Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Monday 24th August 2015

There's a certain irony that I'm meeting Mark Thomas, in person for the first time, in an Edinburgh pop-up bar that's supposedly exclusive to Fringe performers and industry types. His new show, Trespass, is all about swanning into places that are supposedly restricted.

The activist comic's ire here is aimed at the big money hijacking our cities, from houses being left empty by foreign tycoons, to the no-loitering notices that have sprung up along the Thames footpath, which cause Thomas and friends to respond with some tremendous high-concept loitering.

This work in progress hour seemed pretty finished to me, and he'll be touring it from September, while also negotiating numerous other projects, including foreign rebirths for his two hugely acclaimed theatrical shows, Bravo Figaro and Cuckooed.

We'll touch on all of that below, plus the inevitable politics, and his Fringe recommendations. I've since seen two of them - A Gambler's Guide to Dying and Portraits in Motion - and he's right, of course. First though: this.

Part 1: Comedy to Corbyn

So, you're back in the Fringe Guide's comedy section again, rather than theatre?

I know, it's quite nice isn't it. Look, I don't know where people want to bracket me these days and frankly I don't give a fuck. The stuff that I do, I quite like the fact that it's my own quirky little thing, it's either theatre or it's an intervention.

The whole point about this, if you want to write an hour-long show that's full of zinging one liners, then you can spend a year doing that and honing it in clubs and getting ready to bring it up to Edinburgh and you have to be single minded and you have to join every other fucker who's trying to do that. And what I've always liked is the idea that actually, we're creative people, that's what stand-up is about. So when people ask 'how would you describe yourself?' I always say 'creative artist', that's it.

The idea that we're wedded to an exact form is so regressive as an idea: just one-liners, that's all we do? No I hate that. We've got this amazing ability to go off and tell stories. What I do is a mixture of theatre, stand-up and journalism, and it also kind of crosses over into performance art.

Sometimes it's like a meeting...

Yeah, that's fine, I'm happy with that. And the great thing about it, all of those things bring different things, you can tell a story, take people on a journey they may not have been on or considered before. You get people to experience empathy, to see something through someone else's eyes, to reflect upon other people's experience and to reflect upon their own. You get people to see new things, to enjoy it and suspend the normal rules - that's a fantastic opportunity, why would you waste it?

It's a good way to make people think about stuff they wouldn't normally think about.

I think that's really important. Stand-ups are very reticent to talk about change, the power of change and to talk about the power of their work, and actually it drives me fucking nuts. Because stand-up and theatre, all of it is based upon change.
You get someone not laughing to laugh - that is a change. You bring a group of individuals into a room and you make them a community - that is about change. So the very basic building blocks of what people do is about change, and if you accept that, then you have to go 'there are other things we can do too - we can get people to see things from a different perspective, we can get people to take action, we can get people to do things,' and that's really exciting.

For me it's always been about that. One of the most influential things that ever happened to me, I saw a play called Caucasian Chalk Circle by Brecht, when I was 16, and I was amazed that I could go into the theatre thinking one thing, and you could leave thinking another, and that's hugely exciting, that we could be part of social change. All my work is 'what can we do to change, how can we bring about change?' And you know, I think it has worked on occasions.

The TV show certainly made an impact.

The telly shows that I've made changed laws, it got companies to do stuff that they weren't going to do, we actually changed the outcome of events, and that's really exciting: the idea that art and culture has always been at the forefront of liberation, the outriders for new ideas. People say 'what's changed?' well actually quite a bit has changed, equal marriage now exists, this is a huge thing. I remember Clause 28, I remember the dark days, when just to promote homosexuality was illegal.

Is it all happening a bit more surreptitiously now though? At least Thatcher was in your face with it all.

I think Cameron still does that. I mean, they've won, we [the left] have got 30 years of defeat. When you hear Blair going on about how Labour is marching over a cliff because someone is talking about renationalising the railways - are you fucking mad?

I saw Chris Coltrane's show the other day...

