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Alt-country legend Neko Case has been a force in North American music for 30 years now, via her noirish solo records and her collaborations with others, most notably Canadian power poppers the New Pornographers. In her most unexpected move to date, she’s now written a major musical, penning the songs and lyrics for Thelma & Louise at the Young Vic. It is, of course, a stage adaptation of the 1991 Ridley Scott film about two female friends whose road trip vacation spirals drastically out of control thanks to the various men that cross their path. The project is driven and written by Callie Khouri, the film’s original screenwriter who has subsequently found enormous success with the TV show Nashville, among other projects.
You’d have been around 20 when Thema & Louise came out at the cinema – did you see it? What did you think?
‘Yeah! It really meant a lot to me. One of the things that made it such a huge deal was the mixed reactions to it, as though there was some sort of witch hunt for men going on when it wasn’t about hating men at all. So it was polarising, which is so odd because it was about sexual assault.’
If you made it about men taking revenge on men, then no-one would have blinked, but women taking revenge on men is still quite an outlier…
‘Yeah dark justice is like a whole movie genre: every Clint Eastwood movie, every Billy Jack movie, every Chuck Norris movie. [The film] came off the tail end of so much of that, but those films were men on men all the time: women weren’t allowed to defend themselves, and a woman saving another woman was out of the question.’
How on earth did you get involved in a musical? It’s obviously not your background.
‘I had worked with Callie's husband a bunch, T Bone Burnett, and so I had become friends with Callie and she just called me up one day and said, would you be willing to do this? And I made sure that I was very, very, very clear: I don’t know how to read music, I’ve never been trained in any way, like, are you sure you want me? And they said: yes, your outsiderness will give us a different flavour. It’s very surreal to me, but man, it’s really fun.’
Presumably it’s more collaborative than making your own work, as you’re in service of somebody else’s vision?
‘It’s intensely collaborative, yeah, and what I'm trying to do is give Callie Khouri what she wants insofar as the sound of the moment of the story you’re trying to tell. Making my own records is kind of like I put on the plough, I’m like digging up the field by myself, you know, trudging along, not by myself but I have all the decision making to do. And that’s a lot. And then here it’s like you get into a limousine that floats above the ground and you make the decisions in there.’
I feel like I have a PhD in Thelma & Louise at this point
Is it set in the early ’90s still? Has much changed apart from the advent of mobile phones?
‘It was very different to travel around the United States at that time. I toured around then and you had to go to phone booths to do everything. It was a very different ball game.’
I suppose that’s why people saw the American road as romantic, like you can’t just lose yourself on the roads of Surrey can you?
‘If you take a road trip across the United States, there’s still that feeling of romance, but it’s less and less that the towns are unique. It’s big box stores, everything’s a chain. But the landscape and, you know, just losing yourself driving is still a very real thing you can do.’
Musicals are a massive commitment: how long have you been working on this one?
‘Well, it probably seems longer to me because Thelma & Louise has been with me since I was 20 years old. It was very validating and very galvanising, that film. And then, when we started it, however long ago, it just felt like a continuation of that. I do feel like I have a PhD in Thelma & Louise at this point.’
The film is very heavily remembered for its dramatic last few seconds. How do you address that image on stage? It’s a difficult shot to recreate in a theatre.
‘I can’t really speak of it because I would give away what happens. It is a very weighty thing, but it is no more weighty than some of the other things that we explore in the show. We go deeper into things in the past than they do in the movie.’
You talked about the film being divisive at the time: do you think it would be even more so today, given the general state of the culture wars?
‘Well, I mean, if you think about things like Game of Thrones: incredibly mainstream, right? And there were a lot of women defending other women or women defending themselves. I think the culture around our awareness of and the way we deal with sexual violence has gotten much worse. Much, much worse.’
How have you found living in London for the last few months?
‘I love living in Brixton! I live in a very rural place at home, where we don’t really have any food variety or anything, so it’s so much fun for my partner and I to just kind of say ”I would love Caribbean food tonight”, and you can find some of the best Caribbean food you’ve ever had right down the street. We’ve really been enjoying it.’
Thelma & Louise is at the Young Vic, until Oct 24. Buy tickets here.
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