Is walking around a fake bathroom really “immersive” theatre, or is a theme park actually more honest art?
“If you’re making a space from scratch, why make a space that already exists? One of the reasons I love Disneyland is: Walt Disney made a thing that doesn’t exist.”
In this episode, Ben sits down with Simon Kane, a writer and performer whose work spans the devised theatre world of Shunt, BBC radio comedy on John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, and a lockdown Shakespeare experiment where he began reading and performing the plays chronologically. Simon takes us inside the mechanics of performance, questioning what “immersive” should actually mean, and arguing for “fun” as a rigorous artistic metric.
“An idea of what theatre should be is not theatre. You can do anything. That’s the point.”
We also dive into why Richard II can be read as a story about a fallen celebrity, the difference between stage acting and voice work, and the challenge of maintaining creative intentionality in an age of streaming algorithms.
We cover
Story first: why Simon shifted his Richard II from “Sigma male” energy to “washed-up star” to make the play land.
The immersive fallacy: why “walking around a set” is not enough, and why theme parks might be the clearest form of intentional spatial design.
Devised vs scripted: how Shunt built worlds without starting from a text, and how that contrasts with the discipline of audio comedy and drama.
Yes, and no: the improv rule that a clown “must always say yes”, and how refusal can be a creative act.
Escaping the algorithm: practical ways to consume culture on purpose rather than letting autoplay dictate your taste.
“Do stuff on purpose. That’s harder and harder these days because it is so easy to just click the next thing on my algorithm. It’s different to go, no… what do you actually want to do?”
Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.
Contents
00:00 Meet Simon Kane: writer, performer, and lockdown creator
00:24 Lockdown Shakespeare marathon: the idea
01:44 Why YouTube? From Defoe’s Plague Year to tackling Shakespeare chronologically
05:02 Making Shakespeare accessible
06:36 Story-first acting: motivation, ‘pretending,’ and finding the way in
11:10 Cracking Richard II: reinventing the character to unlock the play
15:28 Julius Caesar choices: Cassius, Antony, and playing the populist
16:28 From Shakespeare to Shunt: ensemble theatre and a different kind of acting
22:07 How Shunt builds shows: space as text, rewrites, and devising under pressure
25:19 Audience, space, and ‘immersive’: Jonah, walks, Punchdrunk, and Disneyland
34:25 Clowning 101: Saying “Yes,” Saying “No,” and the Absurdist Engine
35:59 Writer-First vs Ensemble Theatre
37:04 When Critics Don’t Get the New Thing
39:32 Devising, Short Runs, and the Joy of Doing It Night After Night
40:20 Voice & Audio Work: Fast Choices, Characters, and “Reacting”
43:11 Post-Pandemic Theatre + Digital Futures
47:29 What Sticks: Influences from Theatre, TV Comedy, and Low-Fi Ambition
50:53 Overrated/Underrated: Criticism, Arts Council Funding, and Netflix’s Impact
57:52 What’s Next: The Book, Edinburgh Decisions, and the Cost of the Fringe
01:00:55 Advice for Creatives: Do It on Purpose, Make the New Thing, Have Fun
Transcript (lightly edited, transcribed by LLM AI, so mistakes are very possible)
Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Simon Kane. Simon is a brilliant writer and performer whose work ranges from devised and ensemble theater to new writing, solo shows, audio work, and from comedy to Shakespeare. Simon, welcome.
Simon: Hello. I've never actually written any Shakespeare.
Ben: But performed in?
Simon: Yeah. I've just been re-edit, trying to re-edit on this phone, the stuff I did in lockdown projects where I was reading the whole thing. But the phone doesn't have quite enough memory. I want to make sure I, in case YouTube ever suddenly falls to pieces, that I have everything I put on there in other versions.
And I also thought I'd just to explain: during lockdown, I did an actor weekday. That's a bad way to explain it, isn't it, Ben? I read an act, a play, a day for a week, intending to do the complete work of Shakespeare a week at a time. And I got four plays in and then I came back for another play and didn't like it.
So I did that again. And basically, yeah, I didn't achieve playing every character in Shakespeare, but I'm very proud of some of the work they did. I really love the Titus, I really love the Julius Caesar, and I'm thinking of coming back to it as well. I stopped 'cause things were opening up and because I was doing the histories, and Rich II goes into Henry the Fourth, which goes into Henry the V.
And I didn't really feel like doing Henry the V at the time. And also I realized recently, another reason I did it was I didn't know how to do Falstaff, and I've worked out, 'cause I have to choose lots of different voices and it did just have to be big voice choices. 'Cause I'm, and I realized I'll do what I did for Petco, make him Australian.
Ben: What made you choose that as a lockdown project?
Simon: So I'd started the project was I've always been interested in YouTubing and then in lockdown, a lot of my friends were suddenly making stuff like John Finnemore was doing stuff as Arthur from Cabin Pressure and Carrie Quinlan was doing stuff with Andy Stanton.
And that was one aspect of the decision. Another was, as lockdown started, I thought, oh, I'd really wanna read Daniel Defoe's Journal the Plague Year. And then I realized I had that in the flat and I started reading it and it was really interesting. And I thought, oh, I can do read that on YouTube. I'll read 10 pages a day and I'll, and that'll be me reaching out to people on YouTube and by the, and I really enjoyed that.
I really liked that. Discipline's too strong a word. Structure. And already I have a blog and for some reason at the end of the year, previous year, I decided this time I'm really gonna post a thing a day, which would never be the discipline before. And then we went into lockdown. It's, oh, great.
And so that was also provided a thi, the blog was a place where I could then post an episode and a little explanatory thing. And then I got to the end of Journal of the Plague Year and thought, I'm really enjoying this. I want to rea, I'll do another book. And it had to be out of copyright, didn't have to be out of copyright, but I thought—
Ben: Preferable.
Simon: Yeah. And then I suddenly thought, oh, there's no theaters. I haven't done Shakespeare in a while. I'll do the complete works of Shakespeare. And I have, which I won for a competition. I can't remember exactly what it's called. It's the Oxford University Press, I think, which has made some controversial decisions such as Falstaff's not actually called Falstaff.
They call him John Oldcastle. So I quite look forward to being the first actor to play John Oldcastle in a while. They've got a giant magic cat in Macbeth and it's got two king Ls. And I just, anyway, I just, I've got this book. I'll perform the complete works with Shakespeare chronologically as he wrote them.
And I realized I'd get to The Tempest if I'd done that by Christmas and I started reading Two Gentlemen of Verona and really enjoyed it.
Ben: You think you are going to get to the end one day?
