Interview: Chris Goode

You may not have heard of writer, performer and director Chris Goode. But he is, in his speccy, softly spoken way, a star: the theatremaker's theatremaker - if you happen to be hanging out with intelligent leftfield theatremakers who care more about being challenged than staying on-script.

'God/Head', Goode's new autobiographical show at Ovalhouse is actually off-off script, because it explores territory that the leftfield theatreworld - and Goode himself, until very recently - tend to ignore as uncomfortable, irrelevant, or institutionalised madness. Or, as Goode puts it: 'It's based around some experiences I had last year. Having been a confirmed, complacent atheist for most of my life, I had a little tickle from God.'

It actually sounds more like a powerful and turbulent Damascene event than a tickle. 'It was a Thursday morning,' Goode recalls. 'I was coming back from the supermarket and - actually I still don't know how to describe it. I just had a very strong sense that God was present and could see me; see right through me; see who I really was. It only lasted for about 30 seconds but it was very physical. I was trembling and shaken. But I picked up my shopping and carried on home.'

Artistically, it was something of a gift. Goode's past shows have ranged, diversely, from a radical deconstruction of Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' involving live rabbits, to an up-close and personal examination of bereavement, which he and his company took into people's living rooms. His work often asks epic questions in homely language, and his confrontation with God - with its humble shopping bags and its tendency to head over the hills of rationally describable experience - already sounds like one of his shows.

On a personal level, the encounter was more of a mixed blessing: complicated by Goode's skepticism and his history of mental illness. 'I'm still very unnerved by it,' he says. 'When I began to make this piece, I noticed how similar the event was to experiences I had in my twenties with paranoid delusions, in the run-up to being diagnosed as bipolar. Before I was medicated, there were similar moments when the world seemed to reveal something hidden. But in those cases it was very easy for sensible people to go: “That's not true; so let's do something about the fact your brain is telling you something that isn't true.” This is structured in a similar way to classic paranoid delusions but it's not that weird anomalous loneliness of illness: God is a really common apprehension - or misapprehension.'

Having decided to make a piece of theatre about it, Goode turned to the experts for illumination, but decided against inviting them onstage (each show will be a dialogue with a new guest performer, who will approach the subject matter, Goode hopes, without too many preconceptions).

He was, he says, 'slightly disappointed' by the 'get-out-of-jail-free card' offered by one neuroscientist, who explained his encounter with God in terms of adrenalin produced by the physical exertion of walking uphill with heavy bags, and a suggestible state-of-mind produced by listening to his iPod.

'It's doing my head in,' Goode says, 'but I don't want it to be medicalised away, even if I don't end up calling it “God”. I don't want to diminish the potential violence of mental illness. I've experienced extreme times myself when I do want help and I do want to feel safe. But I feel resistant to using the language of “depression” to explain it. Sometimes it feels that “depression” is just a word to put on being sad. And sadness is culturally sidelined, or treated with prescription drugs, because it tends to be unproductive.'

'God/Head' won't, Goode promises, be 'heavy-going': his usual lightness of touch will prevail. But, he says, he wants to 'reclaim the possibility of feeling sad or experiencing difficult stuff without fear, because it's an important human space.' Formerly an intellectually wide-ranging theatre blogger, wired, bitesized life has also renewed the questions his work has traditionally posited, about how to make theatre which is neither traditional nor trivial.

'How do we share what's important in a space that isn't only private?' he asks. 'People are forever getting in trouble on Twitter and Facebook for leaking little private thoughts and saying what they shouldn't have said. But the things that really shape and form us are less known, because we're maintaining a personal brand in the marketplace of ideas, where friendliness and humour are vital.'

In a world peopled by brief, punchy virtual interactions, Goode is a persuasive ambassador for the gently stretching benefits of drawn-out conversation. His Old Testament-style crisis of faith is unlikely to result in him becoming a Christian: he seems, if anything, more Yogic than Pauline.

But it has informed his alternative vision of theatre. It should be, he believes, 'a space of attentive togetherness, where you can be in an honest relationship with things you already knew but didn't talk about; a reflective space. Theatre can be all sorts of things, but if it can't be that too, then it's under-achieving.'