Isobel Cohen
The approach of August brings the Edinburgh Festival to the capital, with not only expensive beer, tourists, and heavy traffic in the center of town, but also the Fringe, the largest arm of the festival. 2011 featured 2,542 different shows, in 258 venues, by 21,192 performers. Over eager students, puppeteers, circus performers, actors, poets – bad ones, dancers, comedians old and new, filled the streets handing out flyers and giving away free tickets to their shows, often in the rain, over a three week period.
Two weeks into the Edinburgh Fringe I resumed my role as a reviewer, and sat front row in the Zoo Southside, a converted church, watching two dancers have their heads repeatedly plunged into buckets of water on stage whist enacting a very violent interrogation scene. I normally only have two thoughts when watching dancers writhe and roll around on stage – one is confusion, and the other is impolite, but this time, I was filled with awe. This is how I was introduced to writer, director and performer of the show Within Range, Isobel Cohen.
Isobel Cohen, Matt Reynolds, Shahla Tarrant and Neil Fleming Brown, star in this mix of contemporary dance and theatre, which tells the emotionally raw story about the oppression people suffered in East Germany by the State at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It is gritty, funny, and at times very, very uncomfortable. It was my highlight of the festival, and only stoked the flame of my life long dream.
I am enchanted by a life in the theatre. I’ve seen Bullets Over Broadway and Barton Fink, and I am convinced that I would make a fantastic starving artist who hits the big time writing a heartfelt, gripping, yet at times quite amusing theatre piece (which is also an intense roller-coaster ride) that premiers at the Edinburgh Fringe – The World largest Arts festival. I’m already starving, and I live in Edinburgh. I’m surely more than halfway there.
I wanted to speak with Isobel to learn about her show, and what it was like bringing it to Edinburgh. In the interview, I also try to discover what the life of an artist is like, and if it’s one I really want. I spoke to Isobel from her home in Cambridge, as she prepared to return to university.
What was the impetus behind your show Within Range?
There is a book called Stasiland by Anna Funder, which tells people’s stories about life in the GDR (The German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany). I read that because I went to Berlin in 2003 on a language course, as I was going to work in Munich for a dance company for four months, and I had to brush up on my German. I stayed with a woman whose life had been ruined by the wall coming down. I had blindly accepted the Western European perception that the wall coming down was good for everyone. I hadn’t ever really critically examined whether that statement is true for everyone.
Why wasn’t it true for the woman you stayed with?
She wanted the wall back again. She had been a single mum, and when her first child was born the state had provided her with childcare, which then enabled her to go to university. She then had another child, and she got a job working for the State. She brought up her two children in an apartment, in what is now a very fashionable part of Berlin, which the State had provided her with. Both her children grew up, were employed by the State, and they were all happy. Then the wall came down. Her daughter became completely liberated. She went to work in West Germany and came out as a lesbian. Her son turned out to be unqualified for anything, he was unemployed for three years, and then he killed himself.
Wow.
And so this lonely middle aged women, living in a high-rise, in the fashionable center of Berlin, renting out the one room in the apartment that her children had grown up in to language students, as she slept in the living room on a fold-out couch blames it all on the wall coming down. And I had a sympathetic reaction to the idea of someone who in their mid-forties wakes up one day and discovers everything they knew about the history of their own country, and the history of their own political environment is inaccurate, and at that sort of age there is not much you can really do to respond. Then when I came home, I wanted to read more about it, found the book by Anna Funder, and that was really where the start of the piece came from. I didn’t really mean to make a political piece, I’m not a terribly political person, but I was mostly taken by the idea that if nothing you think is real is real, or if somehow you know everything is a fiction but you cant figure out why, which is how the Stasi constructed government and police state control, then it makes all of your relationships incredibly difficult because you cant trust anyone.
How did the piece develop from that initial idea to being up in Edinburgh?
I applied for, and got some funding from the Arts Council.
To form a production based on the book?
To research a production. It’s a funding pot called Escalator, which is predominantly a research dedicated funding award. They gave me the means to have two weeks to research in a studio with a cast of four, including myself, and a composer. At the end of those two weeks we did a little informal sharing at The Junction in Cambridge, and I had probably the nicest two week working experience I had ever had up to that point. That was in 2009, which was the year I also went to university.
