“And without death there can’t be rebirth.” – An Interview with Cornelia Baumann.

I first encountered the actress, Cornelia Baumann as Princess Darya Alexandrovna Oblonsky (otherwise known as Dolly) in Arrows & Traps’ production of ‘Anna Karenina’. I found her performance engaging and faithful to the character in Tolstoy’s novel. Since then, I have seen the majority of the plays that she has appeared in within Arrows & Traps. I also inadvertently saw her in an advertisement for the Art Fund at the cinema. Her roles and performances are always eclectic ranging from Olga in ‘Three Sisters’, where Cornelia offered a nuanced performance suggesting both a caring individual but also a pragmatist deeply concerned with the events in her family’s life to the mentally ill yet empathetic Renfield from ‘Dracula’. Her performances continue to hold the attention of the audience, eager to see where they will go next.

Cornelia Baumann has very kindly allowed me to interview her about her work as an actor and her association with Arrows & Traps, the theatre company that she has been most associated with in the last few years. So without further preamble, let’s begin…

When you were growing up, at what point did you realise that you wanted to be an actor? Did other people notice your skills and encourage you?

Quite late I think. Acting wasn’t really considered a viable career path in my family and as drama wasn’t a subject at school in Germany, there weren’t many opportunities. But I had a really good English teacher in my last years at school and we ended up putting on some Shakespeare. I guess that is when I realised I would like to pursue it. But I then still chickened out and ended up studying medicine for a couple of semesters first before moving to the States and studying acting and theatre there and eventually here in London.

Within the creative fields, who has been influential to your development as an actor and performer?

Well, there were obviously teachers and actors you admire that are inspirational but also people who give you opportunities.  Ross McGregor has certainly been that with Arrows & Traps.  But I have also worked several times with other directors and writers in film and theatre and I always feel that you develop when you work with the same people again because they are more likely to give you a chance to do something different.

Do you feel that it is necessary for a professional actor to follow the more traditional route into acting such as drama school and college etc or do you think that an openness to exploring yourself is a more honest approach and entry point to the profession?

I think there are many ways to do it and it probably depends on the individual, on how you learn and how open you are to exploring. Drama school or university give you an opportunity to explore, immerse yourself, learn the language and develop voice and body. And you get to
work to a certain standard. If you can find that outside of drama school or university then that is probably equally valid. I do think you learn most by doing it, ideally working with good people, playing good roles and keeping a level of self-reflection and drive to get better. Unfortunately that isn’t easy to find.

Prior to your many roles within the Arrows & Traps theatre company, what other roles have you played for other companies?

Prior to Arrows &Traps? That seems a long time ago! One of my favourites was probably Amanda in Glass Menagerie. I did some Shakespeare with Grassroots Shakespeare and some new writing with Acting Like Mad. I was also lucky enough to perform at the GAM theatre in Santiago, Chile with a new piece of writing that we had taken to Edinburgh first.

As an actor, do you have a preference for certain roles or do you view each offered role as an opportunity to be explored?

There are different reasons for taking a job. Every role is an opportunity and a challenge but of course you want something to get your teeth into, something that challenges you or something you haven’t done before.

Another aspect is believing in the project as a whole. If a role is perhaps similar to something I have done before, I would still want to do it if the project as a whole is interesting or you get to work with certain people. I’ve been very lucky to have had so many amazing, different and challenging roles with Arrows &Traps. It’s particularly nice when you get to do something that is very different to what you have done before. Renfield in Dracula certainly provided that.

When did you join Arrows & Traps and what is the nature of your relationship with the company?

My first role was Baptista in the gender-swapped Taming of the Shrew in 2015. Arrows & Traps works with a group of actors that return for several shows. I am one of those company core actors.

I have seen a number of your roles within the Arrows & Traps group and I have been captivated by your versatility as an actor. Your performances can be nuanced, a downward stare or more extroverted such as Renfield in ‘Dracula’. As an actor, how do you prepare for a role? What acting approaches do you use? Please can you explain to me how you developed the character of Renfield. You had the play script but you managed to convey a character that the audience was both repelled by and also paradoxically felt tremendous sympathy towards. I wanted to give the character a hug at one point.

