They’ve told us that it puts them in touch with emotions they haven’t felt in years. Same training, using masks and make-up and improvisation. We do exactly the same thing with the prisoners as we do with our actors. Robbins says he never had any qualms about the project, which is now a permanent fixture. The group, led by Robbins and Williams, goes into jails in the US for improvisation workshops they have had an immediate and beneficial effect on the prison population. Pride of place in Robbins’s affections belongs to the Prison Project, the brainchild eight years ago of the company’s British member Sabra Williams. Productions such as this represent only one branch of the work of the Actors’ Gang. I can see someone is angry yet not have to engage Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian I'm less likely now to judge people. Tim Robbins presented A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Actor’s Gang at Les Nuits de Fourvière in Lyon. How do you make a forest without a set? Well, you do it with actors.” “We were still struggling economically so I put a mandate out that we had to do the show for $500. They were in the enchanted forest but they weren’t out of the woods. It was one of those moments where you say, ‘Is this it?’” After some fundraising, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was mounted. “Things had been done which had left us in debt. “In changing management, we found that our old management had…” He takes a long draw on his cigarette and picks a ladybird off his wrist. “Then we acquired a discipline for our anarchy.” Recently the group hit a crisis. “We had that aesthetic: we’ve got each other’s backs.” Early shows could be shambolic. Why, I wonder, is it an actors’ “gang”? “We were a bunch of punk rockers when we started out,” he explains, settling into a chair beneath the tree and pulling a cigarette from a pack of Natural American Spirit (“100% organic tobacco”). A folk tinge has been passed down from his late father, Gil, a member of the Highwaymen.) (He will also play a gig with his band, the Rogues’ Gallery, which specialises in good-natured rock. On the evening we meet, it is about to be performed under the stars at Les Nuits de Fourvière, a two-month festival of theatre, music and dance. His spare, inventive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has toured the world for the past year. He mentioned the company in his Oscar acceptance speech and it is with them that he has come to Lyon. Theatre, his first love, is taking up most of his time, and in particular the Actors’ Gang, which he founded nearly 35 years ago. Tim Robbins with former wife Susan Sarandon in the 1988 hit Bull Durham. And they want you to get a major star before they give you that $10.” “Or, if they are, they’re doing them for $10. “They’re not doing those kinds of movies any more,” he tells me. While he is a celebrated film-maker, Oscar-nominated for Dead Man Walking, he hasn’t directed one for 16 years. He still turns up in the occasional part but films don’t seem to interest him much these days. He has used his body equally well to get laughs, not least as a gormless, oversexed pitcher in Bull Durham, the brilliant 1988 baseball comedy which gave him a breakthrough hit as well as a partner (his co-star, Susan Sarandon, from whom he separated in 2009). His size seemed to give him further to fall, more to lose. In his two signature roles, as an innocent man imprisoned in The Shawshank Redemption, and as a victim of child abuse victimised again in adulthood in Mystic River ( for which he won an Oscar), he was made to seem pitiful. His hair, a mishmash of grubby grey and bright white, is swept back in a mane that nearly reaches his collar. He stoops to greet me beneath a cluster of cherry trees in the sloping gardens and I notice he has the combination of stature and softness that suggests a kindly fairytale character - a Silver Giant, rather than a Selfish one. He is 56, tall (6ft 4½ inches “with a temper” as he once put it) and his white shirt is unbuttoned. T he sun is low in the sky when Tim Robbins strides into view in the grounds of the amphitheatre in Lyon.
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