Jacob

It's a very, very happy marriage, really. And there's a bunch of fortuitous things about how we met, a planetary alignment of sorts. The other thing is that he lives in Auckland and I live in Wellington. That’s a one-hour flight, or a nine-hour drive. We can't be in each other's faces all the time and we can't have endless coffees where nothing gets done. There's an economic imperative that something happens when we're in the same room together. You know, we've paid for flights, we've paid for accommodation, we can't joke around, we need to do something and make it happen within the week or two weeks that we've allocated. That's actually been a great thing. The magic always happens when we're in a room. In the early days, it would just be emails and phone calls. Now we have Zoom. But it is certainly not the same as being in a room together. We have to spend money to make that happen. There is a chemistry between us. I believe the energy of theatre is dialogue. That back and forth is where we spark.

Justin has a real structural brain. He was originally going to train as an architect. Whereas I don't, I'm very scattered. I can work on a little thing for ages and get nowhere. I'll just go further and further and further down a hole. We work strongly on looking at structure and refinement of the dialogue. For us, the physical act of writing scenes only happens in the last stretch. The structure is everything. That has been a lesson fought and learnt, really. We take a long time to put a show together. Two years is the average, we've worked out. Because we don't live in each other's cities, that's obviously not two years making together. It's intense periods and then going away and letting the dust settle. That’s a key part of the process as well. The settling, the dreaming, the not thinking about it, letting it just chew away at your subconscious. Then when you get back together again, there's usually a flourish of something. That's been the rhythm of us creating a work.

J

The character-switching is, I think, a testament to the mask training. My mentor John would[1] say, good mask work is 100% trance and 100% technique. At the same time as you're possessed by the mask, your eyes should change. The quality of your gaze is different in a different character. The way you look at the world is different. I can't quite explain it but I'm sure if you put a mask on, you will feel the same way. Something happens to the person and they're taken over and that's the trance part. But technique-wise, you also have half your face fixed. Your body has to express so much more with your body language, your attitude, where you hold your weight, all of those things we train so diligently. Over time, they become very natural. If you take a photo of a standard Western play, people either will be standing or sitting. Essentially their bodies are not going to be radically different. They'll be vertical, or, you know, sitting, whereas if you took a snapshot of like, a Balinese Topeng mask performance, kind of thing, they will have such extremes within their bodies. But it also has to be believable that these people actually walk like that. If you have to find a way of walking, then you have to find a way of how the person works, sweeps, makes love, you know, they exist as a real thing. What is horrible is when you see somebody put a mask on and there's no synthesis between the mask and the body. You can put a mask on and just be asleep, and the quality of sleep will be different for each mask that you put on. The breath is different. When I [perform] each character, there should be an element of trance within the opposition they create. And then the skill is to do it quickly. And the skill is also to know where the other character that you were talking to was in space. That’s choreography. I know my eyeline. That person is taller than me. I should be looking at that person looking down. If you give the audiences enough cues like that, they start to see the way the space that you occupy conjures realities. The brain is such a wonderful thing. For the audience, they start to see the entire space. We also create a hyperreal sound world so that when you're knocking on something, they actually feel the tangibility of that object or that the traffic is actually Mumbai traffic. [Sound designer] Dave Ward has taken a microphone around and made field recordings. The world has been created through all these other senses. My bugbear is projection, which projects real things, and you just destroy the imagination.

J

The hardest thing to do is to come up with the idea. Sometimes we go sideways and look at the form. For example, the Balinese mask is a particular form. We go over [to Bali], we study masks, [build] a relationship with a mask carver, understand how they do it, and the process around the kinds of stories that they tell. Then we look at those stock characters who are from the comic tradition, the [form of historical Indonesian theatre] Topeng. When we came back, we play on the floor with the masks and found out how they work. For me, the form is the vessel, right? The content is what you fill that vessel with. Obviously, the content is the most important thing. But you don't drink champagne from a coffee cup. You find the appropriate thing to fill that vessel. And once you understand the vessel weird things happen. The content appears. And this is my kooky, spooky kind of cosmic idea around the masks awakening, where I feel they are a conduit for truth.