I don’t know if I have a particular approach. It depends on the role. I usually look at the core purposes and self-images of a character and then apply it to each scene. But I also find that a lot comes from just exploring in rehearsals with the other actors and the director, agreeing
on what is important in a scene or a character. For Mary Shelley in Frankenstein I did a lot of research and read about her. I loved that aspect of preparation but I am not sure how much of it ultimately ends up on stage. In the end you play the version of the character that is in the script not necessarily the real person. The character is created by you saying the words in the script and whatever happens between you and the other actors on stage in the moment. Research and other knowledge sometimes helps you to get into a certain mindset perhaps, but it might not always be the right mindset.

I am glad you felt like that about Renfield as I wanted people to feel disgusted and intrigued at the same time. With Renfield the initial approach was more physical. We discussed her physicality being influenced by the animals she eats and I worked on that with Will Pinchin, our movement director. Early on in rehearsals Ross mentioned that scenes worked particularly well when she became child-like and gleeful. The more fun she could have the better. That then became a bit of an anchor for me and maybe why I enjoyed it so much. Obviously she had to do horrible things but she was damaged. Going insane was her way of coping. But to her it all made sense. She was just in a different world to the people around her. All she wanted was to be loved and respected. She just went about it the wrong way.

When you are performing repertory theatre as you are at the moment, how do you compartmentalise the plays that you are learning, separating the two roles? Your roles in ‘Gentleman Jack’ and ‘TARO’ are very different. As an actor, is it more straightforward to perform one role, in relation to memorising lines and line retention?

I really love this experience of being in two plays and tackling such incredible roles at the same time. Playing different characters often happens even within one play so a lot of actors are used to that. Working like this is just more workload in a shorter rehearsal time. Because they are so different - the roles, but also the plays and the styles of the plays- it isn’t hard to switch from one to the other in performance. In rehearsal the challenge was making sure that both get the attention they deserve. It was easy to get a bit lost in one of them because we rehearsed it for a few days in a row.

I usually don’t sit down and learn lines. Working on the scenes helps me to absorb and remember the dialogue. As we had to work quicker with this project there wasn’t always the luxury to do that so I had to spend more time simply memorising. I found that slightly difficult as it felt harder to make the lines my own.

It did help that both characters are so rich and intriguing and that the plays were so well written. It gives you a lot of motivation to want to do them justice.

Of the many roles you have performed, which have you most enjoyed playing and conversely, which has proven the most challenging?

Renfield in Dracula was certainly the most fun I have ever had on stage. It was very enjoyable and freeing because she could basically get away with anything. It very much felt like playing the whole way through. I also adored playing Lady Macbeth, of course. And Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. And Gerta (Gerta Pohorylle/Gerda Taro in ‘TARO’) is quite fun as she becomes such a warrior.

I think all of them are challenging. I never really know at the beginning how it’ll work out. Even with Renfield I was unsure as I had never really done anything like it. I had an idea of how I wanted her to be but no idea how to execute it. But that is partly why you want to play a role.

Olga in Three Sisters was challenging as she didn’t have a clear scene where she reveals how she actually feels about everything. I was worried she would come across as one-dimensional. But sometimes you just have to trust that the audience puts things together and fills in gaps. In a way that makes it more fun for the audience because they can perceive characters differently.

Your roles with Arrows & Traps have involved a great deal of movement. Are you trained as a dancer or do you learn the movements or dances you need to perform, in a similar way to the methods you use to learn dialogue? I remember one of your roles in ‘The White Rose’ as a gas mask wearing Nazi soldier, moving like a spider with a sense of diligence and menace.

