Flash Quotes

  Sure, another reason I haven't blogged so much might simply be procrastination. I didn't write much about Edinburgh, but as this year began with me wondering whether to take a show there, let's finish 2025 by sweeping up the spoils. I got a trailer out it for a start...

 

 

 

 Pow. Huge thanks to DMLK for making it look like there were more than eight people in. Audiences averaged around ten in the end (for a room that sat around eighty) and one of the many lessons I learnt from taking JONAH NON GRATA to the Assembly Rooms was stars on posters don't necessarily mean bums on seats, so bums on posters next time? Maybe stars on bums? I'll stick links to the reviews that the trailer quotes from at the end of this post, but purely in tribute to the unimpeachable work done by this show's hype machine – ie Madelaine at Gingerbread – not for my sake. This isn't about me.

  But I mean, look at that. It's not easy to PR a twenty-year-old show either. You're not up for any awards. Still, Madelaine worked actually literally round the clock to get me press even if I had to write it myself. I shared some of those think pieces back in July, but not the lot, so let me slip into italics now, as I present an article I wrote for Gareth Vile's Analogue magazine about why JONAH NON GRATA's a clown show...

I remember an old interview with Dylan Moran where he stated an ambition to do absolutely nothing on stage, and have the audience get it.

In a time of such social upheaval no-one even noticed it, Woody Allen made three comedies – in a row – about the assassination of a political leader: “Bananas, “Sleeper”, and “Love and Death”. In each, the ethical and religious arguments against taking human life were inextricably tangled with the protagonist’s solipsistic, Bob-Hope-inspired cowardice and laziness.

It’s a cliché that every comedian wants to play Hamlet. The assumption, I think, is they hope to be taken more seriously. But Hamlet’s one of them already: more existentially comfortable splitting hairs and taking the piss than defeating Evil. The prophet Jonah also – at least in the most famous incident from the short book of the Bible bearing his name – is an inaction hero, comically human-sized. Initially, he refuses outright to call down the Wrath of God upon Nineveh, escaping on a boat. But then a storm comes, and there’s not much to do once you’re inside a whale.

When people ask me what “Jonah Non Grata” is about, I say it’s about that story – “sort of” – but it doesn’t matter if the audience don’t know it. When I’m asked what it is, I say it’s “a clown show”, because that’s what all my friends were making when I first devised it in my bedroom back in 2005. And if they ask me what a clown is, I‘m stuck.

The word means something. It has to. But read any casting breakdown of an advert calling for a “funny bones” or a “Zach Galifianakis/Martin Freeman/Jack Black type” (I only get the male ones, sorry) and you’ll see it’s hard to put into words. “Yes!” is one I remember from a clowning weekend sometime last century given by the great Angela De Castro – head of the “Why Not Institute” – and if you only have one word with which to teach someone how to be a clown, “Yes” might be the best. But doesn’t that then run entirely counter to my opening? Yes. And Why Not? Harpo and Chico try to steal a painting. Chico hears someone coming and hisses at Harpo to hide. Harpo stands on his head in the middle of the room. He’s still saying yes, just to something else. “If thy mind dislike anything,” Horatio tells Hamlet, “obey it.” Yes. Exactly. No.

I had a good pandemic. I hadn’t performed Shakespeare in a while, but with all the theatres shut, I decided to try performing the Complete Works on YouTube in my pyjamas, using a range of radio sketch show voices to differentiate characters, and some home-recorded foley, because why not? I hope the tone didn’t read as taking the piss. Or at least, no more than Rylance at the Globe – who never winked at the audience, but always let them in fully onto how weird everything going was. I like it when actors pretend to be the audience’s friend.

