Scytheplays
Ltd presents
The Dead,
Live by Daniel Thackeray
Sunday 11th
February 3.30pm, The Etcetera Theatre
Manchester-based Scytheplays Ltd, the company
previously responsible for fringe theatre genre hits like the stage adaptation
of 2000AD’s The Ballad of Halo Jones (“The
greatest and most honest interpretation of an Alan Moore comic” – Forbidden
Planet) is thrilled to be part of the first-ever London Lovecraft Festival with
a one-off performance of The Dead, Live. In development for ten years and initially
developed through the Oldham Coliseum Theatre's New Writing programme, the play
is a new and unique take on the theatrical ghost story, and has gained much
popular acclaim on its previous appearances at fringe festivals around the
country (“Intimate chills for fans of postmodern ghost stories” – Starburst
Magazine).
What was the inspiration for this performance?
I’ve always loved ghost stories and films based on ghost
stories, and I wanted to add my own. But
I wanted it to be for the theatre, and I wanted it to be powerfully
theatrical.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve
loved theatre and the transporting, imaginative quality of it, and I had an
inkling that it might be the ideal medium for a tale of supernatural terror. All theatre has a slightly uncanny quality to
it – that sense of being in the same room as, almost able to touch, fictional
characters – and I thought if you emphasised this for horrific effect, you
could deliver a real thrill for the audience.
Having said that, I started writing the piece a decade
ago, and soon stopped – because I saw The
Woman in Black! It’s an obvious
reference point when you’re talking about stage ghost stories, but I had just
never seen the stage version, although I’d read the book. The
Woman in Black has kind of come to define what the stage ghost story is,
and for a while I just couldn’t see how I could do better than that.
My piece, The
Dead, Live, was even structurally kind of similar. So I gave up on it. But, after a long time, I realised that my
piece actually had the potential to be something quite different, and to be uncanny
and frightening in a different way.
The
Dead, Live is a modern-day piece about a popular
‘psychic medium’ called Lawrence Dodds (played by the brilliant Howard
Whittock). He’s a very modern figure who does public ‘reading’ shows – a little
bit Derek Acorah, Colin Fry. And he’s
very much a fake, using plants in the audience to make his psychic abilities
look real.
The play begins as he is
training up an actor called Rachael (Carly Tarett) who is going to be a plant
in the audience watching his latest show, so we get a big discussion – with
some tension, as these are two characters who have never met before and are
forced to quickly develop a working relationship - about how the fraudulent
psychic’s techniques of misdirection and cold reading work. And from that point, we go into the live show
itself. And hopefully things don’t
develop as expected.
When I was thinking about what may really lie beneath
the surface of the fakery and manipulation of the stage psychic, I took
inspiration from a number of writers – Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale, Christopher (Scream and Scream Again) Wicking and HP Lovecraft. The unsettling dread of Lovecraft’s ‘cosmic
horror’ was something I felt could really lie beneath the surface of Lawrence’s
world. And so I’m very pleased and
thrilled that we we’ll be performing at the first ever London Lovecraft
Festival!
Is performance still a good space for the public
discussion of ideas?
It absolutely is. In the age of social media, ‘public
discussion’ seems in large part about people making snap judgements and
attacking each other instantly and with great vitriol. But performance allows the speaker more time
to set out their stall, to work through their ideas, with no less passion and
precision. The discussion happens in the
bar afterwards, or on the way home, and it’s possibly a better discussion
because good theatre is good art, and therefore a more thoughtful and inspiring
way to explore ideas than a soapbox.
How did you become interested in making performance?
I always have been, I can’t really remember how it
started. Possibly a love of Roald Dahl
at an early age led to a love of writing, and that led to drama through
school. But over the years I’ve been
lucky enough to see and be inspired and moved by many fine productions in the
theatre and in film, television and radio, so for a long time I’ve wanted to
study those media and make my own contribution to what seems to me to be a
great tradition.
Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?
This particular show caused a great many interesting conversations in the rehearsal room, between the director, Alex Shepley, myself
and the actors. Without giving too much
away, I think the style we’ve tried to go for is a kind of intimate,
semi-interactive naturalism.
Because the
main characters in the play are both performers and spend a good chunk of the
show ‘in character’, and are at other points required to deal with particularly
non-realistic situations, it was a challenge to keep the tone consistent. It involved breaking the fourth wall – Alex
and I agreed that it’s fine to do that, so long as in doing so you are making
the drama more real, not less real. I
don’t want to say any more about it really.
Except that I hope we succeeded!
Does the show fit with your usual productions?
Pretty much.
Scytheplays is all about bringing genre to life on stage. When I say ‘genre’ I mean horror, sci-fi,
fantasy. We either adapt for the stage
genre material in those genres, or, less frequently, create original works for
the stage that are still identifiably genre.
The Dead, Live is the
latter. Those are the genres that have
always inspired me, and yet they’re rare on stage, possibly because often it
takes a kind of verisimilitude to get an audience to an accept a fantastical
narrative, and verisimilitude isn’t something you can really do on stage.
