Kenny Laurie is a long-standing member of The Clap improvised theatre group and directs for Speech Bubbles in Istanbul. He joins Luke Frostick to talk about his latest play, The Exhibition.  

Luke: Firstly, how does it feel to be the first person to be interviewed twice for the BROB? 

Kenny: It is a deep honour. 

Luke: Not Burhan Sonmez, not Ece Telmukran. It’s you. 

Kenny: I have bragged about it. Just as I left home today, my girlfriend said “Well done on being the first person to be interviewed twice for the Review.”

Luke: I’m glad she noticed, that she is such a keen follower. 

Kenny: Well, it was only because I’d already bragged to her about it. 

Luke: Congratulations are also in order for your latest show, which wrapped a few weeks ago. I enjoyed it greatly, so I wanted to start by asking, why did you want to do a play about French Impressionists? 

Kenny: It’s not necessarily that I wanted to, it is where the inspiration took me. The inspiration was the central theme of community, and the French Impressionists came about as a vehicle at the same time. It came from a book I was re-reading, which I never do.

Obviously, I had an idea that I wanted to do a show, but didn’t know what it would be about. I kept an open photo lens, if you like, keeping my eye out for anything that might do. I was reading a book at about four in the morning. I’d just woken up. It was David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell. I wasn’t re-reading it, I was jumping from section to section. I then landed upon this small bit about the Impressionists. I knew a lot about the Impressionists because I had read about them in school and they are my favourite artistic school, so I was already positively predisposed to them and the description of the cafe in this book immediately put an image in my mind. I kind of stopped reading, rolled over, closed my eyes and that was the image that I wanted. The different personalities were then easily transferred into a play. They gave me the idea rather, then I put them into a play. 

Luke: I haven’t read David and Goliath. Why were they in his book?

Kenny: The chapter that they were in was called “Big Fish in Small Ponds”. It was actually the working title of the play. What that was about was really the  thrust of the play was, which is how you can forge your own path by sticking together and staying tight. I think that the rest of the chapter is about how you are better off going to a university which is lower than your grade standard if you like. If you are good enough to get into Cambridge you should go to Leeds. Basically, you are better off being a big fish in a small pond. You are better off doing your own exhibition in a city that doesn’t do exhibitions than you are going to the big monolith and doing it there. 

Luke: What I liked about the play was that it was accessible for even someone like me who doesn’t really know anything about the Impressionists or really anything about art. Were you worried that you were going to lose some people because of the subject? 

Kenny: Not overly, because the play never gets into art very much. We talked about it beforehand. Anybody could have been the vehicle for this story, and you’d only have to change a few details and names. So I wasn’t concerned. Plus, more than half of the actors knew nothing about the Impressionists or art going into it. Of course, they have learned a lot since. We were more concerned about the language barrier, but as soon as ticket sales started coming, we realised that most of the audience were native speakers and we didn’t have to worry too much. Well there isn’t anything technical in there but we tried to stick fairly closely to the artists’ personalities. However, so much of it is fictionalised that we didn’t have to worry too much about that. 

The only thing I did want people to know was that The Salon was the villain. That was my only concern. In some parts of the script I over-egged it and had to pull it back. Even in the show, when Manet says, “I’m going to The Salon,” sometimes there were gasps in the audience. I even heard someone mutter “No.” It seemed to have penetrated. 

Luke: So what kind of research did you do?

Kenny: I did lots of research. Well, I didn’t do a huge amount because I knew a lot already, but the first three weeks of rehearsing were the actors going away and researching. So I gave them each of their characters and a bit of reading and a couple of videos. I gave them this abysmal BBC docudrama about them. Although it was crap, almost every line in it was taken from their letters. So they were at least speaking in their own voices. It did give you a very clear sense of what the individuals were like. We actually ended up doing too much research. first.We ended up reading stuff that happened after the play is set, which muddied the waters for some of them. 

Luke: I see so they started talking about things that were going to happen but they wouldn’t have know yet. 

Kenny: Say like Degas, he ended up becoming a pariah in the group for being a massive anti-semite after the Dreyfus affair and was ostracised from the group and that was in the initial drafts then we though he probably wouldn’t have been like this originally. But the actors did a lot of research. Principally not just to find out about the people, but to learn about how they felt about the others. 

