Interview: Toby Sedgwick Talks THE CHAIRS at the Almeida Theatre

Choreographer, movement director and actor Toby Sedgwick won an Olivier Award for his work on War Horse, and collaborated with Danny Boyle on the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. His extensive stage and screen credits range from The Play What I Wrote and The 39 Steps to 28 Days Later and Stan and Ollie.

He is currently appearing in The Chairs at the Almeida Theatre, Omar Elerian's new version of Eugène Ionesco's tragic farce.

What is physical theatre?

Oh... yeah. That's a difficult one, but I suppose in its most basic terms, I think it is the idea of creating images or situations without using text directly, as it were.

No one had come up with that term before, but I used to have a company called Moving Picture Mime Show back in the 70s, and it seemed to have stuck on us, because it wasn't mime as such. I suppose it's it's creating images, physically with the body, without necessarily having to describe them. It can incorporate dialogue, but it can also create situations and environments or actions or things that aren't there. It's basically something that allows the audience's imagination to be stirred.

For example, we did The Seven Samurai with just three people. And we told the entire story, you know, with the peasants and the villagers just on an empty stage. So that would be termed as physical theatre, because it's creating stories but without the environment being fixed - if you have a set, you can't change it.

I'm thinking of (co-star in The Chairs) Kathryn Hunter's amazing performances, all three witches in Joel Coen's Macbeth, telling the story as much through her movements and contortions as much her amazing voice and the amazing words.

I want to move on to a second term, a gig in which you've earned awards. What is the director of movement and how does it complement the director of a play?

Yeah, there again, it's multifaceted. The director of movement can work with actors to build up characters or to emulate certain styles.

I've just worked with Danny Boyle for eight months on the Sex Pistols film, and there I was more like a movement coach, because that's the term that we use for that. In a way, that's what it is - overseeing all the the movement qualities of the actor to turn him into type or a person. For example, for 'Johnny Rotten' to move like Johnny Rotten. But then also, there's a physical awareness about where one is standing in a space in simplistic terms, where one is standing in a space vis-a-vis another person, as far as status goes. It's a lot to do with body language and spatial language.

So working with that, which I obviously for film, is not actually different to theatre. The way that the audience sees a stage production is the same way - the camera points at what you want them to see.

I never intended to do movement direction, it's just directors would phone me up because of Moving Picture Mime Show, where we used to create stories with nothing - very complex situations. It's like opening a crack in something you know to widen a visual element that would otherwise be missing. And that's what that's what the director would bring me in for - to open his eyes to a new visual image that wouldn't otherwise have come up.

This works really well in The Chairs. There were moments when the (invisible) guests are arriving and it was all done through the through the movement and the suggestion of the actors.

You've hit the nail on the head, it's actually the suggestion. A lot of it is very much is working with the audience. By a movement or by a certain quality or way of being, you can put into the audience's head a suggestion of a certain type or a certain character. That's what we work on - literally like it can be a gesture or it can be just a little hint physically and the audience will pick up on something much larger.

What was it like working with Kathryn and Marcello in rehearsal, because you all go back a long way.

It was great - it was like old times. We've worked together so much over the last 30 something years, in which we've done various productions or we've workshopped stuff, a lot for Complicite over the years as well. There's a very close feeling in the team. I think we all admire each other's work.

When Omar [Elerian, translator and director of The Chairs] came up the idea about making more of this third character, Kathryn and Marcello both said, let's get Toby. So then when I came in. Rupert [Goold, artistic director of the Almeida Theatre] said yes because of our past history.

When we work together, there is just a great sense of awareness that's always been there for the last 30 years, a fantastic feeling of ease on stage, which I think you only get from knowing your fellow performers so well.

The average theatregoer might feel intimidated by descriptions like 'Theatre of the Absurd", but it's actually not at all, because of that warmth in the relationships, the personal ones you've described, but also the relationships that are within the play itself.

