The Stage

Edinburgh 2011: The enigma of David Leddy

Published Friday 5 August 2011 at 16:42 by Thom Dibdin

What makes David Leddy, the writer/director everyone wants to pin down, tick? Thom Dibdin meets the man before his Edinburgh show starts

There is a brilliantly mysterious quality about David Leddy, the Glasgow-based theatre maker whose masonic hall-set, Sub Rosa, took last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe by storm with a clutch of five and four star reviews and an ensemble nomination for The Stage Award for Acting Excellence.

Many purport to define him and his work but few, if any, can. At one time he was the intimate theatre specialist who brought his own life to his work - when Home Hindrance was set in his own flat, for audiences of six. Then he was known as a sound engineer as his sonic piece Susurrus took audiences round botanic gardens with MP3 players.

More recently, as any self-appointed fringe watcher will tell you, he has become Scotland’s king of site-specific theatre. Sub Rosa’s success proved it beyond all reasonable doubt, despite Grid Iron’s decade leading the field. And despite the fact that it was the second staging of a piece first performed in the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow.

This year, he will no doubt become known the ‘transcendental tyro’ or some such other tabloid nonsense, as he puts meditation at the heart of his latest production. Unseen Love Story is about four people who visit Venice in four different decades of the 20th century and who have similar events happen to them, although they never meet.

“It is a piece for a proper theatre,” Leddy insists, chatting with infectious enthusiasm about his background and his work. “I find it interesting that we are so deeply programmed to look for patterns that aren’t there. It only takes three examples of something and people latch on to it. But no I don’t have any great attachment to site-based theatre. I like doing it sometimes, but in this case it is not the site itself that makes the central transformational shift, it is what you ask the audience to do.”

For Leddy, the starting point of any work is the emotion he wants to convey, more than any particular kind of theatre. Having been shown Pina Bausch’s work by his school music teacher aged 12, and been taken to see Leonard Cohen at the Royal Albert Hall in the same year, the London-born writer and director went on to study performance art.

“I want to break the rules but keep the traditions and keep the skill and keep the emotion,” he says, quoting Louise Bourgeois about not seeking either an image or an idea to recreate, but “an emotion, of wanting, of giving, of destroying”.

“Which I think is a great quote. I think of it often,” he adds. “I do always want some element of stretching the form, picking and pulling at the form of the piece of theatre, stretching and swivelling and snapping it, I suppose.”

For Untitled Love Story, the audience close their eyes and transport themselves somewhere else, inserting their own experiences to echo events in the narrative. They are asked variously to remember a time when they missed somebody so badly it became a physical sensation, a time when they had bodily fluids on their skin - their own or someone else’s - and imagine a time when they have known there was something growing and multiplying inside their body.

So he is not letting his audience off lightly then? He pauses in his description to think about that for a while, before plunging straight in.

“Well… No. No I am not letting them off lightly,” he agrees. “But then that is what I want from a piece of work that I go and see. I want to leave a show feeling that it has made a difference to my life, feeling different from when I went in.

“For a long time I wanted to make a piece where the audience meditate during the show because guided meditation is a very powerful thing. Normally we are just asked to relax, to visualise beautiful trees and hopping bunny rabbits. I wondered what might happen if, during the show, you plunged the audience into complete darkness and asked them to visualise events from their lives that echo events from the narrative.”

Leddy is fascinated by audiences and how they perceive things, quoting research that people will insist they have seen images of Princess Diana dead in her car, when such images have never been released. In this case, the audience is being trusted to provide their own images.

“The play doesn’t have any inherent meaning of its own,” he says. “The audience contribute the majority of meaning when they watch it, when they interpret it. An audience is always drawing on their own experiences in order to understand and interpret that work. I wanted to take that one step further and embed it right into the weft and weave of the piece.”

This is not audience participation, however, a kind of theatre which Leddy says he hates having done to him and therefore couldn’t inflict on his own audience.

“The meditation will be an antidote to the insanity of the Edinburgh fringe,” he says. “You are tired, you are hungover, you are running across town from one show to another and then you arrive with us and this beautiful soundscape washes over you and these warm chocolatey voices ask you to stop and close your eyes and take a deep breath and relax.

“I think that will be a welcome release. It is not going to be embarrassing. People might imagine that meditation is going to be chanting and levitation and humiliating audience participation, but it is not that at all. It is all inside your head, you just close your eyes in the darkness and imagine.”

• David Leddy’s Untitled Love Story is at St George’s West, August 5-29