As Blue Fondue’s intimate theatre production Je l’aime continues its run across London, I caught up with creative and performance director Sophie Larsmon to find out more about this show and what audiences might find when they step into one of the houses rented for the performance.
Where: Streatham, SW16 [to 17 Oct]; Borders of Kensal Rise & Notting Hill, NW10 6AU [21 Oct-7 Nov];
East London, Hackney [11-14 Nov]
Ticket link: https://tickets.bluefondue.co.uk/events/jelaime
Could you remind me who I’m speaking to and what your role is on the production?
Sophie: I’m Sophie Larsmon, and I’m the creative director as well as the performance director of Je l’aime.
This sounds like a really interesting project, particularly as it takes place in people’s homes. How did it come about, and what was the thinking behind it?
Sophie: The background to the project is that Ilma [Tiki], who is the executive producer of Blue Fondue, and I met around this time last year at the College of Extraordinary Experiences, a professional development and networking event in Poland.
I’d just opened a large immersive production which hadn’t gone to plan. I was explaining to her that you can have millions and millions of pounds, a huge design team and enormous ambitions, and still make something you’re fully proud of. Equally, you can make something for £150,000 that you’re really proud of.
I shared a project I’d made with her. It feels like a different lifetime now, because it was pre-children, but it was called Souvenir. That was also based in people’s apartments and houses. I created it with the writer Tristan Bernays, and although it was a very different concept, it was a surprise 30th birthday party experience, quite Black Mirror-esque.
It reviewed very well and was, up until that point, the piece I was most proud of. This really piqued Ilma’s interest. She was interested in making an experience about languages, culture, and how you can become different versions of yourself depending on which language you speak.
Her own lived experience is that she’s Lithuanian, so her first language is Lithuanian. Her second language is Russian, because she had to speak Russian in the Soviet Union. Her third language is English, and she’s now learning French because she and her family live in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.
We started dreaming up ideas, and then she invited me to New York last November to see her graduation piece. She was doing something called the Experience Design Certificate Programme, run by a company called Odyssey Works.
I went out to see the piece, and it was beginning to explore what happens when you give people languages they aren’t fluent in. I thought it had legs. It was an interesting idea that I wanted to explore further.
Having seen her graduate project, Future Spells, I thought this theme of putting yourself in a place of discomfort by learning different languages later in life was really interesting. Through the prism of intimate theatre in people’s homes, we could explore it further.
Tristan and I went out to Switzerland to meet Ilma in January, and we did three or four days of intensive research. We met her French teacher, who teaches her one-to-one, who is also her son’s and husband’s teacher, which really piqued our interest.
We thought the intimacy of the relationship you have with a language teacher was fascinating. They know a lot about your life simply through teaching you a language.
We also met a dialect and linguistics expert at a university elsewhere in Switzerland. The area where Ilma lives also happens to be the resting place of Charlie Chaplin, and all these things started coming together in my brain.
Three months later, we had a work-in-progress script, which we showcased at the World Experience Organisation’s London Experience Week. We got some really good feedback and learned a lot about what worked, what didn’t, what people wanted to see pushed further and what needed developing.
Tristan and I then reworked the draft, and I went into rehearsals in September. The production opens tomorrow.
How did you choose which houses to use?
Sophie: Having done the work-in-progress in April, I realised there were basically three playing zones that I needed. That’s how I directed the search, looking for houses that could accommodate zones A, B and C.
The lighting design has to work with those zones, and the houses need certain features. They always need a kitchen island and an open-plan living room and kitchen. There needs to be a nearby room where the technical operator can be hidden away, and a bedroom, cupboard or nearby space that the actors can enter and exit from.
We found three beautiful houses through a platform for photoshoots and film locations called PeerSpace. Ilma sent out lots of requests to different places, and these three ticked all the boxes.
It’s also important to you to use different parts of London, isn’t it? The production takes place across the city.
Sophie: Yes. It was the same with Souvenir. I wanted to take it to different neighbourhoods.
So often, when you create a touring show, you do London, tick it off the list, and then go out to the regions. But London is full of villages and different communities. I wanted to try it in South London, where I live, as well as the north and east.
The north and east might be the more natural homes for trendy experiential theatre, but I didn’t want to play it safe. I wanted to bring it to different types of audiences all around London.
The basic premise is a housewarming party, isn’t it? How interactive and immersive is the experience for the audience?
Sophie: It’s something we’ve really played with. I’m not calling it immersive on purpose, because I find that the term now has connotations I’m not comfortable with. I’m calling it intimate theatre.
You’re greeted as a guest at a housewarming party by Liv and Vic, the married couple. We know your name because we have a guest list, but that’s all we know.
We learned from the work-in-progress that a housewarming party was more appropriate than an anniversary party, which was the premise back in April. An anniversary party already has an element of intimacy in terms of social etiquette, whereas at a housewarming, you’re there to meet people. It made much more sense.
The first 15 minutes, which comprise the first two scenes, are very much about being a guest. You’re offered drinks and nibbles, and there’s a kind of networking atmosphere.
Then there’s a very clear moment, around 15 minutes in, when it becomes apparent that you’re watching a play. Something Tristan and I really enjoy as theatre-makers is exploring how much you can challenge audiences who come expecting an immersive experience to engage with something more traditionally theatrical.
The piece is 70 minutes long. At the end, guests are invited to stay for another half an hour, when they can have a conversation, eat pizza and have another glass of wine.
For us, it’s important that theatre is the starting point of a conversation, not the endpoint. Normally, when you go to the theatre, you might go to the bar afterwards with friends or loved ones who have seen the show with you. Here, we want to invite wider conversation.
