i hold my son's head in my cursèd hands
the bacchae
by euripides
Thursday 6 November - Saturday 15 November 2003
Bats Theatre, Wellington
Euripides' bloodiest tragedy meets Wellington's goriest company in an all-new, multi-media spectacular production of The Bacchae. Dionysus (god of theatre, wine and cheese) visits the home of his mortal mother Semele to wreak vengeance on his family for disowning him. He drives every woman in the city into a Bacchic trance, guiles the arrogant Pentheus and in true Greek Tragedy fashion, it's not over 'til someone brings on a severed head. Using their new virtual software programme R.E.N.E., The Bacchanals will populate the world of ancient Greece with exploding castles, epic battle scenes, car chases and a CGI-ed cast of thousands. Think Gone With The Wind meets Clash of the Titans meets Brotherhood of the Wolf.
cast:
Eve Middleton (Agauë),
James Stewart (Dionysus, Cadmus),
Alex Greig (Pentheus),
Julia Harrison (Autonoë, Messenger),
Irene Flanagan (Ino, Teiresias, Herdsman),
in the prologue:
Jocelyn Christian (Semele),
Hannah Deans (Hera),
Taika Cohen (Zeus)
Director of photography William J. Earl;
Photography Sar Ruddenklau;
Projectionist Duncan Allan;
Clapper Loader Mark Cleary;
8mm edited by James Stewart & David Lawrence;
Posters & Flyers Ian Freer & James Stewart;
Sound Engineer Aidan Kane;
Costumes constructed by Colin McLean & Cathy (Tree) Harris;
Text & Music Walter J. Plinge & Evil M. Übercrave;
Musicians Aidan Kane & Walter Plinge;
Decapitation Moulding & Finishing Carlos Wedde;
Decapitation Finishing Gareth Jenkins;
Publicist Noel Meek;
Stage Manager Rachel Cooke;
DSM (refreshments) Julia Harrison;
Production Manager Eve Middleton;
Directed by David Lawrence
The beginning
It was in a thermal bath in Taupo that The Bacchanals' direction for 2003
was decided upon. We were doing the venue recce for
Twelfth Night in the middle of a
difficult rehearsal period and Eve, James and I made much of our two days
on the road to put things in perspective. There had been talk of many
ideas for 2003 and for a long time it was assumed we were going to try
King Lear - a plan I liked
initially but came more and more to fear.
King Lear is, to me, the ultimate
challenge when it comes to Shakespeare. Even with our track record for
getting the plays right, the odds stacked against you when trying to do
King Lear are massive (I've only
seen one production of it in NZ that wasn't a total disaster) and ultimately
I realised I don't want to do the play until I have the right venue for
it and the perfect cast, neither of which have happened yet.
To apply for STAB funding seemed a strange idea to me, because
I didn't see how the essences of STAB could fit in with the ethics
of The Bacchanals. The STAB season has been an annual occurrence at
BATS since 1995 and was initially about the integration of theatre and
technology. STAB is now generously funded by Creative New Zealand and
BATS every year have about $60,000 to distribute amongst the however-many
shows they end up commissioning. In 1995 there were eight STAB shows, in
1996 there were four, and in 2000 they decided to give all the money to
one project, the mammoth
Arrrghhh! - The Live Movie Experience,
whose company included Carey, Taika and myself - in fact,
Arrrghhh! opened the week after
The Bacchanals' production of Othello
closed. More recently, I had been engaged to work on one of the 2002 STAB
commissions as a production manager. It was a job I should never have
accepted but back in a period of my life in which I didn't really know
how to say no to people, and marked the first (and only) time in my life
I have walked out on a project. Ironically my reason for agreeing to be
a part of it was partially to erase unhappy memories of
Arrrghhh! (in which I'd been
financially shafted). I kept waiting for a miracle but as the months
dragged on, with opening night a mere three weeks away no moment of
clarity or relief was in sight and I did the unthinkable - I snuck out
of the rehearsal room, got all the accounts in order, paid my fee back
into the co-op's bank account and wrote them a long, long letter about
why I was bailing at the eleventh hour. I thought I would never work
in professional theatre ever again, but rather than display my
unreliability it seemed instead that I'd declared my standards - which
were that I was never again going to work on something I didn't believe in.
I was therefore very surprised when the BATS folk asked if I'd
considered applying for the 2003 commissioning round, and came up with
a few random ideas all based on the same premise. The premise was that
we'd do something epic but on a small scale - adapt an existing work so
that we could use multi-media to make up for the deficiencies in the
storytelling. Throughout 2002 I'd become more and more obsessed with
film - due to the free weekly late-night test screenings at Rialto, I'd
been exposed to all sorts of cinema I wouldn't have normally been
interested in. So I pitched the initial idea to BATS and listed a
number of possible stories/sources, and these were what Eve, James and
I talked about that night in Taupo.
It was sad for the three of us to realise that things really were
changing irrevocably and that we wouldn't be working with many of the
current Bacchanals again but we were in agreement that
King Lear was a ridiculous idea,
and Eve was against working with another large cast.
"Crave was
so easy," she kept
emphasising. We knew it had to be a small-cast show, and one in which
we involved only those whose aspirations were as professional as ours.
