from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator
Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal.
Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.
Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest.
UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?
First video with the Newphone. So maybe badphone wasn't bad after all. Maybe me bad?
Look! I'm in Edinburgh, and beginning to lose track of how many Jonah Non Grata-related PR assigments I've shared on here, but – as these italics suggest – there's more. I don't think the video above counts, but the influence of Jeremy
Hardingham’s brilliant Incarnate – the first site-specific show I ever appeared in back in 1997, and whose route I attempted to retrace last night – only occurred to me in the middle of answering a question about "lo-fi absurdity" for Made in Shoreditch.
Exciting new Youtube Ai feature.
Here then is that Q&A in full (although it's a bit weird seeing my speaking-to-a-publication voice on this blog... I'm not sure why. It's all public, innit):
Nearly 20 years after its first London outing, Simon Kane is reviving Jonah Non Grata,
a solo show that merges absurdism, hymns, and a heavy dose of holy
confusion. This surreal, comic exploration of power, extremism, and
meaning feels sharper than ever in 2025. We caught up with Simon Kane to unpack his return to the Fringe, the joy of “failed magic,” and the art of staying baffling.
You’re
reviving Jonah Non Grata nearly 20 years after its first London outing.
What made you return to this gloriously strange beast now?
It’s
tempting to say something glib about the absurdity of religious
conflict, but I think what’s most important about the show right now is
how baffling it is. Good art can get us talking, but really good art can
get us to shut up. There’s a lot to be said for reaching out to people
through a piece that defies demographics by not making sense to anyone.
But the real answer is, I missed it, and I could now afford it.
The
show mixes hymns, failed magic tricks, and audience interaction. How do
you choreograph chaos without completely surrendering to it?
Entropy
keeps the chaos in balance, and a lot of this show errs on the side of
grinding to a halt. I added a line this year: “Waiting is also a way of
joining in.” So it’s not really chaos. Also, all that’s just in the
first third. There are proper scenes and everything later on. It’s like
tapas.
You call it a “clownish mystery play.” What does that mean to you – and how does that genre-bending shape audience expectations?
I
guess that description is meant to suggest a shabby, human-scale stab
at the unknowable. Mystery Plays were the earliest plays in (sort of)
English – Bible stories played with a realism bordering upon absurdity
by local Guilds. I think it’s helpful to base an absurd work on a simple
story most people already know. Even if they don’t know that’s what
they’re watching, something will chime.
This is a solo show, but
it feels full of shifting characters and perspectives. How do you
maintain that energy and dynamism alone on stage?
I’ve realised a
lot of the inspiration for this show came from simply asking, what do I
want to do onstage. I know why my character does what they’re doing,
and I don’t mind if the audience doesn’t, because as long as I know, it
will still be watchable, maybe even more so than if the audience knew.
Their curiosity provides the dynamism. That, and the songs help.
Power,
extremism, meaning – your themes hit harder in 2025. How have the
world’s changes affected your interpretation of Jonah’s story?
Jonah’s
look of double denim, bare chin and big sideburns was originally based
on me very much not wanting to look like anyone’s idea of a terrorist,
and that certainly changed, but I don’t mourn the passing of that
prejudice. I was a little worried some themes might seem too glib now,
but I’d forgotten how abstract the piece is. Although a personal sequel
to Shunt’s Gunpowder-plot-inspired, coincidentally 9/11-adjacent show
Dance Bear Dance, it’s not really about terrorism at all. It’s about an
abandoned protagonist’s power fantasy, and love is as much a part of
that fantasy as obliteration.
What’s it like re-entering the belly of the beast – literally and figuratively – after so long away from this material?
I’m
incredibly excited. The body has modes, I guess. I’ve just been writing
television sketches for Mitchell and Webb again, and it turns out the
last time I did that was in 2010, but it doesn’t feel like that. Jonah
was never off the table, let’s put it like that. If you want someone to
see your work, and your work’s a show, you have to do it again.
You’ve
worked with experimental companies like Shunt. What role does ‘poor
theatre’ or lo-fi absurdity play in your creative process today?
