Posted by Bonnie on 8 May 2005 at
12:00
A Shakespeare-obsessed killer, puppy pie and a lot of dead critics: Clifford Bishop on the horrors of staging Theatre of Blood
Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson, the creative team from the Improbable theatre company, are experimenting with the little-known art of projectile bleeding. They point towards a livid red splatter more than 15ft up the wall of a rehearsal studio in the bowels — never has a word felt more apposite — of the National Theatre. "We've done imaginary blood," says Simpson. "We've done red silk as blood. So we thought it was time to deal with the real thing. We thought, you can't call something Theatre of Blood and not deliver the goods."
Even as he describes, with some relish, the best way to kill theatre critics — whether by drowning, frying or evisceration — Simpson remains friendly, deadpan, down to earth. McDermott is bouncier, more intense, with goggling eyes and a halo of greying curly hair. Talking to them both is a weirdly retro experience, especially when the conversation wanders onto the subject of growing up in the 1970s and sneaking down to watch the BBC's late-night horror double bills when your parents were out.
That was how McDermott, now 42, first encountered the original Theatre of Blood, a 1973 MGM gore-athon starring Vincent Price as a deranged actor who takes revenge on his critics by murdering them in a variety of styles suggested by the plays of Shakespeare. Think Titus Andronicus meets Stars in Their Eyes.
McDermott loved it: he was a fan of horror films, he wanted to be an actor, he was a member of the school drama society and he made regular trips to Stratford with his English-teacher mum. "It was like they'd made it just for me," he says.
He can't remember how long he has wanted to put Theatre of Blood on stage. "If I had to pluck a figure out of the air, I'd say I've been talking about it for 10 years. Interestingly, when you first mention it to people, they immediately think you're going to do it as a musical." The possibility of staging it at the National came up about five years ago in conversation with Trevor Nunn, then the artistic director. "You could see his eyes light up," says McDermott. Some first loves, though, are better left interred. "In my memory, it was this fantastic film," says McDermott, "but you look at it again and, bloody hell, there's no plot and, basically, there's one idea again and again."
There is something ironic about McDermott, of all people, being worried by the absence of a plot. He and Simpson are two-thirds of Improbable, perhaps the freshest, most uninhibited improvisation-based theatre company in Britain. The pair developed a taste for going on stage without a safety net in the heyday of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, when they were regulars at the improv nights at London's Comedy Store. Together with a self-taught designer, Julian Crouch, they formed Improbable in 1996. "More out of impulse than design," says McDermott. "We wanted to put on a show and the Arts Council wouldn't give us any money otherwise."
The show was 70 Hill Lane, McDermott's semiautobiographical account of a poltergeist experience, in which, unforgettably, hundreds of feet of sticky tape are gradually deployed to evoke a haunted house and the manifestations of its tenant. This and another of their earliest productions, Animo, still sum up for McDermott what Improbable was all about. "Animo was a puppet thing. We'd have loads of junk, and no idea what we were going to do with it, but we'd make puppets out of it and improvise different stories every night. Improbable has always had improvisation as a way of working, and a kind of sensibility about how to use materials and animate them."
For Theatre of Blood, though, they felt they needed a script. In the past, McDermott, Simpson and Crouch had blurred the boundaries between their roles, promiscuously acting as directors, designers and performers. Now, with Crouch working on another project, Simpson became the designated writer, McDermott the director. Simpson managed to miss the film when he was growing up. "Phelim introduced me to it. My first reaction was… well, my mouth dropped open at the actors. It's an amazing cast." Apart from Price, the film features Diana Rigg, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Dennis Price, Coral Browne, Robert Morley, Jack Hawkins, Ian Hendry and Eric Sykes. "There are brilliant set pieces, really audacious film-making. But at a certain point you think, no, not another murder."
