Flabbergast Theatre is reimagining Macbeth.
Artistic director Henry Maynard on his company's acclaimed, avant-garde adaptation, which arrives at Southwark Playhouse soon.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
We are taking a break from VAULT Festival for this week’s issue. Instead, we’ve got a promo interview with Henry Maynard, artistic director of Flabbergast Theatre, whose radically reimagined production of Macbeth opens at Southwark Playhouse the week after next.
Before that, a reminder that you can support this newsletter by becoming a paid subscriber for just the price of a cup-and-a-half of coffee a month, via the button below. If you want to find out more about The Crush Bar - including promo opportunities - then click here.
That’s all for now. A bit more from me at the bottom, but first: Henry Maynard of Flabbergast Theatre!
Question: what do puppetry, clowning, mask performance and the Japanese dance form butoh all have in common? Answer: they all feature in Flabbergast Theatre’s critically acclaimed, thrillingly eclectic eight-handed staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The show, which arrives at Southwark Playhouse in mid-March, is a “big bubbling pot” of influences and ideas, explains artistic director and performer Henry Maynard. It has grown out of the skills and backgrounds, interests and experiences of the ensemble of actors and artists involved with it.
“That’s the way I work,” Maynard says. “I like to devise and improvise with the skills in the rehearsal room. My background is in puppetry and clowning, so there is a bit of that in there. A couple of people trained at Le Coq, so they have brought the skills they learned there. We did some workshops with a butoh teacher, so that is in there. There is a Ukrainian folk song in there, too.”
“We’ve all got different life experiences, as well,” he continues. “We’ve got performers from Poland, Indonesia, Lithuania. We’ve got people with Greek and Irish heritage. Everyone brings something unique and interesting and exciting with them, and it all coheres together into one piece. It is still Macbeth, but with a real, radical twist. No-one wants to see another straight Macbeth anyway.”
Flabbergast’s Macbeth has existed, in one form or another, since 2018, when Maynard got a group of thirteen actors and artists together, cobbled together a show in under ten days, and performed it as a work-in-progress at Wilton’s Music Hall. Since then, it has evolved through several residencies at Hampshire’s Yavington Studios and Poland’s famous Grotowski Institute, and through performances everywhere from Ludlow Castle, to St Ives Corn Exchange, to woods outside Wrocław.
Then, last August, Maynard made the decision to stage Macbeth at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a gamble, he says, as he knew he would likely make a loss over the course of the month, but it was a gamble both he and his ensemble were willing to take, such was their confidence in the show. “We knew it was going to cost an arm and a leg,” Maynard says. “But we also knew that the opportunities that could arise might make all the difference. And we really believed in the work we had made.”
The risk paid off. Flabbergast staged an abridged version of Macbeth at Assembly Roxy and got showered with praise by audiences and critics alike, including Stewart Lee. It was “everything you want,” the comedian commented. “Stuff being banged, terrifying puppets, polyphonic singing, mess, mud, noise, wine, party hats, and an amazingly talented international cast.”
Off the back of that successful stint at the Edinburgh Fringe, Flabbergast has booked an international tour through the European Shakespeare Festivals Network, and will travel to Neuss in Germany, Craiova in Romania, Gdansk in Poland, and York over the next year. Before that, though, the show arrives at Southwark Playhouse for three weeks of shows in the theatre’s main house.
“We can adapt Macbeth to be performed anywhere,” Maynard says. “We can do it inside or outside. We can do it in a proscenium arch, or a traverse stage, or a thrust stage. We can do it in a car park, or a church, or a castle. I can’t wait to do it in London, so we can show more people how good it is.”
“We work with the skills we’ve got in the room and the show changes shape in exciting ways as a result…”
Maynard was born in Croydon and grew up in St Ives, Cambridgeshire. He fell in love with theatre as a child – he would always land the lead role in school plays, he remembers – and went on to train at Mountview. Soon after starting work as a jobbing actor, though, he discovered he desired more creative autonomy, and so Flabbergast was born. None of it would have happened, though, says Maynard, if it had not been for a nasty motorbike accident he suffered in his early twenties.
