A man apart

In 2008 Steve Lambert punched a journalist. The journalist in question, Chris Wilkinson, had refused to participate in The Factory, Badac Theatre's controversial Holocaust piece that sought to give its audience an immersive and near-real—too real, some suggested—experience of the Nazi gas chambers. Two days later Wilkinson was assaulted on the street.

Lambert’s PR has told me that it isn’t appropriate to ask him about this, and while it's true that the incident occurred two years ago, there is still an obvious undercurrent of violence in Lambert’s attitude to theatre. While others deem it appropriate to work with young people at The Pleasance through mediums like rap as a means of expression, Lambert is "much more into the idea of getting them into a room and getting them to punch the fuck out of their energy and just see where it goes".  I’m not sure it’s going to go well.

As Wilkinson himself has said, this is not the first time that an artist has attacked a journalist for a critical response to their work, but with statements such as "Without violence we have nothing" on Badac’s website, Lambert’s case seems more serious. But this doesn’t seem to sit true to the man sat in front of me in 2010, although the signs are there that this obsession with aggression hasn’t disappeared: "a lot of theatre is about a repression of violence. You can’t repress something that isn’t there. I just choose not to repress it – I choose to explore it.’

What is never in doubt as we speak is that he demands complete commitment from both his company and his audience; when you come to him you have to do so with utter heart and soul. It is a holistic approach that was fostered in Poland. After a few frustrating years as a jobbing actor and three interesting ones as a bookie, Lambert hopped on a bus at Victoria and ended up in Warsaw. It changed his outlook on theatre permanently. "You all of a sudden realise that theatre is actually a craft. Here it is viewed as a vehicle to go onto telly, to go onto other things but [there] the training is that you’re learning a craft that is like a life long thing, that you’re always going to be learning a craft."

Lambert returned and was quickly bored with the "kitchen sink drama" around him. Wanting to create work inspired by Jerzy Grotowski, the innovative Polish director, he set up Badac. He was never going to compromise. "If you’re setting up a company, I wasn’t going to do it on anyone else’s terms." Physically and psychologically demanding, Badac’s intense style comes from a suitably "extreme" source: Antonin Artaud's The Theatre And Its Double, the bible for half the radical playwrights of recent decades. "The very first chapter is called 'Theatre and The Plague' and all of our work is about me trying to understand that chapter."

It’s all beginning to sound a bit militant but he surprises me: "I know it’s not everyone’s thing. I’ve got nothing against comedy or musicals – it all goes into the tapestry of theatre."  So you don’t think that everyone should think the way you do then? "No but it is about saying to them we’ve created something. Either join it or don’t join it."

He seems to be aware that he’s seen as an artist whose ego is out of control and is at pains to show that nothing could be further from the truth. "I think that with some of the subject matter that we tackle if you approach it as a vehicle to sell yourself it’s not going to work. It will be very superficial and have no depth."

It is this belief that drew Palestinian poet Ghazi Hussein to a company known more for its physicality than its lyricism. Hussein was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured from the age of 14 for being, as I am told, "guilty of carrying thoughts."  In 2009 he approached Lambert after seeing The Devoured, Badac’s equally harrowing although slightly more conventional one-man show at last year’s Fringe. "He liked the fact that our work really tries, whether it fails or succeeds. Nevertheless it goes in with an energy and a commitment and an honesty that we’re trying to do it, we’re trying to our nth degree to bring this out and show his words."

The Cry uses poems Hussein wrote in prison, but will still very much be a Badac show. "The way we’re approaching it is the energy and drive behind it more than it being as a poem. A couple of them are delivered as screams, a couple of them are delivered as pleading. The emotion that actually created it is more important than the text itself. People talk about light and dark, the way you’ve got to have quiet moments and loud moments. But to me you can move that barrier up and you can have completely intense theatre and it will have different levels. Its just that those levels are really high."

Whether all this will work remains to be seen. But Lambert’s audacious company certainly stands out in the comparatively safe Edinburgh program. Wilfully confrontational, his work assaults theatregoers' sensibilities in a way few companies would attempt. Let's just hope no journalists are injured this time round.