News
Fred Meets the Real World
Hijinks are a company who are committed to inclusive performance: their mission statement insists that ‘the heart of our work is always our learning disabled and/or autistic artists, who constantly challenge perceptions of what theatre and film can be and how they should be made.’ In their collaboration with Blind Summit, Meet Fred, they took the familiar cloth puppet and applied a sharp social commentary.
While Fred just wants to be seen as a ‘regular guy’, who is threatened with losing his Puppetry Living Allowance (the marionette parallel to the UK’s Personal Independence Payment). Fred becomes a warrior against prejudice and, in the words of artistic director Ben Pettit-Wade, ‘puppetry allows us to separate some of the big issues we are dealing with in the piece, of people’s benefits being cut, questions of identity, control and power in people’s lives and ultimately suicide.’
Unlike many of the British companies working with bunraku style puppetry, Hijinks do not see themselves so much in the tradition of visual theatre. Indeed, Pettit-Wade emphasises that ‘the inspiration was to create a puppet show that would include our learning-disabled artist working with cloth puppets.
Seeing the company in the context of ‘a tradition of creating professional theatre that features artists with learning disability,’ Pettit-Wade acknowledges that the company does not ‘necessarily have a particular style, but there is an ethos that our stages are more interesting the more diverse those performing on them are.’ Connecting Hijinks to companies like Mind The Gap, Mooms Teatren in Sweden, Theatre Du Cristal in France and Back to Back in Australia, Pettit-Wade’s engagement with bunraku is perhaps less about puppetry as a form in its own right, but part of a strategy to include and expand theatre’s engagement.
‘Hijinx are an inclusive company: we have a network of academies that train performers throughout the year in an ongoing process,’ Pettit-Wade explains. ‘We worked with the puppets during an eight-month period with the students, exploring ideas and improvising. The process of making Meet Fred was typical of the way we make work here at Hijinx. I believe a devising process is one of the best ways to ensure that you can play to everyone’s strengths in a group, something that is very important when working with learning disabled artists.’
Nevertheless, Meet Fred takes advantage of the puppet in order to elaborate on the issues faced by members of the creative team. The serious social impact of benefit cuts is lent a particular perspective when observed through the cloth eyes of Fred.
‘By seeing all this through Fred’s eyes the show becomes a satire, and as such we are able to view all that happens to Fred with a degree of separation, which allows us to laugh and something which is actually quite dark,’ Pettit-Wade continues.
‘I hope that an audience that see’s Meet Fred will be able to both laugh and cry, to feel pity but also joy – our piece is quite open ended at the end. I like this, I like that the audience have to make up their own mind a little on how things end for Fred and the other characters.’
Although the show achieved success at the Edinburgh Fringe, Meet Fred remains a touring proposition: Pettit-Wade performing as a totalitarian director who both encourages Fred and explains why he can’t be paid for his performance. Fred himself captures sympathy and while his plight is familiar, the blend of real-world problems and object manipulation sets the humour within a harsh reality of political expediency and social cynicism. The medium becomes more than the method, it does carry the meaning and message of the devised reflection on how the benefits system of the UK can be oppressive and, as in the company’s other collaborations, the production demonstrates how Hijinks’ vision of inclusion is served by creative dramaturgy and a determination to speak truth to power.
https://www.hijinx.org.uk/meet-fred/