Simon: I don't see why not. What was great because it was locked down, there were no theaters, so it would've been a project that would seem, I don't, I actually, I'm not sure I believe in stupid hubris anymore, but it would, this actor's gonna do the complete works of Shakespeare, but if there's no theater going on, it made more sense.
But I'm so pleased with the stuff I did, and I, and it's so, for some people, for some of the people who saw it, and that's very few people, it was their first introduction to this play. And I think they're good introductions. I thought I try to make sense of it and that's, it is good for me as well to have come up with a version of a play that to me makes sense.
Where I know why everyone's doing what they're doing and they're fun and that you approach and it doesn't seem frightening. Like people know I've prepared this in the morning. I've shot it, I've edited. One of the reasons I stopped doing it again was it was just taking up every waking hour.
So by the time I got to Tamer the Shrew already, if I was actually gonna do it chronologically, I would've gone onto the histories. So I thought, save the histories and do those separately. Okay. So then I got to Titus Andronicus. And by the end of that, I was so tired. I thought, I need, I can't continue this.
I'll do, I'll just head onto Julius Caesar, which was a play I was interested in. And then stop. And that's a season, that's four Shakespeares, that's a season. And then come back to it later. So yeah, and then when I tried to do the, I don't, yeah, I tried to look at the Henry of the Sixes, part one, two, and three, which are plays I love, but there are a lot of characters in there who—
Ben: [that's tricky].
Simon: A lot of 'em talk quite similarly and especially the first one is, I think, a big spectacle. So without all the battle scenes and explosions, it's a little hollow. Yeah. It's a much harder, it's a much harder thing to do if you don't, like 12th Night, the characters are really well defined and you can have fun playing all of them.
But also history, people keep changing their names 'cause they win and lose titles. So Richard II is quite handleable because there's three or four characters in it. And also every time I do a new act, I say the story so far. And also usefully offer some content warnings and explanations.
Explanations of the stuff. And also, yeah, all the melanin hatred you keep coming across. You just go, this is gonna turn up and yeah, don't make an excuse for it, but it's good to warn people of it. 'Cause you don't want people to go, oh, watch Shakespeare, suddenly feel like they've been mugged.
Ben: It's good to make it accessible.
And I think there was a tradition even at the time of essentially throwing around your troupe of players. They had a day to rehearse and then they just put it on that evening. Oh yeah. Yeah. So there's a, there was a lot of that. I'm interested in your overall process, but maybe through the lens of this project about what's your starting unit or starting point.
Do you tend to like character or an image as a starting point?
Simon: For what?
Ben: For getting into putting on the piece or performing somewhere. Is it through image or line and speech? Is it through character? Or there's a lot of talk about directors nowadays from the US school about everything has gotta be action and want and things like that.
So I'm interested in how you mix together all of those things.
Simon: I do different things, so I don't, it's not all the same process. I've never really directed anything.
Ben: But you're directing yourself in this piece in a way.
Simon: Yeah, but I don't, I'd happily go, yeah, I'm directing, but that's not directing.
Yeah. If you're not, if you're not taking it to someone else that's not directing. It's, but it's, it is like, all writing is improvisation as well. At some point you're improvising it and then you're recording it. And that's how I worked in devised theatre often we'd be improvising stuff and then, and I'd be the one to go and write up my memory of it, then bring that in and everyone else could go, no, there's this.
And at least there, there was a text there to turn, to use, however everyone wanted to use it. But I guess I still don't, I make things in different ways, so I dunno what you're asking me about.
Ben: Yeah. Okay. I guess for this project, [. Because we'll come onto the Shunt work.]
I'm interested, perhaps when you are getting into Shakespeare, you're gonna perform Shakespeare or a play. A play where you have a written text and there's characters, so we are defining it down.
Simon: Yeah.
Ben: Do you, and maybe obviously you'll listen to the director and things, but before the director or the work you are doing alongside the director, do you approach that from a very character driven, let's get inside the head of a practice or?
Simon: I approach it from a, I approach it from a, I think, a story.
Ben: Story?
Simon: Right. So, I think the two main focuses for me, not as a manifesting, but just the thing I do, is the story and, but, and the, all the normal story things of that. What's your motivation?
Ben: So it is a motivation. Yeah.
Simon: Another way to put it is what are you pretending?
Ben: Yes. That's slightly different though, but, yeah.
Because a motivation could be just your simple want, but if you are pretending that's a kind of projection of what you or whatever you want to pretend, but it might not be the same as your want.
Simon: But how is it different, give me an example?
Ben: You could come across, I guess, as pretending to be beautiful or pretending to be ugly.
So that's the thing.
Simon: Oh, I see.
Ben: [But you are but you are wanting to do… cross talk]
Simon: I don't think in those terms at all. How do you pretend to be? Some people do are completely in, that doesn't make sense. Sorry, I'm talking over you.
But you can, yes. You yourself projection is a thing. But you're so, yeah. You're doing it in character, I think, oh, actually. Yeah. I guess a lot of the work I have hasn't really relied on me finding a character because it is so much about my interaction with the audience or my, or my interaction with the story.
And it's just, and I think actually now you bring it up, one of the wonderful things about doing full Shakespeare is I could really do characters and immediately play people who weren't me. Yeah, no you are right. You're right to make that distinction.
Ben: Yeah, I guess this is because I probably want to go and start with the Shunt work and then come forward at this time, and I, this is obviously taints everything in a really simplified bucket, but you could say that some people would approach something purely from get inside the head of the character and from the character.
Play, pretend, or however the extreme, which you may not think works or not, is I'm not gonna think about the character, all I will just dress up like this character, everything on the outside, clown nurse or something. And from that external point of view, everything might flow. And then you have potentially a third blob of work, which is where you don't have a text or anything to working from and you're working with a bunch of other people.
And from that, and then I'm interested, what might be the thing from flows from that. And it's interesting when you're working with a text from Shakespeare, you think I can get inside and think about a character and do that. And so that's why I was interested about coming to that and how that might contrast for when you are devising work or doing ensemble work when you might not have a script or you're trying to do the script or you're making the script and how that all works.
Simon: Yeah. So I've put, I've got a few things to put a pin into for the Shakespeare, I think. The, it's the absolute best illustration of that for me is the fact that I played Rich of the, I did two Richard IIs. So when I came back to it, I thought, I'll start with the histories. And by the time I got to like the fifth act, I was like, I still don't get this play.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: I still don't. I've made, I've make, I'm making and putting some something out, which is a story that I don't understand what the story is. And I thought, and I think round about Act four when I was recording, I thought what's one of the things we know about Richard? We know that Elizabeth the First saw Richard the Second and thought that's me.