Luke: So they were trying to work out the dynamics for when they started acting. 

Kenny: It was really important for someone, say Cézanne, who is the most adrift of all of them due to his antisocial behaviour which I hope we put in the play, to know that he did love Pissarro, and that was something we learned in doing the research. Even someone as cantankerous as Cézanne felt a certain way about Pissarro. That told us a lot about Pissarro. 

Luke: You’ve got to assume that if Cézanne liked him then probably everybody else did as well. 

Kenny: Yes exactly. That is why Pissarro is the hero of the piece, as well. He leads the community how I felt a community should be led i.e. from behind and with a kind of moral compass, rather than with an autocratic or domineering personality. 

Luke: Throughout the play, he guides his friends to where he thinks they should be rather than domineering them. In fact in many ways they are quite dismissive of him and don’t see his hand in things until they reach the climax. 

Kenny: I’m glad that that got through, because that was probably the first decision I made about the show. This must happen. Pissarro has to go from being forgotten about, though always being a consistent person, and not listened to, to listened to with a change in himself. 

Luke: From conversations I’ve had in the past with you and with the actors, I understand that the way that you wrote the play was as almost as a piece of improvisation to start with, as in you give the actors all the information then pair them up and let them roleplay to build the plot. How did you form a narrative structure out of this initial role-playing, improvising mess? 

Kenny: It was very ad hoc. Looking back on it, I’m not very sure how. For the longest time we knew the beginning: Manet wasn’t going the be at the Exhibition. I was tearing my hair out and every time we improvised the scene and it kept going round in circles. Then I said, “It would be much easier if we have it as the central twist, Manet pulling out of the Exhibition.” Basically, after that, everything more or less fell into place. It was a loose plot. During their early improvising it was all about relationships together, because we improvised it chronologically. So all the last scenes that you saw were the last scenes that we improvised. And it was done in chronological order until we decided to switch the last two scenes and the opening scene where they are just kind of bantering. That’s how we improvised it initially. We said, “Lets get all the information out” and then over a long period of editing we whittled it down. Once we reached the half-way point and actually decided on a story arch that I kind of mapped out on this bizarre matrix that only I was able to understand, we were able to put a beginning and end marker. We wrote a draft scene with no intention of it being used but just so I knew while writing it what I hoped to be exposited. Then we could go into the scene saying, this is what you two need to do, you need to do X,Y and Z and you need to say this at this point. Then it became three quarters improvised, three quarters stuck to a frame work.

Luke: So you had a structure and you said, “Now this needs to happen but do it however you like.” 

Kenny: Yeah.

Luke: Ok. So on the actual night how much of it was improvised? 

Kenny: Almost none. 

Luke: So by the end you had it locked into place? 

Kenny: Anything that was improvised on the night was kind of for the own performers’ enjoyment and that changed from show to show. When we got to the last show we decided that we should stick to the script exactly as it is, because sometimes the improvising was detrimental. That’s a bit harsh, but it wasn’t adding anything. 

Luke: I wondered about this, because I was sat right in the front and one of the first things that happened in the show was that somebody threw a bag at me. I got quite excited by that. I thought it was going to be very interactive, but then I felt as it went on it became less so. What do you think worked about the audience interaction or what would you do differently if you did it agin? 

Kenny: I kind of wish we had put more in. That hadn’t escaped my attention, because the whole thing was done chronologically and at the beginning I wanted lots of interaction between the players and the audience. But then, as we got more enveloped in the story, we lost track of that element. In hindsight, and this is an active thought I was having while watching the shows, I was like, “we really abandoned that thing.” The first five minuets have a lot of interaction and then it is completely abandoned. 

Luke: Yes. I got turnip juice spilt on me at one point, but after that, it was a straight play. I wonder if it was partly because the venue was so small it didn’t give the actors any ability to move in with the audience. 

Kenny: I think it is the opposite. Because the audience was so tightly packed in, we didn’t feel the need to do more, that just being that close was interaction enough. 

Luke: I was wondering what liberties did you take with the real history. 