Ultimately,
all immersive work has to do is acknowledge your shared environment,
and that’s cheap as chips. Working with Shunt was a dream come true,
inasmuch I’d always wanted to make work that was funny in a way I hadn’t
seen things be funny before – because that’s what I grew up loving –
and Shunt were deadpan and pithy and wildly creative and wildly
ambitious, but of course they ended up with a real budget, and every -fi
going, which they used brilliantly. Maybe just as strong then is an
earlier influence: a writer, performer, and director a few Shunt artists
and I had worked with at Cambridge called Jeremy Hardingham. We did a
show with him in 1997 around the streets of Edinburgh called
“Incarnate”, based on the Gospels, and interspersed with interviews with
Drew Barrymore and sound bites from Reservoir Dogs, which maybe makes
it sound awful, but Jeremy’s script was brilliant and beguiling, and his
no-budget, Pop Absurdist pilfering was a huge influence on Jonah. He
never liked the title The Empty Space, because there are no empty spaces
– Who plays in an empty space? – but taking everything Peter Brook
wrote about “play”, and trying it out with an artist who actually knows
how to play… that freedom, that power… making a show up becomes
surprisingly easy once you’ve got that under your belt.
How do
you want audiences to feel when they leave Jonah Non Grata – confused,
comforted, or just covered in metaphorical rice pudding?
Do you
know the Monty Python Confuse-A-Cat sketch? Confused only like that cat.
Newly mobile. Reset. Maybe even like they want to make their own
version. Like they can do anything. I don’t want the venue to hate me
though, so no rice pudding. I want people to have had fun, and feel
they’ve come through something safely.
Yes, I now use wet soap instead of rice pudding so I can walk offstage all clean.
By the way, do you know the Confuse-A-Cat sketch? It's this:
Some of those answers were informed by six to seven-hundred words I'd written for Broadway World UK – before I'd clocked Jeremy's influence – attempting a brief historical rundown of other great immersive masters like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, the York Realist, me, Shunt, you know, that lot, so here's that...
Back when Shunt – the theatre collective of which I’m an associate
artist – started, we didn’t call it “immersive theatre”, we called it
“site-specific” because we took what we were given. One of the reasons
for choosing the Gunpowder Plot as an inspiration for DANCE BEAR DANCE
back in 2001 was that our venue was a railway arch. No rumbling of a
train overhead needed to be ignored now. All attention was rewarded. As
the collective grew, and designer Lizzie Clachan
could afford to create strange new spaces within found spaces,
acknowledgment of every detail of our environment remained crucial. The
site was the text.
Twenty years after first performing the thing most resembling the
shape it’s now in, I’m taking my solo show JONAH NON GRATA to Edinburgh.
I consider it very much a personal sequel to that work with Shunt but,
not wishing to give too much away, the logistics of the piece are those
of most other solo shows: me on a stage, and the audience in their
seats. Nevertheless, I still think of it as immersive, and here’s a
brief, cherry-picked history of what I think immersiveness is, to
explain why.
We could start with the Ancient Greeks. While I’ve not seen the
dramas of Sophocles described as immersive (and of course back then, you
could easily differentiate actors from spectators because, in a kind of
reverse Punchdrunk, the former wore masks) when Oedipus first steps
onstage to demand of his subjects through the hole in his face – at some
length – if any know who’s responsible for the curse fallen upon his
city, every citizen watching would already have known the story of
Oedipus, and known it’s him. Their silence wasn’t simply that of an
engaged audience; there was that added tension. They were complicit.
Permission to be complicit is a staple of immersive work. The
Mediaeval Mysteries are probably the earliest play-texts in (sort-of)
English: short, open-air adaptations of biblical incidents staged by
Professional Guilds. In one York Pageant, local “pinners and painters”
are seen hunched over a particularly slippery assignment, and it’s only
when the job is finished and erected, that the audience can see they
were roping and nailing Christ to the Cross. The author of this piece is
known simply as “the York realist”. Realism is also a staple.