Not everyone in the present make-up of the group had ambitions to work
professionally in theatre and we were all too aware that the 'family'
aspect that had dominated the large-cast projects like the Trilogy and
Hamlet had perhaps blinded us
to some of the group's deficiencies.
The plan we originally discussed was
The Threepenny Opera, which we
thought might be a nice tie-in with the impending production of
The Collective, Jean Betts'
brilliant play on the Brecht authorship controversies which was
programmed to run at BATS in March 2003 and which Julia and myself
(and eventually James and Erica) were already engaged to work upon.
We also talked about adapting
The Canterbury Tales, Cervantes'
Don Quixote, Ibsen's
Brand, Ted Hughes'
Tales From Ovid, Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness and Jeanette
Winterson's The Passion. Also
somewhere on the initial list of ideas we sent to BATS were two Euripides
plays - Medea and
The Bacchae.
The Canterbury Tales and
Tales From Ovid were swiftly
ruled out - there was too much material in either to be able to whittle
something down into a 90-minute show and I feared we'd get too lost in
the adapting process - trying to determine which bits were worth having
in and which weren't. I read
Heart of Darkness and couldn't
see anything worthwhile in it that hadn't already been exploited by
Apocalypse Now. The Passion
is a beautiful, beautiful book and I have more than once sat down with
it and made up notes for adapting it into a play … but the things
that for me work so brilliantly about the book will not make especially
vibrant theatre, I think. Brand
was never really investigated as a serious prospect, which seems odd in
retrospect - but maybe I'll save that for another day.
The Threepenny Opera was
sadly ruled out - upon re-reading it I couldn't see how it could be done
with only five or six performers, and any possibilities for multi-media
seemed just to be decorative rather than essential to the storytelling.
Which left Don Quixote. Don Quixote
is supposedly unfilmable - Orson Welles died never having completed his
version, and fate defied Terry Gilliam's attempts to make his. But
sitting down to read it, I could not understand a) why, when I lived
in the UK, it had been voted as the greatest novel ever by prominent
literary figures or b) why Welles, Gilliam et all thought there was
anything in it that would make a great film. More importantly in the
scheme of things, while I could see it working as an abstract play/film
about madness and distorted perception, I find that sort of filmmaking
(and theatre) a little boring and clichéd, and there were no decent
female characters. But for a while we persevered with the idea of
Don Quixote, even though Eve
was pushing for a Greek tragedy. One night during the
Twelfth Night rehearsal process -
it must have been close to production week - I sat in the bath and read
The Bacchae (Eve's favourite),
looking for any multi-media possibilities. Not only was I enormously
enjoying the play - somehow it seemed much more alive and fresh,
especially as I was reading a nice crisp hexameter translation that
rolled off the tongue, than my previous forays into reading Euripides'
works - but by the time I got to the earthquake halfway through I knew
this was going to be the one.
Eve says it was while we were waiting outside the printers' for the
incredibly late Twelfth Night
posters that I settled on The Bacchae
and described how we'd do it. The initial treatment I wrote up - four
pages long, with the film segments in bold type and the theatre side in
normal type - is pretty much exactly the show we ended up doing. Eve,
James and I studied the treatment at length and discussed just how we
might pull these things off - we needed an exploding palace, thousands
of extras, a gruesome death scene for Pentheus, and an 8mm prologue.
James quickly set us up a meeting with Willy Earl, whom he'd thought
might be our ideal collaborator. We vaguely knew Will from Mark's time
on the Avalon film & television production course - Will had a reputation
as a brilliant cameraman and editor and had worked on
The Trivial Pursuit World Championship,
Mark's graduating film (which had starred Eve, James, Tina, John and myself).
More recently he'd been working on the low-budget sci-fi feature
Event 16, which James, Eve, John,
Mark, Erica, Jocelyn, Adam and Alex had all had roles in. We met with
Will and talked him through our treatment, hoping that at the end he
would be able to tell us a) whether what we wanted to do was possible
and b) whether he would be interested in being involved if the project
went ahead. He was enthusiastic and didn't question any of our insane
schemes, no matter how much he tried to claim afterwards that his
internal monologue was saying something different (!). Our first proper
pitch at BATS was the same day as the Eastbourne performance of
Twelfth Night and it was tricky
for James, Eve and I to have the meeting while keeping quiet to the others
about what we were up to.
We made the shortlist, meaning we were one of six projects invited to
develop our idea further and do a 'proper' pitch (somewhat less informal
than the first meeting) in March. The treatment stayed the same but was
enhanced by a more thorough breakdown of who would be in it, how it would
happen and a detailed budget of how much money we needed and what we'd
spend it on. We weren't as prepared for the actual pitch as we wanted to
be - communication mix-ups with Will meant he wasn't ready for us and didn't
have any material (he'd shown us some rough computer schematics of things
like the castle) for us to take to the pitch. Nor had we pulled off any
of the music we wanted to play for them. Our one actual physical item,
the 8mm from Hamlet, nearly didn't
happen because we left the screen at Boston Terrace and James had to go
back from BATS - in rush hour traffic - to pick it up while Eve and I
stalled. Never mind the insane HEAT that day which made it difficult for
me to articulate or even think clearly. Or that the pitch was just days
after the opening night of
The Collective, which had taken a
hell of a lot out of me (I'd been stage manager, lighting and sound
designer, publicist and de facto production manager - and the worst was
yet to come). We were finding it difficult to describe a decent visual
reference point for the style of the whole thing and wanted to avoid all
the Lord of the Rings clichés.
