‘Ask her if it’s true about the poo!” “Ask her what she really calls her vagina!” After watching the gloriously knotty kids’ show Muckers, my daughters have two important questions for its creator, Caroline Horton. But when I meet her at a park cafe in Rugby I’m too embarrassed to ask them until we’ve finished our coffee. This, laughs Horton in the sunshine, is partly why she made the show. She wants to encourage the kind of conversations we shy away from.
Toilet humour guarantees giggles from even the toughest of young audiences. But alongside its raucous silliness and scatological streak, Muckers gently raises questions about body image, anxiety, shame and sexism. Horton likens her approach to looking under a rock and finding “all this shit underneath”. She smiles and says: “It’s fine. It’s there. It’s OK to have a look sometimes.”
Devised with an international ensemble, Muckers is the tale of two friends, Paloma from England and Pichón from Spain. Both love dressing up and acting out scenes from soap operas. While Paloma (played by Horton) strives for politeness, Pichón (Elena Olivieri) delights in beatboxing and burping. On one level, their story is a quest to be comfortable in your own skin. But the feedback on Horton’s first draft focused on whether there had to be quite so much excrement involved. “I was like, guys, we all poo!” she says. “Come on! That kind of attitude to bodily stuff – it affects us. We’re completely mad about it. Things like that lead us on to eating disorders. No, it’s not to everyone’s taste, and that’s fine. But we can look at this stuff and not fall over.”
While she has acted in children’s theatre before, this is the first family show Horton has created. Developed through the Incubator programme by the Egg in Bath, it sprang from her childhood angst about encountering different rules and “messages about what would make you all right in the world”. What sort of things does she mean? “Being clever was one, so doing my best to be whatever that was – doing well in tests and becoming neurotic about tests. And to try and be attractive, whatever that meant.”
She begins to list the bamboozling anxieties of growing up: “How your body looks. How your hair looks. Who you play with. How you play. What your voice sounds like. How you eat. What you eat. Your relationships with boys or girls. What it is to be in love or to fancy someone. How your body is changing, whether it happens late or early. All of the crap around that,” she sighs with a smirk of exasperation.
Muckers opens in a messy bedroom that provides Paloma and Pichón with piles of costumes. When they were rehearsing, says Horton, she scoured markets for bright, ridiculous clothes. She wanted to explore fancy dress because she loved it as a child and because we still use clothes to “perform ourselves”. After watching Muckers, a 10-year-old told Horton that she misses dressing up and is too old for it now. Somehow, says Horton wistfully, the girl had come to believe that it wasn’t appropriate for her any more.
In the play, this sort of reaction is caused by a mysterious third character, Big Luz, whose blinding light judges and overpowers Paloma, threatening to crush her individuality. Horton likens the effect to those moments when you fall foul of the rules and do something that provokes a bewilderingly furious response. “That feeling,” she explains, “of the patriarchy landing on one with its full force of history. You go, ‘Wow, I’ve done something deeply wrong and I have no idea why.’”
Has Horton come up against Big Luz in her career? “I’ve definitely felt that. I’ve had conversations particularly with female theatre-makers who feel that.” These moments, says Horton, can be stultifying, but they come from her “elbowing something and making a bit more space in a way that feels useful”.
In 2015, Islands – her grotesque bouffon show about tax havens – opened to damning reviews in the mainstream press. Even though she knew some people would hate it, the response was destabilising and she wrote later that year: “I genuinely wondered if I’d ever work again.”
If Big Luz has occasionally blinded her it is perhaps because Horton’s work is at odds with what she calls British theatre’s “obsession with story and structure and linear narrative”. At the end of Mess (2012), her anorexic heroine Josephine (played by Horton) argues with the other characters and says the play can’t have a tidy conclusion because anorexia is a disorder that doesn’t “just end”. The show closes, instead, with her coming to terms with the messiness of life as feathers and glitter fall on the stage.
The surreal storyline of Muckers leaves its own trail of feathers, wigs and costumes. It left me thinking of a child’s hands – sweaty, grubby, glittery – before they’re washed for tea. While Horton tends to begin a production thinking it will look “pure and beautiful and minimalist”, a week into rehearsals she finds herself asking: “Why have I got all of this crap everywhere?”
Horton grew up wanting to be a vet – “I probably just liked the James Herriot books” – then did English literature at Cambridge University, where she spent her spare time making plays. She knew she wanted to devise shows rather than become an actor and, soon after graduating, found herself in France studying with the formidable clown professor Philippe Gaulier.
“He called me ‘the anorexic from Cambridge’ for most of the first year which was … relaxing,” she remembers wryly. “It was sort of ameliorated by the fact that he was doing something equally offensive to everyone else.” She left Gaulier’s school in 2007. Does she hear his voice when creating a new piece? “Oh yeah,” she says as if that’s an understatement. If she gets stuck, she’ll look for “something that surprises us with its lightness, particularly if the material is dark”.
It was in Gaulier’s classes that she shared the experiences of anorexia that inspired Mess. “He stopped me and sent me to the back and made me shout it at him. He wanted it bigger. It started being quite funny.” His next idea was to have her sharing these dark memories on a sun lounger while “an enormous Spanish clown with a great big beard was bringing me cocktails”.
The other show that grew out of Gaulier’s school was You’re Not Like the Other Girls Chrissy, a moving comedy based on the wartime love letters between her French grandmother and English grandfather. Horton performed it for her gran at her retirement home in 2010 shortly before she died. She has since performed that show and Mess many times. They are both intensely personal, but she says she is now more at ease with the idea of them being staged by other companies.
With our coffee cups empty, I bashfully bring up my daughters’ questions. Um, number one: does she, like Paloma, call her vagina her fairy? “Not any more,” she laughs, but yes at home as a child she did. “Then obviously there was that moment when you refer to it casually as the name you’ve been told. And someone’s face goes …” Here, she drops her face with the skill of a Gaulier-trained clown.
And the second question: did she really once go two weeks without a poo? “Tell them it’s true. Yeah!” She laughs again but has a serious point, too. “There’s a clinical condition for it, which I learned doing research for the show. It’s really common that it leads on to serious eating disorders.” So when people ask if she really needs that line, she tells them: “Yes! And I’m not talking about you … It’s on me, right?”
