10 Questions: An Interview with Sam Wyer
Today we interview the immensely talented designer and illustrator, Sam Wyer from the most successful show at this year’s 2008 Edinburgh Fringe, ‘The Terrible Infants’. A show based on a series of twisted children’s stories full of imaginative puppetry, live music, storytelling and physical theatre. I finally managed to get along to see The Terrible Infants, and indeed what a show! Sam’s creations are utterly charming and the characters are so alive in themselves!
They are on from the 7th to 25th August at 2.20 pm daily at the Underbelly Pasture in Bristo Square. So let’s chat with Sam…
1. What inspired you to become a designer?
I’m fascinated by the art of storytelling; to lift things into the physical, beyond the spoken word, off the page, without eliminating the opportunity for imagination to flourish - this is a real challenge, but one which really pulls my strings.
2. What is your show about and what should the public expect from your show at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe?
The Terrible Infants is a deliciously dark cabaret style show, composed of a collection of morality tales created by Oliver Lansley and myself about a variety of vice-ridden children and their various comeuppances. It’s mad, macabre and musical, but it’s fun, fun, fun. This year’s audiences can expect new costumes puppets and a very special new character, delectably voiced by the gorgeously honey-throated Dame Judi Dench!
3. What are your funniest and worst experiences performing in front of an audience?
It would probably be the night a show I had designed was performed at the National Theatre in London. At the curtain call all fifteen young actors tore out from the wings, delirious with elation and starry eyed, raced up and over a platform which collapsed under the collective weight shattering two on-set televisions hurtling them across the stage and launching an actor into the orchestra pit. Still, it was the National!
4. What was the last Fringe or Festival you performed at and what was it like?
The Flow Festival in Stourport on Severn - it was bedlam with a budget. Three hundred performers, two languages, a canal basin for a stage, giant fish, dancing in the streets, and a ship that transmogrifies into the devil.
5. What’s your best advice for aspiring designers in your theatrical medium?
Create… opportunities, constraints, problems, solutions, friends, enemies. Just keep creating!
6. What is the best advice you have ever been given? And did you follow it?
My Grandpa once told me ‘You can’t steer a stationary ship.’ I think it was a metaphor, but it’s true in practice, I tried!
7. Are there any dreams or goals that you have yet to fulfill?
To have a Drama and Llama farm in Aguilar del Rio de Alhama.
8. What are the best books you have read and why do you like them?
Louis De Bernieres’ South American trilogy, The War of Don Emmanuels Netherparts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. They are sprawling, unsuccinct, brutal, beautiful and wrench you from hardship to hilarity page by page.
I also read an incredible short story recently called Light Is Like Water by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I suppose I like theatre for the same reasons, its magical realism, the world from a different perspective.
9. Who do you most admire and why?
My family, in the order of things their unique brand of anarchy seems sane and wonderful!
10. If you could change one thing about the world what would it be?
That we as a society give more than a passing shit about people around us, especially those we don’t yet know. Pull our heads out of the sand, or our free papers, look one another in the face, and listen.
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You can check out more interviews from The Terrible Infants:
Oliver Lansley talks about Promoting The Terrible Infants
