Q&A with director Nisha Madhan
It's unusual to come across a director whose process involves setting out to intentionally break a show, but Nisha Madhan is anything but usual. You might know her from her starring roles on television shows Shortland Street and The Blue Rose, but behind the scenes, Nisha is making waves with her exciting choices, unique style of direction, and love for all things chaotic. Nisha shared her insights into the key themes of The First 7500 Days of My Life.
What are the themes of the play, and in what ways have you tried to bring them to life on stage?
This piece of work is a play within a play, and it’s a show that goes wrong and falls apart as the story progresses. There’s an overriding concept of failure. That’s something that I’ve been looking at in my own work for a while now too so it was exciting to get this script and start work on this.
Failure is such a relatable thing. We fail all the time in life. I relate more to failing than I do to succeeding. Because of that I see failure as progress – it makes room for me to be better, to change, to be humble and say sorry, to do the scary but most triumphant things in life. That’s the big gesture of this show. Max is trying to get life right, and trying to control it. But life isn’t like that, life takes over as a beautiful, chaotic, uncatchable thing. The theatre is such a lovely place to reflect that. It’s really possible in the theatre. I really tried to create a real mess on stage.
Focusing on failure can be a compelling way to work. When an actor forgets their line on stage, when something goes wrong – as an audience we love it. It becomes electric. We’re used to sitting there and watching a polished and pristine performance, and when all of a sudden a line gets dropped, or a set piece breaks, the audience are pulled into the action for a minute. It becomes a game, and the audience have to invest just as much as the actors to pick it up and keep the game going.
As much as all of that though, there are still themes of friendship, and romance, and family. Those are the real guts of the story.
Failure is such a relatable thing. We fail all the time in life. I relate more to failing than I do to succeeding. Because of that I see failure as progress – it makes room for me to be better, to change, to be humble and say sorry, to do the scary but most triumphant things in life. That’s the big gesture of this show. Max is trying to get life right, and trying to control it. But life isn’t like that, life takes over as a beautiful, chaotic, uncatchable thing. The theatre is such a lovely place to reflect that. It’s really possible in the theatre. I really tried to create a real mess on stage.
Focusing on failure can be a compelling way to work. When an actor forgets their line on stage, when something goes wrong – as an audience we love it. It becomes electric. We’re used to sitting there and watching a polished and pristine performance, and when all of a sudden a line gets dropped, or a set piece breaks, the audience are pulled into the action for a minute. It becomes a game, and the audience have to invest just as much as the actors to pick it up and keep the game going.
As much as all of that though, there are still themes of friendship, and romance, and family. Those are the real guts of the story.
How have you worked to overcome the feeling of contrived failure – when the audience doesn’t buy that it’s real?
It’s so hard. The audience can smell a rat. I’ve done it before in shows, and you have to approach it as a structured improvisation. In an improv, it’s easier to get away with things because it’s live and you can try, and see what happens. I’ve never come across someone who has tried to script chaos quite like this, in the way that Uther has done.
In rehearsals at the moment, we’re still working through the bits that don’t quite work yet. It’s all about just playing the game of it. The audience will be able to tell straight away that something is up, that the play is falling apart. So we’re working from a place where as soon as the penny drops, lets invite the audience to play with us – together we’ll play the game of failure. The question then becomes how much more can we fail? How much more mess can we make?
We’ve played a lot with the idea of rules vs. no rules and using games to create scenes. We often play games in rehearsal with strict rules, and then start to throw the rules out the window and see how much mess we can make, and how far we can push things. For the first week of rehearsal we didn’t even touch the script – we just played games. It means that no matter what happens on the night the actors are in tune with each other and can respond to whatever happens. It’s been a really big part of approaching the script to try and understand what chaos and failure are.
In rehearsals at the moment, we’re still working through the bits that don’t quite work yet. It’s all about just playing the game of it. The audience will be able to tell straight away that something is up, that the play is falling apart. So we’re working from a place where as soon as the penny drops, lets invite the audience to play with us – together we’ll play the game of failure. The question then becomes how much more can we fail? How much more mess can we make?
We’ve played a lot with the idea of rules vs. no rules and using games to create scenes. We often play games in rehearsal with strict rules, and then start to throw the rules out the window and see how much mess we can make, and how far we can push things. For the first week of rehearsal we didn’t even touch the script – we just played games. It means that no matter what happens on the night the actors are in tune with each other and can respond to whatever happens. It’s been a really big part of approaching the script to try and understand what chaos and failure are.
What is the visual style or aesthetic of the show?
Mess is a really big aesthetic. Christine Urquhart designed the set, and she’s made a stage that the actors are able to break apart. The world around them literally crumbles and splits and falls apart. There is also a massive AV component to it with Max's slide show. Projection is often left in one place, on one screen, and once its set-up it can be ignored. So I was excited to create an environment where that doesn’t happen. We’ve had a projector in rehearsals with us the whole time. One of the characters in the play is an operator, and he is always moving the frame and size of the projection in the space.
I find with technology in theatre, that if you can’t see the tricks and how it is happening, it is often not that interesting. It takes over, and doesn’t really say very much. But as soon as you see someone working an old tape player, or someone playing an instrument live, it’s infinitely more interesting than just hearing music. It’s certainly not about slickness – I don’t relate to slick things. I relate to people scrambling to keep up with life. So the use of technology reflects that idea that everyone is here in the now, making the play happen together. That includes the audience too – it’s important that they are complicit in what is happening, and never ignored. |
Nisha and Doug Grant (Jay) rehearsing the music in The First 7500 Days of My Life.
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Why is this story important and relevant now?
People will relate to it so much. The idea that we want so much to control our lives, that we’re running out of time, that we want to document everything, the idea that we have the best of intentions but do the wrong thing even though we want so badly to do the right thing. It’s a classic mid-20s existential crisis story. I challenge anybody not to find something they can relate to in all of that.
The play-within-a-play style is also a current trend in theatre too, this idea of meta-theatre. It’s popular because audiences love to be let in on the joke and to feel like that they are a part of the wider game of pretend that is happening. They know their role is the audience and they love all that kind of stuff.
It is a satisfying way to work in the theatre because so often we get sick of pretending. It’s a truthful way of working to admit that it’s a show, and that I’m an actor, and that this is all pretend. If you can make an audience feel something through all of that, when all the theatrics are exposed, then you are really digging in to the heart of it and getting into some really exciting territory. I always like to think of theatre as just us in a room having a party - it’s a social affair. It’s immediate. That gets lost in a world of proscenium arch and plays that could just be on television.
The play-within-a-play style is also a current trend in theatre too, this idea of meta-theatre. It’s popular because audiences love to be let in on the joke and to feel like that they are a part of the wider game of pretend that is happening. They know their role is the audience and they love all that kind of stuff.
It is a satisfying way to work in the theatre because so often we get sick of pretending. It’s a truthful way of working to admit that it’s a show, and that I’m an actor, and that this is all pretend. If you can make an audience feel something through all of that, when all the theatrics are exposed, then you are really digging in to the heart of it and getting into some really exciting territory. I always like to think of theatre as just us in a room having a party - it’s a social affair. It’s immediate. That gets lost in a world of proscenium arch and plays that could just be on television.