One man. One Arthurian legend. Far too many knights, kings, queens, wizards, battles, horses and questionable decisions. One Man King Arthur is the legendary tale of Camelot retold by one performer who creates the characters, voices, sound, set, props and world of Arthur entirely live, with a lot of physical comedy, and a little bit of nonsense and absolutely no room backstage for a horse. Fringe Review’s Dr.Pants talks with King Arthur (Sam Gibbs) about his upcoming one-man show. It is on during the Colchester Fringe October 22 – 25.
NAP: Hello Sam! Let’s start with will be, based on the title of your show, a fairly obvious question. What is One Man King Arthur? What can we expect?
SG: It’s about King Arthur, which means, depending on which version of the story you’ve read, it is about swords, sorcery, destiny, betrayal, romance, honour, knights, quests, the Holy Grail and quite a lot of people wandering around looking for something. Our version follows a young Arthur as he discovers his destiny and attempts to unite a divided Britannia. Along the way we meet Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere and a whole host of other characters, all played by one increasingly busy performer. At its heart, though, it’s a story about what happens when we try to do the right thing in a world that is considerably more complicated than we would like it to be.
NAP: Why King Arthur? Haven’t we already got enough stories about King Arthur?
SG: Probably. But that’s exactly why I wanted to do it.
The Arthurian legends are so deeply embedded in our culture that everyone arrives with some version of Arthur already in their head. The fun is taking that familiar story and putting it through the Autojeu machine – stripping it down, building it back up and seeing what happens when one performer has to carry the whole thing. It’s also a story about trying to create unity out of division, which feels like a pretty useful story to be telling at the moment.
NAP: The only things I know about King Arthur are from Cunk on Britain. Do I need to go in knowing anything about King Arthur?
SG: You don’t need to know anything about King Arthur.
You don’t need to have read Le Morte d’Arthur, watched every version of Camelot or know the difference between Lancelot and Galahad. You just need to enjoy watching a performer attempt to convince you that one person is simultaneously an entire medieval kingdom. It’s silly, physical and energetic, but there’s a proper story underneath it. And if you already know the Arthurian legends, there are plenty of things to spot, recognise and play with.
Basically: come and watch one man try to do the work of an entire theatre company.
NAP: Why did you decide to perform at Colchester Fringe? That’s a far way from Camelot.
SG: I love small-scale touring and I love festivals because they give us the chance to put work in front of people who might not necessarily have gone looking for it. Autojeu Theatre has always been interested in finding playful ways to tell stories and sharing them with as wide an audience as possible. Colchester Fringe feels like a great place for that. I have always watched the Colchester Fringe happening from afar and felt I was missing out not taking part so am very excited to have the opportunity to experience it for the first time this year.
NAP: What makes your show unique compared to the other plays on at Colchester Fringe?
SG: There are probably quite a few shows, quite a few one person shows at the Fringe. There probably aren’t quite so many where that same person also plays Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, the knights, the villains, the horses, makes the sound effects, creates the scenery, operates the special effects (please note I use this term incredibly loosely!) and generally tries to keep the whole of Camelot from falling apart.
The show is part storytelling, part physical comedy and part theatrical game. The audience gets to see the world being created in front of them, rather than having everything hidden away backstage.
It’s very much in the Autojeu tradition of taking a big story and asking: how little do we actually need to tell it? Then making that little bit work ridiculously hard.
NAP: Doing a one-man show is not easy. You’re alone on stage for an hour. The only person you can rely on is yourself. What has been the biggest challenge for you in doing this show?
SG: Remembering who I’m supposed to be in the midst of a semi-scripted, semi-improvised storytelling-melee!
The hardest thing about a one-person show is that you don’t have anyone else on stage to pick up the ball when you drop it. Everything has to happen live. The challenge is making all of that look effortless while simultaneously remembering lines, characters, choreography, props, sound, lights and approximately seventeen different voices. I try to remember that the audience doesn’t need to see the machinery working. They just need to believe in the game.
NAP: Speaking of your audience, what are you hopeful audiences will leave your show feeling or doing?
SG: I’d like them to leave having had a really good time.
Hopefully they’ll have laughed, been surprised, maybe rediscovered a story they thought they already knew, and perhaps looked at the idea of one-person theatre slightly differently.
More than anything, I want audiences to leave feeling that they have shared something with us.
There’s something wonderful about sitting in a room with a group of strangers and, for an hour, agreeing to believe in the world infront of them.
NAP: Why make one-person theatre?
SG: Because I like the challenge of taking something enormous and asking how we can make it work with almost nothing. I love the moment when an audience realises that the thing they are watching is being created right in front of them. A sound becomes a sword. A gesture becomes a character. A chair becomes a throne. A performer becomes an army. It’s essentially theatre as a game – and I think we sometimes forget how much fun that can be.
NAP: And what happens when you put one performer in charge of an entire kingdom?
SG: Eventually someone has to be the horse.
And yes, I am the horse.
“One Man King Arthur” is on during the Colchester Fringe Thursday 22 October – 7:00pm, Saturday 24 October – 7:00pm, and Sunday 25 October – 6:00pm. Be sure to check out our other Colchester Fringe interviews in the coming weeks including our interviews out already with radio comedian Mitch Benn, Finnish comedian Jenni Nikinmaa’s “Sheep!”, or Fringe Review’s very own Dr.Pants with his show: “(a play in a) DARK ROOM.”