He's a nice lad is Chris. And I saw Tiernan [Douieb]'s yesterday, it's a really lovely show, really good. A really good show.

It's interesting up here this year. Coltrane's show was very pro-Corbyn, then you've got Matt Forde who's a Blairite saying 'the only way you can look at [left-wing columnist] Owen Jones is to find him funny' - are the Tories sitting there going 'this is marvellous'?

Of course they are, they're loving every minute of it. People have asked me in the past whether I'm a member of the Labour Party and I always say 'no, I'm a socialist. Why would I be interested in the Labour Party?'

I want Corbyn to do well because I think the left doing well, it's a movement, not a party. If it's just the Labour Party, we're fucking doomed. And actually I don't care if the Labour Party goes and splits, I really don't care. I want people to get out there and say 'this is what we stand for and this is what we're going to fight for' and to try doing it, and those values to be about taking back the railways, taking back gas and electric. I want them to renationalise things. I want them to build council houses, I want them to tax the rich.

Can you really change anything without going through the electoral process though?

The electoral process is the final bit of campaigning.

Part 2: The New Show: Trespass

So how did the new show come about? For some reason I thought it was going to be a sequel to 'Cuckooed', but it's a very different thing

It's very exciting doing totally different shows, that don't have to be like the one you did before, that's really cool as far as I'm concerned. For me, this year, I started the year going to Palestine to do book readings on Extreme Rambling, I then revived [opera show] Bravo Figaro to take that out to tour in New Zealand and Australia, was touring Cuckooed, and doing a Magna Carta show based around the manifesto. And we're going out to New York with Cuckooed in November, we've got a month in New York. So there was a point where we went 'fuck, what are we doing about Edinburgh? I haven't written a new show.'

Couldn't you have taken a year off?

Yeah I could've done. But the thing about Edinburgh, you have an opportunity to write a new show, and the lovely thing about this, I suddenly thought, fuck, I dunno if I'll be able to get a new show together, so let's just call it 'work in progress', charge a bit less, they'll know it'll be alright, it just may not be as polished and wonderful as other shows.

It seemed pretty polished...

Well, that's probably luck!

I think the thing about it, literally at the beginning of June we went 'ok, we have to do this thing'. We had these gigs booked, I was gonna do a new hour, I thought 'fuck', so we just started to do things, to go on walks, start building it up.

Did you actively think -'what do I care about that I haven't talked about before? London!'

Actually, I'm furious, because I'm London born and bred... I had to take the picture of my nan and grandad out of the show because it was slightly mawkish in my opinion. It was my nan and grandad on their air raid warden mobile unit fire truck in World War 2, they used to run the air raid shelter on the end of the street I live in.

Crikey

I've not moved far, and I hate what London's becoming, I hate it with a passion.

That story in the show about posh new residents ganging up on the local mechanic...

I was so angry, I was so, so, so angry. It was just the entitlement 'let's get these people out of here' - and what it does is hold communities in contempt. What I love, and what I've always loved about London, and cities generally - cities innately have adopted the New York motto, give us your poor, your hungry, they're homes for people who are trying to find themselves, to be themselves, to escape things, to create things. It's what they are there for.

And they all originally came about because that's where the work was

Yeah - cities are these amazing places where you can build and create yourself and other people and communities, and I'm dead serious about the gay saunas [bit in the show], they do epitomise the ability to be anonymous and part of a community.

Music venues are suffering it too, people moving in nearby because it's cool, then complaining about the noise.

It's really, really annoying. Gentrification: it's everything that's wrong. Cities are no longer refuges, what they've become is investment opportunities.

Homes are homes. You don't just need massive council house rebuilding - although we do need that - but the council houses need to have fair rent, not market rent, that's based upon income. And when you start charging fair rent in the public sector, it's going to affect the private sector. Then rents start to come down. And what you also do is start to compulsory purchase when people die and move out of rich areas, you take those houses and you put working class families in them.

If you want to break up rich and poor ghettos it's not just a matter of building better homes in the poor ghettoes, it's about taking the rich places and fucking tearing them down and putting council houses in.