They have reduced the number of deaths and pumped up the Shakespeare. "We have tons more than you could get away with in a film," says Simpson. "We decided the Vincent Price character, Lionheart, has become so obsessed with Shakespeare, he can't talk anything else. That and the murders, it's like Shakespearian Tourette's." They have also imposed a dreamlike unity on the plot by restricting all the action to a derelict theatre where Lionheart holds court, surrounded by a retinue of tramps. "The critics get lured to this place," says Simpson. "Lionheart is like a malevolent Prospero, and this is his island. The Tempest became the narrative that held all this together for us, but don't look for too many parallels, because it goes to lots of different places — it's also like one of those old-fashioned Agatha Christie whodunits in places, which you just don't see any more."
McDermott chips in: "Because it's all about old versus new in the theatre: whether things have to change and what might be lost when they do. One of the best bits of the film is the opening credits: silent footage of old actors giving these big, big performances, and it's terribly moving in a way. They've become a joke now, but there was obviously something primal about them that connected with the audience. And people talk about Price hamming up the Shakespeare, but he's not. Like those old actors, he's doing it to the best of his ability, not making jokes or parodying it. He's saying, well, this is what you missed. It's touching."
In Jim Broadbent, McDermott thinks they have an actor with just the right sort of "innocence" to play Lionheart. "Whatever he seizes on, he commits to it totally. It's that quality of belief the great clowns have, but Jim also has the advantage that he can be absolutely terrifying." In her mother's role will be Rigg's daughter, Rachael Stirling, while Bette Bourne, the Quentin Crisp impersonator, takes on Robert Morley's part.
Getting the shocks right has been a big technical challenge. One critic suffers electrocution by hairdryer (in homage to the Joan of Arc scene in the little-played Henry VI, Part 1); another is force-fed his pet poodles (in a nod to Titus Andronicus); yet another has his ribs cracked open and his heart extracted (a liberal reinterpretation of The Merchant of Venice). "We had to get a balance between wanting lots of blood and not wanting to hear a sucking noise every time someone moves their feet," says Simpson. "All the tramps will be carrying buckets and mops."
None of it, insists Simpson, is personal. Although he has played with the names, characters and, in one case, even the gender of the critics, none of it is to draw closer parallels to the present day. "If certain critics want to assume it's them, so be it. But, as they say in films, any similarity between these characters and critics living, dead or who have given us bad reviews is purely coincidental."
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Posted by Bonnie on 6 May 2005 at
07:52
A fascinating new interview from today's Evening Standard has been added to the interviews section! In it, Rachael speaks about Theatre of Blood and how she was approached by the filmmakers. She confirms that she had not seen the film of Theatre of Blood until being offered the part, but she has now watched it. (I know some people were wondering about this so it's good to have confirmation!) There is also a very interesting tidbit of information about a certain prop for the stage show, but I won't spoil that for you!
Many thanks to Lottie who provided me with the link to this article. It is very much appreciated! 
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Posted by Bonnie on 6 May 2005 at
12:00
In the past, Rachael Stirling admits, she was "not terribly gracious" when the subject of her mother, Dame Diana Rigg, came up.
Now the 27-year-old actress, who ignited the nation's TV screens when she appeared nude, painted gold and wearing a strap-on dildo as the lesbian heroine of Sarah Walters's Tipping the Velvet, can hardly duck the family connection.
Not just because she has inherited her mum's looks, colouring and imperious dark-brown voice, but because she is about to play on stage a role originated by Rigg on screen.
With typical inventiveness, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson of Improbable Theatre have adapted the 1973 horror flick Theatre of Blood, in which a thwarted, grandstanding Shakespearean actor sets about murdering theatre critics in scenarios derived from the Bard's works.
Jim Broadbent is taking the lead role of Edward Lionheart (played on screen by Vincent Price), and Stirling, like her mother before her, is his loyal daughter, Edwina, who spends much of the play in male disguise.
"When Phelim and Lee approached me about this, I thought it was a setup," she admits. "All my life I've been asked to dress up in a black-leather catsuit, like mum in The Avengers. In the early years, I fought a battle I didn't really need to fight in my own head, about being identified just as my ma's daughter, and now I can be happy and proud about it.
But I'd never seen Theatre of Blood although I knew she was in it."
Watching the camp, overblown film she was "dumbstruck" that it had never been turned into a play before, "because it is really about the passing of the kind of big, heroic acting that died out around the time I was born, and that works so much better on stage than it does on screen".