But I think that theatre is perfect for
flights of the imagination, as long as you lead the audience in the right
way. I’m very proud that many of our
shows, like The Ballad of Halo Jones
or a student production of Nigel Kneale’s The
Year of the Sex Olympics, have put things on stage that seemed impossible –
often in tiny spaces with almost no set!
And in doing so they have transported the audience. The direct feedback we have received from
people who have seen our shows over the years has been really wonderful and it
usually comments on that sort of thing.
Having said that, The
Dead, Live actually is going for a kind of verisimilitude. It’s an experiment, but one that has worked
well so far, I think. And we’re always
refining and improving what we’re doing.
What do you hope that the audience will experience?
The uncanny. A
sense that they’re in the same room as something unearthly. A suspense that they’re not sure where
they’re being led. And hopefully a sense
of having been entertained!
What strategies did you consider towards shaping this
audience experience?
Again, it was about whether or not we could break
the fourth wall – how far we could go in terms of directly addressing the
audience, how soon we could do that, whether it would enhance the atmosphere
we’re trying to create, or wreck it.
Despite the talk about naturalism and verisimilitude, this play does
fall into the category of supernatural fiction.
If you are dealing with that subject matter, I think there are basically
two ways you can go. You can be all
style, and hit the audience over the head with artifice, effects, music and so
on to bludgeon them into submitting to the narrative. That can work wonderfully well – as a fan,
for instance, of the Hammer horror films, I have no problem with that. But the other way you can go is towards
minimalism, appealing to the audience’s intelligence and imagination, so that
they can be sensitive to that chill insidiously creeping up their spine. I think we probably lean more towards that. Or possibly dive!
Partly inspired by stage predecessors such as
Stephen Mallatratt's The Woman in Black and
by memorably frightening TV events such as The
Stone Tape and Ghostwatch, it
nevertheless charts an intriguing course of its own, inviting the audience to
participate in a live psychic medium show, in which things may not be quite what
they seem.
The Dead, Live is a new departure for a
creative team who have in the past been responsible for more light-hearted
fare. Oldham playwright Daniel Thackeray previously wrote the highly-praised,
based-on-truth 1980s-set comedy drama Together
in Electric Dreams, in which Sir Clive Sinclair and the future Lord Sugar
wrestled over sushi for the future of the British electronics industry ("A
lot of laughs and worth a trip down
memory lane" said the Manchester Evening
News). Actor Howard Whittock, who plays Lawrence Dodds, the 'psychic' who knows
he is really a fake, and director Alex Shepley previously worked together on
the surreal comedy sketch show, The Ray
Harryhausen Skeleton Orchestra. And actress Carly Tarett, also from Oldham,
is well known for her comedy one-woman shows, such as Sinful and Princess Dee,
which she has performed locally and internationally to much acclaim.
Although it features light-hearted
“More than a match for any stage… a wonderful performance by all
involved” said Quays News. Audience
member @deadmanjones commented on Twitter: “…a chilling, sardonic tale that
would fit right perfectly into Ghost Stories for Christmas (or inside Inside No
9).” While the Fictionmaker blog
asserted that the play was “Quite terrifying.”
Of the piece’s appearance in the first London
Lovecraft Festival, writer Daniel Thackeray says, “It was an honour for our
show to be selected to appear in this festival.
To be associated with the name of HP Lovecraft – the man who, in many
ways, redefined the territory of literary supernatural horror, and who is owed
a great debt by every writer who has worked in that field since – is no small
thing, and to have the title of The Dead,
Live appear in the festival listings next to monumental titles like At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a real
thrill.
“I feel like supernatural theatre is on the
rise, which wasn’t the case until recently. Apart from the wonderful The Woman in Black, there were so few
theatrical ghost stories, despite that intimate sense of the uncanny, that you
can only really get in theatre, being so suited to that type of story. The
wonderful sense of being in the same room with something otherworldly. But now, more writers and producers of
theatre are emboldened to enter that realm, and often their inspiration is
Lovecraft. Even though our play has no
direct connection to Lovecraft’s works, when I was writing the play, his
universe of ‘cosmic horror’ was very much in my mind as something that might
lurk behind the veneer of the stage ‘psychic’.
“I wanted to capture the unease present in
his stories, adding to it the immediacy of theatre, the feel of the uncanny
being in the room. That element is also
present, in a different way, in live psychic shows, the kind of thing that
Derek Acorah does. It seemed to me that to write something which combined the
two could be a real winner. Still, it took a long time to get the balance right
– years and years of redrafting and rethinking in fact - but, thanks to a
brilliant director and cast, I think we've finally done it. And audiences are
in for something really memorable!
“It’s high time there was a fully-fledged
Lovecraft Festival. The organisers are
clearly doing it out of love for the material, and they’ve put together a
really special programme.”
Show taking place at:
The Etcetera
Theatre
Camden, NW1
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