Why did you go to university when things where going well?
I went because I felt I lacked the critical and intellectual tools to assess my artistic output, and was relying on gut instinct. Instinct is invaluable, but it’s also unreliable, and runs the risk of repetition. I wanted to be a better, a more thoughtful, artist.
How long a process was it from those initial two weeks to what we saw on stage at the Fringe?
It didn’t need to be as long as it was, but it was two years.
Why was it so long?
James McKenzie, who runs Zoo Venues, offered me the chance to bring a show up to Edinburgh last year, and I couldn’t get funding together in time. So it was two years, because it took two years for me to bite the bullet and say right, I’m going to do the fundraising on my own and any shortfall I will make up out of my own wallet.
Wow.
LAUGHS Yeah.
So, roughly, and don’t answer if you don’t want to, but roughly how much money do you need to stage a show at the Fringe?
That depends on whether you have got a show made already or not. If you have a show that’s made already, the most expensive thing is wages. Everything else pales into insignificance comparatively. If I had made this show, as I had wanted to make it, and not have had the dancers living with me while we were rehearsing for four full weeks before our run, then we would probably have been looking at twenty thousand pounds.
Fuck.
And that’s without the things I really needed. The two things I really needed to have but didn’t, as I was funding it myself, was more time, because as it was, we were running so close to the wire that I couldn’t get out to direct because I was in the piece. The second thing we really needed was a publicist, who would come up with a marketing strategy. We had someone who was helping me do that, Aileen Muir, but she couldn’t be there in Edinburgh, which meant I was trying, and not managing, to figure out where to flyer, who to flyer, trying to work out if the flyering was any use at all. We also needed someone with the contacts to get coverage by broadsheet press. As it was, we were flyering and relying on good reviews. It wasn’t ideal.
How did flyering go?
Not brilliantly.
Why was that?
It’s a hard sell. It’s a piece about the fall of the Berlin wall at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s not something that people are automatically going to be drawn to. We would ask people if they were interested in political theatre, and most of the time the answer was no. If we had been ready we might have had better reviews in the first week, and that probably would have helped, there wouldn’t have had to have been so much footwork by a company that was slightly too small to do that amount of footwork. There were two shows at our venue that were selling well. One was 2Faced, which was an all male dance company, another was La Putyka, a Czech circus, and they both had ten to fifteen people out on the street everyday doing three to four hours of flyering. I don’t know whether the flyering itself makes a difference, but the idea that you are out in a coherent group all wearing your t-shirts, or all wearing your circus outfits and handing out beer like the Czechs were makes it easier.
So for next time, or for anyone coming up to the Fringe with their own show, would you recommend hiring a publicist, or just bringing a large group of people with them to hand out flyers?
I think my advice on the Edinburgh Fringe is… make sure you have a show you think will sell at the Fringe. I don’t actually think Within Range was the right show for the Fringe. If you are trying to take a big show to a big venue, it would be better if you took a show that was already made, and had already toured, and therefore already had an audience profile, and some reviews to go with it. On the flyering, marketing and organization front, the thing that I found very difficult, because I wanted to work collaboratively with performers my own age (32), I was in a team of equals. The team is therefore not set up as a conventional hierarchy, and that makes all sorts of questions of who assigns what to whom, and why, fraught and, for me, uncomfortable. It’s very difficult to feel justified in asking your fellow performers to do four hours of flyering a day. I don’t think a publicist is the issue, I think you need a willing other, who is around to be on top of those things, which means you aren’t doing seven jobs.
How did you get on with the cast when you were in Edinburgh?