The final straw was that the member of the BATS board of directors joining
the management staff on the interview panel was someone my only previous
dealings with had not been entirely pleasant (she was on the receiving
end of me being aggressive over being ripped off on
Arrrgghhh!) and, having never
seen any of our shows, she quite rightly questioned how we could possibly
pull the show off - and more particularly how I could direct, light,
compose the music for the show and adapt the script at the same time.
We left the pitch certain we'd blown it - the idea was just too
ludicrous, too expensive and we couldn't even find a decent modern film
to say "It'll be like this!"
to express what it was we had in mind. "Ah well," the three of us
collectively sighed, "it means we can do
The Winter's Tale this winter
instead." A STAB season in October/November would have ruled out any
other Bacchanals activities for the year. That night at Rialto we
saw a test screening of the French import
Brotherhood of the Wolf and,
lo and behold, there was our visual reference point. "If only we'd
seen this 24 hours earlier!" we growled at the end of the film.
The next day was memorable for many reasons. Not only was my
marriage officially dissolved, but Jason Whyte, playing Bertolt Brecht
in The Collective, suddenly came
down with stomach pains and had to be admitted to hospital to have his
appendix removed that very day, cancelling the rest of the season only
two performances after it had opened, but to our immense surprise BATS
phoned to offer us a commission. That whole week was totally bizarre -
not only dealing with the fallout over
The Collective's cancellation
and trying to notify the media, organise a return season for later in
the year, but trying to get as much preliminary STAB stuff done as
possible, because at the end of the week we got the commission Eve was
heading off to Sydney to spend six weeks helping out her brother and
his wife with their newly-born baby.
The cast
Casting the show was straightforward enough. A traditional Greek tragedy
would have had a maximum of three actors - all male and masked - playing
all of the roles, with a Chorus of somewhere between 12 and 24 (Greek
choruses started out with 50 but over the years during the 'golden age'
of Greek drama in Athens this number gradually decreased). We thought
five was a more manageable number - everyone would have one speaking
role and participate in the Chorus when they weren't playing that role.
Agauë was the obvious role for Eve (later, when it was announced
we'd be doing Romeo and Juliet,
her friends straight away said "So you'll be playing Juliet's mother?"
The cliché is that Eve always plays mothers but it's not true.
Yes, she was a mother in The Jew of
Malta, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, The Bacchae and finally
Romeo and Juliet. But Emilia
and Olivia aren't mothers, and M in
Crave only
wants to be a mother.
For me, the roles I always cast Eve in were reflected more by her
incredible authority and maturity onstage). Alex would play Pentheus,
and James was cast somewhat against type as Dionysus (although that
James has no discernable 'type' is more reliable a cliché than
Eve always playing mothers). This left Cadmus, Teiresias, the Herdsman
and the Messenger to be shared amongst the other actors. Julia, who'd
been absolutely brilliant in
Twelfth Night and who I'd
already decided would play Juliet when we toured
Romeo and Juliet in 2004,
was a dead cert. Erica, on the condition that she had singing
lessons (everyone in the show would need to be musically confident),
was an early contender for the third female vacancy; however after
working on Twelfth Night, AVA
and The Collective in close
succession, our relationship was more than a little strained and Erica
had long since had enough of The Bacchanals - she wanted to be working
with actors of a higher calibre and, I think, had only done
Twelfth Night out of loyalty to
me and to play Viola. That, coupled with uncertainty about what role
she'd have in The Bacchae -
some actors aren't keen on ensemble work - and that she'd be overseas
from August right up until the beginning of the rehearsal period
(complicating the pre-rehearsal film sequences) meant that
Twelfth Night ended up being
Erica's swansong with The Bacchanals.
The joy of having a large budget was that we could actually
afford whoever we wanted, but
that wasn't enough for me - all the high-calibre, big-name actors in
the world would mean nothing if we didn't have a
company who were committed to
the work. I'd first met Irene Flanagan in April 2002 when Jean Betts
brought her in to read some minor roles at Playmarket's reading/workshop
of The Collective. She was very
quiet and focused and the only person who didn't seem to know at least
one other person there intimately. By the time of the next reading of
the play, in December, Jean had cast Irene as Grete Steffin (which Erica
had played at the first reading) and when it came to rehearsals for
The Collective through February
and March 2003, I was watching Irene very closely, if for no other reason
than to see why she and not Erica had ultimately been cast in the role.
Jean's confidence in Irene was absolute and Irene spent that whole first
rehearsal period quiet, intense, focused and committed. On the night of
the season's cancellation Jean, Julia, James and I went out for a
commiseratory meal and Irene joined us. She had recently been gradually
coming out of her shell and was fantastic, hilarious company that night,
and I was watching carefully how she interacted with Julia and James.
