By Kat Mokrynski

Do you like people watching? Do you ever watch people walking past you on the street, wondering what is going on in their mind? Well, what if you had a one way mirror in your home, giving you the chance to people watch as you please without anyone knowing? Jonathan Oldfield’s new show, One Way Mirror, explores exactly that. The show, based on Oldfield’s own experiences with a one-way mirror in his home, gives audiences the choice of whether to interact with what they see or not, making an interactive theatrical experience out of a one-man show.

Recently, I had the chance to interview Jonathan about his upcoming run of One Way Mirror at Pleasance London later this month. We talked about how he first got started in comedy and theatre, what it’s been like to be both an actor and the owner of a theatre company, and some relatable content about being an extroverted introvert!

How did you first get into the world of comedy and theatre?

So I went to Edinburgh University and I studied languages there – I did Spanish and Italian. But I partly went there because I knew about the Edinburgh Fringe and I knew that they had a very good student theatre scene there. I got involved with The Improverts up in Edinburgh, which is the longest-running improv troupe at the Fringe – It’s been going for 30 plus years now. And that was like a baptism by fire of comedy because we would do four rehearsals a week, a show every Friday, and then we do a show during Fringe time at half midnight every night. You learnt how to deal with hecklers, to deal with audiences, to improvise, to be funny, and what makes you funny. You would blast out different characters and different concepts and different ideas, and then you’d throw it all away. That was a real education in what that looked like. So from there, I started to make shows. I made a clown duo that went to the Fringe a couple of times, I did improv shows at Fringe, I did theatre shows, interactive and immersive shows, in Edinburgh and at the Fringe. And then I left university and wasn’t quite sure what to do! [Laughs] So I did another job for a bit. I worked as a presenter in kids schools, so I would travel around and present stuff. And as I was presenting, I was realizing that my favorite bit was the presenting and not the education bit. So then I trained as an actor at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – I did a two-year postgraduate course there. And now I balance my sort of acting work in theatre, TV, film, radio, and voiceover with my theatre company, with my own work and the stuff that I like to make, which is mostly blending that barrier between theatre and comedy and cabaret, and just getting as close as I can to an audience getting involved in a show, basically.

So how did you get started with your own theatre company, PillowTalk Theatre?

Me and my partner, Lorna Rose Treen, who set up the theatre company, we were just doing shows up at the Fringe under our own name and we were making work here and there. We realized we needed a website to put it all in, so we were just like, “Well, let’s put it all under one theatre company, and then we can make whatever we want!” So we basically accidentally created a theatre company! [Laughs] 

On brand for comedy, right?

Exactly! I guess we’ve accidentally formed a child beast, who is now a theatre company. 

[Laughs]

And we weren’t really sure what it was going to do, except that we knew we wanted to make work that was in theatre, that was in comedy, that could go anywhere, and that was for audiences to be together and to get involved. We liked making a mess on stage, we liked improvising, we liked clowning, and so we knew that was our basis for it. We just decided to build it, but when the pandemic hit, which was not that long after we started the theatre company, we had to suddenly widen our scope massively. So we made stuff for families and for kids, we made an interactive story in a park for kids, we made a Zoom play that was coproduced by Disentangle Projects, we made a an interactive story pack for kids at home in conjunction with Corn Exchange Newbury . . . We just started making loads of other stuff that we never thought we’d make because all of the theatres were closed. And from there, it just kind of grew! Now we run workshops, improv shows, theatre shows, comedy nights, we do whatever we can.

What is it like being the owner of a company and also participating in its work?

It’s tough! I’ve learned accidentally to be an accountant, a programmer, a business manager, and a website runner. You learn how to do all those things because you have to. But the main thing is that I feel very happy that we’ve got a place where we find people who we like, people who we are inspired by, people who are creative, and we bring them together. Sometimes we do stuff with five people, sometimes we do it with ten people . . . We run the Whitechapel Arts Showcase which is a week-long theatre and comedy festival, so sometimes we bring in hundreds of people! The main thing is that we just look around and we go, “Who do we like and let’s bring them into our into a little hug and give them a space to play, to explore, and to experience.” With Whitechapel Arts Showcase, it’s mostly female and non-binary early careers artists, for example. With improv, it’s people who we like to improvise with. It’s whatever it is for the project.

So what is your solo show, One Way Mirror, about? 

One Way Mirror started during the pandemic. I live in a property guardianship which is a disused solicitor’s office on an East London high street. So it looks, sounds, and acts like a solicitor’s office. It’s got all of the signage that says it’s a solicitor’s office, it looks like an office inside, it feels like an office. And crucially, our front window is a one way mirror onto the high street, so people walk past and they see themselves, and I’m inside and I can see that. So I spent two years over the pandemic watching people go by. I watched some people go by once, I’ve watched some people come by every week . . . I started to build a little book with stories and people who came past. And I realized over the pandemic that I’m an extroverted introvert and I like to people watch. I felt a bit creepy at times, but I also realized that, especially during the pandemic, it was the safest place to be because I had two inches of thick glass between me and them. They couldn’t see me, but I could see them. It’s also very, very soundproof, so I could shout at them, and they would not hear me. 

