The UK première of Passenger will be at Greenwich+Docklands International Festival running from 26 – 29 June at Beckton Park (Bus Stop X), Royal Docks – where the journey begins.
A conversation between two passengers on a bus is the starting point for this intimate yet epic story set against the background of a journey through London’s Royal Docks. Passenger blurs the line between reality and fiction in an immersive and all-encompassing experience. In a familiar conversational style, two strangers discuss the ethics of contemporary life before the female reveals her true identity and her seeking of retribution.
The play is directed by Jessica Wilson and Ian Pidd.
The Artiscape spoke with Jessica Wilson about the play.
What inspired Wilson to devise the play?
Wilson: Passenger is set on board a moving bus. It was originally inspired by the idea of using the windows of the bus as screens. When you are inside a vehicle you can easily enter into a similar mode to that of watching a film. The conversation and music inside your vehicle influence how you interpret the passing world.
As a group of artists we are also interested in how image and sound are increasingly used to manipulate us to buy into ideas and narratives. So we wanted to use the screens of the bus to subtly manipulate the audience into reading a city they are already familiar with, in a completely different way. We experiment a lot with the line between truth and fiction.
The show frames the passing streets as a filmic landscape. It is also loosely structured like a film and it draws specifically on the tropes of the Western. Our main character is subtly based on a cowboy seeking to right a wrong in a place where the law is broken. But this Western is set in 2019, and the frontier landscape is the world of corporate capitalism.
We asked Wilson if she could relate in any way, to any of the characters in the play?
Wilson: That’s a funny question. I would have to be a vigilante woman, a man-splaining corporate guy, or a cowboy. Perhaps I have a bit of all of them!
What (if anything) did she find challenging about devising this piece?
Wilson: There are many shows that take place on buses that are episodic or tour-like in their structure, but we wanted to hold a theatrical narrative across the whole bus journey.
Drama, of course, requires timing and that is challenging when you have traffic lights and sometimes traffic jams are thrown up unexpectedly. The challenge in making Passenger is learning to understand the rhythm of a place – of its traffic and its pedestrians – and then orchestrating our art with those elements. We have a heap of people lined up including our bus driver to make that happen.
Finally, what does she think an audience will take away from Passenger?
It’s an unusual experience which asks the audience to relax their expectations – in order to be rewarded.
Passenger will run at Greenwich+Docklands International Festival from 26 – 29 June at Beckton Park (Bus Stop X), Royal Docks.
