You have been working on David Greig’s San Diego for a year now, what is happening after this year of research?
Nathalie Veuillet: I had the immense pleasure to discover Greig’s writing a year ago. He is little known in France and San Diego will be only the second time one of his plays is performed here. San Diego is not about a specific city or situation or even a specific location, but about the direction one wants his life to take. This is linked to personal centres of interest for me at this time in my life. It deals with the quest... for points of reference. The play is full of characters who are totally jetlagged, completely lost: especially as regards to their emotions, their relationship to their fathers, their mothers, and women. And also in the relationship they have with their own body. This play however is funny, but... in a very Scottish way: it’s subtle and novel. I liked the idea of working on a funny play, which was a first for me.

How is the play funny?
San Diego is a funny play because of the caricatured and preposterous side of the characters. For example, there are two Godot-like characters and between them is a tragic character, Greylag, who has just arrived in San Diego after travelling in the undercarriage of a plane - the illegal immigrant of the play. What I like about this play is the wide range of possibilities it offers in terms of performance: you have to direct a farcical situation and at the same time you need to include a classically tragic character. This is what makes it funny. San Diego has lots of different situations, the play is written like a movie script, there are shots, reverse shots and link shots. This in turn creates oddity on the stage. We are doing a lot of work on these oddities. Having several characters played by different actors highlights even more this madness.

How did you work?
During the first stages, a year ago, we had tried to expose all the technical issues we may encounter in this multiplication of characters and timeframes. We had shot some footage, videos, and made some important decisions. After that, we had to create some rhythm and to think about how to introduce virtual actors. We then introduced props and worked on the male/female aspect, as it is one the challenges of this play for which I have chosen only male performers. The distribution of roles and the change of characters which sometimes tend to accumulate are a way to create humour. I think I am going to do everything I had never tried before: a funny play with props and even maybe an interval... well, a fake one…

Concretely, what will the show look like?
There will be a theatrical aspect: writings, situations, characters, etc.  There will also be lots of footage because the characters are sometimes in several places at once: here, there, they are everywhere at once, in a semi-tragic or semi-comic vein. We therefore have a lot of shooting to do. We will also have to work on the poetic aspect of images, because aside from purely theatrical situations we also want to include visual variations. With movies you can add another dimension, and other backgrounds. One thing is for sure: it will be a very lively show.

Why did you pick exclusively male performers?
It was a choice I made because when you read between the lines, San Diego is about mothers running away and by extension, women running away. This is a world where women want to give up, go into the Church, abandon their children. Mothers disappear, die, even the mother of the geese has vanished. That’s why I decided to not include them, because I thought that in a world where women have more and more responsibilities, what was traditionally a male trait - running away - can also become a female one. Women can also flee from their family, and professional or even political duties. I liked this idea, which was for me underlying Greig’s writing. If women disappear, how will men take their place? How can they stake their claim on femininity?
How will they share roles? As a female director, I wanted to try to outline a question rather than offer a solution.

Dates

Thursday 18, Friday 19, Saturday 20, Monday 22, Tuesday 23, Wednesday 24, Thursday 25, Friday 26, Saturday 27 October at 8pm (No performance on the 21st)

Duration / 2 HOURS APPROX

Prices

€10 / €8/ €6
PASS’ 2 SHOWS €16/ €13
PASS’ 3 SHOWS €21 / €15

Social Gatherings

Soupe à la répèt': 9 Oct 07 at 7:30pm
Babel: 22 Oct 07 after the performance

Residence

Presentation of a model 19-23 Sep 06,
2-12 July 07, 3 Sep-27 Oct 07

---

Links:

www.lahorsde.com