When we began rehearsals for a revival of
Fold, the Jo Randerson play Jean
had directed at BATS and then Downstage in 1995, Jean had cast Irene as
a last-minute replacement for another actor who'd had to pull out. In
the last week of Fold's run at
BATS I asked Jean whether she thought Irene would be the right sort of
actor for The Bacchanals. Jean was enthusiastic and when I put the idea
to James (who was also in Fold)
he gave it the thumbs-up. On the last night of
Fold Irene volunteered to stay
behind after the pack-out and help me paint the floor, and during that
evening I began sounding her out about whether she might be interested
in joining us. I was well aware that really we were looking for someone
who would be committing to the group long-term, not just for
The Bacchae, and by the end
of that evening I was completely convinced it needed to be Irene - not
just her attitude in general towards the theatre industry and community,
but in specifics I swiftly discovered she'd be perfect, especially when
we got to talking about my plans for
Romeo and Juliet - but that's
another story. Irene's recruitment also made the imminent return season
of The Collective great fun -
James and Julia were over the moon to think she'd be joining us and the
remounted Collective was a good warm-up for working on
The Bacchae with Irene
entrenched in the group properly.
The script
I was ultimately very, very
pleased with the finished script. I adapted it in a very short time -
like the script for The Frogs,
I think the first draft took about ten days in total, and had changed
very little by opening night. I was really pleased with how good my
grasp of pentameter was and the witty sarcasm of some lines. I got a
little carried away with my excitement during the first week of
rehearsals and wrote some additional lines for the sequences I was
enjoying the most, like the Cadmus & Teiresias dialogue. The only
section I was unhappy with was the last third, from the entrance of
Agauë I wanted it to be a fantastic piece of rhetoric akin to
III.i of Titus Andronicus or the
lamenting queens in Richard III.
At the June readthrough of the script I apologised in advance for the
finale - but to my surprise it was the best bit when hearing the script
aloud, and it stayed pretty much as it was right up until the season.
The only vexing parts were the Choral odes, and the music for the
show in general. The Bacchanals have always taken great pride in how
good our music often is, and the music for
Twelfth Night - which contained
more music than any Bacchanals show since
The Frogs - elicited much praise
over the course of the season. Turning the choral odes into songs was
not going to be as easy as it had been for
The Frogs, where essentially they
were turned into cheesy musical numbers. Eve and I talked throughout the
pre-production process about having a score for the show - something big
and cinematic and epic throughout - but musically I felt very, very blocked,
and of the seven songs we needed, I'd only nailed two of them by the time
we started rehearsals - "The Teiresias Song" as we called it, and
"Dircé sweet and holy maid". We spent the whole process working on
the first choral ode but decided early on it would be chanted to a
percussion accompaniment. "The Guards' Song" was a favourite of many who
appreciated that we were taking the piss, but was actually a late addition
to the text - the transition from "The Teiresias Song" to the guards
bringing back Dionysus needed something, and Will suggested we have
something to help explain the film segments that would be playing to bridge
this gap. Will thought it should be something tongue-in-cheek and biblical
- "And so they searched for thirty days and nights, and on the thirtieth
day they found the god hiding by the river!" So one night during the first
week of rehearsals I sat in the bar at Circa and wrote the lyrics, and the
next day the song was in the show. The intent of those two songs -
"Teiresias" and "Guards'" - was that very early on we had something bizarre
and tongue-in-cheek, and the two songs were choreographed carefully to
make their mockery clear. "Dircé sweet and holy maid" was a
three-part harmony composed carefully with Julia, Eve and Irene's voices
in mind. It started out with only two stanzas but I wrote a third verse
to get us into the earthquake sequence. "The Vampire Song", as we named
the ode whose lyrics began "O that the night would never end" ended up
being a favourite of mine. Its tune was culled partially from music I
wrote for Ariel in a production of
The Tempest I directed for an
amateur group in 1995. The penultimate song, as Pentheus went off to
his death, gave us the most headaches - "Fly, fly, you hounds of madness".
The lyrics were really abstract and not metrically consistent and we spent
a long time skimming over it. At each rehearsal I'd busk something stupid
on the guitar and the girls would sing something mock and glam-metal.
Eventually we hit on something that worked well enough to be fun but not
so well that it seemed too silly and Kiss-like. The very last song in the
show, "Go toward the light", was my addition to the text - there is no
choral ode at this point, but I felt ending with a piece of music was
important and wrote some vague, simple, generic words (many of which
seemed very funny to us - "This is a reply to John Smythe's review of
Crave!" laughed Eve the first
time she read the lyrics). At the first rehearsal I began playing a
melancholy tune, trying to find something similar in tone to The Beatles'
"Because" (from Abbey Road), and
we worked the whole song out from beginning to end as a group, changing
or omitting lyrics as the tune progressed. The idea was to have something
akin to "A Day in the Life", John Lennon's beautiful conclusion to
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band. "A Day in the Life", being the only song on the outside of
the 'concept' book-ended by the two renditions of the title track, is the
only moment of reality on an album in which The Beatles pretend to be
another band. Once we settled on our 'concept' for
The Bacchae - that the whole play
was a Bacchic trance and that the Maenads/Bacchae/Bacchanals, as part of
their Bacchic rites, act out the
meeting between Dionysus and Pentheus and Pentheus' subsequent death,
that rather than playing Dionysus/Pentheus/Messenger/Herdsman/Cadmus/Teiresias
etc. the actors were playing Bacchic devotees acting the roles of
Dionysus/Pentheus/Messenger/ Herdsman/Cadmus/Teiresias etc. - then the
final song likewise became, like "A Day in the Life", the only moment of
reality in the whole show.
