disagree so wildly with each other? How do we separate the real from the made-up in a piece of theatre?
Make-believe was another Quarantine performance where real life doesn’t stop when the show starts… Working with philosopher Dr Michael Brady and writer Sonia Hughes, we tried to find out how belief works and see how much courage we have in our convictions.
Why we made Make-believe
“Over the last few years – an inevitable response to getting older perhaps – I’ve become aware that some of the beliefs and values I’d pinned myself to in my teens and twenties were perhaps not so certain anymore. The murkier shades of grey for me include being a convinced atheist who finds himself praying every once in a while – to who? What’s that about? Being a good liberal who’s now more comfortable with accepting that the uncomfortable flashes of racism/sexism/other–isms that sometimes burst into mind are (inevitable?) products of my background, my ‘culture’ – and it’s how I respond to them that really matters, rather than pretending they don’t exist…
So. I wanted to make a piece that challenged me and those I work with (and audiences maybe) to think about where our beliefs come from, how they’re formed and how we act upon them. Inevitably perhaps, the piece also became about performance – I’d found myself increasingly unwilling to suspend my disbelief when I’m sat in a theatre, more likely to think about who the actor was and what they might be really thinking about rather than what their fictional character was saying. It’s only in the live encounter that I have this problem – I can lose myself in a film as thoroughly as ever.
And the project became a very personal exploration of death. Sadly, my mum died, aged 87, just a few weeks before we started rehearsal. We were close, and I thought very seriously about cancelling the project. But I’m glad that we went ahead – me and Make-believe had to confront questions about mortality. Every project we’ve ever made as Quarantine has grown out of or circulated around ideas that are close and present to either Renny or I.
I invited one of my oldest friends, Mike (Dr Michael Brady, lecturer in philosophy at Glasgow University) to join us in the process. I’ve known Mike since I was 19. He came into rehearsals and asked us a series of near-impossible questions. We scrabbled away at what we were trying to get at, discarding “believability”, “honesty” and “authenticity” en route, and arrived at an aspiration – we wanted to make a performance that had a quality of truthfulness…”
Richard Gregory, Director, Make-believe
A performer’s perspective
Amy Guest, of the Centre for Applied Theatre Research at the University of Manchester, interviewed members of the cast and creative team of Make-believe for an essay on the relationship between contemporary performance and applied theatre. For an extract of Amy’s interview with Make-believe performer Lowri Evans, click here.
Credits and performance details
Performers:
Lowri Evans, Marcus Hercules, Johanne Timm, Jeziel Warsama, Yusra Warsama
Director Richard Gregory; designer Simon Banham; writer Sonia Hughes; choreographer Johanne Timm; lighting designer Mike Brookes; sound designer Greg Akehurst.
Make-believe was a co-production with Contact, Manchester and first performed there in November 2009, before touring widely in England.
Make-believe toured to Contact; Manchester, Stage @ Leeds, Leeds; The Brewhouse Theatre & Arts Centre, Taunton; Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry; Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster; Exeter Phoenix, Exeter; Arnolfini, Bristol.