Artistic couplings have always fascinated us. Just what did Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre talk about in bed? Did Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh quote Romeo and Juliet to each other while courting? Do Gilbert and George ever disagree about which suit they’re going to identically wear?
With theatre-makers Made in China – AKA Jessica Latowicki and Tim Cowbury – there’s no mystery. This month, they lay their personal lives extremely bare with Tonight I’m Gonna Be the New Me, playing out the power struggles in their relationship. Writing for the Guardian, Lyn Gardner called it “slippery … teasing, murderously entertaining and very, very uncomfortable to watch.”
But was it uncomfortable to make? Latowicki laughs. “I was speaking to somebody and she was saying, ‘Maybe I should make a show with my partner’, and I was like, ‘Don’t. Don’t make a fucking show together’.” That’ll be a yes, then.
They have been a couple for five years, and got together while making their second show, which they say must have been a weird experience for their collaborator Chris Brett Bailey. But aside from Bailey, Latowicki and Cowbury admit that in the past, they’ve found working with other collaborators difficult, because they weren’t communicating with each other successfully, let alone with anyone else.
In addressing this for their new show, they’ve realised it wasn’t for the want of honesty, which they both admit they use too much of when giving feedback. “I remember my dad saying you’re never as mean as you are to the people who love you unconditionally, because you can get away with it,” Latowicki says. Cowbury agrees. “All of the fake things that people do all the time in their professional lives – like being in control of how you speak to each other – don’t apply with your partner,” he says. “We don’t sugar-coat anything. But with this show, we’ve learned to take care of each other. We need to make space to be a couple as well as make work.”
Bristol artists Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse, or Action Hero, have been a couple for 15 years, and making work together for 10. “I look at Action Hero, and everything they do seems to be about taking care of themselves,” says Cowbury admiringly. The couple themselves say it’s a dynamic that really works, with their creative process speeded up by their proximity, and enriched by the shorthand they have built up over the years.
But isn’t living and working together sometimes a bit suffocating? “People often say: ‘Oh my god, isn’t it a bit much?’” Paintin says, laughing. “But it never is for me, because it’s a different way of being together when we’re working from when we’re watching telly.” Stenhouse jumps in. “You do sometimes say, ‘Oh, I feel like I haven’t seen you all day’,” he says. “Another way we manage it is to make sure that the work is things we enjoy and want to be doing together, so that blurred line is a nice thing.”
They also know when to switch off. “We’re really careful to make sure that we spend time together not talking about work,” Stenhouse says. “Sometimes I’m in the bath and Gemma comes in saying, ‘Right, this thing that we’re doing …’ and it’s like: ‘I’m in the bath, shut up!’”
Cowbury agrees. “Talking about work in bed is a complete no-no, although sometimes you just want to know when to set the alarm to get to rehearsal,” he says. Taking an autobiographical role in Tonight I’m Gonna Be the New Me was one boundary he’d thought he’d never cross, but he went with it. “When we realised that this piece was already about us, and that it was either that or not do it at all, it became easier to put myself into it.”
Paintin says they would never want to make a show directly about their relationship, because it’s too private, but Stenhouse maintains that, to a certain extent, all their shows are. “If there’s something really on our minds, then it is present in the room and it will find its way into the work. But it doesn’t become a barrier necessarily as long as we always know it’s there,” he says. “All our work is, in some way, about power relationships within gender. Those inherent power relationships exist within your personal relationships, too, so we are inadvertently acknowledging that. And all the work is about the relationship between a man and a woman.”
Still, people can’t stop being intrigued. “People always ask us about being a couple,” Latowicki says. Paintin agrees: “We don’t make autobiographical work, but people read that into it, and often come up and say: ‘Are you a couple?’”
“I think that’s also what makes our work interesting,” Stenhouse says. “What a lot of people seem to get from it is that, even when a show’s not explicitly about our relationship, people see us in it. But it’s not as if it’s just the two of us are smooching in the rehearsal room.”
- Made in China’s Tonight I’m Gonna Be the New Me is at Soho theatre, 7-26 September. Action Hero’s Natural Selection is at Kielder Forest, 19-20 September.