“I broke my leg and was out of action for months, unable to perform, unable to audition,” he remembers. “I got very good at hopping around with cups of tea. I ended up finding this puppet-making tutorial on Blind Summit’s website. I’ve always been quite good with my hands so I made a couple of puppets. Eventually, I took them, still on crutches, and showed them to Blind Summit.”
The meeting sparked the next stage of Maynard’s career. He went on to work with Blind Summit, its co-founder Nick Barnes, and others, making and operating puppets on dozens of successful shows: the National Theatre’s world-famous War Horse, Complicité’s The Master and Margarita, Blind Summit productions 1984 and Faeries, and more. In 2010, he started his own operation: Flabbergast.
“I made these two puppets out of leather and rabbit fur,” Maynard remembers. “I called them Boris and Sergey, got a group of people together and started making stuff with them as Flabbergast Theatre. They were clown shows performed by puppets. We ended up making six in total.”
Those shows – Boris & Sergey’s Preposterous Improvisation Experiment, Boris & Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure, Boris & Sergey’s Astonishing Freakatorium, and more – were a hit, putting Flabbergast’s name on the map as purveyors of absurdist, adventurous entertainment. Eventually, the creative team behind the Boris & Sergey shows drifted, drawn apart by other pursuits and other projects. Maynard made a solo clown show, Tatterdemalion, and an immersive cabaret, The Swell Mob – both of which are still in Flabbergast’s repertoire – before he turned his attention to Shakespeare.
Flabbergast now consists of Maynard, and the evolving, international ensemble of artists and actors he collaborates with to create work. Maynard himself now lives on a narrowboat, currently moored in London, and splits his time between making shows with Flabbergast and continuing to work as a jobbing actor. He is currently in the West End cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is going to make things tricky when Macbeth is running at Southwark Playhouse simultaneously.
“I couldn’t do the show in Edinburgh because of Harry Potter,” explains Maynard. “But Harry Potter only runs on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. As long as we are not called in for rehearsals, that means I can do the Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays of Macbeth every week. Simon Gleave, who plays Banquo but stepped up to play Macbeth in Edinburgh, will take over when I am not there. That is the plan, anyway. And that is how we always do things, to be honest. We work with the skills we’ve got in the room and the show changes shape in exciting ways as a result.”
What do you want to do?
I want Macbeth to be successful. I want to tour it for the next five years. I want to take it to Europe. I want to take it to Australia. I want to take it to America. And I want to take it properly around Britain.
We’ve got other projects in the pipeline, too. We are thinking about doing Beowulf. We want to do a completely devised piece. We want to do another clown piece. We want to collaborate with other theatres. Ultimately, we want to get to the dizzy heights of a company like Complicité.
What support do you need to get there?
The hope is that we can turn Macbeth into a commercial entity, which actually makes money for us to put towards new projects. If we can sell enough tickets, and get mid-scale and large-scale venues interested, then maybe Macbeth can sustain us for years and years to come.
It would be amazing if we were invited to start relationships with and eventually co-produce work with other theatres. We’d love to work like 1927 or Told By An Idiot, developing work with Malvern Theatres, Theatre Royal Winchester, Nottingham Playhouse, Northern Stage, or whoever.
How can people find out more about you?
We are on Instagram. We are on Twitter. We are on Facebook. We are on YouTube. We’ve got a website. We have got a linktree. And we are at Southwark Playhouse with Macbeth from mid-March!
That’s it for now. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Monday with a pick of five shows to see during the seventh, penultimate week of VAULT Festival.
One final reminder about the various ways you can support this newsletter: you can share it with anyone you think might be interested, you can become a paid subscriber using the button at the top, or you can get in touch with me about using it for promotional purposes.
That’s all. Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch for any reason, just reply to this email or contact me via Twitter - I’m @FergusMorgan. See you in a week!
Fergus