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Lloyd Newson’s work with DV8 Physical Theatre is often unsettlingly explicit, though his latest project is controversial even by the company’s usual standards. The audience is faced with a circular stage that slowly revolves to reveal a macabre merry-go-round of scenes from a London council estate. There’s a sadistic beating, rape, incest and death from a drug overdose, all within the first four minutes.
Like Newson’s previous two works, Can We Talk About This? (the theme was militant Islam) and To Be Straight with You (which attacked religious-sanctioned homophobia), John is a verbatim piece in which the choreography has been devised by the company while listening to interview transcripts on their iPods. Yet rather than presenting a documentary collage of wider social themes, the 80-minute work focusses on the development of a single, extraordinary character.
“At first I thought I was going to create a work about men’s search for love, sex and redemption,” says Newson. “But then I met John, and it very quickly coalesced into a piece about him.” John’s biography makes harrowing reading: having witnessed his mother’s death from a heroin overdose at the age of 10, he was brought up in care and briefly married before falling into a cycle of drug addiction and petty theft. After years of living rough, he was eventually sentenced to five years in prison for a violent crime he had no recollection of committing.
Newson founded DV8 in 1986, having originally studied social work and psychology at Melbourne University. “I realised very quickly that I wasn’t going to be a social worker, a therapist or a psychologist,” he says, yet his current work could be interpreted as an artistic synthesis of all the above. “I suppose my ability to gain John’s trust was partly aided by my academic background,” Newson considers. “But I like to think that there’s a psychological motive behind all my work. I’m interested in why people move, and I get quite obsessive about the fine detail: we’ve spent hours choreographing some of the eyebrow movements in this show.”
Despite the darkness of its themes, the work never loses sight of DV8’s characteristically oddball sense of humour. There’s a hilariously surreptitious pas de deux for a pair of beady-eyed shoplifters – though Newson’s principal mission in recent years has been to reconnect the power of movement with the power of speech.
“I could never understand the discrepancy of dancers yakking away in the wings, then pretending to be mute the minute they stepped out on stage,” Newson says. “A friend and former colleague of mine, Nigel Charnock, once said: ‘Whenever I’m dancing, inside my head, I’m talking to myself the whole time’.”
Charnock, a co-founder of DV8, died of stomach cancer two years ago at the age of 52. Newson comes close to tears when talking about him: “He was a special person, a unique talent, [it’s] a terrible loss.” Though the pair had not collaborated artistically since Charnock struck out on his own in 1993, one senses that the prevalent themes of the current work may be a means of coming to terms with grief.
“What astonishes me about John is that he has suffered so much bereavement in his life and come perilously close to death himself,” Newson says. “He lost his mother, both of his brothers and the woman he came to love. Yet remarkably, he survived – in fact, it was prison that saved him. He became addicted to exercise. It gave him a sense of shelter and security that he’d lost through years of living on the streets.”
While still under sentence, John found employment working as a liaison officer for the probation service, dealing with clients who would frequently re-offend within days, or even hours, of being released from prison. Newson explains: “He very quickly came to realise that unless he found some alternate form of sanctuary, he could easily become part of that revolving door.”
On his release, John eventually came to find that sanctuary and a sense of belonging in the world of gay saunas. “He had been married and had many heterosexual relationships,” Newson says, “but he discovered that gay saunas were the place where he felt most at ease. The remarkable thing about the saunas is that they offer perfect anonymity; the person sitting next to you could be anybody – a judge, a priest or a homeless ex-offender.”
The representation of a gay pick-up joint has inevitably aroused controversy, about which Newson remains characteristically forthright: “A journalist who saw the premiere in Vienna warned me that I wasn’t doing gay men any favours. But I’m not here to present a PR exercise on behalf of the gay community. I’ve given an honest representation based on direct testimony, and I accept that it will make some people feel uncomfortable.”
Newson avoids reviews, comment streams and social media, and states
that there is only one opinion that really matters to him. What does
John himself think of the work? “He hasn’t seen it yet, though he’ll be
coming to the National Theatre,” Newson says. “I’ve tried to make it
clear that it’s an edited version of his experiences – we won’t be
showing people with syringes injecting into their eyeballs. But I hope
he’ll find that we’ve represented him truthfully. Audiences have asked
me, What happened to John? Did he find happiness and security in the
end? And I have to tell them John is still John – it’s an ongoing
story.”
• Until 13 January. Box office: 020-7452 3000. Venue: National Theatre. Then touring. John will be broadcast to cinemas worldwide as part of NT Live from 9 December.
