The body electric: The research-driven theatre of Kandinsky
On a fusion of gothic horror and sci-fi from one of the UK's most exciting companies.
I’m still in London this week, where on Monday I had the pleasure of attending The Stage Awards, which this year took place at Royal Opera House. This is always a really lovely event. The awards celebrate all aspects of British theatre, with prizes for community projects and innovation, as well as the unsung heroes of the industry (there’s a full list of winners here). Projekt Europa won the International Award for the company’s work supporting migrant artists - here’s my interview with director Maria Aberg from last year about the company and its work.
We’re staying in the UK for this week’s newsletter which is about Kandinsky - whose upcoming show More Life, which opens at the Royal Court in February, was one of my pics for 2025 - a British company who have been making international inroads with their layered, intellectually invigorating mode of theatre-making.
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More Life, the new play by UK theatre company Kandinsky, was almost called Meat Sacks. The theatre making duo, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman, had developed an interest in transhumanism having read Future Superhuman – as well as this article - by evolutionary macro-historian Elise Bohan in which she discusses the fact that we’re reaching a point where technology will make it possible to do away with the body entirely. Bohan believes that there will be a point in the near future where we won't need to worry about death, ageing or disease any more- and she’s thrilled about this.
Mooney and Yeatman are more circumspect about the idea of our meat sack-less future, but the discussions and thinking round the topic intrigued them, and bodies have featured in their previous work, – one of their earlier shows, Still Ill was about Functional Neurological Disorders (FND), a condition in which sufferers experience very real symptoms which have no physical cause.
More Life, the eventual title they chose (though I’m kind of relieved and disappointed they didn’t go for Meat Sacks), is set in the future, in 2075. A woman called Bridget is revived fifty years after her death in a car accident, her mind housed inside a synthetic body. It’s an exercise in science fiction, a genre that interests them both, though one they acknowledge is more closely associated with the small and large screen. That’s part of the appeal. In a time when theatre makers are fretting about competing with Netflix, they were drawn to the idea of telling this story on stage in a medium which is all about the body. “There was an opportunity in this subject to talk about the presence of the body and why the body was important,” says Yeatman.
There’s an assumption in a lot of the writing around transhumanism that “we'd all rather not have to waste time eating and sleeping, whereas we think lunch is the best part of the day,” says Mooney. It’s hard not to think of tech CEO Bryan Johnson, whose quest for longevity and bio-optimisation has seen him systemically remove everything pleasurable from his life. “We wanted the show to really embrace the bodily medium of theatre,” says Mooney, “for there to be six people on stage telling this story.”
“We have a very research-driven process,” Mooney explains. The pair started digging into transhumanist thought and reading up on the vast amounts of money that are being poured into this technology - Google, for example, has sunk billions into Calico, a research centre dedicated to extending life and, potentially, curing death. They weren’t all that interested in making a show about what was possible now. It felt more exciting to them to set the show in the future where the technology already exists. With this idea in mind, they embarked on a workshop process, talking to young people and old people about what the future might look like, as well as meeting up with neuroscientists to discuss what might actually happen to you if you were uploaded into a new body.
At some point during this process, they saw Big Mouth Strikes Again a show by the US cabaret artist Salty Brine which blends the songs of The Smiths with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (yes, this exists; yes, it’s amazing). This opened up a new window in their thinking, connecting the sterile world of Silicon Valley tech companies to the 19th century gothic tradition. They were further inspired by an essay in Jeannette Winterson’s 12 Bytes that discussed how the roots of our modern attitudes to the body all lie in Frankenstein. Suddenly they had a connecting thread.
While More Life is set in the future, they took a decision to make the show relatively minimal and tech-light, in part to stop it looking like “1960s Doctor Who” but also because “video is stressful.” Instead music, by their regular collaborator the composer Zac Gvirtzman, will play a large role in creating the world of the piece.
Kandinsky was founded back in 2005 by Yeatman, initially to put on the plays of his university friend, the playwright Al Smith (the company is named after Smith’s cat, not the painter). Yeatman then spent several years working with Simon McBurney and his company Complicité, during which time Kandinsky was largely dormant, save for a 2010 show, Limehouse Nights, about London’s original Chinatown. Then in 2015. Yeatman and Smith collaborated on a new piece Dog Show, inspired by the true story of a dog serial killer in Hong Kong, though they transplanted the story to London. (I called it “an amusing, original and often unexpectedly poignant devised piece exploring the complex bond, and mutual dependency, that often forms between dogs and their owners,” in my review in The Stage and I still fondly remember actor Ntonga Mwanza’s spot-on impression of an excitable pug). Mooney, who was keen to learn the ropes as a producer, joined them. It was a steep learning curve. “We couldn't get any funding. We couldn't afford a stage manager. We were operating the lights in the evening. It was really brutal,” she said. She now co-runs the company with Yeatman and does the lion’s share of the writing as well as working as a dramaturg.