Filming:
The prologue: For
the prologue it was decided we'd have a different cast to that appearing
in the stage show. The advantage of the film material was that we could
include Bacchanals who wouldn't be in the show but still make them feel
like they'd contributed something to it. But the prologue was somewhat
different to the rest of the filmed material in that it had its own
compact, coherent storyline that needed to be carried by the actors. I
culled the prologue from segments of
The Silver Age, a Thomas Heywood
play published in 1613. It's the second play in the quintet that my
post-graduate university work has been dedicated to - I prepared the
first edition of The Golden Age
since 1611 for my MA and am doing the same with the
Silver, Brazen and two parts of
The Iron Age for my doctorate -
and I wanted to use it chiefly because of the lines referring to the
Bacchanals. We wanted three physically stunning people to play Semele,
Hera and Zeus - but physically stunning people who could act. Even when
she was in the Trilogy with us aged 17, Jocelyn Christian had been
described as having a pre-Raphaelite sort of beauty, and she had come a
long way in the film & television world since those dark old days of the
original Bacchanals. I knew she'd have the look, poise and confidence to
pull off Semele, as well as the vulnerability and innocence that ultimately
leads to Semele's death. Oddly, the same night I asked Irene to join us,
we happened to visit the bar at which Jocelyn worked and I made the offer
there and then. Hannah Deans' association with The Bacchanals goes right
back to the start - she lived at Boston Terrace with Carey when I first
returned from the UK, and if it weren't for Hannah I'd have never met Eve
or James. Hannah had also worked as publicist on the Trilogy. At a Boston
Terrace party - I think it must have been the party heralding Eve's return
after those six weeks in Sydney - Hannah had turned up with magnificent
jewellery and a stunning dye-job and right away I thought she'd have the
right smouldering look for Hera. As for Zeus ... I never imagined or
considered anyone else for the role. Taika is about as close to a Greek
god as any mortal I know and we were able to pin him down to some dates.
I always loved the credit "and LAURENCE OLIVIER as Zeus" in
Clash of the Titans and imagined
a similar kind of credit in
The Bacchae.
Adapting the prologue from segments of
The Silver Age was an interesting
exercise and I was initially mortified to see just how much text I could
cut and replace with visual images. The prologue was by far the
best-planned segment of The Bacchae
- not only was every single line and camera set-up scripted, but the whole
sequence was thoroughly storyboarded - we needed about 90 different shots
for the four short scenes - and I shot a test version on a digital handicam,
using Star Wars action figures in
place of actors and doing all the voices myself. We allowed ourselves two
days to shoot the prologue - a day's interior shooting upstairs at Jean's
for the second and fourth scenes, and a day's exterior shooting for the
first and third scenes. When we got to 3pm on the first day and had done
about two set-ups, I began to understand just how shooting a film really
works and Eve and I quickly agreed that placing a time limit on these
things was silly - it was more important to get the shots we needed than
to get them in two days. It took us a day and a half to do the interior
scenes in Semele's bedroom. On the afternoon of the second day we moved
everyone out to the Attaturk memorial to shoot the first scene and then
returned to Jean's to get the last few interior shots, and then finally
on the morning of the third day we took Jocelyn and Taika out to
Silverstream to shoot the third scene. By the time we got to this
forest scene, which was by far the weakest in the script and most boring
in the storyboards, I'd worked out exactly what I was doing, Will had
worked out (I think!) how to comprehend what I was on about and the
actors had got their heads around the language and the style we wanted.
We shot the prologue on black & white 8mm, but also shot back-up
takes on DV - so essentially we did everything twice, because we were
worried that the 8mm might end up being just too hard to edit or project.
Also, the nightmare of the 8mm for
Hamlet only just making it back
to NZ with days before the show opened was one we hadn't forgot and
didn't want to endure again. We knew from the outset that the sound
was going to be a nightmare. We recorded all the dialogue onto a
reel-to-reel four track as well as doing a mini-disc back-up. I was
sure that with clever editing we could create a useable soundtrack but
also aware that we could very well have to re-do all the dialogue in
post-production.
When our eight or nine reels of 8mm finally arrived, we were thrilled
at how fantastic some of the shots looked but there was a hell of a lot
of film to wade through when it came to editing. James and I edited the
8mm ourselves (James had bought a splicer since our 8mm adventures with
Hamlet, in which we'd had to rely
on the goodwill of others to cut the sequence together) over about eight
sessions. It took us a full day to assemble a rough-cut of the first
scene, mainly because of the difficulty of knowing which bits to use.
James likes to do things meticulously and by-the-book (being a cinema
projectionist by trade) whereas I favoured the hack-and-slash approach
and often had to devise creative ways of getting around having
accidentally snipped a vital shot right in the middle of a line.
After another three sessions on each individual scene, we had a rough
cut of the whole prologue. It was about 11 minutes long, whereas I
wanted it to be more like 5. We saved much time simply by trimming the
cuts down further and further so there was no excess at either end of
the takes we'd used (this was one of the major problems of editing the
8mm - with no sound and the tiny frames, it was difficult to know where
in each piece of film the take actually began and ended). Once we had
it as tight as we thought we could get it, it was about 8 minutes long.
