In Their Own Words
"When I founded [the company], one of the first things was to find a name that would both speak of the 'vision' and have other layers of meaning and in fact the name is taken from a Robert Frost poem which is called 'Fire and Ice':
some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice,
from what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favour fire,
but if it had to perish twice,
I know enough of hate,
to say that for destruction,
Ice is also great,
and would suffice.
This spoke to me certainly of war and conflict, and desire and passion and greed being the causes of war and enmity. And also I think what I was really interested in was that whole issue of polarities, ice and fire and these are two elements which we absolutely need you know in order to live our lives in some sense, but they can extinguish each other, so you have to find the balance."
Sonja Linden, Director Ice and Fire - Interview
"At the Medical Foundation I heard the most remarkable stories and I, got a very strong feeling that what was important for the people I worked with was that not only was it important for them to sort of unburden themselves with my supportive help, I hope, but also that to make their story go out there in the world was a fantastic vindication for them. And they could do that through their own writing. So I tried to get some of their stories published and hope more of that will happen in the future. But theatre, which is a form of public speaking, and a shared event, was a way of also culminating their story and putting on record what they had suffered in their own countries and here."
Sonja Linden, Director Ice and Fire - Interview
"I just think [verbatim theatre is] the British way back to political theatre at the moment. It's quite interesting that political theatre is coming back now and I think it's a good thing because we've been dormant. I think political theatre usually arises in situations where there is conflict. You know good theatre in other cultures has very often been seeded by this, by a background of conflict and the hunger for audiences to see their story played out as part of a shared experience. [...] Drama is after all a form of public speaking. In all these places I've mentioned writers have had the great advantage of knowing who they were writing for and what they were writing about. And in our more sort of comfortable world, you know it's not so obvious and there is not one audience, there are many audiences. [...] There is this eruption now isn't there of verbatim theatre and political theatre. And of course because theatre is a shared space, it's a good place to air these things I think."
Sonja Linden, Director Ice and Fire - Interview
"I think [my responsibility] as a theatre writer to make known their [asylum seekers'] stories, to make known their huge distress also…I sigh at this point because I know that I'm always to an extent preaching to the converted, that the people who are going to come and see these plays are already predisposed to be sympathetic and the challenge is how to reach out to people who are not sympathetic to these stories. And I think the answer is to make a fantastic piece of theatre so that people ultimately come to see a great show."
Sonja Linden, Director Ice and Fire - Interview