We lived together throughout. Up until three days before we arrived in Edinburgh and we were struggling, I was having a ball. I was really enjoying their company, and really enjoying the comradery of it. I think when any group of people are kept together in very close quarters for too long will start to segment slightly, and have issues that need to be aired, and probably my unhappiness of how the show was going didn’t make it easy for anyone. In general I think it’s a really hard way of living, and I wouldn’t advocate doing a show where you are in each others pockets all the time, but for most people it’s the reality of how theatre life works. The plus side of having such a close dynamic is that you have the most extraordinary times with people who are extraordinary. I could not have done all of this without Shahla and Mark. I said to Matt that the thing about a theatre life is that you love more intensely, you hate more intensely, everything feels heightened, and the world recedes in its importance. That has both good and bad facets to it. While in Edinburgh we were all worrying about our reviews, and there were riots going on in London – you lose your sense of reality – cause at the time the reviews mean more than the riots.
You had a three week run of shows everyday, you were dealing with all the problems that come up, different personalities involved, egos, mounting stress, no sleep, flyering, long days, competing with other shows – it’s a lot. Did you ever get sick of it?
Yes. I almost gave up at the end of first week, and just closed the show and came home.
LAUGHS What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?
LAUGHS A two star review from The Scotsman.
You took that to heart?
Well, I guess I did, as my confidence was already knocked.
Knocked by what?
There was a three star review from The Herald, and then the one from The Scotsman in pretty short succession. I thought Mary Brennan of The Herald had a lot of good points, and basically slapped me on the wrist for not being ready. I was depressed that we had brought up a show that wasn’t ready, and that had continuity and narrative issues that I hadn’t been able to sort out, as we were rushing to get up to Edinburgh. Then The Scotsman review caught me on my way down to a low point, it also didn’t seem to find any value in the show whatsoever, which is really hard, because then you feel you can’t respond proactively to the criticism. So at that point, I was ready to pack it all in and go home.
What made you stay?
After we got that review, I sat down with the team and said, “What are we going to do?” I felt like I had let them down. I said that the narrative line in the piece that I thought was clear is not, and that’s my fault, and I need to do something to sort that out, but I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what changes we can make while we’re here and doing shows at the same time. It was Matt, Shahla and Neil that came up with the major solution, and with some other minor changes we all came up with something that was more coherent for the audience as far as I can tell from subsequent reviews and subsequent audience response. I think it was having been very down about The Scotsman, it was the sense that OK, well if this isn’t going to be the Fringe I thought it was going to be, if this isn’t going to be the Fringe where people book us, lots of people are glad to see us, reviewers are nice to us, and we all feel content with the thing we put on stage, then lets use it in the way the Fringe used to be used, which is harder, but use it as a testing ground for new material, which you then refine and change and make different because you’ve had the benefit of doing twenty shows and you can get feedback very quickly.
That’s great if you can use the Fringe for that, but when you originally came up to Edinburgh, what were you hoping to get from putting the show on?
I would have liked national tour dates.
How does that work? Does someone call you up and say, “we want to book your show for our theatre,” or…?
Generally, venues send representatives from their venues, and those representatives go back with a list of six shows they’ve seen and say, “yes, this one will work here… this one wont,” and that’s how a lot of the smaller venues fill some of their programming. The Edinburgh Fringe has become a massive trade fair, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s lost its fringe-ness. Most people now come up with a show that is ready to tour, or with a show that has already been on tour and they want more performance dates. That means there is a lot more high quality content than there used to be, but it also means there is a lot less experimentation with the shows than there used to be. If you’re finding people that are really trying out new material then they are doing it on a much smaller scale.
Are you angry, or annoyed that it couldn’t have gone the way you wanted?
Em… yes.
I mean, are you happy? Looking back on it all now, how do you feel about your show?
I’m a perfectionist, so I’m always disappointed. Yes, I would have liked things to go very differently, but after ten years in this industry I am used to dusting myself off and getting on again. I’m a little bit anxious about where it leaves me at the end of my next academic year, as I had hoped this would leave me with a clear plan as to what I was doing in Autumn 2012, and it hasn’t really. There are a few European festivals that are interested in having us, which I really want to be involved in because the response we got from Germans and Eastern Europeans was overwhelmingly positive.
As you want to devise new work, and grow as a writer, director and performer, how much time do you devote to this one piece before you move on?
