Propeller-spinning: An Interview with Chris Myles

Edward Hall’s all-male company Propeller has been responsible for some of the most distinctive and memorable Shakespeare productions of the last fifteen years. Equal parts reverent and irreverent, endlessly inventive but rooted in tradition, Propeller’s wide-ranging approach combines imaginative physical elements with scrupulous attention to the text and has resulted in productions of often startling inventiveness, emotion and wit, productions that make you view plays afresh.

Key to the company’s success has been its versatile ensemble of actors. The set-up works like this: once an actor has created a part in a production he automatically receives an offer of a role in the next play. Inevitably, some have chosen to move on, but among those who’ve stayed is Chris Myles who has appeared in every single one of the company’s major productions since 1997.

Among a multitude of diverse roles he’s been a fishnet-stocking-clad Maria in Twelfth Night, a befuddled, bowler-hatted Vincentio in The Taming of the Shrew and a whip-cracking, lavender-booted Abbess arriving to a chorus of “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” in The Comedy of Errors. He’s also met a memorably gory end as Buckingham in Richard III and flung a scarf in the face of yours truly as a rabble-rousing Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice. He’s currently to be seen doubling as a Montgomery-inspired Exeter and a wry Alice in Henry V, and as Camillo in The Winter’s Tale. As the company prepared for their week’s run at the Lowry Theatre in Salford I spoke to Chris for British Theatre Guide about his time with Propeller, and what keeps him on board.

It is, he says, the company’s collaborative ethos and its spirit of “inclusiveness” that he finds especially appealing. “Ed’s rehearsal process is different to that of a lot of other directors. In traditional rehearsals, you meet at the read-through and then work on your individual scenes. With Propeller you’re in every day and you feel completely included in the whole process. If you don’t have lines in a scene you’ll be given something to do, whether it’s banging on a pot or playing the flute. And when it comes to ideas we can all pitch in and contribute.

“It’s a bit like Henry, in a way. Ed’s the leader; we’re the troops. But he values our input. It really does create this instant camaraderie. In addition, we’re all on the same money, so there’s none of that ‘Oh, your agent got you a better deal than mine did, did they?’”

  

That inclusiveness also extends to performance and the company’s interaction with the audience. “We always seek out moments where we can move through the auditorium, or appeal to the audience directly, finding ways to include and involve them.”

Discussing the wide mix of influences and references that makes Propeller’s work so exciting, Myles affirms that it’s always “about telling the story. For example, The Pogues song [‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’] in Henry. That line: ‘But when we got back, labeled parts one to three…’ The Chorus wants to tell the story of a hero, and this song speaks about the experience of war. Again, anything is permissible - so long as it serves the story that we’re telling.”

  

Henry V was the first play that the company staged in 1997, and they first performed The Winter’s Tale in 2005. Have there been any surprises in returning to the plays for the current tour? “Well, Henry V was so long ago now that it really did feel like working on a new play this time,” Myles says. “The 1997 production was promenade and about a third of it was performed outside the Watermill Theatre.

   

“The Winter’s Tale was also at the Watermill - on that tiny postage-stamp stage - and my main memory of it is a feeling of claustrophobia. The sheer scale of the production makes it different this time around. And of course I was playing the Shepherd then so had his perspective on events, whereas this time, as Camillo, it’s a very different journey.”  

Are there any moments that he especially looks forward to in the current productions? “I really love marching into the French court as Exeter in Henry V [below]. And appearing in disguise in the festival scene in The Winter’s Tale is a definite highlight.” (Ah, that disguise. To give away more would be unfair to those yet to see the production. But let’s just say that it’s a classic “Myles moment.”)

Does he see the two plays as complements in any way? “It’s always about creating two separate experiences for the audience and of course these plays are very different. But it’s surprising, the various echoes that occur. Polixenes and Camillo’s lines about ‘honour’ in The Winter’s Tale make me think of Henry’s speech to the soldiers before Agincourt, for example. One thing about performing two Shakespeares is that it resolves the authorship question for you to some extent. No way do you think that these plays weren’t written by the same person.”