Weirdly though, I don’t like it when stand-ups do it. Maybe because stand-ups are pretending to be themselves. Every solo performer – or at least every solo performer with decent enough PR – is wildly outnumbered by their audience, which I find inherently, situationally funny. But stand-ups can’t acknowledge this power imbalance, because they’re not playing a character, so it’s just awkward. But Jonah is a character. And the audience’s friend, because – although he never uses the word “God” (or indeed “Jonah”) – they are clearly his congregation. The audience however, playing themselves, are under no obligation to be on Jonah’s side in return. That’s the motor of not just this show, but a lot of the work I was lucky enough to make with Shunt that inspired it: “Dance Bear Dance”… “Money”… The audience outnumbers the performer, but the performer knows the territory. I’ve made it sound like we’re at war. We’re not. But it’s nice if we’re strangers.

I assume most people know the story of Jonah, even if they’re not, like me, culturally Christian – or Jewish – and even if they don’t know that’s the story I’m telling. Old stories are good, because you don’t have to worry about making anything up, you can just get on with depicting people, and you can’t be blamed for the horrible things they want to do. And I’ve always thought Theatre was a good place to stage demons. But those attending have to feel it’s their own demons they’re watching, not those other fuckers’. They didn’t seem nearly so prevalent, even back during “The War on Terror”. So, I’ve added one line since which I hope will help keep us safe: “Waiting is also way of joining in."

 

Production shot taken during the technical rehearsal by John Scott. 

(I think I was thinner by the time we shot the trailer.)

 

 Back to the italics, as I present next an interview (by which I mean they emailed me questions and I emailed them answers) with the British Comedy Guide from the 10th of August, illustrated with more of John's production shots, which is why it's important to get production shots (and of course a press release, otherwise what are they going to ask me about, which is another thing I learnt)...

You describe Jonah Non Grata as "Hamlet, only sillier - or Tommy Cooper, only slower." What's the most ridiculous thing that happens onstage?

I don't want to give too much away, but possibly my entrance. And I'm not saying it's all downhill from there - my final exit's pretty ridiculous as well - but when you're presenting a solo immersive piece without any scenery, inspired by a three-thousand-year-old story about a prophet who lives in a fish, with self-penned soft techno songs (one of which is purely a three-verse summary of the Scrap Brain Zone of Sonic the Hedgehog) it's... Do you know, I think it's when I try to mime getting the air nozzle working on a plane. It's not good.

Is it true you've performed the complete works of Shakespeare on YouTube in your pyjamas?

No. But it is five thirty-eighths true. I performed - forgive the abbreviations, but they're long titles and I'm a massive wanker - Two Gents, Shrew, Titus, Julius Caesar, and Richard the Second, that last one twice because I didn't like the first version. I absolutely nailed the others though.

It was lockdown. Everyone was making stuff online, and I'd always been YouTube-curious, so I started reading aloud Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. When I finished that, I looked around for something else to read, and realised if I did a Shakespeare a week, I'd be done by Christmas - performing one act a day, with summaries and regular content warnings - but that didn't happen in the end, because it turned out to be a lot harder than just reading a book, and things were beginning to open up, and Black Lives Mattered so distractions became less useful. But I'm incredibly proud of both the quality and quantity of that work. I remember everyone making so much during lockdown. We thought it was the internet keeping us from having hobbies. Turns out it was pubs. Oh, and they weren't my pyjamas.

What's harder - writing an existential clown show or delivering legal advice in EastEnders?

Both are phenomenally easy, it turns out. In the first case, you just take a really old story everyone knows, make a mix tape to accompany it, listen to it while pissing around in your bedroom, and write down anything you might want to do again in front of an audience. Then you wait twenty years until you land a nice advert and can take it to Edinburgh.

In the second case, you send in a self-tape playing one of a million faceless interfaces with authority soap characters have to face daily, then get a phone-call saying you've landed the role of "seedy lawyer". You turn up knowing your lines. Everyone is brilliant. Danny Dyer's brilliant. Kellie Bright's brilliant. The director's brilliant. You're brilliant. Three cameras record it, and it never happens again. It's brilliant.

What's the most absurd line you've had to say in character?

That "had to" is interesting. So is "in character". I actually got to play Hamlet once. When Horatio tells him the ghost of his dead father has been sighted in a suit of armour on the battlements of Elsinore, his response is "This is very strange" which always got a laugh.