I don’t have any training in dance in particular. When studying acting you have a certain amount of movement and physical theatre training and I always enjoyed those aspects of performance. In terms of learning the movement it really is down to rehearsals. Particularly as it is often done in a group or in connection with other actors. But having worked with A &T on several productions I feel like I have learned a lot because the productions are often movement heavy. We have Will Pinchin and recently other movement directors, like Roman Berry and Matthew Parker, help us to bring physicality into the character and I have learned a lot from them. It is fascinating how much can be communicated in that way.

Please tell me a little more about your roles in ‘Gentleman Jack’ and ‘TARO’. I enjoyed seeing the interplay between Lucy Ioannou and yourself as the young and older versions of the same main characters. The mirroring of mannerisms and movements. To what extent did you develop aspects of your roles throughout the rehearsal process or were there indications within Ross McGregor’s scripts as to how to use body language.

It was certainly something Ross, Lucy and I discussed. I think we watched each other, and when we made physical discoveries or noticed mannerisms developing for our character we shared it with the other actor.

It was very helpful when Ross at some point said that the two Annes (Anne Lister in ‘Gentleman Jack’) aren’t necessarily the same but rather Lucy’s Anne ends up where mine starts. That way we only had to make sure they overlap in some aspects and at certain points but they don’t have to be identical.

In TARO this was slightly different as the theatrical device and set up of the play allows us to be different versions of Gerta/Gerda (Gerta Pohorylle/Gerda Taro in ‘TARO’). The mirroring of what Lucy does in her flashback scenes with Gerta’s father for instance very much happened later on when Lucy had already developed her physicality. I feel like I am still discovering that in performance but I think that is almost what it should be because of how the play and our roles are set up.

Ross McGregor has indicated that he wishes to put Arrow & Traps on hiatus. How do you feel about this decision?

In short, heartbroken. But I have been part of the company for long enough to totally understand why Ross is taking that step. It is necessary. I will miss Arrows & Traps in its current format and am incredibly grateful and honoured to have been part of it. I have had so many wonderful opportunities to play amazing roles, work with so many incredibly talented people and be part of wonderful productions. I have learned a lot and I have also made some very good friends. Ross has created something quite unique but it is always best to go out on a high and have people wanting more.
And without death there can’t be rebirth.

Do you have any future goals that you would like to fulfil within the theatre world or outside of it? Any roles that you would like to perform?

Of course, there is always more to find and explore. I think I am very lucky that I have been able to tick some of those bigger roles, like Lady Macbeth, for instance. (Although I wouldn’t mind playing her again.) But there is always more. I would love to go back to some Shakespeare if possible. And I would like to do some Tennessee Williams and Ibsen. It would also be fun to do some more work in film. And I certainly hope that I can be part of whatever form Arrows & Traps will return in. I know that will be a challenge and a great experience.

Thanks to you, Cornelia for making the time to answer my questions, whilst you continue to perform in ‘Gentleman Jack’ and ‘TARO’ at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre.

Barry Watt - 3rd February 2019.

Photos (Thanks to Cornelia Baumann for allowing me to use these photos)

Cornelia Baumann.

Cornelia Baumann as Renfield in 'Dracula'

Cornelia Baumann as Anne Lister in 'Gentleman Jack'

Cornelia Baumann as Gerta Pohorylle/Gerda Taro in 'TARO'

Afterword.

Many thanks to Cornelia Baumann for taking the time out of her busy schedule to answer my questions and for making fly consumption seem like a pleasant way to spend an afternoon as Renfield in ‘Dracula’ (Please do not eat flies at home and no flies were harmed during the making and performance of 'Dracula.)

Arrows & Traps are a theatre company who continue to astound me with their eclecticism and physicality. Their website is:

https://www.arrowsandtraps.com/

‘Gentleman Jack’ and ‘TARO’ are currently running at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre in London until Saturday 16th February. You really should go to see them if you can:

https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/gentleman-jack/

https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/taro/

All works and characters in this blog are copyright to their respective owners. Likewise with the theatre companies mentioned.

                                                                                                                             BW

“All Good Things…” - An Interview with Ross McGregor.

