James Yarker is an artistic director working in a field he thinks is far too safe. Lorne Jackson discovers what drives him to push the boundaries of performance.

James Yarker informs me that later in the day he’ll be taking his five-year-old daughter, Eve, to see Yogi Bear.

Nothing out of the ordinary about that, you may think, and usually I’d agree.

A few days ago I took my own five-year-old, Ben, to see the very same movie. That’s the kind of thing you’re forced to do if you want to keep your little scamp hushed-up and out of your hair during the school holidays.

I found the film dull beyond belief, though Ben confidently declared it the best flick ever made (starring a talking brown bear in a hat and tie).

So why shouldn’t Yarker take Eve to see Yogi?

Well, the thing is, Yarker isn’t merely Eve’s daddy. He’s also an avant-garde artist, the co-founder and artistic director of Stan’s Cafe, the Birmingham based theatre company with an international reputation for innovative, boundary blasting work.

Babbling brown bears from Jellystone Park are rarely on his agenda.

Still, there’s always a first time...

“I’ve been to the cinema twice since Eve was born,” he says. “And I’ve seen Man On Wire, The Lives of Others and now Yogi Bear, which certainly isn’t what I’d describe as my usual creative sustenance.

“Still, at least it should be different. I’ve never seen a 3D film before.”

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when Yarker ingests Yogi. I bet a few grimaces will be involved. Maybe even some outraged tossing of popcorn at the screen.

Yarker is hard-core when it comes to art. His challenging oeuvre includes It’s Your Film, a mixed-media show structured to look like a movie. It was performed live for an audience of one, 60 times per day

In person, he’s lean and distinctive, with severely cropped hair that makes him look rather Brechtian. Or maybe he’s Winston Smith, minutes after staggering out of Room 101. His opinions on performance are just as uncompromising as his barber’s clippers.

For Yarker, there is nothing streamish about the mainstream. It doesn’t provide a steady flow of freshness – just a rancid reservoir of stale ideas.

“When it comes to theatre and film I really object to being told how to think,” he says. “Y’know: ‘This is how you should feel, and this is how you should respond.’

“There’s this patronising over-explaining of things which I find wearisome, really.

“I have a particular aversion to theatre shows where they’ll do a physicalisation of the things they were telling you in the text as well.

“I’m always thinking, ‘Why are you telling me the same thing twice?’ It really slows things down.”

I’m talking to Yarker in the AE Harris building, the home of Stan’s Cafe (pronounced Caf), a cavernous former warehouse in the Jewellery Quarter.

Free of fakery and frills, it suits the company well, though Yarker admits the upkeep is a strain on already tight resources.

He hunches in one corner of the sprawling site’s office, hunkered close to a basic sort of brazier that struggles valiantly to heat the drafty space.

At the other end of the room sits Eve, a bubbly little thing in silver baseball boots, patiently waiting for daddy to finish discussing theatre with the funny fellow from the Birmingham Post.

Then maybe they can vamoose to the multiplex...

In the meantime she plays something called ‘Mathletics’ on a laptop computer. Which sounds very scientific.

Perhaps Eve takes after her father, who, unlike many arty types, had a passion for numbers during his school days.

“But I had a creative flare, too, that got frustrated by the maths and physics that was my thing at school,” he says. “Though physics helped me to answer some questions I had about how the world worked.”

Before matriculating at Lancaster University, Yarker didn’t enjoy live theatre.

“My aunt, who still lives in Worcester, would take me to Stratford occasionally, when I was around 11 or 12. I found that quite dull. My overriding impression up to the end of school was that theatre was much more fun to do than watch. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to watch it. Though obviously being up on stage and showing off was just brilliant.

“Then at Lancaster I got introduced to theatre that was much more dynamic and powerful, and I felt slightly cheated that I had got to that age and nobody had shown me any of the other stuff that was possible.

“I got very excited at that point, because here was theatre that was really pushing. And I wanted to push back.”

The first theatre to inspire him was a piece by Station House Opera called Cuckoo.

“It didn’t have any words in it, but that didn’t matter. When I watched this thing I felt that the performers had been tapping into my dreams and then staging my dreams. How did they know this was what goes on in my brain when I’m asleep? It was like this really funny deja vu.”

