"Surrealism is destructive, but it only destroys what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision" - Salvador Dalí

Hannah Taylor

Writer and Co-director Alexander Ilija Coles says:

A few years ago I was taken to The Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. It was here I was introduced to the world of surrealism and here the first seeds of Dreaming with Dalí were sown. This was a place like no other. It made my heart race with joy and caused me to literally run from painting to painting, desperate to see how the next piece could top the last. For Dreaming with Dalí I have kept that experience firmly at the forefront of my mind and the production. How can we get people to experience that same sense of wonder? How can we get the hearts of the audience to race in anticipation of what lies next?

To answer these questions we have some very ambitious plans. And though I cannot give too much away I can promise there will be elephants that rise to the ceiling of the Corpus, exploding eggs as big as humans and eight foot high talking skulls. And that’s just the start! This is a wildly ambitious production but with one of the most wonderful casts and crews a wee Welshman could hope for - it has been an absolute joy to get off the ground. I am sure we are creating a show the likes of which Cambridge will have never seen before, and this really excites me and I hope it will excite audiences too.

Gus Mitchell, the actor playing Dalí, says:

Being involved in Dalí is really a total departure from any other theatre I’ve done; the amount of dependence on things external to just acting and saying your lines, or being a character and being watchable and amusing is really new. It’s a spectacle in a small space and in a dream landscape, and really depends on the tons of the flash that Dalí cherished so much. It’s both terrifying and exciting and in a way helpful and relieving; you know that there’s more than just the acting on show, although obviously that’s what holds it all together.

The show is really an awesome mix of arts, sounds, colours – basically a whole bunch of different theatre disciplines all of which are equally important. Dalí being one of the most original, strange and yet totally distinctive and imitable people ever, it’s been interesting and hard to try and be both entertaining in how you present him, and also faithful, recognisable, and “like him” in such a way that is totally involving for the audience. Dalí is popular everywhere still, because he does seem to be a total embodiment of almost Joker-like chaos and lack of reason, or of any need to care or explain; for an English student, or in fact for any student or anyone who has to spend so much time just minutely squinting and explaining away everything you’re thrown, sometimes until it becomes meaningless or loses all its lustre, this is hugely appealing –at least it is for me.

This is obviously some of the joy of surrealism as well: you can create things because they just feel or look good or right or interesting – there doesn’t have to be any great message, political or scientific or anything. Dalí, embodies that, along with the total bullshitting and mythologising caricature that he cultivated, the ultimate ego. This makes his grand statement of "I am Surrealism" totally plausible, and it’s also what I’m finding to be big challenge of playing him.

He was always acting, whenever he was captured on film or recorded (although he was famously shy and almost modestly reserved in private), and so he never shows really genuine emotion or any ‘real’ qualities or vulnerability, so it’s kind of about mixing a real person and his recorded personality, with creating your own character, both really hard and nerve-racking but rewarding if and when I feel I've got it right in some way! I really feel the play shows both the utterly insane and creatively exploding public Dalí, but also tries to imagine him in private, what he might act like – perhaps he was really mad all the time, or maybe he was a sensitive soul. It’s been a really free and improvisational process, with everything resting on the dreamy atmosphere of chaos that we’ll try and create – like constantly rewriting the play in each rehearsal, and discovering new things all the time. We all want to communicate the spirit of inexplicability, and the fun of craziness.

Costume Designer Miranda Gabbott says:

Designing the costumes for Dreaming with Dalí with my equally inexperienced friend Ciara has been my first foray into Cambridge theatre – we do not know what we’re doing! But especially for a first play, it has been empowering to be involved with something so completely off-the-wall and over-ambitious.  As soon as the list of characters came through, I realised that this job might not just be a few cycles to Grafton and some safety pins – the zany script called for a Knight in armour, a lobster, two elephants and one distorted elephant with its limbs stretched out like those of the elephants of the spindly paintings of the artist himself.

It’s a healthy distraction from the books to be thinking about how you’re going to make a guy look like a rhino, and helping with this play has given me some of the most bizarre problems of my life! Ciara and I found it surprisingly difficult to find a wig to suit a female incarnation of Hitler, for example. After panicking a considerable amount and emailing every costume shop within a twenty mile radius, I eventually managed to find a suit of armour for the Knight by bribing some Anglia Ruskin LARPers with a huge bar of Cadbury’s. The distorted elephant was perhaps the biggest headache – who knew it was so difficult to find stilts on a student budget?

It will be incredible on opening night to see the dropped jaws of the audience as the actress’ distorted elephant mask skims the ceiling of Corpus playroom. The exciting thing about being involved with Dalí is the sense that it’s going to reach a level of madness and creativity which doesn’t normally make it to Cambridge. The various bizarre jobs – dying trousers in the bath and trying to find latex lobster claws on eBay among them – have been an excellent outlet for essay procrastination and now we couldn’t be more excited to see our costumes on stage in their full Technicolour weirdness.