Yahoo News 'People need a laugh': the making of Lem ’N’ Ginge, a queer audio adventure quest
‘You’re sitting in a box by yourself, often screaming,” Ell Potter explains over Zoom. “Then you leave and everyone’s like, are you OK?” She shakes her head. “I was just pretending to fall from a great height.”
In March, theatre-makers Mary Higgins and Potter were in Edinburgh performing their show Hotter to dwindling audiences, as the threat of coronavirus loomed ever closer. With the closure of theatres resulting in an absence of ticket sales, a new commission gave the pair a chance to keep on creating, this time for radio. The result is the rollicking comedy and queer adventure-quest Lem ’N’ Ginge: The Princess of Kakos.
Vibrant and bawdy, Lem ’N’ Ginge is a whirlwind story of two out-of-work actors in the mystical land of Kakos. In return for a hefty reward, the pair agree to go on a magical quest to find a princess’s lost voice. Fed up with the assumption that the prince always gets the princess, Lem ’N’ Ginge queers the traditional fairytale setup and toys with the trope of the desirable mute woman. The four-part series conjures Shrek 2’s brazen humour and leans on the twisted fairytales of Angela Carter, without ever erring from the crude, kinetic comedy that is becoming Higgins and Potter’s trademark.
The pair became names on the fringe theatre scene with their show Hotter, a celebration of bodies and queerness. Two years later they followed with Fitter, a greasy duet with the earlier piece that focused on masculinity. Having been exploring fairytales for their next show, they quickly realised during lockdown that they couldn’t make good theatre apart. “We tried,” Higgins says, “but it became more stifling than invigorating, because you don’t know when you’re going to be back on the stage, and that makes it feel quite futile.” Adjusting to audio was, she says, all about learning “how to preserve the energy of liveness, when you’re in a form that is pinned down”.
Lem ’N’ Ginge is part of a wider audio project co-produced by Ellie Keel Productions and 45North. Written on the Waves is designed to offer theatre-makers support while the industry struggles, and to provide an opportunity for playwrights to experiment with radio. “It was a chance to use people’s talents in a new way,” says Keel, who also produced Hotter and Fitter. “The possibilities of the form really opened up.”
The series consists of nine radio plays, to be released through the rest of the year, including A Passion Play by Margaret Perry, starring Nicola Coughlan (Derry Girls), and Nina Simone’s Four Negro Women, a piece based on the singer’s Four Women, written by Lettie Precious and directed by Adjoa Andoh.
On stage, a lot of Higgins and Potter’s comedy relies on visual imagery. To write that into audio work, they have based the sound around the idea of a camera angle. Potter says: “When we were writing, we were watching cartoons like Tuca & Bertie, to help us visualise what would be happening.” With the sound designer Tom Foskett-Barnes, with whom they worked on Fitter, they have created a riotous adventure with a bold sense of humour in dialogue and design. Video-game-like sound effects chirrup between scenes, and laughter-filled bloopers tailend each episode.
As well as the title characters, Lem and Ginge – their names borrowed from the common cure for sore throats – Higgins and Potter perform all but one of the roles in the search for the princess’s voice. The only other voice is the snarky narrator, brilliantly played by Sharon D Clarke. Having always written work for themselves, this is the first time the pair have had their words read aloud by someone else. “It’s hard to give notes to Sharon D Clarke,” Potter says with a laugh. “She’s an Olivier award-winning actress. What do I know?”
Just before lockdown, Potter had been working as a voice actor with BBC radio drama. “There are lots of different versions of Hardy novels and adaptations of Middlemarch,” she says carefully, “which there’s a time and a place for. But it’s exciting that there are lots of young theatre-makers at the moment who, with nowhere else to turn to for a creative output, are looking at things like radio theatre, and making them queer or fucking it up a little bit more. It’s hopefully opening it up to a different kind of audience.”
As the virus robbed them of their incomes, they both left their rented accommodation and moved back in with their parents. From working on audiobooks, Potter has all her recording equipment at home, spinning around excitedly to show off her fancy Isovox. Higgins hired her equipment and recorded it all in a cupboard. “It’s not really a walk in,” she says dryly, “but you could crawl in.” They are not used to creating work apart, and while they have sowed the seeds of lots of projects during lockdown, like most people in theatre, they are finding it tough. “I found making without the joys of socialising and touch and lunchbreaks together exhausting,” Higgins admits. They plan to move in together next year, so if they need to create work from home, they will be sharing one.
“Over and over again, I’ve sat in audiences who are watching their work,” says Keel, pinpointing why she commissioned them, “and seen the joy it brings people. I thought their work was what people needed at the moment. I thought people needed a laugh.”
