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."