And I thought I'm definitely not playing that. I am giving a very naturalistic, slightly odd book as every, I, I lean into the oddball nature of myself when I do Shakespeare. I've a lot of experience of, of doing Shakespeare when I was young, and it was really nice to be playing that kind of, I might be using this phrase wrong, sigma male, but like the Jaques and the Lucio and then Hamlet, like the, the underminers, the outsider intellectuals.
I, I really, and who don't fit in but have their own authority. And that's how I've been playing Rich II and that's how I often see Rich II played. And I thought, but that doesn't make sense. That's not who e, if you look at Elizabeth the First, did I say first or second? Elizabeth the First, there's a very clear on that. And I was thinking, I'd seen photos of Ian Richardson.
I thought what if I play Richard II as Ian Richardson, complete full old school, absolutely delivering every line like you love the poetry, like it's a proper performance. And I thought I'll, I'm gonna redo Rich II, but with a completely different characterization of Rich II. And that changed the whole thing and it made sense to me.
By Act four of this second one, I realized I've been playing, I'm Thatcher, this is, I'm playing amongst other things, and I'm also Norma Desmond, because we don't really have a concept of majesty, but we know what a fallen star is.
And Richard II was as, as a story about a fallen star, about a story about someone who absolutely was the thing they projected themself at, and then loses that because it's built on nothing and then has nothing to replace it with.
That changed the play and also changed how every other character behaved. And that, and it suddenly became a story. I understood what I was telling, and that was specifically because I changed the characterization, Richard the Second, and similarly when I came to and I'm—
Ben: Just gonna pick on that.
Simon: Yeah.
Ben: And that makes sense to me now that you say it's story first, because from understanding the story—
Simon: Yeah.
Ben: The character changed. And from the character, everything else changed to make sense of the story. Yeah.
Simon: Yeah.
Ben: Whereas you could have gone, someone could have gone the other way, I'm just gonna make sense of the character.
Yeah. And then whatever story comes out of that, comes outta that. But you weren't satisfied. 'Cause the first time around you, you had a character. Yeah. But it's like, when I play this character the story doesn't seem to make sense to me anymore. So I think that's a really interesting way of approaching it.
Simon: Yeah. I, and you know that, that's why talking about character and motivation and story are interlinked. But often, especially with a well-worn text, especially with part of the canon, I'll see productions where it doesn't make sense. I don't understand what the story is 'cause the characterization doesn't.
And, but with the great classics, you can change what a character is and still tell a different story. Yeah. And I think Hamlet's the, the best and worst example of this. I've seen so many Hamlets way that work so well, yeah.
Ben: Great character.
Simon: For the first, for the first act, and then come the second act it is, but why isn't he killing Claudius?
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: What, there is this huge gap in Hamlet where you… I think you have to know what's, you have to tell the story of why Hamlet then doesn't kill Claudius.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: And it's not, well because he is pretending to be mad.
What is he, why is he pretending to be mad? Yeah. And I think yeah, it's what's the, so great to be told a story and it becomes, there, there could still be lots of great stuff, but I'd also like, Polonius, what's going on with Polonius. That's a great thing. One of the great things about Shakespeare is just, there are stories there if you wanna—
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: And what's the story—
Ben: We're telling.
Simon: And oh yeah. I, and one of the reasons I'm so proud of my Julius Caesar is I'd always sensed this version of Cassius and Mark Antony. I loved the character of Cassius. I loved how right he was about everything and how he kept deferring to Brutus because he also knew that he was a hothead.
He also knew that he was not a born leader and that dooms them. And I'd always wanted to play that. And then when it came to Mark Antony, I just, I dunno why, is bloviating the right word, sort of Boris Johnson, him, I don't dunno. It was just, he had a very few lines in the first act, but they were so obsequious, Dees, I thought, just go B.
And then by the time you get to his oration, to the Romans, I love doing that so much, even though it's such a sort of classic scene. It was just playing a total populist as a total populist. Without any. Without any, yeah. Without any, yeah. And anyone you play is charming. I could, this is really what you would talk about, but yeah.
It was, it just felt so good to be getting it.
Ben: And let's contrast that then. Do a little potted history. There was a collective called Shunt, which I think was one of the most influential theatre collectives, call it almost a movement, particularly within the London theatre scene.
And so arguably global. And you did a lot of work with Shunt and a lot of their work comes from an ensemble basis. Yeah. Although it often does use a director, but doesn't have to, and we can talk about how ensemble works differently, but often when you start, there isn't a written text. There might be one by the end.
So that's quite different from doing Shakespeare and you might not even start with some characters. But you might do, and I was looking at some clips 'cause I still remember, I don't actually remember the details very well, but I definitely remember the feeling of Dance Bear Dance.
Simon: Yeah.
Ben: [Cross talk: All the way back then. So I'd be interested in, did you—]
Simon: [See the one with me in—]
Ben: Yes. I think I saw it twice. I saw it in the arches. And your one with—
Simon: [Yeah.]
Ben: Yeah, because it was so extraordinary for the time. So I'm gonna let you talk a little bit maybe about your experience of that and then relate it back to making work.
So we just talked about Shakespeare and going through story and then into character and then performing. And then you've got this whole other way of working. And so with contrast, and obviously it's performing, but you start ensemble, you might not even start with much more than an idea or a character, and then you produce this other kind of work.
So why don't you talk about that?
Simon: That's the other thing I want to put the pin in. 'Cause for me there's, the really interesting journey for me was even before I was working with Shunt I knew Shunt through Gemma Brockis, who I knew at Cambridge. And towards our last years at Cambridge, we started working with a guy called Jeremy Hardingham.
So the journey for me is like at the end of my first year at Cambridge, I played Hamlet and I, and it was an amazing company. And then I watched and there it was an amazing company.
I thought I've played Hamlet. I'm gonna… unless there's touring or unless… a friend wants me in something… I don't really wanna act anymore. And Jeremy asked me to be in King Lear, and I said, I don't wanna do King Lear. And I saw his King Lear. And it wasn't like how I imagined, how I had imagined putting on Shakespeare before…
This was not about casting actors who have a really interesting take on the character and bringing them all together and telling the story. This was a completely different kind of piece of theatre, but it was complete, absolutely King Lear. And there were brilliant actors in it. But there were also performances that on their own might be seen as quite wooden, but weren't about people pretending to be that character.
And it was, excuse me, it was just a phenomenal room to be in. For three hours where this thing was happening. And then I started working with Jeremy. We did a thing, we did a version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I loved being in, and, but this type of theatre. And then I stayed, I've been making work with Gemma ever since, but this kind of theatre made me usefully self-conscious about just playing a character and what else an actor does in a company on stage.
