Looking Back: Entertainment

If tragedy is dead, is comedy poorly? If a comedian dries up in the forest, does anyone heckle? Entertainment is a stand-up routine gone off the rails, an accident wanting to happen. You’ll laugh, you’ll frown and if you happen to be nut-intolerant you may come out in a rash.

From the Entertainment press pack.

FEATURE Irish Examiner, Monday 1st September 2003

Whether it is directing plays like Mark O’Rowe’s adaptation of Henry IV for the Abbey Theatre, the award winning version of Trevor Griffith’s Comedians or in his role of founder and artistic director of Bedrock Theatre Company, one of Ireland’s bravest alternative purveyors of drama, one thing is sure when Jimmy Fay is involved: you know you’re in for something edgy and daring.

Originally from Tallagh in Dublin, ever since Fay first set up Bedrock 10 years ago he has been at the forefront of attempts to recreate the riveting plays by dark English modern playwrights like Edward Bond (Saved), Sarah Kane (Blasted) and Caryl Churchill (The Striker). He has resurrected more obscure works by European masters like Brecht (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) and Bernard Marie Koltes (Quay West).

Fay has also premiered new works by three of Ireland’s foremost new troop of young Irish playwrights Mark O’Rowe, Ken Harmon and Alex Johnston.

Johnston, as well as being literary manager of Bedrock, has been a long-time collaborator with Jimmy Fay. Partly as a way of celebrating 10 years of Bedrock and a decade of collaborating together, Johnston and Fay now give us Entertainment.

“Entertainment is written and performed by Alex,’ says Jimmy. “We were looking around for someone else but quickly realized that Alex was perfect for it. He’s a wonderful performer anyway. Maybe he even wrote it for himself to perform all along.

“Entertainment takes as its form that of the stand-up comic. It asks questions of what we find entertaining and what makes us laugh. Entertainment may just challenge you a bit more than that again but it touches on the whole gamut of what we like to be entertained by.

“Hopefully, what will happen is the lines are blurred between whether this is really a guy doing a stand-up routine or it’s an actor. It starts off with lots of laughs and jokes. The jokes get darker and some of them upset people. The script is written with some holes in it which allows for, say, Alex getting heckled.

“We spoke to stand-up comedians like Kevin and Anne Gildea as research. They suggested that because it’s in the theatre and not a pub, for example, that Alex won’t get heckled. There’s a strong Bill Hicks vibe to it. You could throw Lenny Bruce into the mix as well.

“As the show progresses Alex develops these intricate arguments about stuff that, again, hopefully people will come on board about with him.

“There is an extent to which Alex takes the piss out of himself. At one point he develops a scenario where he has two guys telling him that they know the world is crap but that they didn’t spend €14 each on a ticket so that some guy could tell them what they already knew. I think as a writer of dialogue and ideas, Alex is second to none.

“Who knows what people find entertaining? When I directed Sarah Kane’s Blasted in the Project, we had no idea just how big a box office success it was going to be. There was a mixed critical response and I think people are attracted to the play because of Sarah Kane’s dark personality and the fact that she killed herself before she was 30. Still, through, dark as it was, people came.”

Although he harbours a desire to write and promises himself that he will do so when he takes a holiday in Thailand later in the year with his girlfriend, performance artist Amanda Coogan, Fay knows he is primarily someone who gets up to very little isolation and just had to be around people, working with them on ideas.

If his tongue-in-cheek comment is to be believed, it was the reading of a book about Orson Welles that convinced him to become a director. He admits also that although he’s an admirer of many of his contemporary Irish theatre directors, it’s really film directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Luis Bunuel and Jean-Luc Godard who are his real inspiration.

Does this mean then that Jimmy Fay wants to really be a film director? “Yes I do,” he answers coyly. “Having said that, I love the theatre. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done apart from a brief period as an usher in the old Classic Cinema in Harold’s Cross, which has just closed down. “The theatre can be frustrating and a hard master, having to always cope with small budgets. I do have this desire to do something different. For the moment though, Entertainment occupies me completely.”     PATRICK BRENNAN

REVIEW Sunday Independent, 7th September 2003

Alex Johnston’s one-man show Entertainment, a Bedrock production at the Project in Dublin is based on stand-up comic routines. But while being extremely funny at times, it’s anything but comic. This is a serious, indeed, a detached and intellectual, examination of what we find entertaining and more importantly, how we service tragedy without giving away to despair.

Johnston ranges across familiar territory, family relationships, the school playground where we forge our adult selves, the international political stage. He also uses history, death and war as his tools. And he manages to turn what could be the ubiquitous “alternative comedy” routine into an extremely uncomfortable look at human philosophy; we’re not nice, us human’s Johnston suggests. Above all, we’re not rational; our praise and condemnation are dependent on perceptions of what’s on our side”. For instance, in the section entitled ‘Anti American Rant” he describes George W Bush: Ivy league-educated, rich and responsible for huge numbers of executions in his days of state governor. Hanging above the stage is the image of one of Ireland’s heroes: Bill Clinton, who also matches the description to a T.

And in using his memories of his late father, the RTE producer Jeremy Johnston, as triggering tools for much of the material, Johnston pays remarkable tribute to that man of rigorous faith and intellect, and warm-hearted guiding hand. It is easy to see where the son’s relentless mind has its inception.

Jimmy Fay directs, with original sound by Sam Jackson.     EMER O’KELLY

REVIEW (excerpt) The Guardian, Friday 5th September 2003

Johnston’s script and performance capture the studied strategies of the stand-up comedian; Entertainment is both a homage to and parody of an art form that is already saturated in parody. In this show – a series of gags and anecdotes, directed by Jimmy Fay with fine attention to comic timing – Johnston tackles the staples of religion and politics. Anti-US and anti-Catholic rants are delivered with the requisite degree of righteous indignation, culminating in a Swiftian “modest proposal” entailing the export of obese American children to Iraq to be turned into kebabs.

