Interview with Ellen Jackson & Seamus Lavan

What happens when the American Dream comes with a sales target, a forced smile and 66 cars that absolutely must be sold before Monday? Welcome to Terry's: An American Tragedy About Cars, Customers, and Selling Cars to Customers, the absurdist comedy from BRILLIG Theatre that takes audiences into the wonderfully warped world of an American car dealership. Set over Memorial Day weekend, the show follows a motley team of salespeople desperately trying to meet their monthly target while navigating the demands of their overlord boss, Terry. Combining clowning, physical theatre, original music and Broadway-inspired musical numbers, the production transforms the language of sales and marketing into something both hilariously ridiculous and unsettlingly recognisable. Following its Brighton Fringe premiere and Edinburgh Fringe run, the show arrives at Pleasance London this October. I wanted to find out more from BRILLIG's Ellen Jackson and Seamus Lavan about the company's creative process, the inspiration behind this surreal dealership, and how to make audiences laugh while encouraging them to think about the human cost capitalism.

I'd love to start at the beginning. How did BRILLIG Theatre first come together, and what was it about this particular group of theatre-makers that inspired you to create original work together?

We met and trained together at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. As the school’s focus is largely on collaborative devising, we had occasion to make a lot of original work together over our two years in the program and knew that we wanted to keep working together after graduation. We were brought together by a common love of the absurd, dark humour, and clowning, but also recognized complimentary skillsets in the group’s make-up, such as experience in music, design, classical theatre, and production.

The show was initially inspired by the This American Life podcast episode ‘129 Cars’. What was it about that episode that caught your imagination, and how did its real-world material develop into the fictional world of Terry's Cars & Automobiles?

The podcast episode is tense, fast-paced, and full of hilarious, colourful characters. Each month in car selling starts with an arbitrary sales target handed down to the middle managers by the large, faceless company that runs all the dealerships in the country. Depending on how high the target is, the month is normally a scramble to meet this figure. Doing so means a generous bonus for the dealership and the sellers – often the difference between the business operating at a profit or a loss.

But no matter how high the target, or unconventional the efforts to meet it, at the end of each month the goal resets, and the process restarts. This cyclical structure informed our adaptation: our show starts midway through the month; the stress ramps up as the sellers approach the target; there's a moment of jubilation as they reach their goal late on the final night of the month; this is immediately followed by the crushing realisation that they'll start again from scratch tomorrow. The story is inherently tense, hopefully keeping the audience on tenterhooks.

The reporting also captures the dissonance between the camp, upbeat sales tactics designed to entice customers, and the profanity-laced "pep" talks the managers give behind the scenes when the team isn't selling fast enough. In the podcast, the team's efforts to meet the target become increasingly absurd: selling cars to the journalists reporting on them; selling cars to distant relatives on the other side of the country; buying a new car themselves. We found it a delightful challenge to transpose and exaggerate these into theatre, applying our own style to an industry that already feels larger than life.

The premise is simple but increasingly absurd: the team must sell 66 cars by Monday or face the consequences. How did you develop that deadline into the engine of the drama, and what does the pressure reveal about the people working at Terry's?

We structured the show over 4 days, marked for the audience by signs indicating how many days and cars remain and which literally grow in size as the deadline looms. This structure provided a clear framework for exploring each character’s unique vision of the absurd as they spiral into madness. As the pressure to hit the target mounts, one character finds himself in a psychological thriller, while another finds herself in a Broadway musical, and so on.

Seamus, you've described the show as a kind of ‘cabaret in a car-dealership’. What appealed to you about combining the spectacle and entertainment of cabaret with the world of sales targets, customer service and corporate pressure?

Showbusiness has plenty in common with the sales work documented in the podcast. Each world has rigid laws: the show must go on; the target must be met. Charisma, gab, and sex appeal are essential qualities on a cabaret stage or a sales floor. At one point in the podcast, the manager states: 'Balloons sell cars.' He doesn't know why, but assumes it must be to do with putting on a show for the customers, lifting their mood as they step into the dealership – and thereby making them easy to persuade.

In making these similarities explicit, and at points exaggerating them for laughs, we want to encourage the audience to compare the worlds of sales and razzle-dazzle showbusiness. Drawing conclusions from this comparison is, of course, entirely up to them!

Ellen, as Co-Artistic Director, how does Terry’s reflect BRILLIG Theatre's wider creative identity? What is it about clowning, physical theatre and absurdist comedy that makes them such useful tools for telling the stories you want to tell?

Our work focuses on delivering a message with a clear political point of view in a surprising, fun, and sometimes strange container. We identify the absurd in moments of everyday life and twist and stretch those moments past the point of reality to examine the forces that animate our society. Clowning allows us to remain playful and alert, with each other and with our audience, and injects our treatment of the important issues of our time with vulnerability and pathos. We recognize that the world is bleak, and we want to invite our audiences to grapple with that sensation through laughter and silliness.

Beyond Terry’s, what are your ambitions for BRILLIG Theatre? Are there other subjects, theatrical styles or stories you'd like to explore as the company continues developing its original work?

Next up, we've set our sights on a horror show. Through our research, we've discovered that scaring people in a live setting seems similar to making them laugh; frightening moments – like jokes – need careful set-ups, skilful management of tension, and a keen sense of timing. We'd see it as a fun challenge to make a piece that has the audience in stitches one minute and cold sweats the next.

Finally, if someone is deciding whether to spend an evening at Terry’s, what would you say to persuade them to step into this particular dealership? And what do you hope audiences will still be thinking about once they've left the showroom?

It’s a fast-paced, highly entertaining hour of gags, songs, and comedy about a slice of American life that is both unique and universal. You’ll leave with your cheeks sore from laughter, yet melancholy about the bleak reality of the runaway hamster-wheel that is the modern sales model.

I'd like to thank Ellen Jackson and Seamus Lavan of BRILLIG Theatre for sharing the thinking behind Terry's: An American Tragedy About Cars, Customers, and Selling Cars to Customers. With its bizarre dealership setting, physical comedy, original music and increasingly desperate sales team, the production promises an entertainingly surreal ride through the pressures of work, the pursuit of profit and the contradictions lurking beneath the American Dream. What makes the premise particularly intriguing is its ability to combine ridiculous theatrical spectacle with questions about how much people are expected to sacrifice in the name of success. After its previous runs at Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe, keep a look out for where this show heads next.