And when I watched Shunt’s first show… watched Shunt’s second show, actually, The Ballad of Bobby Francois, which was quite a silent piece, quite a clown show. All the performances were great, but they were not really playing characters. And similarly, a lot of this devised stuff, immersive installation.
It wasn't about seeing someone play another character. It was just about someone interact with an audience. And I, and so I became… really, I saw that the thing I wanted to learn to do was absolutely just deal as myself in character with an audience, with a situation, but not present a character that was an interpretation of someone from a story.
And that's what went into when I did my, it's still my head, my solo sequel to the Shunt work, Jonah Non Grata. It wasn't about, I'm presenting my characterization of Jonah, it's about what is this person doing on stage? What are they trying to be? How are they interacting with an audience? It wasn't about me putting on a voice or doing stuff like that.
And in terms of the ensemble I made a piece with Gemma where I played two very different characters and that was an adaptation of, or inspired by, the book Invitation to a Beheading. And a lot of Shunt’s works are inspired by books. There's always some kind of text, but then you improvise scenes within the situations in those texts.
And I think normally when you're improvising it's normal anyway to improvise without actually coming up with a character. You're, it's about the situation and the back and the forth. And so I play two very different characters. I was a nervous lawyer and then a sort of weird surrealist alpha male executioner, but I used my own voice for that.
It was just, the situation was different. And the look was very different. If you put on a costume to be a person, you still need a mirror, otherwise you dunno what you're wearing. It might help you stand or move differently. But I, yeah, I have, I think I have at least those two strings to my bow, if that's the metaphor.
Like I can, like being present with other actors and with an audience in a space and interact with that. And also going away and finding a character and going, doing the whole Antony Sher thing, which I loved growing up. Seeing him draw the characters he was going to be and then transform into that.
I think the visual aspect is really important. And that, and also fun.
Ben: And how did you make decisions within the ensemble? So you're improvising, you're going back and forth, people are playing, however they're playing, all the scenes develop. How does a group of people then decide this is the most interesting way forward?
This is the best way forward. There is no way forward. Let's argue about this for a while. How do decisions within a rehearsal room start to form? Can you articulate that?
Simon: Yeah. Although I'm an associate artist, I would never be involved at the very beginning of a process. The time I would come on board, there would always be a set. The set is the text. What Lizzie designs. And the basic idea, which can change, that the collective has of the audience's journey through that space, or just within that space, is already in place and the text is already in place.
The one slight exception to this was Tropicana, where I came in mid-run. And so there was already a show there, but when I came in as the lift operator, I was allowed to rewrite my stuff. And that rewriting inspired other people like Hannah to rewrite their bits and yeah, I could work on everything I did and it was really useful to have a show in place and for me to be allowed to come in and go, oh, I think this might work, and do this.
And so there's always some kind of thing already there when I come into a Shunt show, and it really varies. It's always down to the wire, at least down to the wire.
And I think when I was first brought into Dance Bear Dance, it was as someone who, working with Gemma on Invitation to a Beheading, it was someone who had experience of coming up with text for a devised show.
Bobby Francois, there wasn't really much text, but because this was gonna be a council meeting, that this was gonna be a much more text-heavy show than they'd done before, which at least I think is one of the reasons I've been invited to come in as early as I did on it.
And I think one, definitely something I literally brought to the table in Shunt was an idea of how to create text that worked within an immersive environment that wasn't just like delivering a lecture, say. Like how you present information to an audience and give them the information to present audience back as well.
And you play games and one of the best bits about the devising process was just, oh, every hour go away, come up with something to present. And the presentations are so important. And when they were doing the cabaret, that was also people would present a thing, a scene.
Ben: Just make the work and see—
Simon: See where it goes.
Yes, it was very much that, yeah. That improv thing of just do it and then see.
Ben: I'm gonna try and pick up on quite a few things and we see where we go here. So I think it's really interesting. I guess it's always been within performance, but there's emphasis, first of all, on audience or audience experience.
And second of all, where the audience and the performer is within the space. And this idea that, and actually it's influenced my more recent work around the show starts immediately. Or in fact my last show, it even starts when you're not in the space, within the bar. Yeah. I'm speaking to people.
You're inviting them in, you are already telling them about what it is, and then you're invited and go through the space. And I've been very much more interested in how much the audience has agency within a space as opposed to in a very traditional, or some traditional, where the audience just sits and watches something and, or you go further back and they're always rowdy.
And I'm interested in how your line of work here thinks about having an audience pay attention, how you think about audience within space, and maybe you can do this with reference to your latest work or even some of the Shunt work, with how that works in terms of thinking about the audience where they're not simply a passive piece of the performance, but a more active piece.
Simon: Yeah. It's obviously about that, but I guess why I become, why I get antsy is I don't wanna start, as I hear often, suggesting that a passive audience is unengaged.
Ben: To do with attention.
Simon: [Not even that attention. Yeah.] No, I thought you said tension.
Ben: [No.]
Simon: All engagement, all art is about holding someone's attention and I think so much of it for me, in terms of doing immersive work, is you're doing this every night. For me, it's really about making the experience I'm going through night after night a proper experience, and that means different from the one before.
And so I was thinking about this on the way here, 'cause I'm thinking about making another, a second solo show finally after Jonah, and what I'd forgotten, one of the things I loved writing about it and when I took it to Edinburgh last year and all the things I was refining about it, but one thing I hadn't really, at least I don't remember acknowledging, is how it's so much a show about a performer in a space.
It's what I'm doing in a space. It's about a person in a space with an audience. And that, which sounds redundant, but I was really thinking about what to do next. I realized, oh, my problem is, I dunno the way in because sort of everything I wanted to play with about the idea of what it is to be, to go into a room and then have someone talk at you, was there in Jonah.
And so I'd be thinking about, oh, maybe the character of this new piece, we sit at a table, it'll be a date. And I'm like, but that's, so you're losing something. It's about the less I have to pretend, the better. Unless there're bits where I suddenly really do have to pretend. And that's a great bit.
So when, although the audience may never be conscious of this, when I'm in the whale and there's just a blue spotlight, there's loads of theatre happening in front of you. And I am covered in stuff, and I am playing a person in the belly of a whale. And that's, and I love it.
And that's something mystical going on, but I always thought a theatre's like a church and a church is set up a bit like an airplane and just all these spaces where an audience come in and that's the contract, and they understand the contract, and you can play with the contract, but that's also something I don't have to pretend.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: That allows me to come in and be as alive as possible in front of them in this show. In the same way that with Shunt where we had these incredible play spaces designed by Lizzie, you could just come in and play that game in that space. What do you want to do in that space with those people? It was a huge inspiration.