“It’s hard to work out what’s OK to say and what’s not,’ Johnston muses disingenuously at one point, proceeding to tell Nazi gags – “to see if there are jokes that nobody would laugh at” – and risking an anti-gay story from his schooldays.

Running through his act is a dialogue with his late father, a Lutheran, about morality: whether it is possible to do good, to be good. He seems to be concerned about this – or is he? He may be having a crisis on stage, but then again this could be one of his routines.

Johnston has brilliantly observed the smoke-screens, the get out clauses, the evasions and multiple ironies of the form, where the raconteur always wins, and language and “stories” are used to maintain distance between people rather than communicate.     HELEN MEANY

FEATURE The Sunday Tribune, 7th September 2009

BEDROCK THEATRE HAS ALWAYS GONE FOR BIG SHOWS WITH LOTS OF CHARACTERS. NOW THEY’RE TURNING FULL CIRCLE AND PUTTING ON A MONOLOGUE, BIT ONE WITH A DIFFERENCE…

Think Bedrock Theatre and the thought is of large, ambitious productions. The last piece I saw of the company’s – an adapted version of Christopher Marlow’s The Massacre of Paris – was one of those unwieldy, epic type shows, with a myriad of actors and a narrative thread that kept the audience on its toes. I remember too, how my companion and I enjoyed it at the time. It had worked despite a few blips here and there.

Big productions, in general, seem to be a favourite of Bedrock artistic director Jimmy Fay, who admits to not being able to stand the one-man show form so favoured at present. Alex Johnston, writer and Bedrock’s literary manager, has a thing about monologues as well. He doesn’t get them. He doesn’t get why one person would stand in the middle of a stage and tell the audience a story. It wouldn’t happen like that. So he sticks to bigger plays as well, filled with dialogue and interweaving of characters.

Until now of course. Johnston – and Fay for that matter – have just turned 660 degrees and are in rehearsals for a show called Entertainment, that has one performer and a long stream of dialogue – a monologue in other words.

Yes, but this is a monologue with a difference, they explain eagerly. Instead, it is a show within a show, the story of a stand up comedian trying desperately to entertain his audience. A play on the nature of entertainment, comedy and the lengths some people will go to make people laugh, Johnston says it grew smaller as he went further with it. “I was writing this enormous play. About Dublin media land,” he says.

The themes stayed and as Johnston continued with the slow, tortuous process of the writing – he says it was the hardest thing he has ever written – he simply morphed his work into a live stage show for his original idea of a TV production. But everything else “collapsed into a black hole.” He realised he didn’t need this character or that character and pretty soon he realised he didn’t need any characters at all – except one – and the audience itself.

Ah, yes, the audience. If Fay and Johnston have their way, this play will be the furthest from a conventional monologue as possible. The drama includes film at the beginning, some digital distractions and a whole host of sandwiches for the unsuspecting audience, whose interaction is essential to the working of the play.

Fay and Johnston chose peanut butter sandwiches, on wholewheat bread, as the only type of sandwich that wouldn’t go soggy, or where bits wouldn’t fall out. “You could have tried jam,” I suggest helpfully, and there is a moment where that is considered, and another where the merits of the tomato sandwiches are also debated. But peanut butter wins out in the end. Fay and Johnston have this kind of ongoing banter – the type of interaction where you know they know each other well – and bounce off each other’s differences and similarities. They’ve been together as a theatrical team for the past ten years, since Bedrock was founded, and although they’ve both gone off into other work – Johnston writing for the Corn Exchange and the Peacock Theatre, among others and Fay working as an Associate Director of the Abbey Theatre – they have come back to the central focus of Bedrock year after year.

In all that time they have kept their promise to challenge, to electrify and occasionally to shock, although never gratuitously, as they would be careful to point out. If people think of them as a company interested in the darker side of life, it possibly harks back to their Theatre Cruelty season, held at the Project in the late 1990s. But although severed heads and chopped off arms and cut to pieces legs featured as props in that season, the Bedrock founders maintain they were doing nothing more than investigating the nature of violence and the place of violence in our world.

Now they have turned their attention to comedy, but in reality, they have not moved that far away from the issues that concern them. The darkness still pervades this piece, according to Johnston, with the protagonist, haunted by memories of his childhood and past, and the laughs often come through gritted teeth – although, naturally, Johnston also hopes people find it funny as well.

It’s a surprise to find that it is the quiet, soft-spoken Johnston who will also act in the piece. A different type of character to the more animated Fay, who throws as many questions at the interviewer as he answers, Johnston himself admits that he had to go through several headspaces to put himself in the place of performer as well as writer. Mostly immediately, he had to think about projecting his voice out into the audience.

But Fay says it was a natural choice to place Johnston in the central role. “It was essential that he was in it as a performer,” he says. Maybe this is because the writing is so personal, for a change. It’s not that Johnston is telling the story of his life here, and he says the mask created in the play is real, but there are elements of himself, variations on his life and experiences. He doesn’t mind. “It’s fun to do a bit of myself for a change.” It’s fun for Fay too, to try something different, something a little bit gentler than the epics he has become so adept at directing and which, he says, can become exhausting. However, he’s hoping that the same kind of audiences who have loyally followed Bedrock for the past decade will also come to see Entertainment. He’s hoping too, that this show will act as a kind of complement to the larger productions he still intends to come back to in the future. For the moment, however, it’s all about this particular show, which will engross Fay and Johnston for more than a month in Dublin. After that, an Irish tour is planned – ideally, reaching every small theatre in every small town. They are both up for it, even though it means stacking up on a lot of peanut butter.     RACHEL ANDREWS