For a while Yarker harboured movie-making aspirations. Though the thrill of creating live theatre quickly had him in its thrall.

“I loved the fact that making theatre could be very immediate and quick. You know the old cliché, ‘Let’s make the show right here and now!’ Well, very quickly I realised that wasn’t the case in the world of movies.

“Very few filmmakers ever get to create the films they want to make. And even if they do, how long does it take them to work towards that?

“But just with you and your mates, you can really get cracking and produce some good theatre.”

After graduation, Yarker set up Stan’s Cafe in 1991 with Graeme Rose, who has since moved on to work on other projects.

The intriguing name for the group came from a greasy spoon in London’s Brick Lane frequented by the two collaborators.

Does the proprietor of the fry-up shack know his business inspired a far-out theatrical collective?

Yarker laughs. “I know people who did try and tell him, but they were just met with blank incomprehension.”

He adds: “Stan’s Cafe might sound very British, but I think it was actually Stanopolis’s Cafe. A great place. There was a dumb waiter in the corner, custard on the menu, that sort of thing.

“Unfortunately it’s now closed down.

“A friend passed by when they were refitting the place, and he saw the old sign in a skip, but he had no means of taking it. A real shame. I’d have loved to have got a hold of it.”

The sign would have made a nice trophy, though Yarker isn’t prepared to start selling gourmet grease just yet. He’s got other fish to fry.

Stan’s Cafe’s new season begins this week with a performance of their critically lauded show, The Cleansing Of Constance Brown, which was commissioned by the Vienna Festival back in 2007.

Like all of the group’s work, it eschews conventional narrative or characterisation. No words, either. Well, okay, there are a few words in the 70-minute show – six to be precise.

There are also seven performers playing 68 characters, 10 tons of kit, a set that’s two metres wide and 14 metres deep and seating for 45 audience members.

And what will the 45 experience?

Well, since the set looks rather like a corridor, the theme is the corridors of power.

And a grim, grey, Kafka-creepy sort of corridor it is. Peopled by domineering, brutish, strutting men in suits and army uniforms, while a meeker female presence is forever marginalised.

“A few years ago I made a show with some university students called The Hearing Of Susan Tuesday.” says Yarker. “And I’ve always really liked that title, but I thought, ‘You can’t make two shows with the same title.’

“So I started playing around. The ‘something of someone something’. I thought cleansing would be a very provocative word. The title was also emerging with the set design, this long sinister corridor.

“Around about that time Eve was born.

“I’d been expecting Eve to be a boy, I don’t know why. I was a bit surprised ‘he’ was a ‘she’.

“I’d always thought of myself as a feminist before her birth. But at that moment, I saw the world in a whole new way. “Sexism seemed much more in my face at that point.

“So I was interested in Constance Brown as a female figure in the corridors of power. And what is her relation to that power? Well, she’s disenfranchised from it. The Constance Brown figure is the under-credited person, though without her we’d all fall apart.”

As an explanation, that may sound rather confusing. In which case you’re probably best popping along to the AE Harris Building to catch the show – then you can be confused some more.

Or maybe not.

A Stan’s Cafe show is like that Station House Opera performance that changed Yarker’s life.

Some people will get it, be delighted by it, say ‘Wow!’ and ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Yay!’

Others will just mumble a fleeting ‘Eh?’ before sprinting for the nearest exit.

Stan’s Cafe performers are unflinching in their commitment to experimental theatre, though Yarker says he doesn’t enjoy dividing opinion, and is sad when people just don’t get it.

Fortunately plenty of people do get it. The group is lauded overseas, and has a spirited following in places as diverse as Germany and the States.

“Los Angeles is particularly good because people stride in and say ‘What’s this? What’s going on?’ It’s quite aggressive. But then you explain to them, and they go in and look around, then come back to you and say, ‘I love it, I love it!’”

And when it comes to Yogi Bear, will Yarker be shouting “I love it, I love it!”?

As I surmised earlier, I sincerely doubt it. Though you never know. This is the man behind Stan’s Cafe, after all.

With James Yarker, anything is possible...

* The Cleansing Of Constance Brown by Stan’s Cafe is at the AE Harris building, 110 Northwood Street in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, until March 19 (not Sundays & Mondays) Tickets are on sale now via the Mac box office Tel: 0121 446 3232.