Kenny: Lots. This was a constant tussle during the show. Particularly with Luke and Tyler, who played Degas and Pissarro. They kind of kept reining me in for changing too much. Even down to the program notes. I put 1873 and it was 1874, stuff like that. Basically, once we had decided to put the twist in the middle, the importance of making the script tight and make sense meant that, and I said this to the group, we have to abandon all pretence of representing history in any shape or form. The most closely accurate parts were probably the characters. They were pretty closely rendered to how we thought they were. A lot of the lines were ones they said themselves. So there is that and Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists. It did also guide it because initially Degas was going to be as much of an antagonist as Manet, but Luke was really insistent that he was the second most supportive, if not the most, community member after Pissarro, so that gave us a nice change. We could flip him from being an arsehole to somebody useful. Though, just for the record, Manet didn’t fuck them over like he does in the play. He did go on to be probably less recognised as a result of not being in there and dying young. We were thinking of having a post script of him being like the others went to enjoy there success where as Manet had a demise. 

Luke: I would say he was probably the only one I hadn’t heard of going into this. I had a question about Manet because we talked about this after the show. You were saying how he was the villain of the piece. You had an interesting theory about what makes a villain in a piece like this. I wonder if you would like to flesh that out for me now. 

Kenny: It was taken from a book called The Science of Story Telling, which I absolutely recommend reading and that showed me the importance of change in characters. Essentially, the thing that is different between a hero and a villain is that a villain never changes and a hero does. That’s what makes him a hero is the capacity to change. 

It is interesting if I can take a slight segue to the new “Joker” film that has come out. The thing that makes him an appealing anti-hero, not a villain, is that he does change. He shows the capacity for change which in a human is really all you can ask of. You can’t be born brilliant with all your opinions in the right places. You have to change. You give up on a human in your life because they will not change, or at least refuse to show the capacity to change. A villain or a dislikable person is somebody without the capacity to change and Manet never changes. He sees the damage he has done to the group. He has the door left open to him the whole time and never ever takes it. It actually doesn’t matter what his motivations were. People who talked to me after the show sympathised with Manet’s position. They were like, “He’s going off and doing his own thing, like I’ve been told to all the time that I should do.” He’s kind of ruthlessly chasing an ambition which is not a bad thing in our society. But he doesn’t change or really acknowledge the damage he has done. He is only interested in himself. 

Luke: That is the interesting comparison with Degas of course. Because Degas in the initial scenes is the arsehole. He is the one who you instinctively dislike. He is arrogant. He is standoffish. He is rude. By the end he is the one who had turned face to use the wrestling term. 

Kenny: Without changing the essential elements of himself. 

Luke: He’s not acting out of character, he is showing a willingness to reform. 

Kenny: His change is the most human one in that you can’t really change your spots but can limit them and he does only limit his change. He goes from having an acerbic wit, which most of the time they enjoy but after a while alienates them. Degas decides to not go into that alienation part anymore and that I am open to you telling me when I have crossed that line.

Luke: Thematically, as you have mentioned before, the play is about community. I know you are involved in a bunch of different groups here in Istanbul. Tell me, how did your experiences in the various communities in Istanbul inform your play? 

Kenny: One hundred percent. I mean there may be a grain of my old self in them, the experiences I’ve had in the last four years, but the last three years in particular have completely shaped my view on these things. Particularly “the Clap” but also to a lesser extent “Speech Bubbles” turned what was an instinct into a theory. So I think I’ve always been community-minded and a team player, a sportsman and all that. I’ve had the experiences in my teens that helped me do this play but not necessarily from a thematic point of view. Thematically, there are two things, one from the inside, one from the outside. One from being in a community that is doing a meaningful enterprise, it literally doesn’t matter what it is, it could be for bad, which inherently provides purpose. And it can effect every part of your life. If you ask somebody on the street what do you want from your life, everybody would say companionship, comradeship, enterprise, interpersonal experience, going on a journey with people, working together to create something. All these things are baked into a community. I do think it is the basic unit of human life. I’ve always said if humans have a superpower like a tiger has its teeth or whatever, it's their ability to interact peaceably and cooperate on a mass mass scale. 

Luke: You’re channeling the Yuval Harari, Sapiens view. 

