Run Riot: When we read 'About' Kings Of England we found this statement that chimes handsomely with our sentiment: 'In a culture of lessening means, we aim to make heartening critical responses to questions of place and belonging.' Can you explain what you mean by this, and what inspired the company name?

Simon Bowes: The bit about a culture of lessening means (and receding hopes) is about the fact that a lot of creative work is under threat from a cabinet full people who don't understand what culture is or why it's important. It's going to get harder and harder, so we're going work harder and harder and ask for more from ourselves and from our audiences, not less. Theatre for us is about identity, community, place and belonging, transitory, wayward ideas that we build cultures out of. I picked the name when my Dad joined me to make our first show, "Where We Live & What We Live For". I think as the King of England you're responsible for a big problem, the problem of a load of other people, and I think performance-makers have a similar responsibility, smaller in scale, but critical. Beyond that, I wanted the Old Man to go on with a big, boastful name, and "Kings of England" was the most cocksure, swaggering name I could think of.

RR: You're a stunning team of devising artists - Rhiannon Armstrong, Simon Bowes, Maxime Burger, Alex Eisenberg, Bryony Kimmings and John Pinder - how did you meet, and can you share with us your devising process?

SB: Most of us met on a DIY weekend that I ran for Live Art Development Agency and Forest Fringe, last year. Like the D&D line goes: 'whoever comes are the right people'. I said that what I wanted more than anything was to get back to a collective aesthetic I had a few years ago, where everybody's got everybody else's back. When I asked the five others to come, I could guarantee work but no fee. They all showed up because they wanted to, because it felt important.

RR: What drew you to the real-life Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac (colleague of Einstein) as the subject and protagonist for 'In Eldersfield'?

SB: Dirac was a legendarily taciturn man, very reticent to speak at length unless absolutely necessary. According to a biographer, he was probably autistic, or asberbic, once asked by a colleague: "Where are you going on your holidays". Twenty minutes later he replied: "why do you want to know?" We're interested in staging this silence and stillness as carefully and respectfully as we can. It's a monument to distance and time.

RR: Being at the beginning of this ten year project, how do you anticipate the work of 'In Eldersfield' to manifest?

SB: We're fascinated by pasts that stay with us, that recur and shape contemporary experience. I guess the whole cycle is a way of trying to deal with living in the present. I think the twenty-first century is designed to make us forget the twentieth, and everything else. So the cycle is an awkward and inadequate way of trying not to let that happen. In Elderfield will be a meditation on the politics of memory. We'll do a show a year on a different aspect of the twentieth century, involving lots of research and archaeology of sorts, moving slowly slowly and carefully, looking for things that attract us because of their remoteness. We've said we're doing it now so we have to at least try.

RR: What is it that makes you feel good to be alive?

SB: Getting up onstage and giving that first toast (to Dead Dogs, Dead Children Dead Lovers) taking it from the top, beginning again.

- Simon Bowes, for Kings of England.

King's of England will be performing 'In Eldersfield' on the 22nd and 23rd April at the Barbican, The Pit as part of SPILL Festival 2011.