Blue Fondue’s slogan is “Normal is not universal”. By allowing people to interact socially afterwards and digest what they’ve experienced, we hope to create an opportunity for that conversation to continue.
The audience is deliberately small, isn’t it? You have around 20 people.
Sophie: Yes. We’re keeping it small and intimate. It was a creative decision, and I think any more than 20 people would dilute that intimacy.
How much has changed between the work-in-progress and the production now? Is it mainly the setting, or have lots of other things changed?
Sophie: I’d say about 70% of the piece is different from what we had in April.
One change was moving from an anniversary party to a housewarming party. The anniversary is still part of the story, but that’s a twist that comes a little later, so the audience doesn’t know about it when they arrive.
The other major change is that the piece has become more surreal. We’ve experimented with the form quite a lot. I don’t know if you know Nick Payne’s play Constellations, but there are parallels with that. We jump around in time.
Audiences were asking for more when it came to the flashbacks. If you’re going to use flashbacks, don’t hide away from them. Give us something that focuses on the characters’ minds and takes us on a twisting journey.
Tristan and I have worked really hard on the script. I think we’ve done three or four drafts to get to the locked script we have now.
In a rather delightful way, I came across a quote from an encounter between Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein at the premiere of City Lights in 1931. Einstein apparently said to Chaplin, “What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you!” and Chaplin responded, “True. But your glory is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say.”
That idea became a key thread throughout the piece, alongside Charlie Chaplin, quantum physics and the idea of different parallel existences.
What about the languages? There’s English, French, Hindi and Esperanto in the piece. How does that work?
Sophie: It works in quite a surreal way. Our male character is Indian, and his mother tongue is Hindi. The female lead is British, but she’s learning French.
Through learning French, she has become more herself, or a version of herself that she recognises more readily than the woman she has typically been.
That’s one of the ways we heighten the theatricality of the piece. Tristan and I always say, which I love, “Make the problem the production.”
We’ve taken French to another level in the piece, and we have surtitles whenever we move into different languages. For those who aren’t familiar with the languages, they can choose to watch the actors or the screen. The surtitles are presented in the graphic style of silent movies.
Towards the end of the piece – and this is a spoiler – there’s a huge argument. He accuses her of having an affair, which is actually incorrect. She isn’t having an affair with her French teacher; what she’s having an affair with is a new version of herself, Véronique.
As I said, this is a version of herself that she recognises more readily than the person she has typically been.
The title of the piece relates to the idea of “I love him, I love her, I love it”. We heighten that idea during the argument by moving into Esperanto, because we wanted the audience to feel isolated, too.
Some people may speak Hindi, and some may speak French, although that’s unlikely across the whole audience. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone will speak Esperanto.
We wanted the audience to experience what the characters are experiencing at that point. Then the language moves into gibberish, which is really fun and very slapstick, very Charlie Chaplin-esque.
That leads into a fight sequence where words aren’t enough anymore. There’s also a really beautiful tango sequence, which culminates in their domestic argument.
After that, there’s a five- to six-minute scene, which is slightly different every night, where we literally sit and watch, listen and smell as someone cooks scrambled eggs in complete silence.
For me, as someone who’s been in the immersive industry for seven or eight years and in the wider industry for 20, it comes back to this question of the immersive label.
What we discovered in April is that being in somebody’s home, watching, smelling and hearing someone make scrambled eggs for their loved one, can be more active and immersive than a 360-degree screen experience.
It’s cheeky, and it pushes the limits of people’s patience. It asks audiences to resist the adrenaline-fuelled, instant gratification that a lot of immersive experiences now try to deliver. I’ve made work that tries to do that myself, so this is a resistance to that approach.
If the writing is good enough for you to genuinely care about these characters, then that silent scene can be the best scene in the play.
As Tristan (the writer of Je l’aime) put it, it’s quite a challenge to tell everyone that their favourite part of the play is a seven-minute scene in silence!
Tell me about Blue Fondue. How did the company start, and what’s its remit?
Sophie: Blue Fondue was founded by Ilma as a vehicle to produce Sharam and Future Spells, the project I mentioned at the beginning, which she showcased in New York last November.
Its aim is to go beyond traditional art forms to explore the idea that normal is not universal.
We’re not interested in theatre just for theatre’s sake, or art just for the gallery. We’re interested in inviting people into more intimate settings and scenarios, where the conversations that happen because of the art and culture they’re experiencing are as important as the art itself.
The name Blue Fondue is a bit silly. It’s a wink towards Charlie Chaplin, slapstick, and not taking ourselves too seriously.
But blue is also an interesting word in Lithuanian, where there are different words for different shades of blue that we don’t necessarily have in English. For us, it might be turquoise or dark blue, whereas Lithuanian has many more distinctions.
That becomes part of the idea behind Blue Fondue. And, of course, you can’t have fondue by yourself. It’s a social occasion, something you gather around a table for. It’s messy, and you eat it together.
Ilma pitched the name to me a few months ago. She asked, “What do you think of Blue Fondue? Is it silly? Is it stupid?” I said, “It is silly. It is stupid. I love it. Go for it.”
You’ve already had a preview performance of the production. How did it go? Was it what you expected?
Sophie: We learned a lot. I’ve realised that matinees don’t work for this show, which is something I suspected might be the case. I’ve asked the producers to cancel the remaining matinees because we need darkness.
Of course, we’re not in a theatre where you can create darkness if it’s still light outside. From a design perspective, the silent-cinema element requires a blackout. At one point, for example, the audience follows the performer by spotting them with torches held in their hands, and that simply doesn’t work when it’s light outside.
That’s been one major learning. The other has been about refining what makes the piece theatrical. It is theatre: theatre in an intimate setting, with conversation and a timeless space for conversation afterwards.