And so I was, yeah. I think this was inspired by a bit of a documentary about Punchdrunk last night on Sky. And I've never seen a Punchdrunk show, but someone was saying about, oh, the audience coming in and they're in a space. But also that space has been designed, like yeah, that's just pretending.
I was like, I don't want to detract from their incredible work 'cause I've never seen it, but I was just like, just a set. You're just walking around a set. What's interesting about being either in a, sharing a space with someone and realizing that, oh, maybe if I do go to Edinburgh with a show, it should be in Edinburgh, it should be a promenade thing.
I do a lot of Jack the Ripper walks. And my friend Ben Whitehead, who came up with them, also came up with ghost bus tours. And I've worked at Phantom Peak and so much of my, so many of my day jobs are within a space. I relate to a very specific space. So Jonah was really good because it was people coming to listen to a man in a box.
Ben: And that's why the label immersive is slightly mislabeled in that sense.
Simon: It's why I think you can call it an immersive work even though it's an audience watching a person on stage. That's why I think it is an immersive piece, yes.
Ben: Oh, so I guess I was saying that for instance, the Jack the Ripper walk is immersive in a way that people might not think it's immersive.
Simon: Yeah. Yeah. But although, everyone knows you're walking around the streets.
I think if you say you don't use it as immersive theatre 'cause you haven't created the space, I think normally immersive suggests to me a creation of a space. And it's some form of installation.
Ben: And which isn't just a set.
Simon: No, it can't help but be a set.
But I think, I guess like I was watching the footage of Punchdrunk and they go, oh, you've walked into a fake bathroom. And it's that, how, it's this dreadful, 'cause I haven't seen the show, but it's like, how interesting is it ultimately to walk into a fake bathroom? And yet, and this is the thing I had to deal with.
I love theme parks. I love theme parks. Okay. And that's just walking around a very created environment.
Ben: Yeah. But they're very honest. It's if you are not pretending to be a bathroom, you're not, theme parks aren't pretending to be something other. So where if you get a very detailed piece of set, which is trying to be naturalistic, but somehow misses a thing, it then feels, oh, it's because you're not the very best fake person.
Simon: That's not the problem for me. Okay. 'Cause everyone makes mistakes. It's not about, it's about the intention.
Ben: I see. Okay.
Simon: I think if you're making a space from scratch, why make a space that already exists? Why? One of the reasons I love Disneyland. Does it exist? Walt Disney made a thing that doesn't exist.
Ben: Only exists. Yeah. Imagination on some points.
Simon: It's such a realization of his very specific idea of what is good, which you don't have to agree with at all, but it's absolutely… he lived there as it was being made.
Ben: Yeah. It's a real—
Simon: I get that. Here's Main Street, USA and here's, there's a steamboat and there's a mountain, and there's the world, and there's all of Africa in a boat. Although that came later, I think.
Ben: Yeah. And even more amazing. Maybe he's the only one who could make it.
Simon: Yeah, absolutely. Singularly, yeah. That's why David Hockney said he is the most important artist of the 20th century.
But it's a very singular vision of a space. And I also love walking around fake environments.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: So I dunno what it was about that bit of the documentary. It's not just artifice, it's something else. I'm sure I'd find it huge fun to see one of their shows.
Ben: If it's not too controversial. I'm interested that you haven't been to a Punchdrunk.
Simon: They used to be too expensive.
Ben: Okay.
Simon: When I was watching the bit of the documentary going, why am I seeing the Punchdrunk show? And I think I would be too scared of not enjoying it.
Ben: And in some ways I think, maybe it's not quite fair to say, but I would say Punchdrunk… there's an argument saying some of Punchdrunk couldn't have existed without some of the stuff that Shunt and Shunt-adjacent work had done earlier.
Simon: So I have not seen it. I wouldn't say that. Because I think there's a huge creative crossover.
[Cross talk]
Simon: BAC was an incredible building and they were using it. And I think that's huge fun. And I think similarly when Shunt moved into underneath London Bridge, it's what do we do with this? And I think the approaches to space are very different. And the approaches, hard to put a show in a space.
Shunt made a clown installation. There's something very absurdist about it. And one of the great things about absurdism is it can be done quite cheaply because there's a slight post-apocalyptic sense of the comedy of scarcity.
Ben: On clowning. I had a very short clown question, which is, should a clown always say yes?
Simon: Oh yeah, that's a very interesting question, but it's not interesting because I feel I have to answer it. It's one of the things that put me off when I was in twenties, I was doing clown school.
I'm rediscovering Dylan Moran. I'm just rewatching Black Books. Dylan is a hugely negative figure. But also there's a real innocence to him when he falls in love.
Even if you're saying no, you're saying yes to no. Instantly you're developing it. But just to be given that lesson, because the very first time I heard that was a weekend workshop, that's such, it's such an important question, which is why it's an interesting one.
Yeah, because also like Jonah is like Hamlet was my investigation of refusing the call to adventure.
Ben: Yes.
Simon: And I did my English dissertation on the early work of Woody Allen, who again is like three films in a row about political assassination with a clown who doesn't want to go on with it.
Absolutely. Obviously a clown can refuse.
Ben: This other absurdist things… I was interested in your audio work, which I'm gonna come to as well as a kind of almost separate strand in how it feeds in. But before that, I was just gonna pick up on the BAC, the space, Shunt…
Because at the same time as that was happening and I'd been theatre blogging a little bit around there as well, there was an ongoing argument from a more traditional writing school which would put the writer first. So you have a writer first, a well-made script.
You get a director and actors and you put things on, versus an ensemble school, of which we touched on various ways that you could do that. I guess I was a theatre maker, but I wasn't doing it full time. I had a whole other job and still was making some bits of theatre.
I found that was a really exciting argument, which was played out in performances. It was played out over blogs. And I guess still to some degree plays out now. David Eldridge, who was from very much the writer school has got some great stuff on at the moment, but I'd be interested if you had any reflections on, did you feel that was an ongoing debate then, and how that fits into the liveliness of theatre now?
Simon: I think the only stakes of that debate really were that theatre critics were suddenly being sent to things that they had no experience of. I'm a theatre critic and though I'm watching this I don't know how to process the thing I'm watching because it's not, not the job I signed up for.
Ben: Interesting.
Simon: I'd already gone through that one. My experience of watching Jeremy's King Lear was like that. One of the things was also really great about that was because he was a student. He was a student who was not trying to be a journeyman director.
He was using the resources that we had to try something new and it killed and it completely transformed or broadened my idea of what doing a show could be. And it wasn't just an idea, it was the brilliance of the execution. It was that Jeremy was so good at that. And I think that's a hugely important part.