Kenny: Yeah. It is. I believe in it a hundred percent, absolutely. I believe in almost nothing, but I believe in the power of community and people working together. Actually, what I find amazing about humans is that we do amazing things together when we don’t even like each other. You can work for a construction company and hate every single one of your colleagues and still build an amazing skyscraper. You can get it done and play your role. No other species comes even close to that. Maybe ants. 

Luke: But they like each other. 

Kenny: But they like each other. I think it is extraordinary. So that is one side. The outside perspective, and I have outlined this for lots of people, was that the communities I’m involved with are all part of active endeavours, not like book clubs that sit together and introspect. I work with communities that produce things, plays or poetry or songs or whatever. I’ve come across, it’s not prevalent, but it does exist, a Manet-ish mindset, which is shooting too high and shooting with the presumption of doing it alone and not needing other people. Or if you do need people, then jettisoning them. There is nothing wrong necessarily with jettisoning people. The Impressionists jettisoned Manet. They realised that he was a cancer that needed to be removed. 

I’d come across a lot of people in communities, some of which I was close with some of which I was not who did have that attitude I just couldn’t understand. Doing a play is a way of telling people that that behaviour is a way of getting punished. There is no greater punishment than a communal one. Ostracism, that is what prison ultimately is. Ostracism and humiliation hit you at the foundation of your ego. Humiliation basically means an immediate removal of your status, even if it is only in that community. If it is removed, it is rudderless. That is how people feel after they lose their jobs, their girlfriends,after they are ostracised in their communities when they become too old to be useful in various areas of society. You lose your direction. And I’m glad it is a punishment because it is virtuous and it is amazing watching it in person. I’ve seen it in person. I’ve seen it with “The Clap” where somebody has transgressed in only a minor enough way to get a tongue lashing. For the rest of the evening, the rest of the community doesn’t feel like engaging with them or looking them in the eye for the next half an hour because they don’t like what that person has done. It hits that person hard and you can watch the person who has transgressed float around the group and get no traction. Then they go home early and have a shitty time. And that’s fine because you should feel shitty when you have done something shitty. Then they come back, all is forgiven and it works without you having to really do anything. It is really a living organism. It’s amazing. 

Luke: That being said particularly the Clap, running it is work right? I suspect you do quite a lot behind the scenes to keep it moving. It’s not a self-perpetuating thing, is it?

Kenny: At the moment it is. The only times I really have to exercise any jurisdiction is when somebody really badly fucks up. We have kicked people out of the group for transgressions that were too great to ignore. Obviously we have a mechanism for say sexual harassment or something like that where we just kick people out. 

Luke: In improv you’ve got to be careful about sexual harassment. 

Kenny: Right. Luckily everybody is close enough friends that most things can be done and be understood that they are done in trust. Everybody understands where the lines are. They can kiss on stage, they have enough trust to make it work. 

Actually, at the moment we don't have anybody doing anything deleterious to the community. So the largest transgressions somebody is going to do is have a shit scene or not show up to rehearsal. The rest of the community will police it. They will say, “Where were you last week?” They do it themselves. To be honest these days, I just look after the Facebook page, take care of the money and show up. That’s about it. 

Luke: Given that you have so much free time, are you thinking of doing something else structured? 

Kenny: Yes. 

Luke: Any hints? 

Kenny: Yes. We have one project that is very much in the works. It is a bit of a long-haul project. It is a musical.  Half of the words have been written and maybe two thirds of that has been set to music. So that is in full swing. That one is moving day by day, but it might take a while. In the meantime we’ve just stared on the next play. 

I’ll give you a bit of a taster if you are interested. The musical’s working title is “A True Love Story.” It is a very simple story. A musical shouldn’t be too complicated. It’s showing the actual workings of a relationship. To commit to somebody, to fall in love with somebody is to acknowledge huge flaws in them and yourself and to work with them. You can’t expect perfection. You are going to have to go through trials and if you believe in the relationship you have to go through those trials. And a lot of it is monologue. The comedy of the show is the awkward thoughts that they would never vocalise.  The initial inspiration came from “Flight of the Conchords”. So you know the song “Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room)”. One of the lines in that is “you are so beautiful you could be a part time model, but would have to keep your day job.” Obviously it’s a hilarious line, but it is also a real compliment. Most of us are not beautiful enough to be part time models. 

