The List

Sound Stage

As the carnivalesque riot of the Arches Theatre Festival rolls around again, Kirstin Innes previews some of the genre-defying acts on offer, including David Leddy’s new work Pater Noster

‘Well, it’s kind of hard to describe. I’m sorry, I just have to meet the person whose party this is . . . Hello! I’m back. There are two dressing rooms which are used for musicians, and there’s a room next to it with washing machines in it, and then there’s that tiny room between the two. And we’re in that tiny room. It’s going to be completely blacked out . . .’

David Leddy is in Delhi, at a garden party for the ‘frighteningly, crazily rich,’ struggling to think himself back to Glasgow to explain exactly which part of the Arches his new work, Pater Noster, will take place in. Typically, for a festival which tries to cram as much into one labyrinthine building and a week-and-a-half as possible, the venue is essentially a glorified cupboard. However, this is exactly the sort of effect the playwright, currently best known for 2007’s intensely moving Home Hindrance, was looking for.

Pater Noster is the latest in the playwright’s interconnected Auricula Series, a chain of site-specific, short and brilliantly crafted audio works listened to on headphones, which Leddy describes as ‘part radio play, part avant-garde sonic art’. The glorified cupboard is working for him because Pater Noster is set in an elevator – Arches Theatre Festival audiences will only be able to go in one at a time.

‘The thing that really set this one going was the sound of the lift in my building – it’s quite a musical lift! The sound rumbles and rises as you get higher, so that was my starting point, really, that I wanted to make something with the sound of a lift in the background.’

A ‘paternoster’ is actually a kind of door-less lift, often used in Eastern Europe, but Leddy has chosen a loaded term for his title. ‘Pater Noster’ is also the Latin translation of ‘Our Father’, it can also refer to a rosary, a string of glacial lakes, a town in South Africa and a type of pasta. The piece may prove equally hard to categorise. Once in the ‘lift’, the single audience member will experience a text which, Leddy says, is best described as ‘like David Lynch – I thought of him because of that strange sense of abstraction you get in his work – whispering in one ear and Bob Dylan in the other. I thought of Dylan because of the way that his lyrics will move you from one place to another, from one line to another, very rapidly, changing ideas.

‘The text itself, which moves around between lots of different locations, is much more abstract than a lot of the other works that I’ve made, so I wanted to make it something that you experience very swiftly and intensely, which is one of the reasons why it’s in the dark. Each audience member is going to be totally immersed in the sound and text, in that tiny blacked out room.’

Leddy is in India on a writer’s retreat, putting the finishing touches to his next play, Sub Rosa, which opens in January. The site-specific piece also ferrets out odd spaces around a theatre; this one will take the audience around the warren of disused corridors and bars at the Citz.

‘Sub Rosa is set in Victorian times, and it’s very strange to be writing it here: there are lots of parallels between Victorian Britain and contemporary Delhi, the huge wealth and huge poverty. This garden party I’m at is frankly obscene – everyone has servants and they treat them all terribly. It’s all feeding into the next play. Strange to think that I’ll be sitting in the heat, itching and writing it, while people five–and–half hour’s time difference away are experiencing Pater Noster – listening to my voice whispering in their ears in a dank basement in Glasgow!’

Kirstin Innes, 27 March 2008