It wouldn't have happened if he wasn't so good at that.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: Sometimes as we were talking about, you make the thing that doesn't exist. Often the best artists are artists who are good at something that doesn't exist. Some who are brilliant at something that doesn't exist.
And so they make the thing and then it exists.
Ben: And the critics didn't understand it at the time.
Simon: Yeah. Do you know Nicholas Craig, the Nigel Planer character?
Ben: A tiny bit.
Simon: There's the only credits to, is The Naked Actor show is such a perfect sort of snapshot of black box, him in different costumes doing things and some science fiction and some, but the point I'm getting at is someone brilliant will come along and do something completely new and people go, oh, there's this.
And then a whole bunch of people who don't really get it at all will come along and go, oh, now we're doing this. You go if you don't do it, if you don't get it. And that sort of theatre of the seventies and eighties, which has huge talents doing incredible stuff, but also the sense that quite a few directors were coming along.
In their twenties and going, oh, this is what theatre looks like now. An idea of what theatre should be is not theatre.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: You can do whatever you like. That's the point. What is it you want to do? That to me is what theatre is.
I think what annoyed me and some of us in, was the idea that we were doing this because we couldn't do text.
Ben: Yes.
Simon: It was, no, we've done text. Yeah. We fucking kicked Shakespeare's ass and now we want to see what else we can do.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: And it's not necessarily a transferable skill. We're coming back to that idea. The main attraction is that you're doing it night after night, so you're doing something slightly different.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: And so I don't have that much experience of a long run of a play.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: I really don't. And that's not 'cause I don't want to. And I don't want to get back to that but yeah, in the first half of my adulthood, it's been mainly devised work.
All very short runs, different things.
Ben: And maybe now be interesting to touch on your audio work. Do you think audio work is essentially your form of theatre as well? You don't necessarily have a set or a space, although you can definitely engage or have an audience pay attention. You don't necessarily get the feedback.
From that. Do you see it as a separate strand?
Simon: There's lots of stuff I'm not good at with voice work, but what I'm good at, I'm good at sight reading, and I'm good at making quick decisions that aren't dumb.
And I also really enjoy working with other people. So most of my voice work that people will know is in a sketch show, where you get to do a lot of voices and use characters very quickly. And it gets me, it allows me to mimic some old school kind of acting because a lot of John's sketches deal in old school genres.
But John's a brilliant performer, a brilliant writer, and everyone in the company's a brilliant performer, brilliant writer. So I'm very happy just sitting and listening. But that kind of work. And then the work I've been doing with Audible and with Big Finish, it's making quick decisions and letting them play out.
The thing that always, and also when I was doing John's show, that's the first sketch work I did. So I wasn't a sketch comedian and a bit like talking about devising, I didn't have a default persona that I could just bring to a sketch and that I didn't have a default voice, but both John and I had been writing for David Mitchell, Robert Webb, and David has a very clear default voice where you could just play it.
I didn't have that. And I certainly hear that in the first two series going I dunno what I am if I'm not playing a specific character. Oh I'm a little awkward about that. I can't remember what's going on and it's all quick decisions.
Ben: Is it just more natural?
Simon: It's just, that's natural. I'm very happy at pretending. I like that game. I like, it's the story, it's the storytelling thing. And I don't always make the right decisions.
There are jokes I don't get. Acting is reacting. You can't react in voice work.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: I did occasionally. I went, oh, oh. But listening to people, the thing I enjoy a lot about acting you just don't do on the radio, but then you're reading a script, so you're not even looking at the other performer.
Your eyes are basically always on the words. But it's a really nice thing to come in and have recorded. But…It's at the far end of the pretending to be other people spectrum.
Ben: Yep. That's fair. And what do you find exciting or the other side challenging about performance today?
Maybe we could say London theatre performance, but you might have views globally or just about performing arts or culture in general?
Simon: You mean as an audience?
Ben: Either.
Simon: In terms of me watching stuff or?
Ben: Either watching or even doing, maybe in terms of doing actually, and I could frame it as a couple of thoughts I had is I had thought that maybe the pandemic might change things more than they have.
We've got back to a state where I don't think it's maybe changed that much. The little bits around, but that's interesting. I still think there's a big question mark on how we approach digital work. Although I think we're getting more, becoming more interesting still, I feel.
Simon: What do you mean by digital work?
Ben: So digital work is essentially, I'm thinking about digital work as digitizing live work or putting the digital—
Simon: Oh, I see.
Ben: Like video archiving or partly archiving or a little bit. So your YouTube or performing Shakespeare is a kind of form of digital work, right?
Simon: Yeah. .
Ben: Rather than just video cameraing,... So that's one element. Or you go the other way where I think Katie Mitchell's done more of this work, or there's been others around it, where you have much more digital within your live performance.
So using video and things, that's maybe one end of the spectrum of where digital could land. We'll see what these LLMs, AIs bring or not to the process. So I'm interested in what you find exciting, either from a performance view or indeed it could be on the other side in terms of watching, and also what you feel is challenging or boring or is we should really just do less of that and do more of something else.
Simon: I don't necessarily find anything as a performer exciting, otherwise I'd go and do it. Again, I was thinking on the walk here how much easier it was making a show like Jonah when I had so many friends and contemporaries who were also making works in small rooms and presenting me with options to copy or being inspired by.
And now I am, I'm seeking it. I'm still seeking out not beginning artists, but artists working in that space. And I'm really excited by their work. I've met a few people who are doing, yeah, just brilliant stuff in a way that brilliant stuff has always been brilliant.
But less that I can take away and go, oh, I wanna do that.
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: Which is one of the reasons I made Jonah was I wanted people to watch it and go, oh, I could do something like that. Yeah. That's another thing I like about the affordability of a piece of theatre.
And as an audience, like the last three big shows I've seen, two at the Globe and then one at the National, I've all really loved. I saw Pinocchio, I saw a fantastic Troilus and Cressida, which is not something I thought I would see. And then I sat at the front row for The Bacchae, which I think is the place to see it.
I know people have sat further back, had a very different experience of it, but everything that went into it seemed so engaged in what they were making and the idea that it should be fun, but that fun's not an embarrassing— that's made by people who get fun, made by people who seem to genuinely be able to have fun.
Ben: Fun, yes.
Simon: And communicate that, but that not be done incredibly intelligently and argumentatively as well. Yeah. Presenting an argument and that's a run of three of those is not something I'm used to.
Ben: Pretty good.
Simon: I really came away from Pinocchio thinking, yeah, everything's fine. People get it. Don't overthink it, but do think it, and have fun. And be fun and don't, yeah.
