Living Newspaper Clippings: Transcript of Mark Ravenhill and Shankho Chaudhuri in conversation

This is the transcript of the recorded conversation between writer Mark Ravenhill and designer Shankho Chaudhuri, recorded as part of the Royal Court Living Newspaper Clippings series. This conversation was recorded in February 2021. 

Mark Ravenhill: So, my name is Mark Ravenhill and I was part of the writing collective for Living Newspaper Edition #2.

Shankho Chaudhuri:  I’m Shankho Chaudhuri, and I am one of the design collective, also working with Mark on Edition #2.

Mark: So Shankho, we find ourselves here with the Living Newspaper on a bit of a… hiatus, would you say?

Shankho: Yeah, definitely. Everything’s on pause.

Mark: So you did two editions, and then then you got word of complete lockdown. Right?

Shankho: Yeah, basically. I mean, we knew it was coming, because we’d had our sort of Christmas, pre-emptive lockdown happening during Edition #2. I felt like maybe January would go ahead, but there was always the option to do online only. And then I think we got word from the Royal Court that they were hoping to bring back the in-person experience at the end of this lockdown, which at the time was going to be February half term, but I think we’re now moving on to March 8th. So hopefully, it’ll be up again soon. We’ve still got four editions to do!

Mark: As a writer, I was just assigned to one of the editions – so actually, my work is done. But you were working across the whole thing. So, how does it feel for you having the work interrupted like this?

Shankho: This one feels more like more of a sizeable pause. I’ve been with this project from about August, and we’ve had a couple of different interruptions like that. But it always felt like the work was still going, because there was still quite a lot of conceptual work to do in the early stages about what the Living Newspaper was. And then we had a lockdown just as we were about to go into our initial production reading and our get-in, before it was all meant to start in November. But that, to be honest, was a little bit of a breath of fresh air, because we were really going at it and it was going to be pretty intense, so I think that gave us a bit of breathing room. Whereas, I think because we did so much to get it up and going, and Edition #2 was non-stop for a few weeks up until that point, this lockdown has felt more like a detachment from the whole thing and I’ve stepped out of it more. So I’m looking forward to getting back into it.

Mark: Is it so long now that you feel that slight anxiety that maybe you won’t be able to get back into the groove again?

Shankho: No, not really. I think it helps that there are six of us in the design collective. So the collective energy is pretty strong. And I think once we’re all bouncing off each other again, it will come back pretty quickly. Could you explain actually – beacause I don’t know – how did that design collective come together? How did you find each other? Or did one person find you all or…? So way back in May, Chloe Lamford who’s the Associate Designer at the Royal Court, she got in touch with a group of us. I think she was looking for a group of emerging and younger designers to just start having a weekly conversation with, so we met in a more organic way as a group of designers hoping to just talk about design in the pause that was happening with the pandemic. And we were speaking all over the shop about things like… What was it like to be a designer? What do we think design could be? And also having conversations about our work. So it was quite a nice, collective sharing but it didn’t really have a specific purpose. And in that conversation, we had touched upon the idea of what it would it be like to design as a group. It turns out that, at the same time, Vicky Featherstone was creating the Living Newspaper project, and Chloe was thinking about that, and I think Chloe sort of realised that those two conversations could sync up. And so we were approached as a group that had formed with for a very different reason, to design Living Newspaper. And that’s how we got in. And since then, it’s really just been the six of us, batting it all from different angles since about August.

Mark: Can I take you way, way back and ask: how did you how did you start off?

Shankho: Okay. So I am an engineering student.

Mark: Really? That’s amazing! Respect.

Shankho:  [Laughs] Well, I’m not very a very good one anymore…

Mark: Where did you study?

Shankho: This was at Imperial College, London – mechanical engineering. I quickly realised I wasn’t an engineer, per se. I’d kind of chosen this thing that had elements that I was interested in but I spent basically all my free time with the musical theatre society at Imperial. I think, being in London and living in London for the first time, I was sort of falling in love with theatre.

Mark: So were you in shows with the musical theatre society?

Shankho: Yeah, I started performing.

Mark: What was your favourite role?

Shankho: Well, see, I was a very good ensemble member… (I’m not a very good lead, because I didn’t have a tenor voice – or that’s my excuse!).

Mark: What was your favourite show that you were in?

Shankho: The Producers, which was my first show.

Mark: Brilliant.

