Bryony Kimmings: Fake It 'til You Make It

"I don’t write fake stories for fake people to perform in fake kitchens," says performance maker Bryony Kimmings, calling The Skinny on her drive into London ahead of a preview run of her show Fake It ’til You Make It at the Southbank Centre. Kimmings is talking both of the honesty of her work and of the collaborative trend that runs through some of her most recent pieces. "I don’t think it was a conscious choice to only work with people who weren’t performers, but I think I was just much more fascinated in the real lives of real people." Those real lives that she was drawn to were those that surrounded her: "Once I’d worked with Amy [Liptrot, Glasgow journalist] for Seven Day Drunk and thought, ‘Wow, that was the best part of the project,’ the idea to work with Taylor [Kimmings' niece, for Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model] just came from hanging out with her so much and watching her at dance shows and thinking, ‘This kid is really fascinating.’" And once her work with Taylor was coming to an end, "it just so happened that in my life this thing was happening with Tim [Grayburn, Kimmings' partner]," and so the pair began work on Fake It ’til You Make It.

Fake It... is "a love story, but not in a gross way." Detailing the relationship between Kimmings and Grayburn, it's also "the story of his history of mental health issues. It’s the story of how I found out about those issues and how that changed our relationship, and how we cope with it day to day." It’s a very personal piece. "Within that there’s lots of mental health facts and figures, there’s lots of dancing and laughing about," says Kimmings, but there are also "lots of recordings of us having a very candid, honest conversation in our lounge a couple of years ago. It’s like coming into our living room and us telling you the story of our relationship – but I guess in doing so we’re not just telling the story of our relationship, but lots of people’s relationships across the world."

For Kimmings, telling this story and exploring mental health on stage are essential, and the latter is something that the wider arts community is recognising. "I think there’s kind of a surge of work around types of mental illness at the moment. It seems to be as funding gets cut to mental health services: as soon as something becomes politically charged in that way, lots of artists start to make work about it from their own personal point of view. I think that proves that it must be relevant and important because there are people who are wanting to talk about it."

This political trend runs through Kimmings’ work, with Credible... responding to a lack of positive female images in the media previously. "Mainly it’s what’s making me angry at the time,” she says on how she chooses her next subject matter. "Generally I get angry about political things. I probably wouldn’t select a subject that I had no personal attachment to, because I think that would just then be a lecture. I try to talk about subjects through a modicum of experience. I’d been thinking a lot about boys anyway because I’d been living through those female issues. I started to think about gender in a more sort of loose way, trying to think about the boys in my life." As well as mental health issues, the play looks at masculinity and at stereotypes. "Tim is very sporty, he’s very broad, very handsome. If you were going to draw a picture of someone that you thought looked like someone with mental health issues in that stigmatised, stereotyped way it would be the opposite of Tim. So I think it’s been very powerful to see what you think of a strong, real man talking about the fact that some days he can’t get out of bed because he’s crying and crying and crying and can’t stop."

This destigmatisation is vital, "because if we don’t talk about it then we’re somehow assuming that there’s some kind of shame attached to it, and that was the whole point of making this show." If theatre can go any way to removing or alleviating that shame then it must, and this is one of the things Kimmings has found to connect most with audiences, following the show’s previous tour in Australia. "Tim talks very, very openly having kept his mental health issues and his depression and his anxiety a secret for almost eight years from pretty much everybody he knew, being in denial about that and not allowing anyone to see that part of him. He’s come full circle and he’s now realised that if he doesn’t talk about it, it makes it a really shameful and kind of damaging thing. I think one of the main points is like, if Tim kept it a secret for such a long time and no one ever guessed, who else do you know, no matter who they are, that might be labouring under the same illness of their own? Because it can affect and does affect all of us. I think it’s been really helpful that it’s his story in particular. He works in a high powered job, he coped for quite a long time keeping it a secret."

After the Australian run of the show, Kimmings and Grayburn came home with five-star reviews, and the Best Theatre Award from the Adelaide Fringe Festival, feeling confident that the work wasn’t just important, or important to them, but that it was good. "You know, you make a piece of art and you hope that people will kind of connect to it, and it was very, very well received. I think what happened more for us was that we felt we had put our finger on the pulse of something that was important to a lot of people." And the show stays with its audience members, who Kimmings says are reaching out for the first time to contact her and Grayburn after the show. "We stand at the door at the end of the show just to fundamentally make sure that people are okay, because the show is quite funny but it’s also very moving and stirs up a lot in people; I think from their own past and their own present stories. So we just get a lot of cheerful hugs or lots of thank yous and handshakes, and lots of people share their stories with us and send us emails after the show. It’s really created this sort of community,” she says, adding that many of these people share not only their own stories but advice and suggestions as well. 

One thing that Kimmings stresses is that despite its subject matter, the show is not all darkness, it has its light as well – humour and pathos. “It’s light as well as dark, it’s both, it’s everything,” she says. Past audience experience and critical acclaim seems to agree with her.