I managed to effect some even more hack-and-slash surgery by working
all the action shots - various shots of Jocelyn's hand on her stomach
to indicate pregnancy, candles blowing out, etc. - so that the dialogue
flowed over them, rather than lines being broken up by action shots.
Eve's partner Aidan had the nightmare job of assembling the sound.
Initially he edited it in the same manner as we had the film itself - he
got the best takes of every line, assembled them in the right order, and
then started trimming time around them so they sounded natural and more
or less matched up with the film. We recorded the 8mm onto a digital
camera so he had a rough version of it to try and get the timing right
and the idea was that, for the show, we'd start the cd and the projector
at the same time so that the sound and picture were more or less in synch
... but what we discovered was that the picture varied in speed every time
the 8mm was played on the projector, so at the eleventh hour we recorded
it onto DV so Aidan could synch the sound up exactly on computer, and for
the show we played the DV version. It was a shame to lose the whole feel
and noise of having an actual projector playing the prologue, but more
than worth it for Aidan's brilliant soundtrack, complete with 1930s
horror film-music.
Opening credits:
We really wanted The Bacchanals' logo to come up like the Lucasfilm
logo at the beginning of the
Star Wars films before going
into the main credit sequence. Sure enough, Will was able to put a
yellow/green/gold sparkle over the logo. The intial script said that
the noise that accompanied the logo should be a scrapy
fingers-down-blackboard kind of noise - like all the air ducts opening
and closing in Alien. Will
mixed the credits with a heartbeat playing throughout, to tie it into
the heartbeat that concluded the 8mm prologue. Everyone's names were
projected, white onto black backdrop, in OCRB font - homage to
The Sopranos as far as I was
concerned.
The first shot of the 'official' show was one we discussed at great
length but never pulled off. The idea was to start on the palace, then
zoom out slowly at first but then incredibly quickly through the city,
the forest, the mountains, the outskirts and finally finish out in the
wilderness with James as Dionysus appearing. It was an incredibly
complex scene to try and imagine, let alone explain - a visual equivalent
of the orchestra build-up at the end of "A Day in the Life" was the
kind of thing I was thinking of. Actual visual reference points were
the end of the Brotherhood of the Wolf
trailer and the opening of
Star Trek: First Contact which
begins, I think, with a close-up of Patrick Stewart's eye and then
gradually zooms out and out until he's just a tiny figure within a
giant Borg spaceship. As a reference to this
Star Trek moment, we always
referred to our intended sequence as "the eye shot", even though there
was never to be an eye apparent.
But it was too complex, especially for something that would feature
so briefly. Eventually we shot James against a green screen, filmed some
footage of the Karori hills at the back of James' house and Will put the
shots together with the computer-generated palace he'd built. We never
had anything in the show that really established the city of Thebes -
something I'd certainly want if we were to undertake such an exercise
again, but something that I don't think ultimately harmed the show too
greatly.
Women leaving the city:
This sequence could have gone on forever and we certainly shot much more
than we could have ever used. Here is the description of the sequence in
the original script:
ONSCREEN: We see footage that shows us
the women leaving Thebes, passing through the woods and arriving in the
wastelands. Not quite sure how this sequence could work - it could be
very straightforward and linear; we see them leave their homes, travel
through the streets of the city and then out through the forest. Or
perhaps we see them being overtaken by the trance - they're all doing
normal, everyday things and suddenly, as though possessed, abandon
whatever they're doing and leave, answering the calling of the god. It
could be that they start out very straight and upright as they shift
through the city, and then become much more free, sensual, feral, fast
with their physical movement as they get away from the city. It is
important that amidst this we clearly identify
AGAUË and her sisters
INO and
AUTONOË, and that we make
clear that none of what they are doing is normal behaviour. It should
be secretive, furtive, but the end result should be that suddenly we are
aware that hundreds of women are involved, even though it has initially
looked like only a few conspirators.
The problem was that every time we had a meeting to talk about what
might go on in this sequence, a thousand new ideas came to mind. We
wanted to show a variety of women all doing very ordinary, normal
things and then all of them, in different places, receiving the
"call" from Dionysus to abandon what they were doing, drop everything,
and head out into the wilderness. Footage for this we shot included:
- James' flatmate Natasya (later to become a proper Bacchanal in
A Midsummer Night's Dream) as a
young woman doing the grocery shopping, walking wearily through
supermarket aisles (at Pak'n'Save in Kilbirnie!), hearing the call
(which we referred to as 'the Dionysus bat signal'), dropping the big
bottle of diet Coke she'd just picked up and walking, trancelike, from
the supermarket, leaving the shopping sitting in its trolley.
- A woman in a café (Midnight Espresso on Cuba St) having
coffee and intimate conversation with a handsome young man (Alex in
disguise) and abandoning him suddenly when hearing the 'bat signal'
and walking out of the café
- A bored, tired, oppressed secretary (Julia in funny wig) sitting
in the corner of an executive boardroom taking minutes at a meeting which
should have finished hours ago. As the board (Mark, James, Eve's partner
Aidan, Alex's cousin Simon and Alex in disguise) waffle on she keeps
looking at the clock and then, upon hearing the 'bat signal', she walks
out of the meeting, dropping everything she's doing.