"You wouldn't shit on a bun" from the Shunt show Money also gets quoted back to me sometimes, but I wrote that one. The line I'll be declaiming on pavements in my final days though, like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, is Sir Maxwell House's intro to The Monster Hunters podcast: "Take two elements. Any two elements. Say, electricity and water. On their own, perfectly harmless. But mix them together, maybe in a bowl... Dynamite!"

Who's your dream audience member for this show - and who would be absolutely baffled?

Exactly. Yes. Them.

 

 The following day, August the 11th, I did an actual interview in person, with Peter Green who was lovely and posted a slightly expurgated (ie minus me gushing about my PR) recording HERE. It's a good reflection of where I was two weeks into the run, and includes a few other lessons I'd learnt, such as how to describe the show when handing out flyers: it had become clear from the look of those walking out halfway through having clearly expected a Play about a Man from the Bible, that a stronger contract with any future crowd might be forged by abandoning the initial pitch "it's based on the Book of Jonah" in favour of "it's a mad show about nothing." I also reflect in the interview on having totally missed the "Art Comedy" bus: whether or not to bill the show under Comedy, rather than Theare, had always been a quandary, and it turns out – due partly to the brilliant and queer work produced that year by BigHead Comedy – that 2025 might have been the year to make that switch. Anyway, I hope Art Comedy remains a thing long enough for me to try and take some credit for it. There's more.

 

musical accompaniment

 

 Back to the press. My final piece was for a music magazine, Fame, published along with a few more production shots on August the 14th...

 While I make not claims for it as a "process", I went about making my first solo show the same way I would advise anyone to: I chose a very old story everyone knew as my starting point – in this case the Book of Jonah (of "and the whale" fame) – then, instead of worrying about how to tell it, built up a playlist of music which might accompany that story, and at my own leisure in my own bedroom, worked out things to do to it which I wouldn't mind doing again in front of an audience.

This may be a generational thing. When I was a student in the nineties, beginning to associate with people who were making theatre from scratch, we didn’t just put movie posters on our walls, we listened to carefully curated playlists of movie soundtracks. Trainspotting. Pulp Fiction. Romeo plus Juliet. Everyone had these CDs, and pre-existing songs beloved by a director were an integral – structural – part of work we found exciting. 

When I graduated, we didn’t disperse, and I started working with a theatre collective in a railway arch in Bethnal Green, called Shunt. Under this arch, behind the Oxo Tower, and finally, in a sprawl of tunnels beneath London Bridge station, we created absurd spaces around which the audience could move, which might change beyond recognition the moment spectators’ backs were turned. Losing your audience is normally considered a bad thing, but having an audience let themselves get lost is different, and essential to these changes were not only the extraordinary designs of Lizzie Clachan, but the versatile and hugely enjoyable soundscapes of Ben and Max Ringham. How, as a performer, could we accompany such compositions, and bring these spaces to life? That was the process I took into making Jonah Non Grata. (And it’s also why I can literally say I have more experience dancing about architecture than I do writing about music.)

 

The show I’m taking to Edinburgh this year I made alongside that work. It is in many ways a personal sequel to it, but as a solo show, it’s also far more suited to rooms above pubs, and – not wishing to give too much away – the audience pretty much stay in their seats (unless there’s a hymn). I wanted it still to have that what-would-now-be-called “immersiveness” though, and music was crucial for this. Nothing I chose for my soundtrack could be too “on the nose” though. The Ringhams’ work for Shunt, while highly evocative, was never generic, and what exactly was being evoked was part of a show’s mystery, something to play with, or against. So there’s no whale song in Jonah, for example. Trying to work out what’s happened once you’ve been swallowed by a whale is, I think, a far more interesting state to play than knowing you’re in a whale, and I’m very happy for the audience to share that mystery. Nearly everything I do onstage, nearly everything we hear, is about existing in the story, rather than telling it. 