For several years, I have attended productions at a small fringe theatre at the back of a pub in South-East London called the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre. They have hosted a number of notable theatre companies and I have seen some amazing adaptations of novels and new plays etc. In 2016, I encountered Arrows & Traps for the first time with their production of an original play called ‘The Gospel According To Philip’. Essentially, a very funny play focused on the life of Jesus and the disciples. Since then, I have seen the majority of the company’s output (I sadly missed all of the adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays). For me, the company are one of the most innovative and vibrant purveyors of theatre at this moment in time. They are one of a handful of theatre companies who deserve attention and greater coverage. Having seen eight of the company’s plays, I finally felt motivated to try to interview at least one member of Arrows & Traps and graciously, I have been granted my wish to interview two of the company. Today, it’s the turn of Ross McGregor, Artistic Director, writer and founder of Arrows & Traps.

Please can you tell me a little bit about your career prior to Arrows & Traps? Were you connected to any other theatre companies and if so, in what capacity?

I have just turned 35, and have professionally directed over 45 theatre productions. I studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Warwick University, before doing an MA in Theatre Direction at UEA. I started a touring theatre collective in East Anglia that specialised in classic revivals and adaptations, and ran that as director and dramaturg for about five years, before taking a four-year break from theatre, going to work in graphic design and CAD drawing. In 2014, I was asked by Simon James Collier to produce a series of modern Shakespeare productions for the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town, and thus Arrows & Traps was born.

When did you devise Arrows & Traps and what has it meant to you?

Arrows & Traps came about through first directing a series of five Shakespeare shows both at the Lion & Unicorn and the New Wimbledon Studio. To begin with, our remit was to tell Shakespeare in a new and interesting way, but after the first two years, we moved beyond that and started to produce literary adaptations and historical new writing. The company has also always been run in a repertory manner, and that has ever been my goal, to build a team both onstage and off that works together beyond the remit of a single production. It has been something of a full-time job, at times an obsession, at others a life sentence, but building the company has meant everything to me, and it's something I'm incredibly proud of creating.

As a playwright and Artistic Director of Arrows & Traps, is it important for you to work with the same creative team i.e. actors and lighting technicians etc.?

Yes, immensely. When you work with the same people across numerous shows, it allows you to build up a shorthand with the actors, and challenge them with roles outside of their usual casting, and the creatives learn to decipher your style and work more effectively to support that. The actors that have been with us the longest now are familiar with my style and what I want from them, as are the designers, and it just saves time in rehearsal as I don't have to explain myself as much as I used to. Which is nice - as contrary to some other directors out there - I don't enjoy speaking at length.

'Gentleman Jack' uses the framing device of two gentlemen decoding the language used in the journals of Anne Lister. Having seen your more recent work and its focus on actual historical figures, would you say that this serves as an accurate metaphor for the act of constructing a character based on a real person i.e. it's an act of interpretation and speculation? How much research do you conduct when you are writing plays based on actual people?

Yes, I suppose I wanted to include the characters of John and Arthur in Gentleman Jack to both emulate that process that I myself had gone through when writing the show, but also show that Anne Lister had achieved what she always wanted - a legacy that transcended her own time. I research all the real people that I write about thoroughly, almost to the point of boredom, because in order to write in their voice, you have to know how they thought, how they would react in the situations you want to put them in, and you have to make your voice sound like theirs. But of course, ultimately, we are making a play, not a historical documentary, so there has to be some leeway in order to serve the story. Some characters are embellishments, others are an amalgam of multiple real people. First and foremost, you're there to tell a good story, so sometimes dates, details and the order of things have to be streamlined a little to make the play work. The best example I can think of about this was in the White Rose, the play I wrote last summer about Sophie Scholl, and her band of friends that took on the Third Reich. In real life, the character profiles of the driven and serious Hans Scholl, Sophie's brother, and the ever-wry and jesting Alexander Schmorell, Sophie's potential love interest, were in fact the other way round in history. The real Hans was always laughing and joking about, and Alex was the dark-eyed pessimist one that wanted to blow up factories, but for my play - it worked better if the characters were the other way round. Her brother had to be the one on the dark path to terrorism, so that she had someone to save; and it made it easier for the audience to fall in love with Alex if he was funny. The changes I made were always to serve the story, and always made with the greatest respect. I'm not trying to recount history, just perhaps hold a mirror up to it and say - this happened - you should find out more about this amazing person that perhaps you hadn't heard of before - because they were brave, and beautiful, and wanted to change their world.