- A harrowed young woman (Eve's flatmate Anna) talking on the phone
to her husband, tied up at work, while trying to get the dinner ready for
their four children, with various pots boiling and the general stresses
of life piling up. When she hears the 'bat signal' she drops the phone,
the tin of tomatoes she's opening with her other hand, and walks off
out of the kitchen and into the night, the pots bubbling over on the stove.
- A surly young man (Eve's flatmate Luca) reads FHM with his feet up
on the coffee table in his flash apartment, while his girlfriend (Natasya
in a funny wig) in their open plan kitchen tries to engage him in
conversation. He doesn't even notice when she goes into a trance and
walks off until he hears the door slam.
- A stressed career woman (Eve in long dark wig - the same wig Alex
wore as Pentheus, in fact!) is checking her post office box and leafing
through an armful of mail when she receives the 'bat signal'. She drops
all of the mail and, as she walks off in her purposeful trance, her
briefcase falls open and spills a trail of paperwork behind her.
- A frayed, stressed waitress (Irene) is trying to take orders
from a young, stroppy, difficult couple (long-time Rialto employee and
Bacchanals supporter Deon Cotgrove and Alex's cousin Simon Smith - who
were credited at the end of the show as 'Gay Couple in Bar'!!) while a
group of rowdy drunken yobs at the table behind them (a whole assortment
of boyfriends, flatmates and friends, including Alex in disguise yet
again, and Julia disguised as a man) get more and more out of control,
rude and offensive. As the couple argue with each other, with the rowdy
mob and are condescending toward the waitress, she hears the call of
Dionysus and leaves them mid-order. We shot this in the Malthouse, the
bar Irene worked at, on a packed, busy night.
- At the Athenian palace (the foyer of the old Hunter building at
Victoria University) a huge civic function is underway. Agauë and
her sisters Ino and Autonoë are in the bathroom putting the finishing
touches to their make-up before they descend the grand central staircase
to greet their hundreds of guests, all immaculately dressed as they wolf
down their caviar and champagne. The three royal sisters mingle amongst
their guests. When the call from Dionysus comes, every woman in the hall
stops what they are doing, and in unison the scores of women walk,
entranced, from the hall, abandoning the party and all the baffled men.
We shot this on a pouring
wet Sunday afternoon and managed to convince about thirty people to come
in, dressed in suits and ball-gowns, for a couple of hours to contribute
to the shots. We hired a bunch of glasses and bought a few casks of
cheap wine and everyone was very merry indeed. Amazing how you can
position everyone in a wide shot so that it looks like there are more
extras than there actually are. The idea of a huge lavish party came
from two sources - the Julie Taymor film of
Titus Andronicus in which
Saturnine and Tamora have a riotous party in the palace with swimming
pool and swing band, and more importantly the Loncraine/McKellen
Richard III in which all of the
central characters are established in the giant party at the start of
the film while jazz singer croons Marlowe's "Come live with me and be my
love". It took us virtually the entire shooting period to find a venue
that was right, after going down dozens of dead ends, and this was the
very last thing we filmed, on the last day of September.
Several of those sequences never made it into the finished show - we
realised we were saying the same thing in ten different ways when we
could say it just as effectively in three. I was especially sad to
lose the scene shot in the Malthouse (since it featured my cameo) but
ultimately agreed with all of Will's choices here.
We never quite filmed the 'hundreds of women going through the
streets in procession' that I'd hoped for, but we did a composite
shot of Julia in thirteen different frocks running over the same
stretch of street so that the impression was of lots of different
people running off at the same time.
Guards capturing Dionysus:
This was a straightforward but (I thought) effective sequence. We agonised
for ages over what sort of 'guards' Pentheus would have - we were worried,
as I've doubtless said, about the whole thing looking like a cheap
Lord of the Rings rip-off, so we
decided on a design that was more gothic and modern for Pentheus and his
mob. The idea was to have an army of dark-suited men, a la all the Agent
Smiths in The Matrix films. So
rather than having breast-plated armies rushing out of a castle on
horseback, we shot in an underground carpark. I became very fond of the
wonder of digitally composited shots, as they solved our ongoing problem
of never having enough extras of the right height/gender - in the carpark
underneath Civic Square we filmed James' car in as many different parks
as it could get into, and many different angles of black-suited folk
getting into it in different formations and slamming the doors. Then we
set the camera up over the top of the exit and Irene stunt-drove the car
out of the carpark several times, turning a different direction each time.
Then, out in the Kaitoke forest, she drove the car down the same hill
several times, stopping in a different place each time. When Will had
put it all together and composited it, the effect was that you saw loads
of guards get into all their identical black cars, the army of black cars
all hoon out of the carpark, and then one group of cars all arrive out
in the forest to capture Dionysus. I could have watched the overhead
shot of all the identical cars emerging from the underground carpark
forever.
The earthquake:
Some of the footage in this was stuff that had been shot for the previous
sequence - we'd shot footage in the tunnel underneath the airport runway
of various Maenads (often Julia in thirteen frocks again) running down
the tunnel, with Will mounted on a skateboard (oh the joys of low budget
filmmaking!!). We also got footage of guards marching James (as Dionysus)
down the tunnel.
The exploding palace was entirely computer-generated and was one of
Will's real centrepieces - and I believe it took him forever to do.