 

And there are a lot of songs. An abstract space invites abstract text, something sparer than a monologue. Rather than lectures, I learnt working with Shunt that the audience might be better addressed by awkward questions, slogans, ritual, found text or invented catchphrases, language as part of the alien landscape. Or of course, lyrics. There’s an economy to lyrics. People receive words differently when they’re sung, and a performer delivers them differently too. Songs are time stretchers, time savers, and, as well as releasing words from their obligation to convey specific information, music releases an audience from its obligation to follow what’s going on. This can be essential when a public might worry they’re not “getting it”. All attention should be rewarded, but rather than demanding intellectual engagement, I think there should always be space for an audience to drift off, without fear of getting lost, especially if – as may happen at the Edinburgh Fringe – they’ll be seeing four or five other shows that day. 

I hope this helps.

  Hmm. Two "though"s. Not good. 

 Anyway, that's what I wrote. Just before I move onto the reviews: I lost or maybe I should just say spent ten thousand on the whole thing in the end, which is what I expected to lose, but I wonder if I'd have still lost it if I hadn't exxpected to. it was the most nerve-wracking show I have ever done which is probably a good thing, Edinburgh New Town's not what it was ten years ago in terms of passing trade, I was surprised how long it took me to be in the mood to see anything else, at least two weeks, if I return with a solo show I'll try to make sure it's still part of a larger group of people, every night saw somebody not like Jonah and somebody absolutely love it and with single-figure crowds there's only so much you can sway that, I felt like an artist, if not a working artist, and I finally want to make a next show, and if you came, thank you, and whether or not you did, let's shake off these italics, and happy new year!

 

 Here in France, it's just turned 2026, and a warm hello to everyone sticking around for the plaudits. So. PR's plan to do a second London preview at the Hen and Chickens in order to potentially have something to stick to the posters as soon as we were up, bore beautiful, juicy fruit, although I balked at turning Ben Moor's whales into stars...

 

 Still, long term readers of the blog will know how much those whales will have meant to me. As for the rest, here are the links along with any quotes that ended up electric-stapled to the flyer. That's how I'm celebrating. (I also have port.)

 

So, I already mentioned Rich Cline's review from June 22nd at the time but here it is again: "There's a reason why this show has such a following: it's a near-perfect display of surrealist comedy, brain-bending and utterly hilarious... a skilful performance that brings out hauntingly deep, dark ideas about humanity in unimaginably amusing style."

 

July 20th, The Reviews Hub     (This was a hell of a review. ) "A divinely commanded clown... absurd and profound... Kane's performance is extraordinary... He welcomes both laughter and awe... so thematically dense that you could discuss it for days on end, but it is also an absolutely joyous, in-the-moment experience." This was a hell of a review.

 

July 21st, Sarah Birch Hackney Citizen  (quality) "A virtually indescribable cacophony of humour and found language...  be sure not to miss this captivating five-star-quality production."

July 22nd, Malcolm Beckett Theatre Vibe DON'T DO STARS bless, and then we went to Edinburgh, to receive...

 

 

 But also – on August the 6th – from Bruce the Moose Bruce on the Fringe .5 and then...

 

August 9th, Erin Ross Edinburgh Guide  "The show is, yes, funny; it’s absolutely mad; but it has a startling poignancy. Perhaps it’s the sheer conviction of this writer and performer... The audience left dizzy, happy and connected having experienced something very strange together, something to think on and share when someone inevitably asks, “What did you see at the festival?” Don’t miss the chance to see something devout immersive and interactive theatre lovers have lauded for many years; it’s the fringiest thing at the Fringe."
 

August 11th, Kay Marquis The Wee Review  "Kane manages to be both alarmingly unpredictable and reassuringly genial... it may dwell on angst and be full of sinister shocks and disorientating requests, but it’s very funny... for anyone looking for something different, this is perfect."

 

And then my first actual print review on August 12th, from Hamish Gibson in
Fest 

 

Never mind, let's check on those audience reviews (thanks, Morgan!) 

 So the show was, if not finding its audience, at least losing its non-audience, and trouble was being shot...