Related to the above questions, how long does it tend to take you to write a play and are your plays complete, prior to the rehearsal process? If not, do the actors and production team influence their final form with their contributions?

They're usually completed before the rehearsals start but with TARO I did struggle to get it finished on time, so the cast had to wait for the last fifteen pages for a few weeks. Which was strange for us all, working on a show when you don't know how it ends. My writing style is quite quick and pressurised, because it has to be. When producing, writing and directing 4-5 shows a year, there isn't really space to breathe, and I haven't really stopped since I began writing the shows back in 2017 with Frankenstein. Usually once the current show has opened (got to Press Night) it is then usually time for me to begin writing the next one. On average, it takes about six weeks from the first page to the final edit, but that is more due to necessity and time pressure than personal choice - I don't think anyone would choose to write a show in six weeks if they were allowed to do it in eight or ten. The Rep Season was particularly testing as I had the same six week period to write not one but two shows - it was certainly a challenge, and probably why they're a little shorter than our usual fare. The actors usually help me in the form of a read-through after the second draft, which allows me to hear what works, what doesn't, and it's from there that I can then make my final edit - we usually lose about 25 pages on average at that point. I'm an over-writer, I think, as I tend to take a while to work out which way the story is going, and usually burn up words working that out.

Your plays, both the plays based on fictional works and your real-life plays display an interest in physical theatre. Has dance and movement always been an interest of yours? I have been particularly captivated by your command of choreography or by your company's command of choreography when presenting morally corrupt characters such as the Nazis in 'The White Rose' with their gas masks and spider-like movements and the vampires in 'Dracula' with their slow seductive movements.

Why thank you, that's awfully kind of you. Glad you liked them. Dance and movement is something that I've always felt theatre did better than film, and particularly in such an intimate stage as the Jack, it's always been the goal to try and come up with as many versatile and diverse utilisations of the space as possible. Whilst I would never say my background or main skill set is in movement or dance, I have been utterly gifted in the level of inordinate talent in the various movement directors that I have worked with in Arrows & Traps - Will Pinchin, Nancy Kettle, Roman Berry, The Globe's Yarit Dor, and most recently the Hope Theatre's Matthew Parker - I've been ever so lucky to have them in the room with me. They have all made such beautiful stage pictures, and come up with the choreography that has, perhaps, ended up defining us partially as a company.

An element of your work that fascinates me is your use of repetition and mirroring. The juxtaposition of the two leading actors, Cornelia Baumann and Lucy Ioannou playing the same role at different ages in 'Gentleman Jack' and 'TARO' and copying each other's mannerisms add a striking dimension to your work. Also recurrent visual and aural motifs such as 'Little Trout' in 'TARO' that informs both the audiences' perception of the character of Gerda Taro and provides a powerful recurring visual motif of someone fighting to regain the surface during the simulated water sequences. Do you feel that linear narratives are limited at times and that as our lives are quite often more erratic and fragmentary, plays should be more fluid? What playwrights have been influential to your creative output?