Dog Show was followed by Still Ill, and in 2018, by Trap Street – the name comes from the fictitious streets drawn on maps by cartographers in order to catch out plagiarists – a piece about London housing estates and shifting attitudes towards them. Exeunt called it a “ferociously intelligent and poignant” show in which “attention to the human aspect of urban planning is continually underlined.”
Their 2019 show Dinomania was inspired by the life of Gideon Mantell, the English doctor who discovered the existence of dinosaurs, but in typical Kandinsky fashion it also encompassed the relationship between religion and science and what it is to be remembered - and forgotten - by history. (Here’s a nice Guardian piece on the ideas behind the show). They followed this with There is a Light that Never Goes Out, a piece about the Luddite Rebellion of 1812 which they made for the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. (This review of the show by Francesca Peschier, written as a series of voice notes is an absolute delight).
With the exception of There is a Light all of these shows began life at the New Diorama Theatre, the tiny London studio theatre, which at the time was run by David Byrne – now artistic director of the Royal Court – whose support for artists is renowned in the industry. In this interview with The Stage, they call him their “fairy godmother.”
2019 also saw Trap Street programmed by the Schaubühne as part of FIND, its international new work festival. (Yeatman had connections with the Schaubühne, having worked there on Complicité’s Beware of Pity). This led to an invitation to make a new piece for the Schauspielhaus Wien, who at the time were keen to make work with UK theatre makers. “The now dramaturg at the Schauspielhaus saw it, flew us out to Vienna for a meeting, and commissioned us to make whatever we wanted,” said Yeatman told The Stage.
This show ended up being SHTF, a piece exploring the idea of bunkers for the super-rich, prepper culture and who will survive when the ‘shit hits the fan’ (here’s the trailer). It was due to open early in 2021, though Covid scuppered that plan. The fact Schauspielhaus Wien honoured the commission probably saved them as a company, given that Yeatman and Mooney are both freelancers and Mooney wasn’t yet eligible for self-employment income support. “It was a really frightening time,” she said in a previous interview about the experience. Without that support it would have been difficult for them to continue as a company. When the show eventually opened in April 2022 it was well-received and actor Clara Liepsch was nominated for a Nestroy award for Best Supporting Actor. The fact the show is performed both in German and English has, however, made it a hard sell in the UK, they previously told me.
In 2022, they also made The Winston Machine, a piece about Second World War nostalgia and romanticisation of an imagined past, which the Guardian described as “a rich production, which dances nimbly across the decades,” which they subsequently took on tour.
Kandinsky has often been described as a devising company, but they stress that’s not really accurate. “That gives a sense that we have a non-hierarchical room. And our room is quite hierarchical,” says Mooney. That’s not to say we’re not collaborative, she adds. Collaboration is part of their process'; she describes her and Yeatman as “the lead writers in a writers’ room.” The model that best resembles theirs, he adds, is probably that used by Joint Stock in the 1980s, who used a workshop process from which writers would gather material and compose a script. “We like to discover what the theatrical gesture of the show is with the actors in the room,” he says, but in a way that also feeds their writing process.
Kandinsky makes plays, so it makes sense for them to be programmed in a venue like the renowned new writing theatre, the Royal Court. “There is a real privilege of feeling part of the machinery of a big organization like this, partly because it allows you to focus on making the show,” says Mooney. “We are an artist-led company, and when you produce your own work, you can end up feeling really alone,” she explains. Small companies are inherently more vulnerable. When Kandinsky was touring the UK with The Winston Machine, for example, their van got broken into and all their costumes got stolen, a huge blow for a company of their size. “That was so exposing. It felt like the company might fold and we might not be able to pay everyone,” says Mooney. The support of the Royal Court gives them a safety net.
There’s also the joy of becoming part of the history of a building like the Royal Court. “So many of my favourite things I've ever seen have been in that room,” says Mooney. “It's a powerful lineage.” Yeatman agrees. “It's the absolute dream,” he says.
This week in European Theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
No Yoghurt for the Dead – For the sixth edition of NT Gent’s Histoire(s) du Théâtre series, Portuguese director (and Avignon Festival artistic director) Tiago Rodrigues presents a piece inspired by his late father, a acclaimed journalist who, in the hospital and nearing the end of his life, started writing a newspaper article about his experiences. This article amounted to little more than a few scribbles in a notebook, which Rodrigues uses at the basis of what sounds like a particularly personal piece. It opens in Ghent on 23rd January.
Carmen - Christian Weise directs a version of Bizet’s opera which explores the Romani community’s complex relationship with the character. Reframing the piece as a queer-burlesque, it stars features a text by British musician and performer Riah Knight and Lindy Larsson, both of whom have Romani heritage. It premieres at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin on 24th January.
Oh Schrek! - German actor Max Schreck, the original Count Orlock, in FW Murnau’s seminal Nosferatu, was a regular performer at the Münchner Kammerspiele in the mid-1920s. This new comedy from Jan-Christoph Gockel explores the iconic actor’s life in a performance that promises live silent movie-style piano - plus puppets. It opens at the Münchner Kammerspiele on 24th January.
Thank you for reading. If you have any recommendations, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com