Today’s #quickfiretheatre interview is with Eve Nicol! How would you describe what you do? I direct and write theatre. I tell stories even though no one has asked me to. I spill my guts and trying not to slip up on my own muck.
What theatre inspires you the most? I’ve got this headcanon of 1970s Citz which is probably totally fabricated but keeps me in check. Approaching the classics and new works with a bit of blood, glitter, sweat and sex. The dream. I’m suckered by theatre that leans into hedonism, talks to our secret parts and is okay with being a little bit intellectual. Individual theatre artists inspire me perhaps more than genres of work. I need my heroes to look up to. Totems. Giants whose shoulders I stand on. People who left their handprints on the cave walls. Proof that the paths I want to meander down have been tread before and are safe to travel. At least if you’ve come ready to fight the monsters.
What is your dream role/project? Wouldn’t it be nice to read plays all day then have a drink and talk about shows all evening? I’d love to be Kenneth Tynan and rock a slick paisley print pyjama if that job is going. I do think that time spent exploring what is already out there and cultivating discussion is a valid use of time. It helps create the basis for interesting programming, building an audience and creating a home for other artists. Alternatively if anyone knows how I could get a job doing the voices for Pokemon - I’d be down for that. I do a mean Bulbasaur.
What’s your favourite play? I cycle through different Philip Ridley plays on an hourly basis. I grew up reading his stories for children so his particular brand of fairytale freakery is mother’s milk to me. No one writes about love quite like him. His 2005 play, Mercury Fur, holds a particular special spot if only for containing the sentence “the zebra burst into flames”. It wasn’t until I saw it performed that it opened itself up to me. It sits as a particular keystone in Ridley’s work, can be the most difficult of his stories to stomach but its intense depiction of love at its boiling point is prophetic and beautiful.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? “So why don’t you just do it?” One of my utter heroes asked me this when I hadn’t started out yet and told them about my ideas for the kind of theatre I wanted to make. I realised that there wasn’t any good reason not to get on with it. I’d been waiting for permission which I didn’t really need. No one was going to ask me to make the work. I just had to do it anyway.
What advice would you give to someone starting out? “So why don’t you just do it?” It won’t be perfect but it will be real. And time is running out.
What are you up to next? My tabletop production of Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall joins the line up of A Younger Theatre and New Diorama Theatre’s Incoming Festival in London tonight. I’ve been supported by a Federation of Scottish Theatre bursary to work as Assistant Director on Linda McLean’s new play, Glory on Earth, at Lyceum, Edinburgh which closes 10 June. Then I’m trying out some new ideas with Georgie Mac during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The best development is just to do it and get it in front of an audience I reckon.