Hitting the spotlight today is Jonathan Brown with his highly compelling one-man show. Without doubt “Licence” is gripping theatre as Jonathan plays upwards of 15 characters, roller-coasting every emotion from his audience. With three shows performed to-date why not go along and see Licence’s intoxicating tales from the 13th to the 15th May at 7.30 pm each evening at the Brighton Town Hall. Clearly as an artist who understands “la condition humaine” Jonathan has a lot to tell us…
1. What inspired you to become a performer and writer?
Lots of “little” things. e.g. Reading Alan Bennett, Shakespeare, Dickens, Thornton Wilder, Manil Suri, Bernhard Schlink and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, among others; devising scripts in a night school group and feeling surprised that I could create dialogue; a week in the Minnesota wilderness with Robert Bly and 140 men; Watching Jonathan Kay perform; watching The Festival of Fools perform; watching my daughter grow inside my wife’s belly; noticing how attentive people can become when a script and a character comes alive in front of them.
2. What’s your show about and where are you taking your show after the Brighton Fringe?
Licence is funny and moving. It’s about how the most intimate feelings, memories and stories can emerge, like a tiny crocus shoot, even within the harshest environment and can, if ignored (ig-gnawed) gnaw away at our plans to deny them, sabotaging those plans.
The setting, The Toby pub, the man in denial is Bernie, the landlord. His son Teddy, wife Margaret, best friend Ronnie, children in Kiddies Corner, Brewery Rep Donna, son’s social worker Brenda, and several others all fall foul of his attempts to cover up anything painful, unconventional or unpleasant. After all… he wants to run a Nice Family Pub. Slowly his whole world begins to unravel, with both moving and hilarious consequences. As the chaos increases, I play around 12-15 characters in quick succession, including a pub fight. I describe it as “one man’s odyssey, to save his child and his own sanity from the sinister forces he’s exposed them both to.”
I’m taking the play to Glastonbury (town) and to Bridgwater in June, and on to as many venues as I can thereafter.
3. What are your funniest and worst experiences performing in front of an audience?
Funniest: In 2003 I was playing (with others) Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet at Winchester Hat Fair with Theatre of Now (a troupe directed by Jonathan Kay). We were improvising in the moment how we interpreted the playing of the words. In it a friend was shifting about, looking around him, not paying attention. Somehow I knew he was looking for his girlfriend, also called Juliet, with whom he’d been having a rough time. Suddenly I leapt off the stage, grabbing him by the collars, speaking the next lines into his surprised looking, suddenly very attentive face:
“What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead.
There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slewest Tybalt. There art thou happy.
The law, that threat’ned death, becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile. There art thou happy.
A pack of blessings light upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love.
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.”
His face was quite a picture and I surprised (to put it politely) my fellow players quite a bit. But he continues to be a friend and a “fan”.
Worst: The stage invasion by about 20 drunk teenagers, wearing only bowler hats, bow ties and pants, and the subsequent 25 long minutes of hard-core heckling (“Fuck off!”, “You’re shit mate!”) from them at a late night festival performance. By the end of the 2 hr show, the worst hecklers had either wandered off after a salute of respect, or sat down to listen. It was a steep learning curve moment, and I don’t think I’ll be afraid of any audience quite so much again!
4. If you had a chance to work with anyone of your choosing, who would it be?
I would like to work again with Jonathan Kay. I think his way of working is remarkable.
5. What are you most proud of and what dreams or goals would you like to fulfill?
Most Proud of: My discovery of my desire to create and to keep creating.
Dreams:
(i) More experience of working with groups of players with whom I really gel, perhaps in creating a production of my latest play, “The Well”.
(ii) Developing the confidence to perform more solo improvised theatre.
(iii) Seeing my daughter fly in all she wants to achieve for herself.
6. Are you a gadget geek or a gadget freak? How do you see technology progressing to assist production and marketing of your show in the future?
I like the computer, probably too much, as it helps me to write and keep in touch. Otherwise, I’m a Luddite, preferring to work with minimal technology in performance. Except well-placed simple lighting and acoustic music. And word of mouth for marketing. I like what lends itself to developing intimacy.
7. Which three famous people would you invite to dinner and why [dead celebrities included]? And what tasty treat would you prepare?
Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Meryl Streep. I would just listen a lot, I suppose and make them something like a tofu-sausage hot pot, with plenty of raspberries in Booja Booja (dairy & sugar-free) ice cream for later.
8. What is the best book or books you have read and why?
(i) “Romeo and Juliet.” The first Shakespeare I read for pleasure, it brought me back to Shakespeare after having that relationship completely wrecked by the school system.
(ii) “Bridge of San Luis Ray.” Thornton Wilder. The twins’ story makes me cry.
(iii) “Death of Vishnu”. Brilliant dynamics between the families, wonderful dialogue and sense of place.
(iv) “Songlines” Bruce Chatwin. Understanding something of my most primordial emotional roots.
(v) “When She was Bad” Patricia Pearson. About how women are invariably cast as victims, even when they kill in cold blood. She argues that the two main culprits of the tendency to overlook extreme behaviour in women are feminists who have claimed victim-hood for women, and male society, which finds it impossible to see women as powerful.
(vi) “The Manufacture of Madness” Thomas Szasz. Szasz dismantles the credibility of the mental health industry by exposing and deconstructing the mythology, history and language of both it, and of one of its “founders” Dr Benjamin Rush. He explores how the religious language and roles of the Inquisitions were slowly converted into the secular, scientific language and roles of the mental health industry, but that little else changed, resulting in a new scape-goating, witch-hunting establishment that survives to this day. My third play (“Billy”) is based on these ideas.
9. Tell us 5 interesting and unknown facts about yourself?
(i) I ate only raw food for 5 years. I’m one of those sad people who doesn’t do sugar, milk, meat, msg, coffee, tea, wheat, alcohol or ciggies.
(ii) We home-educate our child.
(iii) I once sat alone under a tornado and violent thunderstorm with immense lightning bolts bursting around me every few seconds in a flimsy two-person tent for 4 hours on a sacred Pawnee site in central Kansas.
(iv) I was born near to the site of the world’s deepest hand-dug well, (which is 1300 ft , deeper than the Empire State Building is high) in Woodingdean, Brighton and on which my next play (The Well) is based.
(v) In May (ish) 1986 I had a “Readers Top Tip” published in Viz magazine.
10. What do you think we can do as an individual to save the planet, if anything?
Create more! Being creative is my deepest resource. It fulfills me, and when I’m writing or playing, all desire to consume, to cover up anxieties or to suppress pain with substances or comfort buying, is forgotten. I don’t need so much “stuff” to fill any empty holes in my identity. I do have some stuff, but it’s not central to my happiness. Creating is…
In my youth, it would have been Milan Kundera – ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. Apart from the brilliant stories/histories and philosophies contained therein, it was the idea of using the musical form of a suite i.e. several individual pieces based around the same themes.
