Our Editor-in-Chief, Richard Beck, heard the title of Jake Mace's play, Deeptime Atomic Waste Pleasure Party and just had to find out more.
Hi Jake, let's start with some background to your company Elastic Fantastic.
Jake: Hi Richard – I put together Elastic Fantastic from a group of influential fellow storytellers I’d met in my career working in Fringe Theatre. In my eye, they’re some of the most fresh and exciting voices working in the industry, working across different media, from sound-scaping, to visual arts, synth-pop music, spoken word, storytelling and narrative film.
The intention in the company was to create dynamic and empowering multimedia stories skewed on a Queer axis. We’re a group of LGBTQ+ and allied storytellers looking to front and centre narratives that give us hope, that offer a sense of justice, but that are also high energy in presentation and (hopefully) very entertaining.
Your debut work, Deeptime Atomic Waste Pleasure Party, has a rather unfathomable and unusual name. What’s the story behind it?
Jake: Deeptime, as we call it for short, is the culmination of years of research about something called ‘nuclear semiotics’. In more clear terms, that’s the conundrum of how we communicate the dangers of buried nuclear waste to future generations – tens, hundreds, thousands of years into the future - even when our contemporary languages have broken down. I’ve seen many stories about the topic since we got started on this, and I noticed the thing that was missing was a discussion of the relationship between the body and deeply harmful radioactive material; stuff that we’re putting in the ground and expecting to stay there for hundreds of thousands of years.
So what sparked that original interest in exploring Nuclear Waste as the theme for a play?
Jake: When I was 19, my parents moved to a village close to Torness Nuclear Power Plant. I learnt that when it was being constructed in the late 1970s, there were protests with tens of thousands of people from all over Britain, and grassroots groups who occupied the site.
I was then in a nightclub in Edinburgh when I had a conversation with a stranger in the smoking area who had a fascination with Geiger counters. I spent the rest of the evening, relatively intoxicated it should be said, imagining a nightclub with a DJ trying to warn the party-goers about the dangers of buried radiation. The show is a culmination of those two things – an exploration of how our bodies can be used to block the imposition of nuclear sites on our communities and the envisioning of our own warning message to future generations about the dangers of radioactive waste.
The Director, Mike, and I have since travelled to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone among other nuclear-related sites to try and understand more, because this is a message for all of humanity to convey. Oh. And to be clear, the main character, Rey, gets up to a lot of hedonistic Queer stuff while we try and explore all of the philosophical stuff.
Those are quite hefty topics to handle. what is the main message the piece looks to get across?
Jake: Without spoiling too much, the piece is asking us to take a more compassionate look at how we communicate danger deep into the future. Right now, we are using clinical and academic tools to try to convey a message that is, in reality, quite distinctly human and emotive.
This was the pitch we put forward as part of our application for the Keep it Fringe Fund, which we very gratefully received £2,500 of funding from this year to make this exploration happen.
In the show we explore some of the answers that people have looked to provide already to communicate the dangers inherent in meddling with nuclear waste, from genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark cats to fabricating an entire organised religion , and we look to ask, "Where is the humanity in any of these messages?" How can we not only warn, but maybe also say sorry for what we’ve left behind?
Is the piece, in that way, anti-Nuclear?
Jake: I don’t think the piece is strictly against nuclear power, and I’m actually still rather on the fence on the issue, which is quite agonising after years of researching. Really. I think what we’re trying to convey is that it’s time to take more of a sense of responsibility for what we’re doing to the planet, and future generations, by pursuing nuclear power further. If we are going to build more nuclear sites, the surrounding communities need to be engaged and involved first, to start.
As Scotland and otherparts of Britain look toward providing a ‘just transition’ for workers engaged in oil and gas, we’re going to see a much greater discussion of nuclear power as a potential alternative. We want to get ahead of the game and say, “How are we making sure this is right for everyone involved? Now and in the millennia to come?”
I think I also want to stress that the piece is highly playful and at times, utterly absurd. We really want to explore the farthest corners of this topic, and that makes it one hell of a rollercoaster in just fifty minutes.
Fifty minutes certainly is a short period of time, though a satndar Fringe-size slot. Are you worried you’re taking on too much?
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt doing this show, it’s that the best messages cover a lot of ground in very little time.
And with that maxim for playwrights we'll wind up and wish you all the best with Deeptime.
