Interviewer: Tell me how you came to choose Getting Married?

Philippe: Well that' s back to Typhoon really. When I read plays for the Typhoon festival, I read all kinds of plays. It goes from theatre journals to translation by academics to Phd students etc and some of them published in America or here or scripts sent to us directly by the writers, and then... We do a shortlist, and from that shortlist we eventually produce a programme, and Getting Married was one of the plays that was selected in the Typhoon festival and I happened to direct it at that time purely by chance really. We allocate various directors to various plays and I did this one. So this year when we decided to do this double bill of Getting Married and Dogs, it seemed almost natural that, having done the play reading, that I should now have the opportunity to direct it as a full production as it were. I also have a particular fondness for the text. I think it' s a lovely little text. I think that you can look at it superficially and say that' s a very light play about a man falling in love with a woman, there' s few weird happenings, and it' s a bit strange but not much to it. But I think that would not do justice to the piece, there' s a lot of subtlety, and a lot of things that are unsaid, or are said... are metaphorical. And I heard a couple of people discussing it and I heard, ' oh but it' s sweet' , ' but it' s a bit light' . And I feel that if you feel it' s a bit light, it' s because you haven' t really listened to it properly because I think it' s deceptively light because underneath it all the subject it deals with is vital. It' s about life, it' s about seize the day, it' s about the transiency of everything, life, our possessions, and it' s a gently critic of materialism because the swindler says at one point ' my love was distracted by possessions, shoes, ties, houses, but now that everything has been removed it flows directly to you' and I think that that' s an interesting sentence and if you put it back into the context of Korea in the seventies, South Korea in the seventies, I' m sure it is also very potent, as a country blossoming, developing a very materialistic consumerism. So I think it' s got a valid point that will speak to most people if you listen to it carefully.

Kwong: Ok, so with the collaboration of a team, you have the designer, you think about the lighting designer, and again someone you may have worked with or not, also you then as a director already have a certain idea of mood, of setting you know, and then you communicate that over to the lighting designer. They will have their own ideas, so then you can have a dialogue you see. And often they do refer to you, for the time of day, that' s really important and you almost have to make that decision for them. I mean it comes from a script of course, but sometimes if the script doesn' t say it, I mean like this one for example doesn' t, it says in the evening but that' s for the whole play, but when I split it up into three sections I can start having different times of days, and so I have to make that decision and I leave them to make it work for me. And sound, again you have a feeling inside you, the mood, the feeling of a scene. Same thing, you communicate that over to the sound designer, see what they come up with. Often I' m very particular, very particular with the sound and light, extremely particular, because that is so important to the mood, yeah.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the colours and the shapes of the set in Getting Married?

Yoon: Yeah sure. The colours, especially for the backdrop, for the Getting Married, the inspiration has come from the Korean traditional decoration. I' ts called Tanchong and it' s been used in Korea so many centuries to, well basically to protect the woodwork, but also as a decorating method of the architecture and it basically enhances the important buildings like palaces and temples and very rich people' s homes. So I thought that perhaps this is a house the swindler has borrowed, and it' s very colourful and the shapes are also from Tanchong itself as well.

Interviewer: Did you try to make the contrast, economic and social level between the protagonist and the people who were working on the house, so everybody try to see the difference between the social statement, is that, on the dress design?

Yoon: Yeah, traditionally yes. The Koreans lived in a very monochrome houses and dress that way, so having such the richness in the colour and shape, I thought that would take us up to what swindler was trying to do, disguise himself as a very rich man.

Interviewer: And the furniture we' re seeing in Getting Married is very contemporary, so you had that contrast between the traditional and the modern.

Yoon: The furniture also, has been chosen very carefully, again this is a modern play, and what I was trying to do for today' s audience was, I wanted to make the relevance of the Korean play about this relationship, so I have found this Philip Starks Louis Ghost Chair, so it' s French twist with a modern material. And then the table is also called the illusion table, so it' s see-through and it' s modern material but in a classical form, which I thought would work very well with the Tanchong and the very rich colour of the floor.

Interviewer: Can you tell me briefly a little bit about your roles, you know, how do you go about managing a performance like that?

Jen: Well, depending on what your role is, in rehearsals, you would ideally be in rehearsals all the time, as much as possible being on the books, you' ve got the script in front of you and you just watch what their doing the whole time and you make detailed notes of a blocking and all movements, and you have detailed discussions with the directors about what cueing they want, lighting and sound wise, so you would know when to say go, to the lighting designers, when to press play and stop. And at the same time, the production as a whole, you have meetings with the designer, the lighting designer, so you have an intimate knowledge basically of what everything' s about, an intimate knowledge of what the set is made of, how you would move it from venue to venue, how to look after it, how to care for it. Same with the props, do you need to make lots of specific things for this prop, or is there something really valuable that you need to look after or is there something that you can' t touch, you just need to know every single thing about the show that you really should know.

Jen: And at the same time you have to, with this show as well, as company manager you need to kind of look after the company, the actors, make sure they're getting paid ok, make sure everybody's alright on a daily basis, that's there's no problems within the thing. So within rehearsals you're building up this knowledge of the show and so that when it comes to the technical rehearsal, the dress, and the opening night you know exactly what is meant to go where, what's being said where, what's been cut, what's been added and you can run the show!

Interviewer: From either play really, what were the highlights for you in each play?

Matthew: Yeah, I also liked the dialogue in Dogs, which was funny and edgy and very nuanced culturally, very attentive to the pace and rhythm of Singaporean life. It was in many ways a fascinating play, with a strange experience of being exposed to ' in-your-face' Singaporean way of living as a dysfunctional family. In a London theatre, this kind of cultural space-time warp phenomenon for me was really quite exciting. To be present to in the middle of a domestic dispute which was happening in Singapore in the imagination, here in London, many moments of that standing out, having some fluency in Malay for example, and hearing the wife' s constant use of Malay throughout the play, using terms of endearment, as well as insults of the most crude sort, with minimal attempt to translate that for a London audience was a great pleasure in fact, to find that as a cultural resource. So those were linguistically those were some of the most fun, funny moments as well.

Interviewer: How you came to be involved in Yellow Earth?

David: It was back, I think, way back in 1990, certain political events going on in East Asia, I wanted some artistic response to support I suppose our fellow East Asians, who sometimes don' t have the same freedoms that we enjoy in the West. So I think the first time that Yellow Earth was mentioned was in 1990 when I organised a rehearsed reading of something in response to an event that happened in 1989. And then the second time was in 1993 when the Dalai Lama was visiting this country and again I felt that the East Asian sector ought to have some kind of voice about that particular issue. And then between 1993 and 1995 a lot of the actors I' d worked with on those rehearsed readings were very keen that I try to apply for funding and get Yellow Earth started to produce a full production. But obviously with any new company it was very difficult without a track record. So we spent two years organising a lot of rehearsed readings trying to prove that we could contribute to the British Theatre scene as well as the East Asian sector. And then it was by chance that Polka Theatre commissioned me as a writer to adapt something called The Magic Paintbrush which did very well both commercially and critically and as a result of that I got my first very small grant from the London Borough Grants Community Scheme that was around then. And that enabled me to do a workshop performance of a piece that became New Territories, so in 1995 that was made on a very small budget, I wrote and directed it and the Arts Council saw it and loved it and asked me to apply for funding to tour it. So that' s how Yellow Earth got started I suppose through my desire to help the British East Asian community in this country and particularly the artist have a voice, have a voice that would break through that glass ceiling that currently exists. And also, move us from a state of invisibility that also currently exists to one of being accepted, integrated into the mainstream and also would play a vital role in the cultural life of this country.