David Leddy's Untitled Love Story

“I’ve always wanted to make a piece about meditation, where the audience take part in the meditation as part of the show. “ So says David Leddy in speaking about his latest work Untitled Love Story.

Set in Venice, the play is a 90-minute multimedia production that relies on light, sound, an enormous red cloth and visualisation. “The audience contribute most of the meaning when they come and watch the play and interpret it. [Audiences] are always drawing on their own experiences to understand something, and I wanted to push that one step further and to embed it right into the weave of the piece.”

The setting of Venice is key to the production, with Leddy calling it the city of “love”, “art” and “imagination”. “It’s a city that we all have a strong sense of what it’s like, whether we’ve been there or not. So, as a city to ask people to visualise, I think it’s more powerful than any other.”

Leddy himself is known to be a bit of a maverick in theatre, for his productions seem to come with a conceptional catch. Yet Leddy doesn’t see himself as a puppeteer of gimmicks. “For me, emotions are what come first. I always want to do some element of stretching the form and picking and pulling at the form of what theatre is and stretching it while still making it a piece of theatre. That’s what comes first, and then there’s finding a narrative that fits within those ideas.”