Then there’s the Elizabethans. I’m old enough to have learnt – by
which I mean, old enough to have been wrongly taught – that
Shakespeare’s actors originally were rubbish, and crudely bellowed their
lines because the Globe was an open-air space, with no special lighting
to tell you who to look at. “Wrongly” of course, because once Sam Wanamaker had the thing rebuilt, its first actor manager was Mark Rylance, stammering and standing like Stan Laurel
wondering what he’d done with his keys, captivating audience after
audience with his brilliantly studied vulnerability because, in the open
air, they could see he could see them back. It wasn’t just
soliloquies that were played out to the audience now. Everything had to
be, thought and speech balloons alike. Numerous mob scenes, which had
proven such a headache in beautifully lit black boxes regardless of
their dimensions, were now a piece of piss at the Globe where the
audience was the mob, happy to be whipped up by whatever demagogue
stepped up. We didn’t call it “immersive” when the Globe reopened
either; that was still a word to be used in opposition to the idea of
“traditional” theatre. But the Globe Experiment proved Shakespeare’s
plays had been both.
Then theatre went indoors, and theatrical spaces stopped basing
themselves on the courtyards of inns. It became too expensive to light
an audience for the duration, and the relationship between performer and
spectator couldn’t help but be affected. Over two hundred years later,
in Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, the young Konstantin’s awkward rebelliousness
is exemplified by his attempt to stage his work in front of a real lake
beneath a real moon. Not a realist piece, but a hugely ambitious,
abstract poem about the beginning and end of all things, it’s still
immersive, albeit fictionally – it’s an attempt to recontextualize his
audience’s experience of their environment, like the rumbling of the
trains in DANCE BEAR DANCE, or the fleeing green figure in the EXIT sign
my reluctant prophet of doom can’t take his eyes off in JONAH NON
GRATA.
If your environment – audience included – is visible, and
acknowledged, a show cannot help but be “immersive”. And if it’s not,
you might be better off putting whatever you’re doing online, and giving
yourself the evening off. “Come and ignore where you are” is still the
default tradition when going to see a play. “Or don’t” is all
“immersive” really means.
I open tomorrow. My technical rehearsal was Monday, and everyone was lovely but the venue still hadn't been built, so I don't entirely know yet what there won't be to ignore there. But, just to prove my inspiration for Jonah changes every time I'm asked, here to play us out is a Q&A for Hinton magazine in which I add to the mix of Shakespeare, Shunt, Jeremy, Deburau and Chris Ware, not only Sulayman Al-Bassam, but the artist I finally, actually realised probably did inspire me to do a show about Jonah: Alasdair Gray, in his little Canongate Introduction to books of the Bible. These interviews have proved really useful. I hope it's not telling tales to say the one below originally went out under the headline "A Whale of a Mid-Life Crisis" but I do want to broadcast public thanks to my PR and her phones today for handling that narrative. I should probably also state explicitly that – apart from Voidspacezine in the previous post – all the Qs in these Q&As are based purely on a single press release (basically this). Maybe you knew that already. It's a new dynamic for me though. Take it away, liminal beings!
Rooted in the Book of Jonah but constantly spiralling into stranger territory, this solo performance is silly, profound, and as Kane puts it, “a temporary reprieve from having to be right.”
You describe Jonah Non Grata as “a clown take on a modern-day mystery play.” Tell us a bit more about this.
The first show I wrote on my own, rather than co-devising with fun people like Shunt who’d actually studied theatre, was a modern-day prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello, because I really wanted to play Iago, and had also just been to Cairo with Sulayman Al-Bassam’s “Al Hamlet Summit”, so any work seemed fair game. For my second play I wanted to go even further back for inspiration, to the old Mediaeval Mystery plays: rough, semi-realist adaptations of old stories from the Bible. Initially, I considered adapting Jesus’ awkward goodbyes on his return from the dead as described in various Gospels, but then I came across Alasdair Gray’s little Canongate introduction to The Book of Jonah, which he described as “a prose comedy” about “an unwilling prophet” who just “wants God to leave him alone”, and realised this should be the next show, and also that it should be – if not a clown show – at least a show where people felt very comfortable laughing at me.
The show originally debuted nearly 20 years ago. Why revive it now - and what’s changed?
