The Wolves on the Stage
Oct. 20th, 2006 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOn Wednesday evening, the usual suspects went to see The Wolves in the Walls at Northern Stage (as the reopened Playhouse appears to be called). The verdict, short version: I enjoyed it, quite a lot, but the things I liked best about it were things I'd liked even better in the book.
I had wondered, beforehand, how the brief narrative of a picture book could be extended to carry a full length play, even with the addition of "musical pandemonium". But it hadn't occurred to me to wonder how the pictures from the picture book could be adapted, so the ingenious staging was a delightful surprise. Starting from a reasonably faithful rendition of Dave McKean's pictures, lighing is used to scribble Lucy's drawings onto the walls, or to reveal the family busy with their own occupations behind them (or the eyes of the wolves within them). Panels slide and fold, turning exteriors into interiors, one room into another; Lucy's bed with its colourful counterpane stands upright, with Lucy and her pig puppet within it, and the skewed perspective is joyfully pure McKean. Pig Puppet herself is a scene-stealer (and her exploits on the staircase in the wolf-occupied house made me very glad that I was sitting near enough to the front to see every detail, despite the curry-scented smoke which accompanied the eruption of the wolves).
The spoken words are substantially those of the book, but transformed by the music; the songs are not musical interludes within a spoken dialogue, but the threads on which the entire play is strung. I had expected a musical, but found the piece much more operatic - although![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance, who knows far more than I about opera, was not impressed: if you are going to do this, he argued, you should do it better, using singers not actors. And certainly, today, reading the programme, I read Neil Gaiman's explanation that "we're calling it a pandemonium because 'children's opera' seemed to give the wrong idea." Which is fair enough, and it's pointless to criticise the show for not being a different show entirely: but I do wonder how it would have worked as a wholehearted opera.
The nature of the staging has unexpected implications for how we see Lucy's family, and therefore how we interpret what happens. The picture book shows Lucy going to tell her mother that there are wolves in the walls, and finding her mother making jam: this is simply her occupation at the moment captured in one double-page spread (although, admittedly, she is shown surrounded by heroic quantities of jam, and later on the wolves find enough jam to spread liberally over all surfaces). The show turns this into a repeated motif; making jam is what Lucy's mother does, obsessively, just as her father plays obsessively (but not professionally) on his tuba, and her brother his computer games. The family is no longer a normal family with normal eccentricities, but a bunch so self-absorbed that they don't even notice that the puppeteers have come out of the walls. Don't take this as a reflection on the puppeteers, who were wonderful: but the convention of their invisibility to the rest of the cast sometimes wore thin.
The Lucy of the picture book is a small child (indeed, the Lucy of the text seems to be the youngest of the family, and pre-school, though the Lucy of the pictures is not), struggling for the attention of her family. The Lucy of the stage show is, inevitably, an older child, and if she, too, is struggling for the attention of her family, it is because this is more of a challenge than it might be. Curiously, two aspects of the production which might present problems cancel each other out.
Which leaves one problem outstanding: here is a picture book which I once heard the author read, in its entirety, as a prelude to an evening of discussion. Even with the addition of the music, and the wild rumpus of the wolves (which it would be unfair to describe too closely), the show runs little over an hour. But this occupies the cast and the theatre for a full evening, so the tickets must be full-price - and full-price, for theatre tickets, is full-price. I ended the evening reflecting that there are reasons why I don't go to the theatre more often.
And I was sorry that the Queen of Melanesia was unable to drop by to help with the gardening.
I had wondered, beforehand, how the brief narrative of a picture book could be extended to carry a full length play, even with the addition of "musical pandemonium". But it hadn't occurred to me to wonder how the pictures from the picture book could be adapted, so the ingenious staging was a delightful surprise. Starting from a reasonably faithful rendition of Dave McKean's pictures, lighing is used to scribble Lucy's drawings onto the walls, or to reveal the family busy with their own occupations behind them (or the eyes of the wolves within them). Panels slide and fold, turning exteriors into interiors, one room into another; Lucy's bed with its colourful counterpane stands upright, with Lucy and her pig puppet within it, and the skewed perspective is joyfully pure McKean. Pig Puppet herself is a scene-stealer (and her exploits on the staircase in the wolf-occupied house made me very glad that I was sitting near enough to the front to see every detail, despite the curry-scented smoke which accompanied the eruption of the wolves).
The spoken words are substantially those of the book, but transformed by the music; the songs are not musical interludes within a spoken dialogue, but the threads on which the entire play is strung. I had expected a musical, but found the piece much more operatic - although
desperance, who knows far more than I about opera, was not impressed: if you are going to do this, he argued, you should do it better, using singers not actors. And certainly, today, reading the programme, I read Neil Gaiman's explanation that "we're calling it a pandemonium because 'children's opera' seemed to give the wrong idea." Which is fair enough, and it's pointless to criticise the show for not being a different show entirely: but I do wonder how it would have worked as a wholehearted opera. The nature of the staging has unexpected implications for how we see Lucy's family, and therefore how we interpret what happens. The picture book shows Lucy going to tell her mother that there are wolves in the walls, and finding her mother making jam: this is simply her occupation at the moment captured in one double-page spread (although, admittedly, she is shown surrounded by heroic quantities of jam, and later on the wolves find enough jam to spread liberally over all surfaces). The show turns this into a repeated motif; making jam is what Lucy's mother does, obsessively, just as her father plays obsessively (but not professionally) on his tuba, and her brother his computer games. The family is no longer a normal family with normal eccentricities, but a bunch so self-absorbed that they don't even notice that the puppeteers have come out of the walls. Don't take this as a reflection on the puppeteers, who were wonderful: but the convention of their invisibility to the rest of the cast sometimes wore thin.
The Lucy of the picture book is a small child (indeed, the Lucy of the text seems to be the youngest of the family, and pre-school, though the Lucy of the pictures is not), struggling for the attention of her family. The Lucy of the stage show is, inevitably, an older child, and if she, too, is struggling for the attention of her family, it is because this is more of a challenge than it might be. Curiously, two aspects of the production which might present problems cancel each other out.
Which leaves one problem outstanding: here is a picture book which I once heard the author read, in its entirety, as a prelude to an evening of discussion. Even with the addition of the music, and the wild rumpus of the wolves (which it would be unfair to describe too closely), the show runs little over an hour. But this occupies the cast and the theatre for a full evening, so the tickets must be full-price - and full-price, for theatre tickets, is full-price. I ended the evening reflecting that there are reasons why I don't go to the theatre more often.
And I was sorry that the Queen of Melanesia was unable to drop by to help with the gardening.