With regard to Propeller’s intense touring schedules, Myles is enthusiastic. “It keeps plays alive, performing them in different spaces. Plus, it’s great fun, going around the world with your mates. We’ve now instituted ‘Leisure Friday’ when we’ll get together for a game of football, or to go to a gallery, or see a film. Of course, you’ve got to enjoy travelling. I love seeing cities, including English cities: Salford, Newcastle… My family has been able to come along on some of the international dates. My wife came with me to Girona, Verona, Madrid. My kids had a wonderful time in Boston.”

Asked about some of the incidents outlined by his long-time cohort Tony Bell on the latter’s fabulous blog - Chris, Bell writes, has “rescued me from Mexican gangsters, Filipino lady boys, the Watermill river and incurable ‘foot in mouth’ disease” - Myles laughs. “Tony does tend to wander off sometimes with his head in the clouds and has to be brought back from the brink. In Mexico we did get mistaken for anti-government guerrillas. It was the balaclavas we were wearing for that production … The TV crews turned up.” Life on a Propeller tour can be as dramatic off-stage as on-stage, evidently.

  

Myles also speaks of the differences in responses to the productions country-to-country, including American audience’s occasional discomfort with some of the more low-brow, ribald elements in the plays. He singles out the audiences at the Shakespeare Festival in Neuss as especially responsive and clued-up: “They ‘get’ the most obscure jokes.”

  

The issue of “all-male companies” has been raised again recently, with Jo Caird, in a blog for whatsonstage.com, highlighting the “chronic underrepresentation of women on the British stage” and suggesting that she would boycott the work of companies such as Propeller. What’s Myles’s take? “We’re doing the plays as they were done originally. And there are things in them that resonate in a different way when it’s a male actor saying those lines as a female character. There’s a reason that so many of Shakespeare’s heroines cross-dress and it’s because boys were originally playing these roles... I should also point out that women are very present in Propeller, from our stage management team to our executive producer, Caro MacKay.

   

“When this issue comes up at talkbacks we often say, ‘Well, why not do an all-female production, like the Kathryn Hunter and Janet McTeer Taming of the Shrew?’ Many people say that Kathryn Hunter’s Lear was the best they’ve ever seen, and the same with Fiona Shaw’s Richard II…

  

“That being said, I do have female friends in the business who will comment ‘So you’re playing another role I’d love to play.’ Sometimes all you can say in response is ‘Sorry…’”

Does he approach playing a female character differently in any way? “No. I think that the biggest mistake you can make is to think that you have to approach it differently. Acting always requires a ‘leap’ of some sort: of age, of ability. Gender is no different.”

Myles, who is also a local councillor in Hackney, was drawn to acting from a fairly young age, and recalls being inspired by his father who performed with an amateur theatre group. “I remember going to see him in a farce. He got a lot of laughs, and I was impressed by that. Then I did plays at school. And at University I found that I wasn’t going to lectures but I was going to rehearsals. So it became clear that that was where the interest lay.”

Most Propeller followers have a wish-list for future productions. Does Myles have a longing to do certain plays or to take on certain roles? “Hamlet and Iago. Of course most actors would say those two, but it doesn’t hurt to mention them in print, just in case your director happens to be reading.

 “I also think that it would be fascinating to see Propeller do a non-Shakespeare play. I think that’s something that will happen, long-term. There’s no reason why our ways of working on Shakespeare wouldn’t work for a range of other plays.”

   

With such an expansive vision for the future, and actors as talented and versatile as Myles on board, Propeller, it seems certain, will keep spinning creatively for many years to come.

  

Propeller tour Henry V and The Winter’s Tale until July this year. See the Propeller website for full dates and details, and catch them wherever you can.

