Within minutes of meeting the cast of The Night Heron, they led me into a dark, dingy cellar and started taking their kit off. I was hoping to expose many details of the production, but I’d uncovered far more than I’d anticipated. I was assured that this was not the norm for every rehearsal; today they were trying on their costumes. They were a weird assortment of outfits - a police costume, willies, pyjamas, a tight black mini skirt, and an old lady’s coat. Everyone was very shifty whenever I asked them about the plot of the play, mumbling something about dark comedy. At one point a seemingly random man turned up to ask if they still needed him to appear, stark naked, in the middle of the production. They debated whether to make him wear underwear. I personally always find nudity adds an element of excitement to a production, but I kept this thoughtful observation to myself.

While the cast are performing an energetic game of zip-zag-boing, the staple of any hard-hitting production, I speak to the show’s director Naomi Obeng. A quick Google of the play revealed a recurring theme of ‘religious symbolism’, so I found it wryly amusing that Naomi, Hebrew for ‘sweet’ and ‘agreeable’, lives up to her namesake. Softly spoken, she was quietly enthused as I tried to draw her out on the mysterious production.

I open with an easy question; tell me about the play. “That’s surprisingly a difficult question,” Naomi answers. “It’s a very complex play, and every time I think about it, it means something else and it’s a different play to me. The main idea is that there are two ex-college gardeners and they live in the Fens and they are on the fringes of society. They are poor and it’s winter. They take on a lodger to get some income, and the play unfolds from there.

“It’s full of symbolism, it’s full of crazy things, and it’s very funny. It’s a play that you won’t see anywhere else. It was written by Jez Butterworth; people will know his other stuff like Jerusalem and Mojo. This was his second play, written in 2002, and it hasn’t been performed very often. It’s set in Cambridge, so it shouldn’t be something that’s unfamiliar to us. The things that they say and the jokes that they make about Cambridge will make people laugh, but also wonder about their role in it all, as students who are on the other side of it. There’s definitely a separation between town and gown, and here we’re considering a story of people that we see in college but we never really hear about. I really like that. I’ve often wondered what the college gardeners get up to.”

I ask whether working on the play has changed her outlook at all. “Like I said, every time I think about it it’s different. The first time I read it, I thought ‘This is really shocking, these characters are just horrible, horrible people.’ And then when I started casting, and we’ve had actual physical people playing them, I’ve become more sympathetic, particularly to the character Bolla. She’s a lodger in the gardeners’ home. When I read it I just couldn’t understand her, but now that we’ve been going through her character development I can understand where she’s coming from. In a way that’s a bit worrying, because if you see what she does in the play you think that her actions aren’t particularly justified. She’s just come out of prison and she has a past, and she gets up to some shenanigans in the play.

“We’ve got some really great actors who are really excited about all the potential in their characters. Putting it together has just been a case of really working out who these people are and where they are coming from, because all of them do some questionable things. They’re being pushed to the edge. We’ve still got a lot of questions about these people, and I think that’s really cool. There’s a lot of uncertainty written into the script, and it’s been really fun testing that out. It’s definitely been exciting to have the input of all of the actors on their characters and also their other characters. You can’t really think about all of the characters’ headspace when you’re reading it, but when you’ve got people defending their corner because they are playing this character it’s a lot easier to see the different sides of the story. And that’s opened it up to playing a story that’s really multi-faceted. And funny! It’s definitely funny.”

I ask what Naomi thinks about the Cambridge theatre scene. This is usually when directors launch into a gushing speech about how much they love all of the productions at the ADC, but again Naomi surprises me. “With a lot of stories, like Shakespeare and the classics that are really well-known, you know what happens and they are stock-characters. There’s no suspense.
With this the characters are not characters that you really see in any literature: An ex-jailbird who has moved out into the marshes of Cambridgeshire, two college gardeners who no longer go to church and stay in this cabin and catch rabbits at night. It’s so close to home and it’s surprising because it’s not what we expect to see on stage, and it’s intricate and complex.

I picked this play because when I read it, nothing about it felt inevitable. Everything felt like a shock or surprise, and you were on the edge of your seat when you were reading it, and I want to bring that to the stage. I felt like if I was going to direct a play it has to be something that makes people think, not something that you just watch and it doesn’t affect you when you leave the theatre. It presents a world that’s very shocking.”

Is there a message that she wants the audience to take away? “I don’t want to put particular thoughts in their mind, but I definitely want them to be affected by it, and that comes from being immersed by this world that we are creating. It’s set in this wooden cabin in the middle of the Fens, with the wind and the rain and the elements. We’re bringing a lot of exciting soundscapes to it, to bring that world into the Corpus Playroom. I just want people to be immersed in it. When I watch plays I want them to make me think, and I don’t mind what they want me to think, but I want them to stay with me.

What we’re trying to do is present truth on stage. It’s about religion, belonging, being an outsider, all sorts of things. There’s a lodger who comes and wants to find a place in society, there are gardeners who have been kicked out of their garden. They are people who are socially ostracised. Hopefully people will come and be very surprised. I want people to feel something.”

The Night Heron is on at 7pm from Tue 1st March 2016 - Sat 5th March 2016 at the Corpus Playroom.