Nearly 20 years after its first London outing, Simon Kane is reviving Jonah Non Grata, a solo show that merges absurdism, hymns, and a heavy dose of holy confusion. This surreal, comic exploration of power, extremism, and meaning feels sharper than ever in 2025. We caught up with Simon Kane to unpack his return to the Fringe, the joy of “failed magic,” and the art of staying baffling.
You’re reviving Jonah Non Grata nearly 20 years after its first London outing. What made you return to this gloriously strange beast now?
It’s tempting to say something glib about the absurdity of religious conflict, but I think what’s most important about the show right now is how baffling it is. Good art can get us talking, but really good art can get us to shut up. There’s a lot to be said for reaching out to people through a piece that defies demographics by not making sense to anyone. But the real answer is, I missed it, and I could now afford it.
The show mixes hymns, failed magic tricks, and audience interaction. How do you choreograph chaos without completely surrendering to it?
Entropy keeps the chaos in balance, and a lot of this show errs on the side of grinding to a halt. I added a line this year: “Waiting is also a way of joining in.” So it’s not really chaos. Also, all that’s just in the first third. There are proper scenes and everything later on. It’s like tapas.
You call it a “clownish mystery play.” What does that mean to you – and how does that genre-bending shape audience expectations?
I guess that description is meant to suggest a shabby, human-scale stab at the unknowable. Mystery Plays were the earliest plays in (sort of) English – Bible stories played with a realism bordering upon absurdity by local Guilds. I think it’s helpful to base an absurd work on a simple story most people already know. Even if they don’t know that’s what they’re watching, something will chime.
This is a solo show, but it feels full of shifting characters and perspectives. How do you maintain that energy and dynamism alone on stage?
I’ve realised a lot of the inspiration for this show came from simply asking, what do I want to do onstage. I know why my character does what they’re doing, and I don’t mind if the audience doesn’t, because as long as I know, it will still be watchable, maybe even more so than if the audience knew. Their curiosity provides the dynamism. That, and the songs help.
Power, extremism, meaning – your themes hit harder in 2025. How have the world’s changes affected your interpretation of Jonah’s story?
Jonah’s look of double denim, bare chin and big sideburns was originally based on me very much not wanting to look like anyone’s idea of a terrorist, and that certainly changed, but I don’t mourn the passing of that prejudice. I was a little worried some themes might seem too glib now, but I’d forgotten how abstract the piece is. Although a personal sequel to Shunt’s Gunpowder-plot-inspired, coincidentally 9/11-adjacent show Dance Bear Dance, it’s not really about terrorism at all. It’s about an abandoned protagonist’s power fantasy, and love is as much a part of that fantasy as obliteration.
What’s it like re-entering the belly of the beast – literally and figuratively – after so long away from this material?
I’m incredibly excited. The body has modes, I guess. I’ve just been writing television sketches for Mitchell and Webb again, and it turns out the last time I did that was in 2010, but it doesn’t feel like that. .Jonah was never off the table, let’s put it like that. If you want someone to see your work, and your work’s a show, you have to do it again.
You’ve worked with experimental companies like Shunt. What role does ‘poor theatre’ or lo-fi absurdity play in your creative process today?
Ultimately, all immersive work has to do is acknowledge your shared environment, and that’s cheap as chips. Working with Shunt was a dream come true, inasmuch I’d always wanted to make work that was funny in a way I hadn’t seen things be funny before – because that’s what I grew up loving – and Shunt were deadpan and pithy and wildly creative and wildly ambitious, but of course they ended up with a real budget, and every -fi going, which they used brilliantly. Maybe just as strong then is an earlier influence: a writer, performer, and director a few Shunt artists and I had worked with at Cambridge called Jeremy Hardingham. We did a show with him in 1997 around the streets of Edinburgh called “Incarnate”, based on the Gospels, and interspersed with interviews with Drew Barrymore and sound bites from Reservoir Dogs, which maybe makes it sound awful, but Jeremy’s script was brilliant and beguiling, and his no-budget, Pop Absurdist pilfering was a huge influence on Jonah. He never liked the title The Empty Space, because there are no empty spaces – Who plays in an empty space? – but taking everything Peter Brook wrote about “play”, and trying it out with an artist who actually knows how to play… that freedom, that power… making a show up becomes surprisingly easy once you’ve got that under your belt.
How do you want audiences to feel when they leave Jonah Non Grata – confused, comforted, or just covered in metaphorical rice pudding?
Do you know the Monty Python Confuse-A-Cat sketch? Confused only like that cat. Newly mobile. Reset. Maybe even like they want to make their own version. Like they can do anything. I don’t want the venue to hate me though, so no rice pudding. I want people to have had fun, and feel they’ve come through something safely.
xxx
Jonah Non Grata will be performed at 9.10pm in Assembly Rooms (Front Room) from 31st July – 24th August (not 11th or 18th)
For tickets and more information, visit: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/1076-jonah-non-grata