Angels and abandoned children, glorious music and murder most foul whirl through a richly-colourful tale of 18th-century England as Coram Boy takes to the stage at Chichester Festival Theatre.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely to
00:06 start talking about The Coram Boy, which is the next show in the main house in Chichester
00:11 Festival Theatre. Now we've had a pretty brutal world with the Tudors, now we're moving into
00:16 something seemingly equally brutal. Lovely to speak to Jo McInnes. Tell me a little bit
00:21 about what we've got in store. It sounds epic to start with.
00:25 It's absolutely epic. It feels like this show was actually written for Chichester. It wasn't.
00:32 It was first on at the National and it was a massive success there in the early 2000s.
00:40 And I, you know, the play just fits so well in Chichester Theatre because it is so extremely
00:51 epic. We have 16 in the cast, plus a four piece quartet, so live music. And then we
01:02 have this incredible epic piece of storytelling, which I liken to Dickens. So it has that absolute
01:09 element of a yarn. It's a yarn, and with the goodies and the baddies and then all the people
01:17 in between and then the complexity of the goodie, the complexity of the baddie, and
01:22 then this extraordinary music. So you've got this live music, incredible singers in the
01:30 show. So there's a composition as well for the show. So you've got this amazing storytelling
01:40 with this music thread that is always pulling us through this very complex, exciting story.
01:48 And you were saying we're going to get some extremes. We're going to get terrible cruelty
01:53 and object poverty and nastiness, but redeemed by kindness and love.
02:00 Yeah, I think so. I think it questions where we are now. It questions what it means to
02:10 have empathy. What does empathy really mean? Can we empathize with what we put as other?
02:17 So in this world, it's abject poverty. You know, can we empathize? Can we look at poverty
02:25 or do we turn away from it? Or do we just give it just enough? Do we put just enough
02:30 in the charity pot to make us feel okay, but not to make us actually really take it on?
02:38 And that I think that this piece does in the most, you know, I would liken it to Oliver
02:45 in some ways, where we're looking at this terrible situation that we cannot believe
02:54 that could happen. And yet I still think that things like that are happening in our, well
03:00 they are, you know.
03:01 Well, adding to the complexity, you're the baddie, you're the villain.
03:07 Yes.
03:08 Yes, please.
03:09 Yeah, because she's written so well. She's complex, you know, she's got a backstory that
03:15 we hear just tiny little fragments of that are really interesting, really interesting
03:19 of a woman of that time, of her class. You don't quite know where she comes from. You
03:25 know, so she has this sort of enigmatic, charismatic role in the piece, where she is literally
03:34 shape-shifting. So you can never quite get hold of her. And I think it's brilliant that
03:39 Helen has given that to a female of that time. Because obviously the history, we often only
03:46 see it through the man's perspective, but obviously in reality, it wouldn't have been
03:50 like, you know, just like that, you know. And her and Otis, who is the bad man of the
04:00 piece are extraordinarily bad, you know. They are like in Dickens, they are, you know, they
04:07 do some terrible things. But what she's written, and with great humour and great, like a real
04:15 deep core complexity that dramatically is so interesting for an audience that keeps
04:21 us engaged with them. Because I think if we're just abhorred by them, then what happens is
04:25 we cut off emotionally. So we have to, like in the characters in the play, we have to
04:33 be seduced by them in some way. And I think Helen has managed to do that brilliantly.
04:39 And then the seduction of the piece is this amazing story that's always in front of us.
04:45 The audience are always, you know, and as us as actors working on it, we're always like
04:50 we're catching up, catching up, catching up with the story. And there's always so many
04:55 events in each scene. So we're never, there's never any part where you feel like you're
05:00 treading water, like every scene has an event, every scene is moving towards the conclusion
05:07 of the piece.
05:08 It sounds fantastic. You wetted our appetites brilliantly. Really looking forward to it.
05:14 Really looking forward to seeing it. And Jo, lovely to speak to you. Thank you very much
05:17 again.
05:18 Cheers. Bye bye. Bye.