In the show? My eyesight’s got worse, so there’s more audience interaction, as I have to ask people to read stuff out to me. Also, I received a very helpful note, after a late-night performance in 2008, to never let my character lose their temper. The technology that was lying around in 2005 is rarer to source now too, and you can’t just light candles onstage. Bits have been added. Bits have drifted off. But the biggest change is that stupid, evil, wrong people are even more of a problem in the world, and making sense doesn’t seem to be enough to diffuse that. So the show’s absurdity maybe seems more of a radical kindness now – a temporary reprieve from having to be right.
There are hymns, bungled magic tricks, a hotel room, and someone who might be on the moon. What’s your method for weaving such a mix into a cohesive narrative?
Bit by bit. I worry that the more I go into my inspirations for the piece, the more I risk closing off how people might enjoy it. It’s intentionally abstract, but the narrative’s there, in The Book of Jonah. I don’t want audiences to think it’s necessary for them to know that to enjoy the show though. Treat it like a concept album, or a cabaret. Music helps. A lot of the show was made to accompany the music I wanted to put into it. It’s practically a musical.
How does audience interaction influence the tone or outcome of the show if at all?
I’ve realised, in many ways, the show is simply about a character trying to work out how to talk to other people. And those other people are, for the most part, the audience. But because the audience is real, and the character is not, and we know that’s the deal when you come to see a show – a bit like Hamlet’s soliloquies – nothing will ultimately be sorted out. So I think probably the outcome won’t be affected at all. But hopefully watching that failure play out will be something, and maybe even itself feel like a connection.
What’s the strangest or most memorable reaction you’ve had from an audience member?
I think it’s my duty to out-weird the audience, and the richness of an interaction is not in its uniqueness or anecdotal worth, but in the simple fact it’s a reaction. In other words, I don’t remember. Honestly, what I find weirdest is just that so many people get it.
What do you hope to take away from Edinburgh Fringe this year?
Apart from all the stuff you’d expect me to want to take away from performing a show at an International Arts Festival – like love and respect and glory and validation and happy memories and job and book offers – I hope to take away with me some idea of what to do next. I’ve never really made anything as a means to an end, and I have the CV to prove it.
Questions:
What is lost? Can it be remembered?
Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
Are there people who surprisingly come to mind?
Location: Judith E Wilson Studio
Time: Monday 11th February 2008 10am- 12midday & 2pm - 4pm
Each of the following categories to be freely available -as material for activity- throughout the session. Each category must be engaged with,
even if only partly. Some may last, or hold, more or less than others.
We will each be doing them, with probable co-interruptions and overlaps.
I think there is no need for any stipulations about eating, drinking,
smoking or the toilet: it happens when it does. But we do not speak to
each other at all, even to say hello, except under the provisions of 1.
Writing is permitted, but only as an action within the work: no notes
for future reference, no recording of any kind
When it ends at 4, we can perhaps humanly speak to one another again for a bit!
1. NOISE
there will be microphones, there will be sound sources such as CDs.
Please add to these with:
) music / noise on CD or minidisc
) objects to manipulate & amplify through the microphone or not
) one piece of a learnt text (kept in your head: this, or words from
this, are the only intelligible words you may utter)
2. Finding a voice.
there is always a choice . . .
This is an exercise about selection: throughout the duration of the
session, please elect 4 things which you would like to utter; yet the
terms of the exercise prohibit you from actually speaking, so the words
or phrases which you would most like to utter, and which you must
remember exactly -paying strict attention to word order and intonation-
must be translated in to noiseless actions. Make each action distinct
and specific to the unutterable words/phrase(s), existing in its own FRAME.
3. 7 speeds.
Of bodily movement. The only rule is that they are identifiably distinct.
4. Uneven clothing.
Perhaps one boot is much tighter than the other, or maybe there are
cords that bind a section of the body, or perhaps a sense is censored.
Also, at least one item of clothing which is either too big or too small.
5. Cleaning.
Either: an object to clean and an object to clean it.
'Object' may be metaphysical, or physical, living or dead, or even an
abstract notion. The object to clean it is tangible and visible.
