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Serious Money, Carolyn Churchill’s dazzling examination of Thatcher’s big bang on the financial world full of sex, power and corruption – think Rivals only with the Stock Exchange instead of TV studios - is back onstage in London, at The Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton. Not one of the biggest stages for a production which has a cast of 12 playing over 40 characters in a sprawling near-3 hour epic – told in rhyme! - but one which reflects the ambitions of the new company behind it: Mad Spirit Productions.
Created by brother and sister duo Douglas and Charlotte Taylor, Mad Spirit are doing things differently. Despite being a young company, their attitude is about going large, with work that is playful, adventurous and yes – as anyone who has been to the show will attest – really rather mad.
“I think one of the best things about laughter in a room is that it brings us all into the same space mentally and physically, we all find this connection,” says Charlotte, “Laughter can be such a bizarre visceral thing and it’s somewhere where we all meet when we find something funny. When that happens in a room, I think that's magic.”
“We're named after what Oberon says to Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream,” says Douglas backstage after the show a few nights ago (Serious Money runs until 19th September, so be quick), “’How now, mad spirit! What night-rule now about this haunted grove.’”
Which kind of says it all for a clearly driven yet playful pair who are creating these almost childlike worlds and then inviting actors and audiences to immerse themselves in it. Their family is from Serbia and moved to the UK during the war, where they, “moved around different council houses.” Their father became a cab driver but the children went in different directions – Charlotte studied under Philippe Gaulier at his clown school in France, while Douglas studied literature at Oxford. After doing their own things for a few years, they finally decided to go all-in on their own theatre company, beginning with a production of Midsummer last year. Immediately they had a different approach to your average company:
“We did it on the Midsummer solstice in Hackney Wick woods. We had 15 people, musicians, fairy lights, no budget, all in the woods, and had a transfer of that. Then we did the Scottish play six weeks later, a cast of 13 who were also manning the bar. With each, it was a combined thing with me and Charlotte: I'm really into literature and fidelity to the text – so our Shakespeare is like, you're doing Midsummer, so you're in the woods - and Charlotte introduced clowning and play into that, and have games that allow performances freedom within that kind of academic rigour.”
Serious Money now follows exactly this approach. Courtyard Theatre is close to the financial district, and Douglas stresses the importance of remaining site specific. But it’s Churchill’s text that remains the heart, and you can see why this breakneck, high-wire, extravagant play appealed.
“When we read it, it was just the most energetic, wild day, it just leaps out from the page,” says Douglas, “It just felt like it could really kind of explode, it felt like it had so much to it.”
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Assembling the cast, some of whom have never acted before, was a joy: “The large cast means there's a lot of energy in the room. We love to free everyone up. Trying to bring everyone back to what we were like as children. What did we find funny? What did we enjoy? What were our ways to communicate with people? That's what we try and explore.
People can have so many blocks that stops them from being truly spontaneous and connecting with an audience… the rooms that we work in are just so much fun, we really allow people to go with a crazy idea.”
Charlotte adds, “I think our rehearsal rooms and the way we work is quite similar to what we would expect of an audience: we don't really go in with anything. It's your experience, so we don't need anyone to react a certain way or feel a certain thing. It will be different for everyone. There could be a character that on the first night's funny and the second night the whole room is in tears. We think about, ‘how do I play and change with the room?’”
The results in Serious Money are performances that don’t hold back, and particularly in the cases of Felicity Green as Scilla, Ben Pugh-Cook (in four roles) and Vedika Haralalka (in three roles), its a showcase for clear superstars in waiting. You sense that as this company continues, it will become a favoured one for actors, a vehicle for exploration, connection, and attention.
“Everything about Serious Money is excessive. The number of characters is excessive. The rhyming is extravagant. The energy is so heightened, and in that way it's meant to give the audience the feeling of being on the trading floor, those constant hits that you get of the rhyme, of the character changes, the energy of the jokes, which imitates that dopamine-fuelled 80s trading floor.”
Once this production is out of the way they’re looking at originals – one in the works is about mysticism, another is a farce. “If you just do what you really think is the funnest thing to do, then things just gather around it. There's that JD Salinger quote from Rise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, when Buddy Glass is like, ‘I don't know what to write.’ And his friend goes, ‘what would Buddy Glass most want to read? That's what you should write.’ And that's why we choose the shows that we do. What are the shows that you'd most want to see? How would you want to see them done? That's how we do them.”
And make no mistake, this is an all-encompassing passion project, they’re doing all the marketing and promotion on top of everything else; says Douglas, “We’re working on it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, and that's kind of how it is for like months at a time. But there's just nothing else that would come close, it's a genuine dream.”
Yes, Mad Spirit are welcome new additions to the London theatre scene and every production will clearly be something special. Douglas returns to their name: “What we do is mad but mad in that Midsummer way – it’s joyfulness, it’s phenomenological if you want to call it something. Everything tends towards the present moment, and, and the present moment is what theatre is all about.”
Serious Money is at The Courtyard Theatre until 19th September.