I've always enjoyed messing about with narrative chronology. I think it's interesting for an audience to see two seemingly different timelines and know that at some point they're going to intersect. In Frankenstein you have the education and evolution of the Creature, whilst seeing Victor start down the dark path that will end with him creating this same monster. In White Rose, you have the joy and life and humour of the White Rose group, intercut with Sophie's interrogation at the cold hands of Mohr, so you know that at some point she's going to be arrested which adds a layer of tension and futility to the fun the young people are having - you know at some point it's all going to go very, very wrong, and in Gentleman Jack - you have two concurrent timelines - the later one informing the doom of the love in the earlier - whilst also seeing how this optimistic and naive young woman becomes the cold, calculating powerhouse that she is later in her life. I've always found it more interesting to show an audience Point A and Point B right at the beginning, and let them wonder how on earth we're going to get there. Doesn't our past always inform and intersect with our present? Don't we continually spend our lives walking in the echoes of where we have been before? It only takes the slightest scent of perfume in the street and we're transported back to another time, when we were someone else, when we felt differently, and loved differently. The mind is a powerful thing. Memory is one of it's greatest mysteries. In TARO, it is a little different, and perhaps the closest I've come yet to condensing these ideas into a theatrical conceit - as Gerda is dying right from the beginning, she may even already be dead, and she's walking through her mind palace, interacting with her past, picking out the bits that interest her, or perhaps frighten her the most, because she, as a Jew, is going through the Sheoh - the final passage of a soul, where one's actions are weighed and measured, like grains of salt. She must face her past, and make her peace with it, come what may.

My favourite playwrights are: Yasmina Reza, Martin McDonagh, Caryl Churchill and Tennessee Williams.

Do the venues you use help to determine how you write your plays or do you adapt the plays to fully utilise the spaces that you occupy?

We've been at the Jack pretty much without deviation since 2016, so yes, when you come to write these things - you generally know the space that the play is going to play to, and the people that you have to play with in terms of casting - so you can work according to those restrictions. However, sometimes it's quite fun for the writer part of you to set the director part of you a challenge - armies / wolves / fire / throat-slitting / flying / swimming etc. - as the writer it's not down to you to work out how to stage it, and when you're fulfilling both roles yourself, there is sometimes a temptation to go easy on yourself, and not test yourself. Necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes all you need is imagination and enough time for lots of practice.

You state that Arrows & Traps will be going on 'permanent hiatus' soon. Why have you decided to lay the company to rest at this point? As an audience member who has enjoyed many of your shows, it seems too soon. Also what do you plan to do next?

As I've mentioned, I've written every show we've done since Frankenstein in 2017 and it's been non-stop for almost two years. To be honest, it's been very tiring, and I don't have the energy at the moment to jump into anything new theatrically, so I'm taking some time off - to work on other (non-theatrical) parts of my life, get some rest, do some other things, see some work that is not my own, read books and scripts that are not my own, and generally get some breathing space. I hear rumours that there may be areas of this life that do not involve theatre, and I'd like to spend a year experiencing some. I do plan to return to the Jack later in the year, but it will be in a new form - it may still be as Arrows & Traps, it may not, but the remit and scale will be very different, and the company's goals will be very different, and the vision will be somewhat transformed from what it currently is. This is not to take anything away from what the company has achieved, I'm very proud of what we've accomplished, and change can always be a positive if done for the right reasons. But yes, for now, this is our fond farewell to the current incarnation of Arrows & Traps, as it presently stands. As they say, "All Good Things..."

Many thanks, Ross for allowing me to interview you and good luck with your future plans.

Barry Watt – 2nd February 2019.

Photos (Thanks to Ross McGregor for providing and allowing me to use these images)

Ross McGregor.

Ross McGregor and the very talented Arrows & Traps (the current Female Firsts company).

Afterword.

I would like to thank Ross McGregor for his willingness to answer my questions and also thank him for his continuing commitment to the theatre. I would also like to strongly recommend that you go to see Arrows & Traps’ ‘Gentleman Jack’ and ‘TARO’ if you can at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre prior to the 16th February 2019 when they finish.

https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/gentleman-jack/

https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/taro/

All works referenced above in the blog are copyright to their respective owners.

Arrows & Traps have a website that can be accessed via the following link:

https://www.arrowsandtraps.com/

                                                                                                                                         BW.