Well-known Fringe favourite, Interactive Theatre International, has a massive year coming up in 2022. Not only are they celebrating 25 years as a company, they are also celebrating 15 years of their sell-out show, Faulty Towers The Dining Experience as well as 10 years of that show being performed as a resident show on London’s West End. On top of that, they are also bringing two new shows to Adelaide: Confetti & Chaos and a children’s show, Roald Dahl And The Imagination Seekers.
Monique Lewis Reynolds has been performing with Interactive Theatre International (ITI) for the past 7 years, and is once again returning to Adelaide to play the iconic Sybil Faulty in Faulty Towers The Dining Experience, as well as a multitude of characters in Confetti & Chaos. I caught up with Monique ahead of her very busy Adelaide season to talk about both shows and what has made ITI such a longstanding company.
“When a company is running successfully (and an Australian-born company as well) for 25 years, you have a group of people and collaborators that know how to nail things and get it all right. Starting with Faulty Towers The Dining Experience, they were incredibly lucky to have a wonderful, iconic show that they could pick up some incredible characters from and that just worked in the immersive and interactive forum. They have just been able to work shows from there over the last 25 years, with this wonderful baseline of being able to do shows over and over again across the world and having direct audience feedback. You instantly see their reactions and can go “wow that worked” or “we need to tweak this and make it better” and move on from there. We’ve had incredible actors who have worked for the company over those 25 years in all the different shows and they are actors, performers and production people that have stayed. We probably have one of the best histories for employees that have longevity with the company. We have people who were there at the very beginning. I myself am in my 7th year with the company. It’s really extraordinary that people stay. It’s a combination of the company being great to work for, as well as these shows having so much life and energy, as well as movement and change. We all stay around and keep coming back for more.”
Playing the iconic Sybil Faulty must be a dream job, as well as working in a very fluid style show. I was keen to find out from Monique where it all started for her. What led her into the world of performing arts?
“I was one of those kids that was constantly entertaining people. My Mum tells a wonderful story from when I was growing up in the Hunter Valley area in NSW, where I was caught once in the window-front of David Jones in Hunter St Mall putting on a show with the mannequins. So, with that history I think it was a career I was destined to do. My passion early on was singing, and I was working towards a professional career as an opera singer, and then landed a wonderful job in a musical, Disney’s Beauty And The Beast in Melbourne (the professional production), and then veered off into the musical theatre world for quite some time. It was something I was always going to do, coming around to do Faulty Towers, and playing Sybil Faulty. She is such an iconic role. I grew up watching the show with my family, and I would never have guessed that that was what I was going to be doing for the last 7 years of my professional working career. It’s such a great fit for me, and I love the character and the idea of interactive audiences. It’s a completely different show every night.”
After 15 years of performing Faulty Towers in Adelaide, what is it about the magic of this show that keeps audiences coming back year after year?
“We get a lot of audiences come back because they grew up with that sort of comedy – that slap-stick style of comedy, along with the British humour that was flooded on our TV screens here in Australia for so long. But what is really interesting is we get all of these younger audiences, or older families bringing their children and their children’s children. They love getting them involved in these very interesting characters that have really stood the test of time. I know the humour can be a little inappropriate in our day and age, but it’s really nice to step into the space and take your appropriate current hat off, leave it at the door and enjoy the humour, the comedy and the laughs for what they are. They are endearing characters that people can identify with. I would be a very rich woman for every man in the room who would say to me, “I have my own Sybil at home”. People also just love Manuel; they want to back the little under dog who has to fight through adversity each night.”
WIth all interactive theatre, the audience is a huge part of the show. The magic of this show is that you can participate as little or as much as you want to. But with COVID and social distancing, how has the show had to be adapted since 2020?
“We’ve been a lucky company to be able to manage and adapt things as well as we have, because we’ve been able to work right through COVID apart from the massive lockdowns. When things started to open again we were a company who was able to get in and work again. We adapted our script in a really interesting way. The Manuel character in particular had to be adapted a lot because his physical comedy is very close to people. Because we’ve had to change the script and ideas on how we work things in a different score, we’ve actually come away with something that most of us are all saying is a better show than we had pre-COVID. I guess we get an opportunity at the opening of the show where we get to greet the guests as we open the door in a different way to how the initial set up was, and the audience gets to know Basil and Sybil’s relationship quite quickly. A lot of audiences who are, as I call them, ‘repeat offenders’ because they come back year after year, have said they love the big change. From an acting perspective, working out how you deal with keeping your distance from the audience has been a great challenge.”
ITI’s Confetti & Chaos is a new show at this year’s Adelaide Fringe. Like Faulty Towers The Dining Experience, Confetti & Chaos is a dining show, with the show unfolding around the audience throughout the meal.
“There are four people in this show, and we all play multiple characters. It’s a surprise wedding for Will and Stacey, and the couple have no idea that Stacey’s parents are putting on this wedding for them. The guests very quickly work out that they are thrown into this mayhem. A lot of the audience are family members who have been dragged along to this quick put together wedding. A lot of stuff can go wrong in this show – a rogue relative might turn up, family secrets. It has a lot that audiences can relate to from weddings they might have attended. There’s a lot of chaos, hence the name ‘Confetti & Chaos’. It’s a fantastic show. It’s a good look at slightly dysfunctional families that are trying to put their best foot forward on a wedding day. The beauty of the show is at the end of it all, it’s a show that is full of an amazing amount of heart and spirit. The characters have this beautiful amount of love for each other in amongst the chaos and dysfunction. It’s incredibly funny and works brilliantly as an immersive dinner. It’s also very constant; it’s 2 hours and 15 minutes of constant activity.”
Faulty Towers The Dining Experience will feature Monique Lewis Reynolds as Sybil Faulty, Jack Newell is Basil and Nicholas Richard is Manuel. It is running until Sunday 13 March at The Terrace Hotel, South Terrace.
Tickets for Faulty Towers can be purchased from FringeTix or at https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/faulty-towers-the-dining-experience-af2022
Confetti & Chaos features the Faulty Towers cast joined by Rebecca Fortuna. Confetti & Chaos will be running between March 16 and 20 at The Terrace Hotel, South Terrace.
Tickets for Confetti & Chaos can be purchased from FringeTix or at https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/confetti-and-chaos-af2022 .
Interview by Ben Stefanoff
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