Told by an Idiot
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| Company type | Charity and company limited by guarantee |
|---|---|
| Founder | Hayley Carmichael, Paul Hunter, John Wright |
| Fate | Operational |
| Headquarters | Unicorn Theatre, |
Told by an Idiot are a British theatre company[1] which specialises in devised and physical theatre.[2] Following their 1995 Edinburgh Fringe Festival debut,[3] the group, also known as The Idiots, continue to create comedies based on bleak source material.[1] Throughout their career, the outfit’s core members Hayley Carmichael, Paul Hunter and John Wright collaborated with The Royal Shakespeare Company,[4] Scottish actor Richard Wilson, and poets laureate Carol Anne Duffy[5] and Simon Armitage.[2]
Paul Hunter and British actress Hayley Carmichael formed the company with their former drama teacher John Wright[1] after graduating from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1993.[6]
The outfit debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a play inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Hunter and Carmichael’s debut offering titled, On the Verge of Exploding received a nomination for the Independent Theatre Award. Subsequently, the London International Mime Festival hosted the play at their annual event in London.[5]
In 1995 the outfit created a play inspired by Emir Kusturica’s film, Time of the Gypsies titled, I’m So Big.[7] The adaptation which John Wright described as ‘a brutally comic fable’,[8] aired at the Battersea Arts Centre. I’m so Big told the story of Romani brothers: Maximo and Fredo who kidnap a prostitute to survive. Actor and director, Hayley Carmichael played Lady, the kidnapped prostitute.[8]
Their fourth production, I Weep at My Piano, reinforced the troupe’s favourable position amongst theatre goers.[3] Northern Stage commissioned the show in 1998 for the Lorca Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne. The production, a tribute to the Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, a contemporary of Salvador Dalí and Luis Bunuel addressed Lorca’s untimely death with theatrical absurdity set to a melancholic soundscape.[3]
The cohort’s version of Argentinian Julio Llinas short story and film, Shoot Me in the Heart played at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. Llinas’ fairy tale about Andrea, a nomadic bachelor who falls in love with Carlotta, an adult woman who stopped growing at the age of seven, revealed both physical theatre’s limitations and strengths.[9] Told in the cohort’s esoteric style, the actors played the parts of horses, bells and garden gnomes. The production divided opinion, “This is as much a celebration of theatrical possibility as of prejudice-confounding love. It delights in subverting expectations, in stylising reactions and in overlapping scenes, absurdly.”[10] Art critic Michael Billington pointed out that the plot relies heavily on the passage of time which did not come across in the troupe’s rendering.[9]
Style
Both Carmichael and Hunter admit that their spontaneous approach often verges on the chaotic.[1] Philippe Gaulier has been cited as a massive influence on the company's work.[11] Carmichael cites Jacques Lecoq and his Parisian school of physical theatre as an overarching influence on the outfit’s theatrical style, with one difference; Lecoq favoured style and technique, while The Idiots seek out stories. In this way, their approach favors that of Gaulier's.[1] Additionally, they often eschew psychology for ‘lazoo’ a Commedia dell’arte term for a comic routine.[1]
The actors gravitate towards bleak source material, and tonal tension characterises much of their work.[1] They combine hard thinking with tomfoolery and handle difficult topics with irreverence. For example, they took a romp-style look at Alzheimer's disease and terrorist groups.[1]