Writers like Ionesco and Beckett get compartmentalised very easily by people in the theatre, put into "The Theatre of the Absurd". But if you analyse his writing, the situation is fundamentally not absurd. It can be very tragic and very funny. I think what makes it absurd is the story of the old couple juxtaposed with a situation or an environment that has been suggested to be slightly surreal. So when you get when you get the idea that they're on an island, they're in a room somewhere, you get the feeling that it's that it's isolated and there's water all around it and stuff like that. So that situation makes it sound strange but fundamentally, it's not - it's not extreme.

People who have seen it just go, "That's a totally new experience for me!" I think a good reason to go and see it is to actually experience some element of theatre that they will not normally see in England, something much more European.

It has much more of a European quality. I think, this production, just simply because not many people do productions like this in England. They do that more in Europe, and I don't know why - I think just people are riskier in Europe. I've seen some incredible Dutch and Belgium companies, working mostly on fringe level but very popular in the theatres, incredibly well attended.

The people who will come and see The Chairs will be people who are not afraid to jump in and just go "What the hell is this?"

We've always had this thing in this country that there's something called high culture and something called low culture and ne're the twain shall meet. And, as you say, I don't think it happens in Europe, certainly not to the same extent. But we're still fighting it here.

I think that's true. That's very true.

I mean, even people who saw War Horse amazed themselves that they got so involved in what they would normally never consider a serious aspect of theatre, which is puppetry. I was often told during interviews that people who saw both the film of War Horse and the stage production were not half as affected by the film, because the puppets on stage have the ability to allow the audience's imagination to be so powerfully moved that it actually becomes more realistic in their own minds.

At the end of The Chairs, you come on and ask the audience if anyone knows of Guy Debord and nobody admits to it (even those of us who do!) That's one of the many changes Omar made in his free adaptation of the text - what's behind them?

I think you probably have to ask Omar as to why he came up with it. I think in those days, back in the 50s, Ionesco was answering questions about society, about what is real, what is the truth of a situation, the truth of a fact. Since then, the world has progressed so much, in a potentially very dangerous direction, with artificial intelligence and algorithms.

It all comes back to what way will the world go and when you get things like surveillance capitalism on such a scale or the phenomenon of looking at something on your computer, and then 10 minutes later, being zapped by all these things. Someone is listening somewhere in that whole system behind what we can see.

That becomes quite an important aspect, I think, of where Ionesco was sort of going or asking those sort of questions at that time, in a much simpler form, because there weren't the complexities of computers 70 years ago.

It's clearly the intention of Omar to leave us with something substantive to think about, so that when we get home and put the news on, we think, yeah, I can see what he means.

There's a bit of that. You do actually start to question the BBC's direction, what they produce and when.

But also on the other hand, with Ionesco, the way the old couple's imagination is stimulated by inventing invisible people, produces ramifications. It's like their safety net and safety nets can be very different, but they're still inherent in what one's brain comes up with to resolve a specific situation.

It's such an amazing phenomenon, to have two old people being comforted by those inventions of the imagination - it is quite a wonderful thing.

Reminds me a little of an English film called Dinner for One, shown every New Year's Eve in Sweden.

What's the best reason for someone to come along and see The Chairs at the Almeida Theatre?

Maybe it's the performances (though it's very difficult talking about myself) but there's also something about how there is no story in traditional theatre terms, really. If you think about it, it's not a story, it's a situation. Maybe it has something to do with the phrase, "Things are not what they seem to be".

Monty Python has often been described as inventing the sketch without a punchline, haven't they?

I'll never forget watching some of the first things of Monty Python - some of them went completely by the wayside. Some of them were not funny at all. Some of the sketches were terrible. I remember going "This is rubbish", and then suddenly there'd be a dynamite sketch like The Dead Parrot, and then crap again. I remember saying to myself, I've never seen television like that.

Maybe that is it - there are hits and misses, depending on your state of mind.

Watching the play was a genuinely unique experience when the chance to come together and laugh, as we did at The Almeida, is needed more than ever.

That's a very good reason to come along.

The Chairs is at the Almeida Theatre until 5 March

Read BWW's four-star review

Photo Helen Murray