Have you ever attended to a theatre performance and wondered what are some of the motifs and the strength behind a production? What directors might think when putting on a show and their own perspectives of a performance?

Sarah Thunder, the director and one of the featured performers in Therapy, is a Trinity alumna, having received her M Phil in Theatre and Performance in 2013. I sat down with her for coffee and a chat about her experiences working on this play with the Judder Theatre Company. The Judder Theatre Company aims to experiment new material written and created by its own members, and Therapy is a great example of this, as Sarah is not only involved with directing and acting, her brother, Morgan Thunder, wrote the play.

Due to the nature of the company as well as the familial connection,  as the director of Therapy, Sarah enjoys a close relationship with the playwright, Due to this, Sarah believes that she had a greater freedom when translating the written word to the stage, and essentially transmuting it into our physical reality. Thunder explained how Therapy has different levels of interpretation and how it had achieved different types of audience: those who can understand some deep philosophical and psychological concerns and those who are looking for an entertaining night out and pints.  

The theme of the play was mental health, and the way different perspectives on reality are subjective. Some of the themes evoke deep philosophical concerns: to what extent something is real or illusion? What is right or wrong? Who determines what reality is? Is psychological suffering  less important than physical suffering?

To portray these sentiments on stage the director highlights how the actor’s own life experience is important and here we can see the value of casting — as mentioned earlier, Sarah is one of the featured actors in the play, portraying the protagonist’s therapist, Ellen. Thunder also emphasizes that the actors need to find their own emotional truth which reminds me of some of Aristotle’s Poetics views on tragedy and how the suffering of the characters can teach and heal the audience through katharsis.

Finally, Thunder also talked about the freedom that new small theatre companies have in comparison to the traditional and bigger theatre companies which sometimes focus more on recreating art to attract a guaranteed certain type of audience. Judder Theatre Company is attempting to make theatre more inclusive to different types of audience members and exploring new ways of creating theatre for not only theatre but art should not be confined under the spectrum of business preoccupations.