Theatre Review: The Winter's Tale (Propeller; Lyceum, Sheffield & touring)

“A sad tale’s best for winter,” states young Mamillius, ill-starred scion of that Oracle-proclaimed “jealous tyrant” King Leontes and his falsely-accused Queen, Hermione. Judging by the overall mood of Propeller’s production, Ed Hall would seem to agree with the young prince’s statement. Make no mistake, the dizzying tonal shifts in Shakespeare’s genre-bending late romance are accomplished with characteristic Propeller panache here. The action moves from a dark, steely Sicilia to a riotous, colourful, music-fest of a Bohemia presided over by an ageing rock God Autolycus (Tony Bell, natch) and complete with back-up singing sheep and Beyoncé  dance routines. And yet for all the anarchic joy that that sequence generates, the overriding mood of Hall’s production is melancholic, its final flourish offering one of those indelible Propeller moments that takes you by surprise and yet feels exactly right. Reunions and reconciliations accomplished, there’s a memorable sting in this Tale.

Paired up with their solid but (to me) slightly disappointing Henry V, Propeller return to pretty much peak form with this hugely entertaining production, which suggests a mixture of self-made adult nightmare and child’s playtime dream-world. It’s an enchanting , funny and very moving staging that makes sense of the play’s uncanny amalgam of disturbing psychological study and restorative pastoral fantasy.

As Leontes - “an Othello who is his own Iago” to use Harold Bloom's nifty appraisal of the character - Robert Hands gives a subtle, astutely judged performance: he unravels without grandstanding. Richard Dempsey is an elegant, moving Hermione, especially strong in a (brilliantly done) trial scene. Vince Leigh’s Paulina is stately and commonsensical, defiant but un-shrewish as she makes the case for the Queen. John Dougall and Karl Davies are warm and hilarious as the Shepherds. And the incomparable Mr. Bell  is a perfect cutpurse MC, by turns arthritic and spry, strewing thongs and condoms. In an especially deft touch Mamillius (Ben Allen, who’s also a fetching Perdita in the Bohemia scenes) remains a ghostly presence at key moments, giving  the most notorious stage direction in Shakespeare a brilliant twist. But for all the inventive conceits it’s the heart-wrenching, exquisitely judged ending that haunts the most, and that lifts a very good production into true greatness. A sad tale’s best for winter, indeed.

The production tours with Henry V until July. Full information on dates and venues details at the Propeller website.

Theatre Review: Propeller's Henry V (Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford)

As readers of this blog might be aware, Ed Hall’s Propeller have been responsible for some of the theatre productions that I’ve cherished the most over the past several years, and I’ve travelled far and wide (well, only as far as Guildford, Oxford and Sheffield, actually) to see their work. (See reviews of The Merchant of Venice here, and Richard III and The Comedy of Errors here, here, and here.) The company’s much anticipated 2011/12 tour finds them revisiting two plays that they’ve previously staged in new, recast productions. First up is Henry V, which opened at Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre this week, and which was, in fact, the very first play that Hall and company presented back in 1997. (It’s joined in rep by The Winter’s Tale in the New Year.)

With its opening appeals to the audience’s imagination, Henry V seems, in many ways, the ideal play for Propeller, a company defined in part by its inclusive, participatory approach to Shakespeare’s drama. But for me the new production, while boasting some great moments and wonderful details, doesn’t quite achieve the breathtaking inventiveness and richness of texture that’s distinguished their very best work.

First performed in 1599, Henry V is of course one of the history plays that’s proved most enduring in its appeal, and also one of the most adaptable to different historical moments. And our view of its protagonist has shifted more drastically, perhaps, than that of any other Shakespeare character, with Henry moving in the public imagination from hero to war criminal. Made with the encouragement of the British government, Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film played up the play’s rabble-rousing nationalism to create an overt piece of WW2 propaganda that erased any moments in the play that presented Henry negatively. Forty-five years later, Kenneth Branagh’s film approached the play through the prism of Vietnam and the Falklands War, restoring most of the scenes cut by Olivier, but - some critics argued - ultimately endorsing a conservative view of the material that jarred with an apparent “anti-war” stance. Opening in 2003, Nicholas Hytner’s production at the National went full-tilt for Iraq war parallels, with Adrian Lester’s Henry a steely operator who dispatched friend and foe alike with cold efficiency on his route to the conquest of France. In Hytner’s production the orders and threats cut by Olivier weren’t just restored; in a couple of cases, their outcomes were presented on-stage, with Henry himself dispatching his old mucker Bardolph with a bullet to the skull.