Fun's not a genre. Yeah. A lot of things are feelings that you genuinely want to inspire in people, and they're not, and then they're a genre. You can't fake it. It's working out what in the medium you have to fake and what in the medium you shouldn't fake. And I think I've never really had that much respect for criticism.
'Cause I always think it lets people get away with absolute murder.
Ben: We'll come to that when we do a little bit of overrated, underrated. But maybe the last one on this. Is those are recent pieces, which are all done well.
I was wondering if there are any particular pieces either that you've seen or maybe that you've been in, which have stayed with you in the sense that you come back to it from time to time. So actually Dance Bear Dance is one of those. I'm not saying I think about it every month, but I'd probably say once a year something comes along and reminds me of either the feeling of the piece or what it's, ah, this is something there.
There's a few other pieces for me and it might not even be theatre. It might not even be performance. It could be, I sometimes have it on visual work or words or things.
But I'd be interested if there is a piece of performance, either as an audience or as a performer, where maybe once a year or something it refloats back in your mind and go, oh yeah, this has influenced how I think about the world or art.
Simon: There are lots and I, but I can't, immediate, nothing immediately comes to mind.
But when I was, I had a brilliant PR for Jonah Non Grata, which is a 20-year-old show that I did at Edinburgh last year, and I had to write a lot of pieces about it. And so it was interesting to me at least going, what did inspire it? Where did that idea come from?
And so some of it was books by Alasdair Gray and Stan, and all the idea of Stanley Spencer and the idea of the importance of religious art, even as an atheist, just how handy that is dealing with old stories.
But if I think of when I was in Edinburgh I started watching a lot of rewatching, a lot of National Theatre of Brent, and I'll happily put forward that— do you know the National Theatre of Brent? Brent, Desmond Dingle, and then Jim Broadbent and up into Raymond Box.
And I was rewatching them going, oh no, this is really influential. Not even in a, it's a, they're a comedy, but also the lo-fi-ness. But the fact that within this joke, the human scale they gave to history, which is often missing from how history is talked about, was so genuinely pertinent and moving.
And I loved the cleanness of that idea and I loved just the clown-ness of it. And I loved, we are going to stage the biggest thing imaginable, but we don't have the resources. So it's not something I've seen live. But I watched a lot of television, Black Books.
Watching Black Books just 'cause I thought it was about time and every, everything Dylan Moran does, I don't, again, this isn't necessarily really, we talk about, I just go, oh yeah, that informed me so much.
Ben: I haven't re-watched it recently, but there's probably been a series that I've watched—
Simon: Even before Black Books, when he was doing, How Do You Want Me? Just his performance. This is, yeah, I think I saw it in Edinburgh. Yeah.
But that doesn't really… just when I'm, a lot of my writing for comedy, writing for Mitchell & Webb was inspired by the way Dylan Moran wrote. So there's one sketch about Queen Victoria that, where this is sort of David Mitchell rant, and I thought I wasn't intentionally writing a David Mitchell rant, but it was a Dylan Moran rant that David Mitchell then said, and that it sounded like a David Mitchell rant.
But again, so yeah, television is a huge influence and that's I guess why when I'm doing theatre I want, it's based on stuff that isn't screenable.
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Simon: It's based on being with the audience.
Ben: Great. Let's do a little bit of overrated, underrated, and then into last couple of questions on current projects or any advice.
So I'm gonna say a short thing or word, and you can say whether you think it's an underrated thing or an overrated. I guess things can be correctly rated as well, whether we want more of or less of. So I'll start with one, which we touched on.
Simon: At what point in this should I say I'm absolutely against ratings?
Ben: At the—
Simon: Beginning.
Ben: We could say—
Simon: Because everyone likes different things. This would be underrated, I think, rating. I think I'm really, I don't think, I think in print, I think criticism has stakes with the employee. Yes. And so I don't necessarily trust that people who say they like stuff in print necessarily like stuff.
But I think outside the media, outside journalism, just outside, like in personal interactions, if someone likes something, they like it.
Ben: Yeah. Oh, I don't mean in terms of that sort of rating. So I'll see. So like whether we want something more of or less. So I would say reviews and criticism.
Simon: Right.
Ben: And you are saying we should probably have less of it.
Simon: No but we've now it's, but it's a zero. It's not a zero. I'm game, is it? No it's, no, I've, dear God, I got some amazing writeups from Jonah and genuinely amazing. Not, oh, I've won this prize, but oh, you got it.
Oh, and you taught me something about my show. So if you try, I, I don't just try to see the good in stuff in a kind of self-policing way. I try and see the good in stuff because why wouldn't you find good stuff? Like no, the only benefits your life to find the good in it. But I'll try to not, not answer the question.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And what about the Arts Council? Do you think we should have more of it or less of it?
Simon: I don't, I've never had interactions with the Arts Council. So neutral. Not even neutral. I don't understand. Maybe more. I'm very, I'm very, okay.
I've never, one of the reasons I've never applied to council funding—
Ben: Is a good thing.
Simon: State funding for lottery funding less. I think that's why I've never applied. I've always been [uneasy with] poor people gambling and funding me. And also I'm a very privileged person. I went to Cambridge. … I should be able to find a way to make a thing.
I get it. That, yeah, exactly…. I've don't think I've been around long enough to deserve a bit of that pot now. But I think like with the blog and the lack of a financial incentive makes it much easier for me to do what I want.
Ben: …I've done the same, done a podcast, never gonna be commercial. My blog, actually, it is on Substack, but only because they email it out. Never gonna be commercial. My very early work, I did get some Arts Council money, but then I didn't have any money then.
Now I do have money. I wouldn't ever, I would never say never. But I don't foresee a path where I would take Arts Council money. And there's just an interesting, legitimate question about what level you do arts funding, particularly in this country where you wanna fund the NHS, you wanna fund education and things like that.
Simon: Yeah, there's so much money in this country. We do give money to take whatever money …that's my feeling about it's not what it was 25 years ago.
Ben: That's fair enough.
Simon: So have you seen what they're giving money to? If they wanna give something to you, take it.
Ben: Yeah. Okay. And the last one on this, influence of Netflix, do you think it's more influence, less influence? Do you think it's been a good thing, bad thing, or just a thing —
Simon: On what?
Ben: On writing and performance, culture stories, maybe broadly. So I guess there's one argument that it has brought more stories and more funding and maybe more global stories and more funding.
And then there is also a critical argument saying it has maybe narrowed us. It's also taken away attention from other forms. Arguably social media and things are the worst, but there is that sort of argument as well. And then there's in the middle.
