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All Your Wants And Needs Fulfilled Forever, the latest work from The Playground Collective, is making its Auckland debut, fresh from its success at La Mama Theatre in New York. 

Renee Liang interviewed director Robin Kerr about his processes for making theatre.

An existential comedy, the play, by Eli Kent, ‘dissects the stories we all tell ourselves as we try to make meaning from the chaos’ and features design by Sam Trubridge. 

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Why do you make theatre?

Good question! I love theatre as a way of creating something very current, it’s a platform through which you can bring together a group of artists; actors, musicians, writers, designers - and create something together that speaks to ourselves and the world right now. What we feel is important, and then share that with an audience. 

Do you see yourself as primarily a director?

Yes - I love the role in all of its shapes and forms and have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to create a lot of my own work.

Tell me about The Playground Collective. How was it formed and why?

Myself and Eli, who wrote and who stars in our latest show, All Your Wants and Needs Fulfilled Forever - we are both childhood friends. We grew up together and went to high school together. After a year away where I trained in devising in the UK I approached him and said I wanted to start a company - he said ‘great, I’ve got an idea for our first show.’ Fast forward 8 years, now we’ve made 8 different works, toured around the country, and now internationally.

Has it evolved since you started it? And how do you keep it going?

Definitely, I think that’s really important. I like that we’re hard to pin down, once we’ve learnt something we don’t tend to flog that trick for long, we leapfrog it on to the next thing - I think we’re always looking for new challenges and we challenge each other quite a lot too, to look for something more purposeful and relevant.

How long have you worked with Eli now? At what stage in the process of writing do you get involved? And then at what stage do you get other collaborators, such as actors and designers, involved?

Oh dear, yes no -- I’m afraid this is not quite the right way to look at it! I think a lot of theatre gets stuck in this old ‘the writer writes - the actors act - end of story’ and you end up with very stale work. Work that needs to be worked hard to get it off the page, and onto the stage in an interesting way. We don’t work like that at all. Me and Eli built this work from the start right from the ground up together. And barely a word was written when we got in the room with the actors. We also have a great relationship with our designer Sam Trubridge where he helps shape the dramaturgy by offering design tools that show ideas far better than words ever could say, so we’re all in the rehearsal room together shaping the work. So the full script arrived in the last week of six weeks of full-time rehearsal, by which point the actors already knew their lines because we’d created all the pieces together. In some ways the script is just there for the lighting operator at the back -- that’s not to diminish Eli’s fantastic work as a writer, boy oh boy is he working hard to shape what everyone is coming up with, but it’s more of a cohesive process - building a show, rather than staging a play.

How long does it take to develop a show like All Your Wants And Needs Fulfilled Forever?  Do you have a process, or is it pretty organic?

We usually find several pieces of source material as a key inspiration to start with; with this one it was a novel + a piece of writing by David Foster Wallace, and a technique for writing and analyzing story that we wanted to really unpack. So from there we generated material with the team through devising and improvising, and started to hone in on key moments, or devices we knew were going to be useful. At a certain point we both reorient ourselves from generating, into curating the material we’ve created - finding the gaps and opportunities and filling them in. Even now, two years on from its first debut, we’re still picking at it, making little changes to make it better.

I see that many of your shows have a long life, with remounts and touring productions. How do you facilitate this?

Yes this is really important - there is a lethal culture in New Zealand theatre where we don’t tour our work. We make things, put them on once, and then abandon them. I think its really important to try and get ‘sweat equity’--  to reap the equivalent reward for all the hard work you’ve put in to developing it. Taking it to New York really taught me about producing, something that I had been fortunate, in a way, to have avoided until this point in my career. Bringing it to Q has been a lot more comfortable in a way!

The Playground Collective is now reaching out internationally. How has that happened and do you have tips for other small companies that want to do the same?

We were very fortunate to be part of a large group of kiwi’s who participated in the New Zealand New Performance Festival New York. We’re a tight knit community in NZ who all know each other and all work on each others shows so there is a lot of cross over and cost savings if you can team up the way we all did. It would have been impossible for any of us to have taken just ourselves overseas, without having done that before, but being able to support each other made it all possible. Long may that continue! Join forces and share the load!

What was the reception in New York for All Your Wants And Needs Fulfilled Forever?

It was fantastic to take our work overseas, especially to come home with a four and a half star review. It really felt like we were bench-marking ourselves internationally. I don’t think we know it but the work we’re making in NZ is as sophisticated as anywhere else. Seeing work too from some of the giants in the USA - my sense is that there’s no gulf of talent or skill between us and them - they just have more time, more money, and more audiences to support them.

Do you make work outside of The Playground Collective?

The PlayGround Collective has really been my focus, and right now I’m aiming on getting the shows we have done already, seen and staged across the country and offshore. I like to assist others in shaping their work and offer myself as a dramturg and script developer on occasion - as I realize I’ve cultivated a certain set of skills that are unique and useful to others - so I try and give back to others as much as I can when asked.

What's next for you?

This year I’ve participated in Momentum which is a Creative New Zealand and British Council initiative that sent me to the UK - so am currently looking at opportunities there to collaborate or present some of our work there. Exciting times!