Shankho:  And basically, halfway through my course, I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be an engineer, I want to go into design more broadly’. And there was sort of a design/engineering route, so I did everything I could to buff up a portfolio to get me into this design Masters at the Royal College of Art. And so that really was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to move from performing to directing, choreographing and designing for that society’. And then that got me into art school, and I still didn’t know what I was trying to do, and I think halfway through that post-grad I saw this Es Devlin documentary on Netflix. And it kind of finally clicked in my brain – that this was a job – and that design for performing arts in general could happen. So eventually I turned the last year of my post grad into a sort of study of technology and performing arts, looking at motion capture and dance and VR and music. And in the end my thesis project was on set design and how augmented reality might change the way we design. So I have this sort of weird, Frankenstein portfolio that I was using to send a few feelers out. And then a friend of mine got in touch saying their boyfriend was looking for a designer. And that’s how I kind of got involved. It was like finally letting that voice that had clearly been growing for about six years tell me to try and go. And I’ve sort of fallen accidentally upwards through that into being a freelance designer.

Mark: And what did your family think about your switch from engineer to designer?

Shankho: Well, I think I’d done enough of the prerequisites that they kind of knew that I had my head screwed on. And that I could always fall back on this plethora of different higher education degrees I’d gathered. And so, working on the Living Newspaper – is it very, very different from anything else you’ve ever done? I mean, you’re in a collective, you’re also working with a collective of writers, you’ve got writing coming in right up to the wire… Is there a crossover with stuff you’ve done before? Or is it just all new experience? I mean, I think from a theatre point of view it’s very new, and I’d love to ask the same question of you – how it changed your process as a writer. I guess there’s some overlap with the fact I’ve done a bit of exhibition design. So I’d kind of thought about all the different facets that are “design”, and the logistics and some of the infrastructure planning that we did in the end. But from a theatre point of view, it’s sort of interesting to be right at the centre from the start. And I think that’s very, very new. How did you find it from a writer’s perspective?

Mark: I think there were a lot of differences. I mean, I think the fact that the design collective were involved from the start means that we as writers – we were leading it, but you were actually able to show us quite fully realised ideas for an environment and what you want to in the theatre that we could write ‘inside of’ before we wrote anything. That’s a very different way round. And obviously also the collective aspect of it and having all the writers talking together before we wrote anything. What was lovely for me was a chance to meet a lot of new writers as well, because there’s quite a lot of younger writers and writers who are new to the Royal Court involved. (It would be better to be in a room and to actually meet them like that, but you know, Zoom is second best). So yeah it was actually really nice just to meet fresh ideas and fresh talent and have those conversations. But because we got pushed back a bit anyway, we had quite a lot of conversations, it was like week after week after week. And so, I think as a writer (and you probably had to do this as a designer in a way), you also have to, like, hold back a bit of your brain so that you don’t over overthink it and over talk it – because the actual amount of writing that any of us had to do really was very short. So you don’t want to sort of… overburden that. You sort of want to have the conversation, stew in all the ideas and enjoy that and get your mind working in some way. But you don’t want to end up trying to squeeze some sort of over thought thing into just a few minutes of writing.

Shankho: So how did you find that? Was that an easy instinct to push to the side, or was it difficult?

Mark: I had to slightly pace myself and think, ‘Okay, well, it’s great to have all these thoughts, but then don’t make all these decisions and overburden it’, because the actual writing, you want to leave to the last minute because it’s a living newspaper. So you can think about the wider issues and the wider aesthetics of it, but actually don’t write the thing until, like, a day before it’s due in – because otherwise it won’t have that spontaneity. There’s always an element of that in writing – you do research and… I try not to talk too much to other people about it before I write it. I don’t want to have endless meetings talking about what I’m going to write. You do, obviously, in your head, do lots of thinking, but then you got to go ‘right, it’s there’. And you sort of trust that it’s there. But the actual act of writing has still got to be quite spontaneous although it’s drawing on that thinking and research. And I guess any creative act is like that.

Shankho: It’d be great to talk a bit about the specific sections that you ended up writing into. So if I’m correct, that was the front page, which is sort of the big musical number that collectively, as an edition, all of you writers are involved in. But then more specifically, you had the opening address from our actors, which, honestly, when we first listened to it in our dress rehearsal, there were tears because it just felt so… I don’t know, it just brought us into live theatre again, and I didn’t realise how starved I was of that direct relationship with a performer. And I remember it just being a really wonderful piece and I’d love to talk a bit more about that. But then also, the section that we most directly work together on was the cartoons, both of which are not particularly ‘normal’ environments to write into. What was that like?

