An interview with Jared McNeill

Peter Brook’s legacy, digital storytelling, music and theatrical research: in the second part of this interview, we’ll continue to discover Jared McNeill’s thoughts and career.
A heartfelt thanks to Jared for his kindness and art.

How do you envision Peter Brooks’ legacy being carried forward?

People do that in different ways. It’s tricky because it’s very commodifiable. Peter did a funny thing when he left the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. I want to say this without implying it’s negative, but he left it in the hands of some people who do more commercial shows, outside the realm of what you imagine would be for the Bouffes du Nord. This choice was questioned by many, but I think it was deliberate, because he didn’t want to create a frozen dogma of his legacy, or a mausoleum dedicated to him, which a lot of centres do with big theatre names. Peter was interested in continuous research. He was endlessly curious.

When people ask what it was like to work with him, the best answer is: “It’s exactly what you imagine it to be, and it’s nothing like you imagine it to be”. Any other answer would be limiting. The danger is that people who study Peter Brook say the following keywords: empty space, minimalist (he wanted to be called an essentialist!), slow, quiet. That’s not the way his work was. The work was to try everything, even technology. This is where the danger would be. If someone restricts the legacy, then it becomes diluted and a parody of itself, because it bounces back without moving ahead. Nobody’s allowed to touch it, it becomes too sacred, and there’s no room for development.

When I left and started directing, one of my problems was that I felt the responsibility to carry on his legacy, but it was like mimicking Peter. I had a good time with those initial projects, but that was a mistake. I don’t regret it, because I had to find my voice. I acknowledge the fact that working with Peter for ten years had a huge influence on me, it would be false to deny it, but at the same time I shouldn’t feel held by that.

Between 2019 and 2020 you developed a project on digital storytelling. What conclusions did you draw about the importance of art in times of crisis, such as during the Covid pandemic?

During Covid, digital storytelling felt innovative and essential, because we were providing something that people needed. Art saved people from themselves in many ways.

The project on digital storytelling, The Telematic Embrace, started thanks to Andrea Paciotto, a collaborator who worked at La Mama Umbria in Spoleto and then at the Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea. When we first premiered it, we got some feedback from people saying it was stupid to do it online. Three weeks later Covid hit, and people started to want to know more about this project.

We haven’t exploited its full potential yet. The mistake is thinking of it as theatre. It isn’t, it’s another space. The research revolved around this question: if it’s not theatre, what are the elements that make this space? How do you tell stories that are specific to online platforms? When artists started using them, online platforms got big updates and became creative spaces where it was possible to do live music, choose narratives and interact directly with people.

A lot of theatres closed after Covid, and they will always blame the audience for it, but in New York it’s because the theatres are asking huge amounts of money. Many of the stories told in New York are crowd pleasers, because from a political and social point of view you already know you have an audience for them. If you tell a story so that everybody feels good about themselves for going to the theatre, you’re not challenging any ideas. I think the online world is an interesting space to reveal new aspects of humanity. Moreover, artists can use it to connect with wider communities. There was a democratisation of the stories told and of the audiences who were able to receive them.

There’s only one downside that I’ve seen in online spaces, when performers tend to fit themselves within the algorithm to reach bigger audiences. Some of them bend their genuine voice to please the audience’s expectations and to be catchier.

On January 31^st 2025, you published your first album, The Rock, inspired by the choruses written by T. S. Eliot for the homonymous poem. How did you come up with this idea? What is its meaning?

I started working on The Rock in 2018, during a workshop with Professor Giovanni Greco at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica “Silvio d’Amico” in Rome. When I first read the text by T. S. Eliot, it seemed it was speaking about today.

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to work on it again. Even though Eliot wrote it as a play, this time we decided to do it musically. The idea behind that choice was to maintain a poetic language. I also didn’t want the audience to sit down in silence, because after Covid people wanted to sing, not to shut up. So, I imagined a show that was also a concert. I asked myself how to present something that was concrete enough to be a performance, but also open enough to remain poetry. I didn’t want to apply only my idea; I needed a communal interpretation that allowed its symbology to be kept open.

I approached this text for a double reason. First, I found it interesting that the period after Covid and the one between World War I and World War II were very similar in terms of psyche. Eliot wrote the piece as a response to nihilism, because people mistrusted the systems and ceased to believe. Second, I like the fact that the author’s intention was to build a church, a community. In the text it’s very clear that he meant a community of people, not a physical place, and he did it in the theatre form. That’s why in our shows we included people from the workshops and we brought them on stage with us. My collaborator, Claudio Scarabottini, talks about “choral work”: you can have 30 voices, and maybe not one would work as a soloist, but together they can create something beautiful.

This summer we worked on The Rock with Sergio Castellitto for the opening of Rimini’s Meeting, he was really generous. That was very cool, very rewarding.

At what stage is your theatrical research?

I haven’t done my own laboratorio, but I think it would be interesting to do that, because it frees you from any expectation of an organization and of a result. That would just be about research, because I believe there’s the need for a new room to exist. There’s some other world, outside production and commercial, that’s maybe missing some definition right now. If you put some people in a room gathered behind the same question, what is possible without having to worry so much about reviews, money, selling and promoting?

My hope would be to share what I was lucky enough to receive which was the gift of feeling a different wavelength of relevance. I want to maintain a level of dignity, which is a bit lacking, and to work in ways that promote that.

What was your dream when you were a child? And now?

I was obsessed with the idea of being a detective. As a child, I always used to say: “My superpower would be to go to a place and immediately learn their language”. So, I wanted to become a detective who could speak every language. My dream now is more practical: I want to be able to experience both love and heartache and not lose my childlike view of the world and my commitment to remaining vulnerable.

Anna Baracco