Luke: Speak for yourself. 

Kenny: It just makes good financial sense to keep your normal job. I’m guessing that a lot of people who think a lot of their girlfriends or boyfriends think that they are good enough to at least be a part time model, but they would never say it. 

Luke: It’s the part-time part. That’s a night on the sofa right there. 

Kenny: So there are lots of thoughts that people have, particularly in the early stages. Just the first night you get together you are worrying, is your bedroom tidy enough when you are taking them home? Are your areas groomed? Do I remember how to do this thing?

Maybe there is an unfortunate birthmark you are worried they might judge. Most of these things are irrational and they don’t really matter, but they don’t get layered out in any love story. So I wouldn’t say it’s an exploration but it is shining a spotlight on all the thoughts that people have going into these things. Even when you meet somebody who ends up being your girlfriend she wasn't your first choice. There was somebody else that you didn’t get any traction with and then you met a girl in a bar who showed a bit more interest. Then, you are like “Oh well, that’s good enough.” 

Luke: So are you workshopping this like you were for “The Exhibition”? 

Kenny: No. This is much more structured. It is written by only a handful of people and this one I have a much firmer guide on where it is going. There are two people doing the music and they are working secretly. I and the other two writers, Zac and Michelle, get together and go off and put it together. 

The play we’re working on in the meantime is going to be in a two or three story house where the audience move from room to room following the play around. It’s not quite like a punch drunk one where it is your choice which one you go to. The performers will guide the audience. If the performer leaves the room, you follow them. 

Luke: Nothing’s going to happen if you stay behind. 

Kenny: Yeah. We are making it not horror, but scary. 

Luke: That sounds fun. 

Kenny: Again, that is based on a story I read from the 1700s. It was like the first big media crime sensation. It will be heavily adapted to the point it is unrecognisable, but it did provide the inspiration. 

Luke: My last question. Bringing it back to the Impressionists, what were some books that were important in the writing of your play?  

Kenny: Ninety nine percent of the what informed the play was The Science of Storytelling. Obviously that didn’t give me a guide to the Impressionists themselves, but when I think of the play, almost the first thing that comes to my mind is that book. I wasn’t lost before it, but I was found when I got it. I really couldn’t recommend it enough. I think it should almost be required reading. The other one was that documentary, which you can find on YouTube. Just put in “Impressionists documentary”. There was a book by XXX which was kind of a bit like the documentary in that it was a bit of a crap book. Not very well written, not very engaging, but useful. 

There was a book I read at school that was useful. Anybody who studies the history of art, this is the Bible and I think it is just called The History of Art. It is a massive fucking doorstop of a thing and obviously there is a quite significant chunk dedicated to the Impressionists.

If you want to learn about the Impressionists, what I would say is that there are two points in the history of art where they are really significant. One is the exhibition they put on. In fact I think they actually put on ten before they got any traction. The one that was done the next day, twice as many people came to out exhibition than came to theirs. It was not successful and that was over a month. It was their insistence on changing what the point of art was. That was important. They moved away from patronage. Even Michelangelo depended on patronage. That was massive. If you read about the impressionists, the thing you are looking for is not the work they did themselves, but the concept that pulled them away from patronage. And the art world has never gone back.

The second thing you should research, particularly if you want to look at an individual impressionist - he’s not my favourite one - but Cézanne was unquestionably the most important of the impressionists and it wasn’t even close. Monet was the face of the impressionists and you think of Renoir and Pissarro when you imagine an impressionist painting, but really their importance extended only to themselves. It didn’t go that far out. They were just the most accessible. If you want to see Picasso, or even Damien Hirst, you can trace a direct line to Cézanne because he was the one who was like, “you have to break it all down to its constituent parts.” So his latter paintings were almost like a Mondrian, just blocks of colour. He was really kind of like breaking down a visual image to its base parts where if you were looking at that ridge it would be a line of red, a line of brown, a line of green and a flash of white at the top. He suffered for that. I don’t think he enjoyed any success in his lifetime and he came to be loathed by anybody who came into his orbit, but he was the most complicated of them and had the longest tail of them. 

Having said that, Manet was actually my favourite of them. 

Luke: Perfect place to end thank you.