Simon: I dunno. I need some actual stats. This is just vibes on what, yeah. Because like sometimes something can get an audience that's not taking away someone else's audience. It's not zero sum. It's like building an audience.
This is a non-answer, but one of the things that intrigues me is how just before the Me Too movement started, like two of my favourite shows on Netflix were Jessica Jones and Kimmy Schmidt, and there were all these massive narratives being made about a woman living in a nightmare world completely controlled by an evil man.
Oh, okay. Yeah. That and yeah, when I, that time, so that would've been 2016, I think, 2015, it was brilliant to see such huge narratives that then played out. And it is extraordinary that Netflix has no money. It just keeps spending more and more money, billions, companies…. I don't understand how that works.
… I still watch. I do stream more than I watch television, but I watch a lot of YouTube. I watch a lot of YouTube channels. Yeah.
Ben: You have a favourite?
Simon: Yeah, I have a few favourites. A few of my favourites don't exist anymore. They've gone on to, is it, and there's a real gender divide by who's stayed on YouTube and who's been driven off.
Theme parks. I love all theme park YouTube. Defunctland doesn't do much now but was an incredible channel. Jenny Nicholson was incredible.
Ben: Do you have a favourite theme park…?
Simon: Hm…
Ben: Every theme park is a great theme park.
Simon: Yeah. Not every, but I do just love theme parks, but Disney, Disneyland is absolutely my favourite. I went as a kid. I went at exactly the right time, right? It was a, for those who dunno, it was a futurist series of rides in the eighties where futurism was still really exciting.
There'd be underwater schools and you can go on, I think you can go on YouTube and see a version of this ride Horizons, which was as responsible as anything for me thinking about the future up until I realized what the future would actually be like and that you can't see underwater 'cause light doesn't travel, which is a huge disappointment.
And I don't, yeah. And so I follow, I really enjoy Red Letter Media. Again, it's really interesting to see people who have started off just putting stuff on YouTube and then have thrived very much within their own scale.
So these now middle-aged friends in, is it Milwaukee, getting together and watching terrible films and getting drunk and talking about them. That is, that, is that now a business model? Matt? Men? I love, I love.
And you couldn't have done that without all of that. Putting that on BBC One, there's no way. And Vlogbrothers, both John and Hank Green, I think, although, and it's a great— Hank videos are now more than five minutes long and I don't follow them so much, but the people who use— I was really interested where suddenly anyone could be a presenter, what they chose to preserve.
Ben: And it gives you a real slice of humanity. Even human flourishing I think is a form of human flourishing. Okay. Last couple of questions 'cause we're running up in time. So one is current projects. Any current projects that you are working on, current or future projects that you'd like to?
Simon: Yeah I'm going back to, I'm writing, am I? Yeah, no, this, I'm writing a book… First I took to Edinburgh was the first three chapter adaptation of the first three chapters of a book, which at the time was the whole story. It was never meant to be the story. And then someone said, oh, that's the story. I went, oh yeah, it was, 'cause it's a sort of a hero's journey.
But now I realized, no, I wanted it to be a bigger, a proper, children's short novel. And so I'm now thinking about that and it involves thoughts about theatre and stories and lies and fantasy and, but it's also just, yeah, really fun to think about and occasionally write.
I won't make the self-appointed deadline for getting a draft done by the end of this month. But that's an unpaid project, but that's what I'm writing on.
And we're towards the end of January now, thinking about whether or not to go to Edinburgh with another show. I've got two in mind as starting points.
But now I'm thinking about venue and how important that is. That sort of completely, and it all starts with as you said, at what point does the audience start feeling like they're in the show?
Ben: Yeah.
Simon: And you, that, and I do, I want an audience to be excited and I want to maintain that feeling of excitement.
Ben: And you think that's 'cause it's something particular about an Edinburgh audience, or why wouldn't you do it in a London venue somewhere?
Simon: Because Edinburgh has, oh, just, oh, guess this. Oh. That's really, that's a really good question, 'cause that's how we're taught to think.
Fair. But also because you can win prizes, Edinburgh. Yeah. If you wanna go, oh, actually I'm a theatre maker. Yeah. I've got a class, that's where you, that's the deadline you set yourself. That's the best place to show new work.
Even though I've long weighed it in my mind and gone, I live in London. I don't need Edinburgh. But yeah it's different. Which just, it's just, you have to think now, am I gonna do Edinburgh? Yeah. I haven't done a big advert that can definitely pay for it, so probably not. And I'm just moving to a new flat. Financially it does take a bite.
Unless I do free fringe and I do something and that's another thing to think about. Who am I going up there with?
Ben: Just to say most people may not realize that the vast majority of Edinburgh shows don't make any, in fact lose money. Not only do they not make money, they will lose money from— Oh, do they?
Simon: Yeah. If you dunno that. Yes. Yeah.
Ben: Tens of thousands.
Simon: That sort of magnitude. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah I lost 10,000 and that goes in your rent while you're up there because there's a lot of rent. And it goes on a producer if you have a producer and it goes on a PR if you have a PR, which is a good idea.
And what else? What else other things?
Ben: It depends on how many people you've gotta pay for actors and set and things.
Simon: If it's not just you. You have to pay for technicians, certainly.
Ben: Okay. That sounds a great range of current projects. And then obviously audio work and other things running by.
Simon: That keeps coming up.
Ben: Do you have any advice for maybe wannabe creatives or you could have life advice in general? I guess you've had a portfolio career of different parts of creativity across everything. Have you reached a stage where you would offer any thoughts to others—
Simon: Get out, see work you like, meet the people who make work that you like. Do stuff on purpose. That's harder and harder these days 'cause it is so easy.
Ben: Purpose is an intentional thing you're doing?
Simon: Yes. It's so easy. Because I have a lot of time off and I might just click the next thing on my algorithm and it's different to go, no, intentional, what do you actually want to do?
Watch something on purpose, not because you are in a position where you're watching things and you want to go, I could watch this next. But that's maybe something more for my generation. Maybe people deal with stuff easier.
My other advice is you can do anything. There are a lot of dialogues about, or conversations about what is it you can do.
See what you can do. And that I've been very lucky to be surrounded by creatives who really do stuff that I never saw exist before. But even before that, I knew that was a common factor in a lot of stuff I loved was that it was stuff that was being done for the first time.
So I shouldn't imitate it. I would see who's doing stuff I've never seen before. I really like that. That seemed like an obvious idea once I'd seen it and work out what's going on there. … And have fun.
Ben: Yeah. That sounds amazing. Have fun, do things with purpose, make things which haven't existed before. Great set of advice. With that, Simon, thank you very much.
Simon: Thank you, Ben.