 

August 13th, Sean Greenhorn The List , a big one which we didn't use any quotes from, but I still enjoyed the writing: "It’s always tough to review a show like Jonah Non Grata; a show that consistently wrongfoots the audience, revelling in awkward moments where things don’t seem to be working. It’s tough because, to some, the lack of laughter is the point, and can perversely lead to the biggest laughs of all. Simon Kane’s surreal anti-comedy piece is loosely about dilemmas and decisions. Or a vengeful man who wants to stay at the Marriott. Or simply the slow unravelling of an entertainer. It’s honestly hard to tell." 

 

 The show was definitely better when people laughed though, I knew that by now. You can't let the audience know you're in on the joke however without breaking character, but I was getting better at it...

August 17th, Elise Mc Leod Ruby TV (who don't do stars)

August 19th, Oli Fuller Binge Fringe  "An hour of theatre that will have you on the edge of your seat and will keep you thinking about it for the rest of your life... It is artistic and beautiful and indescribably enticing... an absurdist masterpiece. Go see this show, do not put it on a list, do not see it if you have time, book it now." 

 

Oli stayed around afterwards. I loved Oli.

 

August 22nd, My Goddess Complex  "equal parts absurdist theatre, stand-up comedy, and performance art."

 

And finally...

August 25th, Ben Kulvichit Exeunt (who also don't to stars) "I like liquorice." And it should have turned 2026 in Britain too now so HAPPY THAT! No rush.

 

 

5th of March 2017

Alright, If Immersed (Backtracking in Edinburgh)

 

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.

 Jonah Non Grata will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August. For tickets and more information, visit:: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/1076-jonah-non-grata

A Jonah-based mural by Alsadair Gray which I have only just this second found out existed.

The Longest Game

 Here's one of many tangents from a very enjoyable series of conversations I had with Katy Naylor, either side of Katy seeing Jonah Non Grata's Soho show, about that and other participatory projects:

Simon Kane:

Do you know the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game?

 

Voidspace:

Yes, it’s impossible. Notoriously impossible.

Simon Kane:

Once I worked out what that was doing, I thought this is incredible, because it’s actually subverting what a game is. It’s not a role-playing game at all. I think it’s designed to be about creating a very visceral emotional relationship with the technology. The whole point of it is that it’s almost impossible to play.

 

Voidspace:

I had always thought of that as a bug rather than a feature, and just said it was early days, and they hadn’t actually got the hang of difficulty moderating it.

Simon Kane:

It’s about how you deal – it’s a Kobayashi Maru – it’s about how you deal with this unplayable game.

Voidspace:

In the modern Table Top Role-Playing Game world, in the art-game one-pager space, there are games that are deliberately unplayable. There are all sorts of things that are interrogating the form and just being fun and weird. It’s interesting if that was an idea back in the ’80s.

 

Simon Kane:

It has to be. There’s no reason to make it that unplayable. I think it’s signalled by the very first thing you do, where you have to work out how to turn on the light. That’s unnecessary. And you could die. It's horrible. This machine doesn’t understand how a person exists.

Voidspace:

It’s creating in you the sensation of being Arthur Dent, because Arthur Dent hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Everything is alien, nothing makes sense, everything is baffling. And so that ties into the idea of this work being able to create a sense of exchange, or a sense of communication that can put you into an emotional state of someone else who’s in the world of the piece. 

Tell me some more about Jonah.

... which, if you can bear it, I contine to do HERE.

 

 

 

 And you can try to play the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure for yourself HERE.

 If you want to see me in a dressing gown in Islington, you can come and see Jonah Non Grata's other preview, at the Hen and Chickens this Saturday, by getting tickets for almost a tenner HERE.

 Meanwhile, the PR continues to work, keep taking the PR, with a lovely piece from, of all places, ATV HERE and another from Midlands TV HERE.

 (And here is the final scene of Jack Aldisert's The Manikins (A Work In Progress) – one of many other things Katy and I talked about – as passed to me in a manila envelope when I left the venue. Enlarge for spoilers...)