Characteristically, Propeller’s approach is less specific and more eccentric than these earlier versions. Hall and his collaborators are masters at creating vivid, often surprising worlds on stage, worlds that work equally as literal spaces and potent metaphors, as their penitentiary-set Merchant and asylum-cum-morgue-set Richard III attested. Michael Pavelka’s design here appears to take the “unworthy scaffold” of the opening Chorus to suggest scaffolding and variously evokes bunker and barracks, parade ground and gym. The opening moments are glorious: the actors, in combat fatigues, take to the stage singing The Pogues's “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” discover a crown in a trunk, launch into the first Chorus, and so begin the play.

Other moments are equally striking, in inimitable Propeller style: the transition to Eastcheap - accomplished with an acoustic singalonga “London Calling” - is superb, while the English-learning scene finds Karl Davies’s wonderful Katherine reclining in a bath-tub as she’s tutored by Chris Myles’s hilariously dead-pan Alice. There seem to be some missed opportunitites for invention, though, while the attempts at Richard III-esque gross-out gore - though justifiable on the grounds of History Play continuity - come off as less effective Richard rehashes rather than dynamic parts of the whole.

Still, the production boasts fine performances from an ensemble made up equally of Propeller newbies and returnees. There’s especially good work from Gunnar Cauthery as a firebrand Dauphin, from Vince Leigh as a vigorous Pistol, and from the expert Robert Hands as Ely and the Constable of France. As a cackling Mistress Quickly Tony Bell - last seen leaving The Comedy of Errors with a sparkler in the sphincter - gets an entrance here that's as memorable as his exit was there; he’s so good that it’s a shame that the part has been cut, and with it, unfortunately, the report of Falstaff’s death and some of the essential context of Henry’s past. (Bell is equally enjoyable as a hearty, leek-brandishing Fluellen, though.)

About Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s Henry I’m somewhat unsure: often the actor falls back on an odd singsongy delivery that feels affected; the eve-of-Agincourt soliloquy is taken a tad too fast for my liking; and the Band of Brothers speech a bit too casually. But he’s strong in the "tennis balls" scene and on “Once more unto the breach,” touching when conveying Henry’s pain at the traitors’ betrayal and expressing his shame about how his father secured the crown, convincingly fervent as a God-botherer, and he proves his comic chops in the closing encounter with Katherine. (Although it might be argued that this scene is stolen by Mr. Myles’s reactions.) Though broadly speaking a sympathetic portrayal, what’s admirable about the performance - and indeed the production - is that it doesn’t editorialise excessively on Henry as either hero or villain but allows a range of colours to emerge.

It’s likely that the weight of extremely high expectations may be responsible for my slight sense of disappointment with Propeller’s Henry V.  Nonetheless, the company has produced another entertaining evening here, even if they haven’t come up with an epic vision to equal that of their Richard III for shock and awe.

The production runs for 2 hours 55 minutes, and the interval antics - all in aid of a good cause -  are, as usual, priceless. Full touring information on the Propeller website.   

Review: Propeller's The Comedy of Errors (Sheffield Lyceum; & touring)

With their take on The Comedy of Errors, Ed Hall’s Propeller have crafted yet another blissfully enjoyable production, one that blows the dust right off of one of Shakespeare’s earliest (and, some would say, creakiest) comedies and proves a more than worthy companion to the company’s startling Richard III. Despite its equivocal reputation within Shakespeare’s canon, The Comedy of Errors seems to have remained surprisingly popular with audiences, with several major stagings in the last ten years (including a rap version!) and a new production just announced for the National Theatre this Christmas. It will have to go some way to top this one, though. For those underwhelmed by Peter Hall’s bland Twelfth Night at the National Theatre Hall Jnr provides the antidote: a breathtakingly inventive, energetic and hilarious production that makes a flawed play shine like a masterpiece.

