Theatre Re is one of the UK’s leading visual theatre companies. Their work combines original live music with striking visual performance to create non-verbal productions about universal human challenges and the fragility of life.
As the company prepares to bring their new show Moments to Lighthouse, as part of a double bill with BIRTH, on Tuesday 11 March 2025, we caught up with conceiver, director and performer Guillaume Pigé about this new venture for Theatre Re.
How would you describe your latest show, Moments?
Moments is different and special. Different because it’s a show about how we make shows. It starts off as a TED talk and little by little we fall into the world of performance, with our trademark style of accessible physical storytelling with music at its heart. Special because it weaves our personal stories of becoming parents and reaching mid-life with theatrical imagination. Ultimately, it’s a question: why do we do what we do and is it the best use of our time?
Why did you decide to set up Theatre Re?
Originally, we just wanted to make a show and take it to the Edinburgh Fringe. We also work very collaboratively and each of our pieces is the result of an intimate collaboration with all artists involved. So it felt appropriate to create an entity that could bring together everyone’s sensibilities and aspirations.
The name of the company is also important. It sets out what we wanted and still want to achieve. We chose the prefix ‘re’ because all the verbs of action that highlighted our ambitions started with that prefix: to rediscover, to reinvent, to reveal, to remind.
The company has an incredibly distinct style of theatre, what was the process of developing this style like?
It is a very empirical process in the sense that our style or our voice is evolving based on what the projects that we are working on require, and who is in the creative team. One of our strengths is to be able to create an atmosphere, where everyone can work at their best for the benefit of the production. It is key to make sure that everyone in the creative team has ownership over the work, so everyone cares and feels empowered to make bold choices.
Moments is a new show from Theatre Re, and not like any other performance you have done before. What sparked this change?
Before Moments, we had created a piece called Bluebelle, which was (and still is) our most ambitious production in terms of scale, number of collaborators involved, budgets, set, props, costumes, partners… everything. It also felt that we had reached a milestone with our work as company, and we had the urge to take a moment to pause and rediscover why. Why all of this matters and why we should keep doing it. Moments is our move to do just that and make a new piece at the same time.
You take in a lot of different aspects into your work from different aspects of physical theatre to your own original music. How important do you think it is for theatre students to explore all the different aspects of Theatre?
I think it’s important for theatre students to see that everything is possible. In our theatre making world, there is no right and no wrong, there is only play. And from that point of view the sky is the limit. We want to encourage students, but also artists and makers to use absolutely everything that they have at their disposal to communicate, without restricting themselves to a genre or common ways of communicating. We also want to empower them to not rely on a play-text or a playwright to start making. For us doing and playing are the most important and the first steps towards making.
What advice would you give to any theatre students, whether this be actors, directors, writers, producers etc…?
Personally, I would advise to search for and identify what kind of theatre they really like or what kind of theatre really touches them in a deep and intuitive way. We are all different and having the understanding of what really resonates with them, will help them decide what kind of training or route they want to follow. This is important because at the end of the day, it all comes down to pleasure, joy and how to make the most of the time that we have.
:: You can read more about Theatre Re and their work at their website: https://www.theatrere.co.uk/
:: Tickets for the double bill of Moments and BIRTH are available now at Moments & BIRTH – Lighthouse