"At the moment I want to stimulate the ability to imagine. To get the audience and me to imagine things, which we didn’t imagine we could imagine."

In January the award winning Gruppe 38 performed three of their productions in the Unicorn’s Clore Theatre. I was lucky enough to snatch a few moments with Artistic Director and lead performer of the Danish company, Bodil Alling, and her two co-performers between performances of the last play in their three-week run, A Sonatina.

Bodil engages in few conversations without at some point apologising for her English, always aware of language as a potential barrier to communication. This is as true of her on stage as off. Almost the first thing Bodil does when faced with her audience is to acknowledge that she must sound "funny" to them, responding immediately to the unspoken first impressions she knows her English audience will have of her. From the outset our presence and perceptions are recognised and we are drawn into an intimate relationship with the performers. In one respect Bodil is simply dealing with an undeniable feature that in part characterises this visiting company for an English audience - their foreignness. Yet the way in which she handles this "difference" also points to a fundamental concern for Gruppe 38 with the way in which theatre communicates and how one is able to blur the distinction between the world of the stage and that of the audience.

The theatre you will experience at a performance by Gruppe 38 is quite unlike any other you are likely to have encountered before. From the moment you take your seat you are aware that the boundaries you might expect between the audience and the stage are being crossed. In A Sonatina you enter the auditorium to see a small pick-up truck on stage and a live chicken minding its own business, whilst Bodil chats freely with adults and children, suggesting where people might sit, calmly watching them make themselves comfortable. With no sense of urgency for the play to begin, and often with comic delay, the three performers proceed to prepare themselves for something - though for what we are not sure. The main lights are still on and the audience have been given no indication that the production has actually started. We are made to feel drawn in by the actors’ relaxed informality yet also wrong-footed; the apparent preamble is personal but when it continues we are unsure if it is delaying the performance or if we have missed the point at which it became the ‘performance’. We are introduced to the ‘players’, who aren’t actors but a collection of seemingly unconnected objects – a live chicken, an egg, a potato, a dirty potato masher and more. The pick-up truck contains all that is needed to tell the story and we soon discover that includes more than just the cast. Once the players are introduced the lights go down, as Bodil says, "to make things more theatrical", and the back of the truck is opened up like a treasure box, revealing hidden compartments and panels that open out. Suddenly the truck is a stage, complete with lights and a set. Gruppe 38’s Mobile Theatre is ready to begin.

The joy of the way the production unfolds is seeing how these objects become animated and the ways in which we are led into using our imagination to help tell the story. On the pick-up truck stage the tale of Little Red Riding Hood is enacted; an egg stars in the title role, the chicken is her mother and a potato her grandmother. By the time the potato masher snaps its jaws we are ready to see it as the wolf with the potato Grandma being gnashed and mashed onto the stage.

Bodil tells me that Gruppe 38 "work like a collective". The group’s six core members collaborate with other actors and directors who share a "common language", which gives the group’s performances their distinctive "sound". It is clear at numerous points during Gruppe 38’s productions that this creative relationship includes the audience as well; we too have an important role to play in the ensemble. In order for the wonderfully original and playful retelling of such a familiar fairytale to work in A Sonatina the audience must make an unspoken agreement with the actors to use their imaginations. Bodil is not interested in bringing a story to life on stage through attempting to simulate a ‘realistic’ version on stage, in effect side-stepping the engagement of the audience’s imagination by attempting to create the vision for them. She recalls a lavish big budget children’s show she watched recently in Denmark: "A large model of a goose suspended on strings flying over the stage is not an actual giant goose - it is just a model - so why ask the audience to pretend it is otherwise?" Elaborating further, Bodil says, "It is important to say things are what they really are. We cannot change things – a potato masher, for example. We can use it in a way so that it becomes a wolf – but we all know it is a potato masher." So when the audience bursts into laughter at the sight of the grandmother being ‘eaten’ by the wolf, the potato squeezed through the masher onto the stage, we are not laughing at a joke but with each other in recognition of what we have created together with the actors on stage.

Bodil’s dramatic and aesthetic approach is driven by her belief that there is not such a big difference between the stage and the audience. Her hope for their performances is that any "difference" will disappear, so that we "are all one stage". It is easiest to achieve this with children, she tells me, "They do not treat the stage with the same reverence as adult audiences do". Children are less inhibited about bridging the ‘gap’ between the actors and themselves, evident in the way they will often vocally respond to the action or dialogue in a play. There are moments in Gruppe 38’s performances where the performers themselves bridge this gap by drawing the audience’s attention to the tricks they are using on stage, sharing with us how they achieve certain theatrical effects. In Little Match Girl, also performed at the Unicorn, a sheet of A4 paper attached at one corner to a long bendy wire is danced above Bodil’s head to evoke wind blowing it out of her grasp. Tiring of trying to catch it Bodil impatiently tells her co-actor that she knows he is moving the paper with the wire. Bodil refers to the trick without embarrassment or secrecy; just as she is not fooled she knows too that the audience will already have noticed the trick themselves. At moments like this, Bodil explains, "we as the spectator make a decision, to see it as wind or as string", to focus on the technical aspect of the effect or to engage with it imaginatively.

How one achieves the ‘magical’ in theatre is an issue Bodil is keen to discuss and one she talks animatedly about. When co-actor Søren emerges from the tiny cab of the pick-up truck early on in A Sonatina we discover that there is a basin attached to inside of the cab door. This everyday appliance is familiar to everyone in the audience. Yet when Søren casually pulls the plug and water gushes down a short tube into a bucket below the audience grin with wonder and glee. This reaction is due to the displacement of something very ordinary from the world of ‘reality’ to that of the theatre - not only onto a stage but in the unlikely location of the inside of a small pick-up truck. Paradoxically we enjoy the ‘magic’ of this unpredictable moment not because it is miraculous but because it is real and simple. As Bodil points out, "we do not expect to see ‘real’ things in theatre." Such expectations create interesting responses from children to A Sonatina, who seem to be constantly questioning the reality of what they are watching. Bodil is fascinated by the fact that wherever they tour children never cease to ask after performances of A Sonatina if the chicken is real – a question they would be unlikely to ask if faced with a chicken on a farm. Dressed in a hood and lit up on the mobile theatre stage, the egg in the play provoked a similar sense of curiosity and intrigue. At the end of the performance I watched, many children in the audience were desperate to hold it, to touch it and talk about it. Some treated it with great care, convinced that ‘Pierre’ the chicken had indeed laid it on stage when commanded to by Bodil, while others pronounced it a toy egg, a fake.

Gruppe 38’s incredibly inventive and witty retellings of familiar fairytales open up the inner world of theatre. Their plays are self-conscious, often reflecting on the theatrical techniques they are employing, drawing the audience’s attention to the processes involved in putting on a play. However, they know not to give away all their secrets and so retain a mystery that keeps us utterly captivated. In Little Match Girl a lightbulb lights up every time Bodil holds it. One of her co-performers, Jacob, whose job it is within the play to be the ‘lightman’, tries to persuade her throughout the play to tell him how she does it. She refuses, telling him that he will work it out eventually but that he must do this on his own. The whole audience is longing to know the answer, but Bodil seems to be reminding us of the power of our own imaginations, that if we put our mind to it we are all capable of creative ideas, of lighting up a lightbulb with a moment of inspiration. This is magical theatre that delights and inspires and I would be surprised if future theatre professionals are not among the children leaving the auditorium after experiencing Gruppe 38.