The Grand Babylon Hotel is a rollicking comedy thriller, with a virtuoso cast of five bringing you many faces, chases, glamour, intrigue, and a couple of German princes thrown in for good measure. In this interview, Claybody Theatre co-Artistic Directors, Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson, talk about what to expect.
What inspired you to take your work on the road?
Conrad: It’s a first for Claybody, but not for us as artists. It’s been an ambition for the company for some time, and of course we have a history of touring with previous companies. But also, we were heavily encouraged by fellow artists, Artistic Directors, theatres, and other supporters who will often travel to Stoke-on-Trent to see us. It is lovely to feel encouraged and welcomed to tour our work.
Deborah: When you’re adapting a piece, the material often invites a certain type of treatment. I always knew that this novel would respond best to a small cast, multi rolling, narrative storytelling, hat swapping, comic playing… in the style of The 39 Steps. And therefore, it’s portable. One of the first things I said was: I think this could tour.
Another really important part of what we do is to make people think again about what Stoke-on-Trent makes and what the city is all about.
Conrad: Yeah, the idea that Stoke-on-Trent as a city backstamped much of its work, and it went around the world. The city creates high quality work that is exported elsewhere, so there is a model. The fact that we hopefully do a similar job, is a really nice story to tell.
Tell us about your decision to stage The Grand Babylon Hotel; why this story now?
Conrad: It’s a great introduction for people who haven’t been to the theatre before or haven’t been for a while; it’s a popular piece of well-crafted high-quality theatre, which will speak to pretty much anyone, and that’s what theatres are wanting and needing right now, to fill their auditorium.
Deborah: I think it’s something that can be absolutely billed as a comedy. People want to be entertained, they want light relief, and it’s the job of those of us who work in the arts to bring relief, distraction and enjoyment. As well as to enlighten, expose and discuss.
The scales too often weigh heavily on the worthy side of the work, and actually, we must remember the value of the arts in lifting people’s hearts, bringing them together with other human beings to have an experience which makes them more fortified to go out and tackle their lives and the world outside. Which at the moment is full of uncertainty, anxiety, violence and concern. Going out there with a comedy is right for the times, right for the audience and absolutely right for what we need to do with Claybody right now.
To audiences who are new to Claybody Theatre’s work, how would you describe the style or feel of the shows?
Conrad: It’s billed as a “rollicking comedy thriller”, and we’d invite audiences to come with an open heart, an open mind, and just ready to be entertained. Within the rollicking comedy, there is real quality, it’s accessible, and it’s fun. It is driven by the thing that audiences love most; creativity with actors.
We’re making this work with a lot of love, and it’s for the audience, not for ourselves. That’s critical in the way that we make work; how is it going to be received? How is it going to charm, affect, cheer? Without the audience, we are nowhere.
Deborah: The characters are warm and likeable, even the dastardly villain is somebody you want to be in the room with. There’s a lovely warmth and charm about these actors that we’re working with as well. They’re people who you want to spend an evening with and have a laugh with.
There are many eccentric characters in the show, Deborah, which character did you enjoy writing most and why?
Deborah: Well, I like funny voices! That’s probably the actor in me. Nanny Heidi is not in the book – I would say, her, because she’s brilliantly performed by Shelley Atkinson who knows how to do that size of characterisation. And the very ridiculous French man who’s on the boats, which was written by me, and Conrad and Mike Hugo just run with it.
You’ve mentioned that Claybody has a very special connection with its audience, how would you describe it?
Conrad: The audience are the whole reason to exist, from the start of the writing into rehearsals, it is a participatory event, and it’s grounded in that. We keep that connection at the forefront of everything we do.
That’s why we’re a professional theatre company sitting within a community, locally and nationally. We get audiences from 30 towns and cities coming to The Dipping House now, you’d be surprised – “oh I’ve come up from Cambridge. And that’s a real privilege; we don’t ever forget that. It’s something that you have to work hard at, and it’s important for us to be seen when we’re making the work, we don’t do it behind closed doors.
What is it about Arnold Bennett’s writing that keeps you coming back?
Deborah: Just personally, I really like Arnold Bennett’s writing – he has brilliant female characters, I really love his women, they feel very real. He writes about characters that I want to spend time with.
They’re a bit more caricatured in The Grand Babylon Hotel, because it’s a potboiler, he wrote it for pure entertainment in serial form. But when you get into his more literary works, like Anna of the Five Towns, or The Old Wives Tale, you get these complex and interesting characters, particularly female characters.
On this tour, you will be performing in very different spaces from the more intimate Dipping House to in the round in Scarborough, how does the space shape the way you tell the story?
Conrad: Well, the space does really tell the story, you come in, and you play the space that you’ve got. You look at the merits of the space and then play it. In the conversion to thrust, in-the-round in Scarborough, and then traditional proscenium arch spaces like Harrogate and Colchester, it doesn’t matter where you see it from, the stage has to feel deep, otherwise you get very flat performances.
So you respond to the size and intimacy of space, and that’s also to do with the actors’ experience. When the actors come in on the morning, they have to convert their performance extremely quickly. It’s exciting, it gives it a bit of frisson! If you come and see it on the first night, you’ll get that lovely energy of actors figuring out what it sounds like. Because you can open your mouth in a different space and it sounds completely different, that’s part of the director’s job to make sure that you’re telling the actor truthfully how it plays.
This show is a little bit bonkers, why do you think it’s important that we create shows for audiences that celebrate silliness these days?
Conrad: I think that’s partly to do with what audiences respond to, you can do a really well-crafted, difficult piece of theatre, and then somebody puts on a hat and does a fart gag and it gets the biggest response of the evening. So we like a bit of bonkers, a bit of eccentricity, you just have to look around on any high street and you will see it in spades. People are anything but dull and characterless. And given the right motivation, we all love a bit of nuts.
Deborah: Comedy has always been used as a tool of anarchy, and we’ve done quite a bit of that in the past with Dario Fo, and in fact our Colchester adventure follows my They Don’t Pay? We Won’t Pay! which I reworked in 2023.
We use comedy to undermine some of the power that people have; it’s being used as a weapon across the world right now, isn’t it? Comedy helps us get through dark times. The Grand Babylon Hotel is silly and easy to go with, and hopefully people who might be feeling a bit down, or don’t feel like coming out the theatre, will actually be glad they did. They might get their tank topped up a bit in terms of resilience because I think that’s what comedy can do for us.
Is there anything you’d like to say to people thinking of booking tickets?
Deborah: We just want to say how thrilled we are to be coming to these wonderful theatres around the country and bringing them quality work, that’s what we live to do, really. That’s our job, that’s our life. And so it’s a real privilege and a pleasure and we really hope that people will come and see us.
One of us, or both of us, will often be in the theatres when the shows are on, so if you spot us, say hello.