[Laughs]

So I was like, “Okay, there’s something funny and interesting that speaks to wider themes.” What I like to do with my storytelling is look at little individual moments with characters and how they resonate to an audience on a much larger scale, on a much larger level. So a show that I made a couple of years ago called I Just Want Someone to Know I Was Here, which went to the Edinburgh Fringe with A Play, A Pie and A Pint, won an award down here in London, had a run at The Actors Centre. That was about this box that was lost in the ocean, but it was actually the wider things where it was about death, memory, legacy, objects, and ideas. And so with this, it’s about a mirror and some people who walk past a mirror, but it’s also about connection, seeing, being seen, about whether you want to connect with others or whether you don’t. The wonderful people at Elevate East, I got involved with their Stuck in the Lift artists development programme. I did a 20-minute scratch night in 2021, which was two years ago now, just as we were coming out of a pandemic, which was really, really great, important, and useful. And then I got a little bit of funding from from something called the Interactive Soup Fund, which helped me to get some audio equipment to develop the show a little bit more. And then I did a 20-minute scratch night at Theatre Royal Stratford East, and then a “Work in Progress” at Camden People’s Theatre. And now here we are, getting ready for the Pleasance run!

It mentioned on the site that the show is interactive – How do you plan on bringing that into One Way Mirror while still having it be scripted?

I think it’s the improviser in me who likes to be challenged by an audience and likes to give an audience control. But also, as I was coming out the pandemic, I realized that the kinds of things I was enjoying watching in theatre made me feel like, as an audience member, hat what we were watching that night is never going to be the same again. As in our presence in the room, and the actor’s presence in the room, made a special kind of chemistry, which meant this is the only night that it’s going to be this way, which is true of all theatere, right? Audiences will laugh in different places, cry in different places, applaud or not applaud in different places. And so I wanted to create an interactive show where audiences really felt like they had control over what was happening in the show, that they had agency and were involved. And also was okay for both extroverts and introverts, becauseI’m aware that a lot of interactive work can really favour extroverts. And for introverts, or people who want to get involved but don’t want to speak out, how can we make sure that they also have a voice and they have agency in the show? And for a show that itself was about hiding behind a mirror, that felt like quite a useful parallel – The performer on stage talking about hiding behind a one way mirror and then giving an audience the choice whether they wanted to hide behind a mirror or come and join the show felt like quite a nice parallel to help with that. 

So how do you separate your own story and the story that you’re telling within the show? Do you try to keep a balance between those two? 

I like to create work where the truth of how I’ve entered into the world of the story is truthful. And it’s truthful, it’s truthful, it’s truthful, and then at a certain point, it’s not truthful anymore. It’s fictional, it’s magical, and it’s theatrical. And I like, with an audience, to find that that moment where it goes, “This is a true story, and then maybe it’s not anymore.” And sometimes that’s because I’m changing the truth of the story, sometimes it’s because I want the audience to take me away from truth. But I think that interplay is really interesting, where the truth of what’s happening has inspired something that’s a bit magical realist, that takes me out of the real world. Because, as I’m sure you can probably guess, living behind a one way mirror is really nice and pretty magical. Some wild stuff does happen. But the wildest stuff happens in my imagination whilst I’m standing there. And that’s where I’d like an audience to come and get involved. If I could find a way through the true story to help an audience connect to my imagination and their imaginations more, then that’s the magical bit for me. 

What do you hope audiences take away from the show?

I hope that audiences will think about in what moments they want to connect to other people and in what moments they don’t. I think part of the show is about presenting the audiences with stories where they have a choice – Whether they want to interact with what’s happening outside the mirror or stay where they are. I think that we do this in our life all the time, especially in London, where somebody could be like, throwing up on the Tube, and everyone around will be ignoring them. What are the points, especially living in London, especially now in 2023, where we’ve spent a couple of years not interacting with people and legally not touching people or talking to people, what are the points in which you as a person can go, “Actually, no. I’m going to talk to this person. I’m going to interact.” And what are the moments where I don’t? I hope that they have a laugh, I hope that they have a think, I hope that they get a bit scared – It’s a bit spooky at times! I hope that they come back again, that they want to come back again to see how it happens next time, or that they want to see how the show develops and come back in a different place at a different time with a different idea. 

And what do you want to take away from the show?

I would like to see what happens when I set up a show and then give as much control as I can  to the audience that’s there that night. I want to see where they want to go. So I would love to see, across the run, wildly different endings to the show, wildly different ideas of what it should look like. I saw this a little bit in the work in progress already, that the ending of the show did not go how expected. It’s very hard to rehearse interactive theater because you don’t have an audience until suddenly you do, which is why the work in progress was so useful. But I’d like to see what wild imaginations different audiences have and what wild places they want to take it.

And how would you describe the show in one word?

Oh no, an improviser’s nightmare! I think it’s reflection. Both because literally, there is a mirror on stage, and because of reflecting on what it is. It’s got to be reflection!

Thank you to Jonathan for the great interview! You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter as well as his theatre company, PillowTalk Theatre, on Instagram and Twitter as well.

One Way Mirror runs at the Pleasance London Downstairs from 29th June to 1st July with performances at 8:45 PM. The runtime is 60 minutes with an age restriction of 16+. Tickets can be purchased here.