When you're mucking around on the rehearsal floor, something will happen when you've got the mask on. And you go, hmm, that's interesting. Let's go research that, let's have a look at that. And then in Bali, the guy that taught us this, a mask dancer (Nyoman Sukerta), basically became the central character for our award-winning (2011) show the Guru of Chai. Sadly, Nyoman died shortly after the show was made but kind of danced out of life and onto the pages of that play. He was an incredibly beautiful dancer, fluid and graceful and had this spiritual tradition. In a sense it was a kind of sacred performance. And yet, he was quietly worried about his beer belly and was really, really desperate to have a Facebook page. And you know, his wife was bemoaning the fact that he was gambling a lot and drinking and going fishing when he should’ve been working. So here was a guy that was battling the spiritual and the venereal and he was a beautifully flawed human being. He became the influencing character of the guru, this dubious spiritual guide that was promising to take away everything that was wrong with the audience’s lives - which is the self-help industry today. You're looking for a wandering kind of Deepak Chopra and those people to give you that instant hit of Eastern wisdom to fix everything that's wrong with your life. Then he goes on to tell a story from his own life.

Investigating that form brought us the idea of a storyteller who was a deeply flawed, unreliable narrator. Then we looked at fairy tales. Does that demonstrate how the form kind of brought the content in? We found this very dark 1886 fairytale called Punchkin. We modernised it and that became the story that he told. We made a biographical story for him. Content came in, sideways.

J

My second play The Candlestickmaker was born from the real life experience I had going back to my ancestral home in India, where the only remnants of that home were my grandmother who had dementia at the time and her cook. They were the only things left in this once grand home. In the middle of the day, all I could do was read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time because it happened to be on her bookshelf. I don't know why. And I was reading that, in this environment, thinking about astrophysics, and came across Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a guy who at the age of 19, made this discovery that would later win him the Nobel Prize. I had no idea. I'm a science student, okay, I'm a C minus student but I am a science student. I had heard of Rutherford, Einstein and Oppenheimer. I'd heard of all these white guys but hadn't heard of my own countrymen winning the Nobel Prize for this thing. I was determined to do a kind of sideways tribute to Subramanyan Chandrasekar in this piece, and a little nod to my science background as well. And there was something about teaching an audience and myself, what this formula he came up with was within the piece, and using these masks and puppetry. Puppetry is again, a close cousin of mask. It's that inanimate object that everyone believes. They bring together the skill of the puppeteer and the audience's belief in the moment.

J

There's this brilliant book [from 1965] that I discovered early on in the drama school library called A Technique for Producing Great Ideas. Okay, bear with me. It’s a great book that comes from a 1960s ad exec. Somebody had asked him, how do you produce all these great ideas, where do your ideas come from? And he wrote this book about them. It outlines his five steps around producing a great idea and they actually aligned with how we do things. He writes that the imaginative act is taking two things that have been never put together and putting them together. That's it, at its core.

The Dairy and the Taj Mahal had never been put together and the imaginative work was to make them work together in Krishnan’s Dairy, one of our earlier works. The first thing you need to do is research. And if you skip that research part and go to these two ideas and try to bring them together, it's hopeless. We research and research and research and then you go down the rabbit hole and find all these amazing things that will never appear in your play. You fill up on either the two things that happened before that point or after that point, but you'll find those two things that you'll bring together. Then you will try to bring them together. But you'll get to a point where you will hate it. And the ad exec says, this happens. It happens to me all the time when I fall out of love with the work. I have looked at it for so long, that I can't understand why or what even brought me to do this thing in the first place. And I hate it. And I've run out of ideas, and I don't want to look at it anymore. And the ad exec says, that's when you walk away. You don't look at it deliberately because then it's going into your subconscious. Justin and I have found this out accidentally. These intense periods where we work together until we can't stand each other and then go away. That is an essential point, which people miss. I think they just go hard, and force and force and force blood out of the stone and then put that thing up. You can feel that in a work. But we deliberately walk away from it.

And then when you come together, that's the aha moment. There’s the actual idea. There's the actual thing. And then you have to clear away all the research to find the clarity of the story that you're trying to tell. Just because you’ve got all this good stuff, all these great funny lines, this brilliant stuff that nobody's heard of that you want to squeeze into your play, never do it. Be true to that one thing.