6. Memory / Locations / Time.
7 locations which are designated on the way to the studio. One location
must be an identifiable place between the station and the studio. Other
locations could be unreachable, notional, global, cosmic, microscopic etc.
Let me know somehow what you think about this.
:Jeremy
This is the Shepherd Gate Clock at Greenwich. Note the
twenty-four hours. Wired to the "Shepherd Electric Impulse Clock"
within, entrusted with cabling standardised time not just nationwide but
eventually as far as Massachusetts thanks to the transatlantic cable, it was the first clock ever to directly show Greenwich Mean Time to the public, and is one of Louise Devoy's contributions to this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars.
Actual Greenwich astronomer Ed Bloomer presents its sequel - the atomic clock, while psychologist Steve Taylor brings along a book he wrote and a child's safety seat for some
reason, and the excellent Helen
Czerski refuses to be fazed. I was asked if there was any good bit of Shakespeare relating to Time I could read, and immediately thought of this...
... but instead suggested something I've always loved but never performed from Henry the Sixth Part Three - an uncharasteristically trance-like meditation on routine from, as Helen perfectly summarises, "a slightly depressed king on a hill who just can't tell if he's a bit useless". Yes! Another one! Centering on another kind of shepherd's clock, it's one of the most sustainedly simple things Shakespeare wrote - one of the reasons I love it, and you can hear me read it at 2:50. Then Helen asked me to read the closing words to Einsteins' fourth paper on General Relativity, (28:30), and I really enjoyed that too. It's been far too long since I last performed words nobody's meant to understand. *
Three in the morning. Um - Ah. Look. I found these:
I can't stay. Sorry. I shouldn't even be here.
Look! I did those when I was four! How cool!
If
I had more time I might argue that the unloading of all this stuff
actually relates to a conversation I had in Cambridge today about ideas,
the instant of an idea, the storing of that idea, the writing down of
it, the changing of it, the losing of it, and cleaning. I've been asked
to participate in something called "I shall never be clean". I'll
explain. Just not now. "You can't clean anything without making
something else dirty," Jeremy pointed out, and I think this project of
his is going to be a bit of a clearout after ten years of not making.
And those are often very good.
Actually as I'm here I might as well clear some things up:
My
phone is now working again after a couple of sessions on the radiator,
but its session in the coffee has made the joystick stick a little.
Joylessly.
The documentary I was voice-overing yesterday for the
SciFi channel turned out to be about "Heroes", and not Mary Shelley or
string theory, which I'd sort of guessed really. And it turned out I'd
been hired by Steve Hore who made that show-reel where I get born.
Surprise. Lovely.
It's pronounced "George Ta-KAY" apparently. Not Takeye.
Laurence
and Gus had their final table-read today, which I couldn't make
(Cambridge, see above) and having totally failed to make good on a
promise (at least to myself) of an epic sketch concerning Elizabethan
conjuror (read "map-reader") Dr. John Dee and his earless, klepto stooge
Ned Kelly, I submitted instead some last-minute stuff that was old and
weak and listlessly tinkered with at five in the morning WHICH IT IS NOW
AS WELL!!!...
NO!!!
HOW CAN IT BE FIVE?!?!? Hhhhh...
Anyway - thereby ends with a snivel and a whimper an assignment that up until that dawning has been all grins and zeal.
Anyway.
And
Shunt are giving me everything I ask for and more regarding "Jonah".
Which is incredibly exciting but does mean I have to get some work done
now. Or maybe fume with hubris and balls this up as well. I see Chris
Goode (see past strands and tangents) has kindly posted the following
plug on his blog, which has made me laugh and will have to make do in
lieu of a press release. Now GOOD NIGHT. NIGHT. GOOD NIGHT.
"This
revival might be garbage, who knows, but the several times I saw it at
CPT, it frightened and baffled and upset me and made me laugh, all in
ways that I normally associate only with getting out of the bath in a
heavily mirrored room. It is ruthlessly inventive, acutely painful and,
oh, stuff. It is also very titillatingly close to this new invention of
mine called theatre."