The new play is being staged at the National Theatre, which McDermott and Simpson have written into their adaptation. They explicitly link it to the 1972 opening of the National, depicting Laurence Olivier's handing of the reins to Peter Hall as symbolic of the passing of the old actormanagers' companies in favour of buildings run by professional directors.
"How do you control actors?" says Stirling. "You employ them." And it wasn't the Rigg connection, but Stirling's other most famous appurtenance — that dildo — that made McDermott and Simpson think of employing her. "They'd seen me impersonating a boy in Tipping the Velvet," she grins.
"The costume department are making me a cock. It's the second one I've had made for me, although I also played a boy in a film called The Triumph of Love. But then I just had a handkerchief in my trousers…
"We had a real-life prosthetic, the kind transvestites wear, brought in from New York for this show, but it wasn't big enough. So, they're making me a nine-incher from lentils. I have still got the one from Tipping the Velvet, although it's gone a bit green. I wonder if I'll end up with an armoury of them in years to come…"
Ahem, let's change the subject. Isn't the idea of killing critics every actor's dream? "I thought it might be rather empowering," she admits, "but actually we end up making a pretty good argument for critics. We went through this bizarre cathartic process in rehearsals where we all read out our own worst reviews and, of course, they were hilarious.
"You come to a realisation that when you get a bad review, the reason it stings is that you have an inner critic that agrees, however slightly. Sometimes a reviewer can actually give you some good notes." She pointedly declines to name the "one critic all actors wouldn't mind seeing dispatched", but says that her favourite murder in the play is when Merideth Merridew is force-fed his pet poodles, baked in a pie, in a homage to Titus Andronicus.
She chose not to discuss her role in Theatre of Blood with her mother, nor did she consult her over the nude scenes in Tipping the Velvet, even though Rigg had been the first classical actress to appear naked on the British stage, in Abelard and Heloise, in 1971. "When she was described as being built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses," laughs Stirling.
"We don't discuss work all the time, but the great thing now is that I've done enough myself for us to enjoy having this profession in common."
Mother and daughter did, recently, however, perform a long-promised ritual, opening up the treasure trove of old reviews, photos and programmes that Rigg's own mother had stored in a trunk. "We got rather pissed going through this Pandora's box and spent most of the afternoon in tears."
Stirling has always said that acting chose her rather than the other way around. She got her first taste of it at boarding school, after Rigg and her father, landowner Archie Stirling, divorced following his affair with Joely Richardson. (Rachael still spends as much time as she can on his estate, and adores the new stepbrother he had last year with his third wife.)
Stirling didn't go to drama school, but got an agent when she appeared with the National Youth Theatre in her teens. She made her first two films, Still Crazy and Complicity, while at Edinburgh University, studying art history and Russian. "Green doesn't begin to describe what I was then," she says. "I didn't know what a camera looked like, what an agent was for. I'd been on a film set with ma once, maybe twice, but I didn't know what the f*** I was doing."
Tipping the Velvet did teach her more about film technique, but it also ushered in eight months of unemployment when all she got in the post were scripts "where my character got her tits out, for no reason, on page two".
A tabloid sensation here, the series gained art-house kudos when screened in the US. After a stint in A Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket in 2003, Stirling capitalised on it by going to Los Angeles. "I've got an agent there who got me meetings with powerful directors but after a couple of months I thought, what am I doing here? There are things I need to do in London."
She came back, she says, to gain a proper grounding in theatre, first at Hampstead in Anna in the Tropics and now at the National. She lives alone since breaking up with DJ John Lycett-Green two years ago; a rumoured romance with her co-star at the Haymarket, Julien Ovenden, was, she says, made up by the newspapers.
"I'm feeling my way around life, work and love," she says. "I really don't have any set idea of where I'm supposed to be in my career or who I'm supposed to be with, at this stage of my life." Under pressure, she admits that she fancies a crack at bigger films and some Shakespearean roles. Including, naturally, the crossdressing ones. "I think I'd be a rocking Rosalind," laughs Stirling. "It's about time someone cast me as her."
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