Preview: catch brilliant UK show Interiors in Shanghai

Photographs: courtesy Vanishing Point

Who among us hasn’t trudged through foul weather and cast longing looks towards the snug homes along the way? Who hasn’t seen children giggling around tables or couples cuddling on sofas, all happier than we are? With Interiors, creator/director Matthew Lenton transforms that human curiosity and longing into a brilliant drama. Set deep in the snow during (it is implied) Norway’s Yule dinner, held annually on the longest night of the year, we see a nervous host checking and rechecking his table. We see guests arriving one after another, peeling off layers, kicking snow from their boots and stowing their rifles brought to ward against creatures of the forest. Once inside, their sudden warmth is palpable. 'The bleak setting gives the celebration special meaning,' says Lenton. 'It’s when people need each other the most, when they can come together for a fleeting moment, to try to connect, try to share, try to touch. But all too soon they are gone, returning to the winter from whence they came,' he continues. 'Interiors is about the fullness of the moment in all its comedy and tragedy.'

This is underscored by the set’s snowy exterior and the impossibly cosy home. The host is an elderly widower who welcomes his eclectic group of friends and family – his granddaughter, nursing a hopeless crush, a friend who makes a disastrous declaration of love and a vegetarian who picks miserably at her food until the host remembers he left her meal in the kitchen. In a particularly hilarious moment, she uses this time to launch into a graphic description of animals in a slaughterhouse, as the rest of the guests dig into their meat.

How do we know this? Not by any spoken lines – Interiors is completely silent until a narrator’s voice floats through the darkness followed by a spectral figure appearing in the snow. She is an outside observer of the action – like us. But unlike us, she can hear their innermost thoughts. 'She identifies with being human and remembers once being human herself,' says Lenton. 'As a mechanism, she [communicates] the thoughts and intentions of the characters, making their actions pregnant with meaning. We see their intentions acted out,' he continues, 'often with funny and sometimes melancholy consequences.'

Reviewers have compared Interiors with Hopper’s painting The Nighthawks and Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, but Lenton says the main influence was Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Intérieur. This play also deals with a protagonist outside a house watching people within, and 'embodies the fundamental theme of voyeurism and the power of what the watcher knows compared to the innocence of those being watched,' says Lenton. He adds that both shows are different but have similar themes, such as 'innocence versus experience, voyeurism and loss. The difference is that Interiors is much funnier.'

But that makes the ending even more jarring. Just as you’re reflecting that your cheeks hurt from laughter, the dinner winds to a close and the characters start drifting out. But not before the ethereal narrator explains how and when each one will die. Not have children, change careers or move abroad, but die. But Lenton is not out to depress. 'Perhaps it is not about death, but rather how short and fleeting life is,' he says. 'I prefer to allow the audience to dream.' Bittersweet dreams, then!

📍Shanghai Grand Theatre, 300 Renmin Da Dao, near Huangpi Bei Lu. Thu 28 Nov-Sun 1 Dec. 80-500RMB. Extract the QR code to book. 

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