Preview: The Marked, Tobacco Factory Theatres

International company Theatre Témoin, who brought their show The Fantasist to Bristol Festival of Puppetry, return with their critically acclaimed new play: a beautiful, horrifying and unforgettable story that needs to be told.
As a boy, Jack lived in a world of monsters and invisible guardians, as he fought to protect the people he loved. Now grown, his life on the streets of London is less fantastical. But when a ghost from his past turns up, Jack must harness the power of forgotten myths to defeat her.
Mixing together mask, puppetry and physical theatre, The Marked “navigates a haunting, mystical wonderland inspired by real-life stories of homelessness”.
Ahead of its run at Tobacco Factory Theatres, we put some questions about the show to Theatre Témoin.

All pics: Idil Sukan

Tell us more about Jack’s childhood, and this ghost from his past.
Working with people experiencing homelessness, we met a lot of people who had grown up around adults struggling with substance misuse. We’re deliberate about the epic and polarised language of “Monsters” and “Guardians”, “Ghosts” and “People”, because to a child who is looked after by a highly volatile and changeable carer, that carer might – at different times – be completely different things to him or her.
When we meet Jack, he’s dealing with the death of his mother, who he has very mixed memories and feelings about.  The play is essentially his journey of reconciliation with who she was and what she did – both to him and for him – as a child.

“At its heart, The Marked is a story about the link between trauma in childhood and homelessness in adulthood” – how prevalent, and how well-known, is this link?
Very, is the short answer. The most recent report by the Faculty for Homelessness and Inclusion Health states that multi-morbidity (combinations of mental ill health, physical ill health, and substance dependency) expressed by homeless service users “often has its roots in histories of complex trauma, including high levels of child neglect and abuse, that impact on developmental trajectories and mental health” (Hewitt, 2013).
With The Marked, we put this link on stage in a way that is visually arresting and evocative, to get inside the head and heart of a person living with a history of trauma.

What are the extra (dramatic, emotional) dimensions achieved by telling this story specifically through masked theatre?
We don’t go to the theatre to receive a lecture or report, I think the main pull of theatre is its ability to present subjective reality in a poetic and transposed way, a way that makes us feel the essential (instead of the literal) truth of an experience.
Working with masks allowed us to take Jack’s experiences – particularly his experiences as a child – and blow them up to be fantastical. Not larger-than-life, but rather, as-large-as-life. The subjective experience of trauma and recovery are huge, an epic adventure, a battle with witches and demons. We use mask to get to the heart of that experience.

“it became increasingly clear to me that for some people fantastical beliefs are a matter of urgency, of vital necessity” – can you explain a little more?
Try to imagine that you come from a childhood where the dangers are so vivid and pressing that your ability to read a situation and respond accordingly literally have life-and-death consequences. There are evils that you need to learn to navigate and avoid at all costs, and equally there are saviours and havens of protection that become the counterpoints to the darkness…
The emotional landscape of trauma is equally so fundamentally huge that epic language and thinking can “fit” better than the emotional descriptors of pop psychology; when you talk to people struggling with heroin abuse, for example, it’s noticeable how quickly their conversation becomes peppered with words like “demon” and “evil” when they are describing the forces they’re fighting.
People coming out of addiction will use similarly epic language – often with religious or spiritual undertones – to describe the forces and people who are aiding them. It’s because saying “I’m feeling out of balance” or “I had a difficult childhood” are just massive understatements in these circumstances.

What would you hope to send audiences away thinking and feeling – about the homelessness crisis, about those people they may walk past to and from work, about how our society is dealing or not dealing with this problem?
That those people are heroes in an epic journey that is invisible to the naked eye. Every one of us, to some extent or another, is fighting a battle that no one else can see. Compassion is borne of the basic acceptance of the fact that we will never really understand the journey that someone’s life has taken to reach the point that it’s at now, and the basic respect and trust that everyone is doing the best they possibly can under their particular set of given circumstances.
I think we’re fundamentally terrified by the idea that the world is so unfair that someone can try their hardest and still end up on the streets, that we subconsciously invent false narratives – about living in a meritocracy, about the superiority of our own core values and how they protect us – and these false narratives insulate us from society’s most vulnerable and our collective responsibility to look after them.

The Marked is at Tobacco Factory Theatres from Thursday, May 11 to Saturday, May 13. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/the-marked

Read more: Homelessness doubles in Bristol