Interview: Alex Knott & James Demaine, of Bag of Beard Theatre

What's the story and the ethos behind Bag of Beard Theatre?

Alex Knott: We met at Italia Conti drama school, where we trained together. We graduated in 2016 and almost straight away we became two thirds of Bag of Beard Theatre – the other third being our director, Ryan Hutton. We started the company because we didn’t want to wait for the phone to ring. We wanted to make theatre and create our own work.

James Demaine: I kind of hitchhiked into it. It was Ryan and Alex who originally started the company, and through being involved in skits and plays over the years I became a more solid part of it. Now I’m the Associate Director, which happened pretty organically. There’s also a fourth person, Sam, who did a lot of the original music.

AK: The ethos of Bag of Beard is: original words and original music. We devise a lot of our work by sharing the writing – I’ll write a bit, James will write a bit, sometimes Ryan will write a bit – and then we come back together to shape it into a script…We also work quite a lot with our sister company, Boxless Theatre, which is run by Zoe Grain, who is the producer of this play.  There’s a lot of cross-pollination of ideas.

JD: With Bag of Beard there’s a dark vein that runs through most of the plays. We did one by a playwright called David Spencer about a soldier who was trapped under a hotel that exploded, and the whole play kind of takes place in his memories…this one’s about a vampire - this one is the first all-out comedy.

Tell us about 'The Highgate Vampire'...

JD: I heard about the true story of the Highgate Vampire, which happened in the 1970s. There were reported sightings of a strange entity in Highgate Cemetery, and two men – a bishop and an occult practitioner – became locked in this very public feud about how to deal with it. They absolutely hated each other, but both were trying to destroy whatever this thing was.

I brought that story to Alex, who had been working on something totally different, and the play just started writing itself.

AK: We immediately fictionalised the names [Bishop Patrick Sheffield and Daniel Farringdon] and started improvising. Very quickly we came up with the idea that these two characters had put aside their differences for one night only to tell their story as a kind of lecture to the people of London. That’s what audiences see when they come to the show.

JD: We went to Highgate Cemetery, got a sense of the place, decided a rough plot, then divided the scenes between us to write separately. When we came back together, we reshaped everything into a single voice and finished it together.

AK: Often we makes changes to each other’s work. James brought in this long, well-researched section about how to slay a vampire…

JD: I brought in an essay!

AK: And I suggested turning it into a song – which became the ukulele number. That contrast between James’s character, who brings in a bag of props, and mine, who wants a serious academic lecture, is where a lot of the comedy comes from.

The play is obviously based in London, and has a very distinctive vibe to it; What does London mean to you both?

JD: London was the first place that ever really felt like home to me outside of Yorkshire. I was drawn to it through theatre, music, and the mythology – Dickens, Jack the Ripper, The Libertines. There’s a version of London that exists in my head with lamplit streets and turned-up collars, and in a way that’s the London that lives inside this play.

AK: London is where life began for me. Italia Conti was my first real taste of artistic life, and everything we’ve done since has been trying to recapture that spirit of just getting on and making things. My wife and I have lived in south London for twelve years now and it really feels like home. I love how the city layers itself – Dickensian streets, Brutalism, skyscrapers, Roman walls, St Paul’s – it’s all there at once.

JD: one of the exciting things about doing this play, The Highgate Vampire, is that it gives a little bit of London folklore that people might not know about - although it has a cult status among those who do - and we’re keeping it alive in a way. Because it only happened in the 1970s, there are people who actually remember it; we met friends of the people our characters are based on - these old hippies with pony tails…

AK: And they re-iterated our slogan to us: “More of this is true than we would like”!

What culture is calling you?

AK: I’ve been going back to the writers who inspired me originally – Harold Pinter and subsequently Jez Butterworth, who both have a very London 'flavour', and a very folkloric Englishness. I’m also really into minimalist writers like Annie Baker. I’m drawn to a kind of esoteric minimalism which we have explored a little bit so far - but this one has lots of jokes, rather than words like ‘esoteric minimalism’...

JD: I’ve been rewatching lots of versions of A Christmas Carol - I really like the George C Scott and Patrick Stewart versions. We even did our own Bag of Beard version from the point of view of Bob Cratchit, which feels very Bag of Beard - exploring the darker side of London. In terms of our approach, we take very much from Italia Conti, which was focused on that grass-roots, threadbare, ‘get on and do it, and when you’re finished have a pint’ school of theatre.

AK:  there’s a really enterprising, grass-roots, Italia Conti graduate company called The New Rep Theatre - they’re trying to bring back the old-school idea of repertory theatre; the same cast or ensemble of actors who will do plays back to back. They’ve done A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Doll’s House, a whole range of stuff. In terms of grass-roots, independent work, they are definitely ones to watch.

Following their run at Clapham's Omnibus Theatre, Bag of Beard Theatre are now taking ‘The Highgate Vampire’ to Marylebone's The Cockpit Theatre between January 28th and February 1st