The Space Man

David Leddy picks up the phone early on a sunny evening to tell me he’s sitting on his 16th floor Broomhill balcony in Glasgow, “looking west”. He sounds relaxed – and I immediately feel somewhat intrusive, especially when he tells me how rare such quiet moments are.

He’s had a busy year: Sub Rosa, his staggeringly inventive Victorian gothic horror, debuted to great acclaim in Glasgow in January, and he’s had little respite since. Susurrus, his audio play set in a public garden, is returning to Edinburgh in August after stints in Oxford, Cork and Milan; and his newest effort, White Tea, which premieres at the Assembly Rooms in August, is nearing completion. All that, and “about five other projects”.

Since first attracting attention in the early 2000s with a triptych of one-man shows which he performed himself (he’s since abandoned acting because he’s “too lazy to learn the words”) Leddy has made a name for himself as an exceptional and unconventional talent. He is persistently described as a “site-specific theatre maker": Sub Rosa had tiny audiences being led around the eerie backstage places of Glasgow’s Citizens theatre; Susurrus was written for Glasgow’s Botanic Garden, where the audience would wander around with headphones, listening to what he calls “part radio play, part tour guide, part avant-garde sonic art and part stroll in the park.”

Leddy finds the “site-specific” label restrictive: “I don’t know who invented the term," he says, "but it has become an albatross for a lot of theatre-makers." He points out that Susurrus has been taken to gardens in Cork and Oxford, and will be adapted for a museum in Milan later this year's the unusual installation which houses the set of White Tea, meanwhile, means that the whole production can be dismantled and taken anywhere without losing the play’s own unique sense of place.

The performance takes place in a huge white papery cube. Everything’s inside the cube: actors, audience (who will be given white kimonos to wear and Japanese tea to drink), all of the lighting needed for the show, and projectors which shine video footage onto all four walls and the ceiling.

Sounds like a lot to organise. “There’s just a huge amount of administrative and producerly things that need to be done," says Leddy; "people don’t realise that I run a company. I’m producing two shows at the same time."

But he clearly relishes the minutiae of his job. He rhapsodises about all the “fabulous technology” used in White Tea – “we’re all completely in love with it”. The play even features a laser, boasts Leddy. “I’m so excited. Part of me is an eight year old child that thinks that lasers are really cool.”

But although White Tea is technically extravagant for a smallish theatrical production, the story is relatively straightforward – at least for a playwright with a history of fractured, tricky narratives. After the bombastic horror of Sub Rosa, Leddy wanted to make something “tender and simple about the frailty of human relationships…something like a see-through crystal."

Naomi, who lives in Paris, gets a phone call one day to find out that her mother in Kyoto has had a stroke. At first she refuses to visit, but eventually her mother’s nurse flies out to Paris to collect her, and the two of them return to Japan together. “The action of the piece is about their developing friendship, and the daughter’s exploration of her mother’s history.”

It’s also about the paradoxical interaction between Japanese and British cultures, which can seem poles apart but share so much: “an obsession with politeness, a strictly stratified social order, habits which other countries find completely bizarre.” The figure of Yoko Ono – who has fascinated Leddy “since I was a child” – runs through the play as an emblem of this clash of cultures, as does the shared ritual of tea drinking.

Leddy wrote the first draft of the play in a couple of days, “jetlagged in a hotel room in Vancouver”, where he had been working with a Japanese-Canadian theatre company – although the idea had been forming for as long as four years. Since then it’s been reworked extensively – a process that will continue, in collaboration with his actors, as rehearsals begin. “I find great pleasure in reworking my material. As I get older I realise how many of my earlier pieces weren’t good simply because I hadn’t finished them.”

I ask him about the host of other projects he’s working on – will they be simpler in execution, or can we expect more lasers? “The projects are getting bigger and bigger," he says – largely because he’s at a point in his career where people are willing to stump up enough cash to allow him to realise his grander ideas.

But perhaps it’s useless to predict what Leddy will serve up next. He tells me excitedly about “Heuristic,” a bizarre-sounding project which he describes as a cross between a yoga class and a creative writing group. “That’d just be me talking to a room full of people on yoga mats.”