Mark: The cartoon is particularly interesting, because obviously a cartoon is primarily entirely a visual thing. So what’s interesting is you sort of question ‘Why am I writing a description, (or sort of outline or breakdown or whatever it is), for a cartoon? That’s an entirely visual thing.’ But I guess as a writer, you are always training yourself to think visually as well as through words. I think most of us do have ‘stage pictures’ in our heads as we write and the most satisfying theatre is that meeting of the text and the image. So yeah, that felt particularly weird as well as the fact that it had to be like a cartoon you’d have in a newspaper, so it should also be very hot-off-the-press. So yeah, I definitely went through phases of thinking, ‘Why is a writer even involved in a cartoon?’ In the end it was good to think, ‘Okay, primarily, you’ve got to come up with one big image for this and then probably a little bit of text’ – and some of the very best cartoons don’t have any text, but I thought – ‘Yeah, big speech bubbles’. Sometimes you have a little bit of a tagline at the bottom as well – in fact probably half the time there’s quite a good bit of very concise text incorporated. So I did actually sit and write eight lines or 10 lines, and wrote a sort of outline/briefing document, visually describing this cartoon, and then sent it to you. So, what was your response when you got it? Did you feel like it was too prescriptive or too open, or…?

Shankho: No, I really appreciated it. I mean, it’s worth just talking a little bit about what the cartoon sort of “toolkit” is, and how we used it. So, we put the cartoon in the scenery dock, which is behind the main stage. And we have a sort of selection of different wooden cut outs of figures, speech bubbles that are on casters, and then whatever props we can get hold of. And I think it’s a challenging room because, as you say, it is a primarily visual form. I think of the New Yorker style cartoon that’s sort of a visual gag and then a caption. Or there’s the sort of like, newspaper strip four-scene cartoons. And then when you throw a performer into that, then it’s like, ‘Are we going to make a quick sketch? Is it that sort of sketch comedy kind of feel?’ And I really enjoyed your text, because it felt like there were very specific panels. In my head, I could imagine what the four scenes of that strip comic would be, and that was quite a nice way to sort of tether what we were thinking about in terms of how we might visually present it. I mean, also, you gave some really clear visual moments in the text that I think just held us very easily. And that meant that, actually, it was pretty simple and clear what we had to do. And the challenge for us was then thinking: what does it mean to step into a cartoon?

Mark: Yeah, because the difference from it being in a real newspaper was that actually our audience were going to experience it spatially. And I suppose the closest you could have it to the way you might experience a newspaper review, was for the audience to be seated and there be a proscenium arch and a curtain that lifted so you could see it and then the curtain fell again. But we knew that our audience were actually going to pass through the space, so it’s a different experience from a newspaper cartoon. They’re going to see it from one angle, approach it, pass by it… And originally we thought they were going to be a live audience. In the end, we did it as a live stream, but still, the camera is going to go on that journey that the audience go on.

Shankho:  I actually think that the camera helped a lot, because it allowed us to really control the editing of it. I think it would have been an interesting challenge thinking about how you might have that sequence in a space where the audience are fixed, and you’re not necessarily moving them through a huge amount of room. You would probably have had to bring on Liza (the actor) to move things, and there would have been a bit more choreography in real-time. Whereas because we had the camera, we could almost set things up in a way that meant you could really control the movement from frame to frame, which quite fun because it was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna have my little Spielberg one take moment’. That was quite a nice exercise, thinking about design being not just ‘setting up the space’ but also thinking about the the order in which you receive information. I really enjoyed the making of it. As with all of these things through Zoom – I remember when it was me, you, Adam and Jane one of the facilitators of the project from the Court, trying to coordinate this camera movement, where…

Mark: I was at home. I think Jane was showing it to me on her phone video camera, and you guys were all there in masks and everything. That was sort of crazy, but it was fun as well, wasn’t it – to figure that out like that?

Shankho: It was one of those things where I was like: ‘In a world where I could pick up Jane’s phone and show you exactly what I was imagining, this would be 10 times easier.’ But instead I was sort of like, ‘Okay, Jane, can you just stand there and point the camera -but don’t point it too much,’ and there was a real lack of control over what I’d had in my head. But you know, that’s what making theatre in this time has been like, so…

Mark: So Shankho, you’ve got Living Newspaper coming back, but what are you doing in the in the meanwhile? Are you designing other stuff? Or are you finding another thing to enjoy during lockdown?

Shankho: I mean, yeah, not a huge amount is going on right now. I’ve been doing a lot of yoga trying to cook again, be more vegetarian. I mean there is stuff that’s going to come but I think as with everyone I’ve just been like hibernating until it’s time. You know, we’re pacing ourselves again.

Mark: Absolutely. Right, well, we’ve got to say goodbye Shankho.

Shankho:  Bye Mark. Wonderful to speak to you.

Mark: We will see each other in actual real life… eventually. Take care.

Shankho: Hopefully soon. Bye

Mark: Bye.