Like Twelfth Night, the Plautus-derived plot of The Comedy of Errors revolves around twins separated by shipwreck: two sets, in this case, Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse, and their servants, both called Dromio, who wind up in Ephesus on the very same day as the Antipholus’s father, Egeon. Comic complications ensue, not least for Antipholus of E’s wife Adriana and her sister Luciana, who react in rather surprising ways to the odd behaviour of the man they believe to be their husband and brother-in-law.

Unsurprisingly, the innate silliness of the plot is embraced with wholehearted, hog-wild enthusiasm here. Where the ambience of the company’s Richard III was black and steely, suggestive of asylum and morgue, this time Michael Pavelka’s set and Ben Omerod’s lighting evoke nothing so much as a delightfully tacky package holiday resort, complete with fairy lights and graffiti, and mariachi music provided by a marvellously stoned-looking sombrero-sporting Chorus. Richard III’s violence was staged with gory Theatre of Blood-esque bravura; here the many beatings are presented as cartoonish slapstick, supplemented with comic sound effects. Snatches of pop songs (from “The Girl From Ipanema” to “Like A Prayer” to “Gold”) are judiciously - and sparingly - employed, and the company has great fun with some of the devices of Shakespearean comedy. When a character delivers an aside, for example, he steps out of the scene, leaving the rest of the action effectively “freeze-framed” (usually with the actors in the most ungainly positions possible). Speech delivered, the character then returns to his place to pick up the scene from where he left it.

Perfectly honed moments such as these exemplify the skill of this ensemble which is, as ever, beyond praise. The actors work together with consummate ease and expertise. Every character - no matter how minor - is vividly realised, and each performance is a gem, from Dugald Bruce-Lockhart and Sam Swainsbury as the Antipholi and Richard Frame and Jon Trenchard as the Dromios to Wayne Cater’s merchant Balthasar, Chris Myles’s whip-wielding, lavender-booted Abbess, and Kelsey Brookfield’s canny bunny girl courtesan, whose sensational cleavage catches the roving eye of Richard Clothier’s Duke. I think I laughed the hardest at David Newman’s Luciana - a coquette with a hip-flask and some mean martial-arts moves - and at Dominic Tighe’s fabulously accented (and frequently tumescent) Officer, who seldom succeeds in keeping the peace. Robert Hands puts on a superb display as Adriana, all the while giving a marvellous emotional truth to a character who’s often just presented as a shrew or a scold. And John Dougall’s Egeon is a singularly moving presence; the performance nicely complements his understated Clarence in Richard III, and the actor really makes you feel the weight of the character’s long, weary search for his lost family.

Throughout, the big set-piece scenes are orchestrated with sometimes jaw-dropping invention and aplomb, from Frame’s delivery of Dromio’s discourse on Nell the kitchen wench to Swainsbury’s late recapitulation of the plot, a priceless moment in which the production turns around to comment on some of its own strategies. And I can’t imagine seeing a more wildly enjoyable sequence this year than the production’s outrageous, tour-de-force take on the “exorcism” scene, in which Tony Bell’s conjourer Dr. Pinch - who’s re-imagined here as a dirty-minded tele-evangelist (think Robert Duvall in The Apostle crossed with Sir Les Patterson) - leads the company in a rousing chorus of “He Was Saved!” (Then there’s Bell’s exit scene, which I won’t spoil for you, except to say that it involves a very strategically placed sparkler.)

Propeller’s irreverent cheek and pick-and-mix approach never becomes tiresome because it’s tied, at base, to traditional values: care with verse-speaking, clarity of story-telling. And they never labour a conceit. Hall’s command of pace and rhythm is such that the production can move from the riotous to the reflective with ease. (Against all odds, the final reunions here carry much more emotional weight than those in the current NT Twelfth Night.) The company’s generous, inclusive spirit of play is infectious (the actors even provide musical entertainment during the interval), and, like Richard III, the production teems with so many great ideas and details that it practically demands to be seen more than once. This is a total theatre experience, and delightful in every department. Do not miss.

The production runs for 2 hours 20 minutes. It tours internationally, along with Richard III, until July. Newcastle next week; full details here.