Em… LONG PAUSE You sound like my mother LAUGHS “When are you gonna stop doing this, darling?” LAUGHS I don’t really know the answer to that question. I was interested to know that La Putyka the circus show, had been on tour for three years before it came to the Fringe. I… LONG PAUSE I don’t really know if the creative team that worked with me will be able to come back. Lapsed time between creation and touring means you sometimes lose cast members to other projects and they cease to be available. I do also have to earn some money at some point. I don’t really know where that fits in with continuing to make theatre that doesn’t seem to make very much money. I think I will probably try after I leave university to do something else three days a week and try and put myself in a position to work with this show and my other artistic work two days a week. But that’s a sort of idealistic vision, and I don’t know how it functions.
But you want to balance the getting money with expression?
Yes, cause if I just do the creative bits then I feel like I’m not properly a member of society, as I’m not quite working. I would love it if the creative bits became my stable income, but I haven’t managed to make that happen yet. And if I just do that something else, even if it’s theatre administration or something, I would feel stifled creatively, and that makes life less worth living.
Overall, your experience at the Fringe sounds up and down. Looking back on it all now, did you enjoy it?
LONG LONG PAUSE Em…
LAUGHS No.
Yes and no. It’s too close to the event and I’m aware that for me the lows count more than the highs. I know that is not a great way to live your life, but it just is what it is. I let the bad times loom larger in my focus than the good times.
Do you think that’s just because of your anxiety?
You’re analyzing me LAUGHS I think that, yes. I have no ability to rest on my laurels or take successes on board.
Do you think that gives you the drive you clearly have?
Probably. I think it is the thing that sort of navigates me through university exams, and navigates me through all sorts of things…
I have anxiety too, and I think we share a similar drive to keep on going. For you, do you think there will ever be a moment when you’ll be happy and you’ll think, “Yes! That’s it! I’ve done it! I can stop now,” or will you continually move on?
Both. I hope some day I feel victory. No wait, victory sounds like I win over somebody. LAUGHS I hope some day I will find satisfaction.
What do you think that’ll be for?
The interesting thing is I think this show can do it, whereas my work previously hasn’t. There is one piece that I have that is incredibly successful, and has been going for six years, has toured me internationally, has got four star reviews across the board two years ago at the Fringe, and it bores the shit out of me. It’s a mix of comedy and contemporary dance that I enjoyed performing at the time, but for me, it doesn’t have much artistic merit. I think it’s clever, but I don’t think it’s substantial. I think Within Range has the potential to be substantial, and I would like it to become substantial, and then I think I might feel victory – not victory, satisfaction.
What would have to happen for the show for you to feel satisfaction?
I think it would be to end up with European touring. I don’t want to end up with European touring so I can say I have done international touring, I want to end up with European touring cause I want to take it to Berlin, Prague, Budapest, and perform for people who understand where it comes from, and if they feel that I have done that thing justice, or offered them a mirror to their experience, then I will feel like I’ve really done something important.
Do you see this show coming back to the Fringe? Or see yourself coming back to the Fringe with another show?
I don’t see Within Range coming back to the Fringe. Not unless it comes with a lot more support, and funding. I don’t know whether I’d come back to the Fringe with another show. Possibly.
Really?
I wouldn’t come back for a full four week run. I don’t think that’s humane for anyone. LAUGHS
LAUGHS Who is it good for? Who do you recommend the Fringe for?
Em… LONG PAUSE Em… LAUGHS Em… comedians. Em… student groups. One person shows. Em… I think it’s great training in the underprivileged world of the theatre.
What would you recommend for everyone else then who is not a comedian and not a student? How would they develop their own show? Where should they do it?
It’s really hard. I know from experience it’s hard, but there are forums. I think probably the best thing to do is try and form a relationship with a venue, and hope that venue will support you with infrastructure and rehearsal space, and work with that venue on producing something that you can then invite promoters and reviewers to.
Last question, or more of a statement really. Surely the Fringe cannot be this bad?
When you asked me earlier if I was happy with the outcome, I said no, and I would do things differently, but I wouldn’t not have done it if I had the chance again.
For more information on Within Range visit www.Within-Range.com and on Twitter @WithinRangeShow. Follow Isobel on Facebook facebook.com/isobelcohen
