Arts co editor, Ruth Waters, caught up with local director, James Ivens, ahead of the opening night of his latest piece, Lone Rangers, at the Blue Elephant Theatre in Camberwell on Tuesday.
A forty-minute absurdist physical comedy, Lone Rangers is one half of a double bill opening this Tuesday at Blue Elephant Theatre from new theatre company Unstable Table, performed alongside One for Sorrow. James hopes that the pieces compliment as well as contrast with each other: “We wanted to give a sense of the range if different work our new company can produce. [One for Sorrow] is a very stark text-based play whilst the other, Lone Rangers, is an absurdist physical comedy without a single spoken word”.
James feels however that both plays, being performed as two separate acts with an interval in the middle, demonstrate the “off-kilter sense of humour” which is a key distinguishing characteristic of his new theatre company.
James has been part of the creation of Lone Rangers, as well as being its director. “I would definitely like to think of myself as a collaborative director, I don’t like to be too authoritarian and try to always give ideas a bit of space to breath”. With such a small company, just six people in total, James explains how they make it work: “We see ourselves as a team of storytellers with different roles. As much as the director is mute in the performance, the actors are blind.” Although on bad days, he laughs, “it can feel like the blind leading the blind…”
The double bill is titled ominously (although maybe I have just seen too much bad student theatre) as a ‘work in progress’, which James explains to me is because each of the two pieces or halves could be developed into longer pieces. They contain so many ideas and themes, that each half could easily be a complete play in its own right. Why are Unstable Table presenting these two pieces now then, I ask: “You could keep on asking yourself forever, is it finished? As with any piece of art, at some point you’ve just got to chuck it in a frame”.
Despite landing a space in the programme of Blue Elephant theatre, the creation and rehearsal process has certainly not been without its challenges for the company. “We all work full time in other roles, so our rehearsals have been quite dissipated”. Although far from ideal,  James feels this type of rehearsal schedule is not entirely without merit: “because it’s devised, you think of something and think it’s great but you come back to it another day and discover it’s crap.”
James and all of the Unstable Table company are hoping that as many people as possible come and see their double bill. In an ideal world, what would James like audience members to take away with them? “People to think its a different world, that they’ve never seen a world with so many surprises and weird detail before. And, although there’s a sense of sadness in the pieces, there’s also a lot of sweetness. I’d love people to leave with a feeling that while there’s a lot of loneliness in the world, there’s a lot of warmth too.”
The Unstable Table double bill is on at 8pm Tuesday 21 October – Saturday 25 October at Blue Elephant Camberwell. Click here to book your tickets.Â