The Mitsubishi bit of the show is amazing, you trespassing without officially trespassing

That's amazing isn't it.

You weren't even being nasty

I was walking as a sheep! What sort of compounds it, there's an Elizabeth Frink Sculpture just off to my right, of a shepherd with sheep around it...

Part 3: The Fringe

Funnily enough, while I was waiting for your show there was a roped off Summerhall launch party going on, with nibbles, and I was hungry...

Did you go in?

I didn't!

Why not?

That's me

That's the whole thing - assume you have a right to do something until someone stops you. I always remember when we did the walk around the Israeli wall In the West Bank, someone said 'have you got permission?' Fuck off, are we gonna ask 'Dear Israel...'? Assume you have a right.

This bar we're talking in is a private bar as well

Is it?

That struck me as quite funny. I mean, I wandered in without anyone checking me

I walked straight in too.

So what do you make of Edinburgh, and the Fringe?

I love this place, I really love it, I go to see as many shows as I can - I went to four shows yesterday, as well as doing my own.

Not everyone does

Fucking hell, how could you not? Are you fucking insane? How can people do their own show without input, why don't you want to go and see other people's work, why don't you want to be inspired by other people, see other things, appreciate the fucking world that you're in. You work in the arts, 'no, it's just my stuff that's important' - what a fucking cock!

Do you personally still get influenced by seeing other people's stuff?

Oh you always do. I went to see Victoria Melody's piece, she's a performance artist, I love her work, I've seen three of her shows, I take my daughter all the time. It's about trying to trace where her hair extensions came from. Ending up in Russia, in India, it's a surprisingly emotional show.

So that, then Tiernan, which is the free Fringe, so I got to see a bit of that, then I went to see James Acaster.

He's quite a traditional stand-up, in a funny way

I would not call James traditional! Have you seen his new show?

Not yet, no - I mean traditional in that he's just trying to make you laugh really

He's great, he's really talented, he's like a family favourite, we all go as a family. I went to see a show [Pictures in Motion] about a guy who does flipbooks, over at Summerhall. I've never seen a show like it, it is utterly beautiful. I was so glad I saw that show.

Do you think there should be a tombola system in Edinburgh, where we're all just sent to random stuff

I sort of work on that system, I love to go to stuff where people just give me flyers - I couldn't go to this show, a bloke does spoken word about Kraftwerk and electronic music [Kraftwerk Badger Spaceship], I thought 'I'd love to go and see that.'
Once someone gave me a leaflet and I said 'what is it,' they said 'it's an opera, we've written it ourselves, it's about when Melvyn Bragg interviewed Frances Bacon for LWT and they both got pissed and discussed the human form.' So I went to see it, and it was that, it was fucking great! In a church hall, out of tune piano, two people, 35 in the audience, wobbly wigs, dodgy make up, it was great!
And people should go and see this stuff that you wouldn't go and see. So I go and see stuff at the Traverse, I go and see my mates' shows, like Gary McNair's show [A Gambler's Guide to Dying].

You wrote a play that was on at the Traverse a few years ago, for Theatre Uncut - had you written one before?

No, it's weird, it's now being performed at the Young Vic. Somebody wrote to me and said 'we've put your play on' - people come up and say 'we're drama students, we've just done your play' - which is wonderful!

Because the idea is, they're free domain, anyone can put on those plays?

Yeah - someone wrote and said 'I want to do a pub tour, can I do your play?' and I said 'yeah!' It's very weird, Cuckooed has just ben performed in Turkey, this Turkish theatre company is doing it.

Are they using your videos inserts?

Yeah, we're just about to negotiate with them. So those bits are really interesting. I like the idea you can do bits that exist outside of you, it's unusual.

It's the opposite of stand-up really

Yeah, and I love the fact that you can create something that has a universality.

That could live on beyond you

I know - how disgusting!

'Trespass' is at Summerhall, Edinburgh until August 30th, then touring from September. Visit www.markthomasinfo.com for more info.