Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? On a Thursday morning at a school in south-west London for children with severe and complex learning difficulties, it is Jem, Thomas, Poppy and other pupils who are visiting the Oily Cart beauty parlour. Mirror Mirror, the latest show from the acclaimed company that celebrates its 35th birthday this year, is a 360-degree fairytale illusion. The school hall has been transformed into a place of wonder that glitters silver and blue: there’s live harp music and songs, bubbles are blown and brushes passed over brows and cheeks, glitter falls in an arc, and scents waft across the room. Everyone gets a chance to play, not just the actors.
“A lot of theatre production that I see seems so unexamined,” says Tim Webb, who co-founded Oily Cart with musician and composer Max Reinhardt and designer Claire de Loon. “Because of who our audiences are, we have to be very practical, and that means taking the whole theatre machine apart to examine the different parts and then put it back together again in a way that will really serve that audience.”
Many theatre-makers pay little attention to their audience, but Oily Cart have always put the needs of their audience right at the heart of their practice. They’ve had to. Mirror Mirror, which tours this month, comes in two forms: one for young people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (which I saw) and one for those on the autism spectrum.
Webb describes Oily Cart’s work as being “like a Japanese tea ceremony. There is never anything superfluous, and everything is done with real precision”. One of the company’s audition techniques was to invite would-be performers to explain exactly how to make a jam sandwich. Thinking about the audience and wanting to reflect their world led to a variety and range in casting, including learning-disabled performers and actors from ethnic backgrounds, long before most people in theatre had even thought about diversity.
“When we first started in 1981, Max and I were performing mostly in day nurseries and one-o’clock clubs and community centres, and we saw all sorts of people in our audience,” Webb says. “What there wasn’t was a lot of prematurely balding white blokes like us, and we immediately realised that who is doing the show is as important as what it is. There has to be a correspondence with the audience’s world and the world we are showing them. When we got our first grant from the old Greater London Council in 1984, the first thing we did was to employ a black female actor and since then we’ve always thought about diversity when casting.”
This very practical approach has often led to innovation and richly layered work. Whoever their audience, the company has never sacrificed complexity. Mirror Mirror might seem deceptively simple in construction but it raises all sorts of issues about identity and how we see ourselves and others; 2011’s Ring a Ding Ding for the under-sixes not only delivered a really good story but questioned what a story is and how is it made. Nor do practical considerations clip the artistic vision and scope of the work: 2006’s Blue was clearly influenced by the work of visual artist Yves Klein and the jazz musicians Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. 2012’s In a Pickle, commissioned by the RSC, took its inspiration from The Winter’s Tale in a show for three-to-five year olds. In a Pickle will tour the UK later this year before heading to Lincoln Center Education and BAM in New York, and Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
In the US, Oily Cart are feted; audiences in Britain often take them more for granted, or they are overlooked because they are working in an unglamorous, undervalued area of theatre-making. Yet when I teach they are always one of the companies whose work I urge young theatre-makers to see – whether they are interested in making work for children or not – because it is so innovative in its use of theatrical techniques and its relationship to audience.
Webb believes the challenges of making work for small and pre-verbal children and those with learning difficulties has propelled the artistic content forward. Oily Cart was making immersive theatre long before Punchdrunk came along, and made theatre in which the audience were real participants before the concept became fashionable. When Oily Cart make a show that takes place in a swimming pool or on trampolines, as they did in 2014’s Bounce, it’s not for the novelty value but because they are investigating the way the kinaesthetic, haptic and olfactory can be applied to theatre performance.
“When people say something is impossible, we are always spurred on,” says Webb, pointing out that Oily Cart was making work for the under fives in the 1980s, when there was very little such work around. They made shows for babies at a time when some said it was a ridiculous concept, and defied those who declared it pointless to make theatre for those with profound and multiple learning difficulties, who may have forgotten the beginning of the show by its end. The company is currently involved in exploring new ways of working and developing a project in Russia that works with deaf-blind audiences with no intellectual impairment.
“People say these things are a challenge but they also free you up from the well-trodden paths, whether they are about using space or narrative,” says Webb. “It’s about making theatre that can be experienced in a different way. We never make a proscenium arch-style show, most of what we do takes place in 360 degrees, and we are constantly alert to the fact that people will be experiencing it in different ways. Some may be able to see or feel but not hear. It gives us the freedom to be more impressionistic and create a rich series of sensory events that create an experience in which there are patterns that can be detected. What we do is prioritise the audience experience by paying close attention to the light, the sound, the smell and even the texture of the piece because with our audience, you never know what it is that is really going to attract attention. It could turn out that they don’t even glance at the element that you think is most important, but are fixated on the colour of a beanbag, so we have to pay attention to every detail.”
So will Oily Cart be around in another 35 years? “I might not be, but I hope it will. I’m beginning to admit I’m mortal and looking at the succession. I would love to see it continue, it still feels so necessary.” It does. It’s a long way from Oily Cart’s very first show for children, 35 years ago, that an Arts Council officer described as “simply appalling”. Maybe it was just ahead of its time?
“Or maybe he was right,” says Webb with a wry grin. “Maybe we’ve just got better.”
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Mirror Mirror is at Arts Depot, London, on 19 and 20 October. Box office: 020-8369 5454. Then Northern Stage in Newcastle on 27 and 28 October. Box office: 0191-230 5151. In a Pickle tours from 13 December-12 February.