All the palace staff fleeing in terror was hilarious to shoot, since it
was one of those days (like most) where we only had about five extras.
So we kept the camera focused quite tightly on Alex, pushing his way
onward through the airport tunnel while the same five extras ran
frantically past him, around the back of the camera, and then
frantically past Alex again - and we did this over and over again so
that it looked like hoards of people running for their lives.
Pentheus' hallucinations were tough because no one - Will, Eve or
I - could come up with an effective or interesting way of telling this
part of the story. On the most miserable day of filming, where we were
totally rained out and sheltering in Will's family's garage, we rigged
up the green-screen and shot footage of Alex looking terrified and angry,
lashing out at invisible attackers, and later Will composited in strange
shadow things and scary noises.
The Herdsman's Tale:
This was the longest and most complicated part of the show, if only
because it took us forever to be able to film all of the various elements
we needed. Essentially, while Irene related the tale in the stage show,
we had to show the audience how a herdsman comes across the sleeping
Maenads and then gathers all the local farmers together; how the farmers
observe the women waking up and undertaking strange Bacchic rites in the
forest; how the farmers then try to capture Agauü but are fought off
by her; how the Maenads stop to slaughter all the cattle in their pursuit
of the farmers; how the Maenads attack the villages and kill all the men;
and finally the Maenads returning to the forest, blood-soaked, and
washing the blood off in the river.
The first segment of the story was shot out in the Kaitoke forest
on a freezing cold Tuesday morning in June. The sun was shining but it
had been raining all week, so there was a fair bit of slipping and falling
(in fact one shot that made it into the show of Natasya had to be cut
right before the second she went unintentionally sliding down the bank
mid-take!) The wonders of digital compositing meant that Will was able
to add many more sleeping Bacchae into the footage than we actually had.
We shot with Eve, Julia, Irene, Natasya and Eve's flatmate Anna as the
sleeping women. Both Eve and Julia had just dyed their hair and the
colours were incredible, especially when Will did a digital colour-grade
to alter the colour tones somewhat. The farmers were played that morning
by Alex and James (complete with ridiculous bush-shirts and beards) and
a friend of Anna's called Jason, who brought his dog with him. Chucky,
a border collie, was an incredible dog and more directable than some
actors I've worked with. So we were able very easily to shoot Jason
and Chucky coming across the sleeping women, rushing back to fetch Alex
and James, and then the three of them plus dog hiding in the foliage
and observing the Bacchae. It was hard to stop it looking too
Lord of the Rings-ish, especially
since the farmers all looked like hobbits. Shooting the women doing
what Eve called in the shooting script "freaky nature shit" was a bit
comical and one of those many moments where I wondered if I actually had
any idea of what I was doing.
The next segment, where the men have waited until nightfall to make
their move in capturing Agauë was the beginning of the many horrendous
inconsistencies that prevailed through this segment. First off, we were
no longer at Kaitoke but in my front and back yards. Jason and Chucky
had vanished, so instead of three farmers there were now only two (Farmer
Jim and Farmer Al as we'd christened them) and no dog. And the night we
shot it we weren't able to have Irene, Natasya or Anna, so suddenly the
Maenads were made up of Eve, Julia and the amazing Edwards sisters Zelda
and Lucy. We made a giant bonfire in my front yard (beginning the sequence
with homage to the shot at the end of Return of the Jedi in which Luke
lights his father's funeral pyre) and shot the women dancing around the
fire (the guide track on the first cut of this sequence was the music
used in the rave scene in
The Matrix Reloaded - again,
Will's great editing made it look like the discrepancies between this
and the Kaitoke footage were minimal). The combination of flame, the
howling wind and the rain - it began pouring through this shoot - gave
us some good footage. We shot Agauë being attacked by James and
Alex in my back yard and Eve, a huge
Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan,
loved her big fight sequence beating James and Alex up and then trampling
James into the ground as all the Maenads pursue the farmers through the
forest. For all the Maenads read
Eve, Julia, Zelda and Lucy; for
the farmers read Alex; for
through the forest read up and
down my garden pathway. I'd just shifted into a new house and virtually
everyone was seeing it for the first time that night. Blankets huddled
under that night between takes still smell of kerosene to this day.
We never actually included the slaughter of the cows in the final show.
We did actually film some cows out in Kaitoke and talked about various
strategies for getting the necessary sequence filmed but it just
continually got stalled until we ran out of time - and I doubt if anyone
noticed it wasn't in the show.
The Maenads descending upon the villages of Hyrsae and Erythrae and
massacring the townsfolk was one of those moments when I knew I was in
over my head. We shot at Boston Terrace on a Friday night with about
35 extras - not only were we able to call in many friends but also roped
in a bunch of Wellington Performing Arts Centre students and all of Eve's
Lord of the Rings workmates. So
we had a big bunch of burly farmers armed with shovels, axes and trowels,
and a whole army of laurel-wreathed Maenads. Unfortunately I had no idea
how to direct so many extras, especially not in the three hours we had to
get the work done. Continual fire and smoke problems didn't help - with
that night's wind, you'd get ten seconds into a take before the torches
would all blow out. Much of the footage was terrible, simply because we
had no idea how to cope with that many people and convey what we wanted.
A few nights later we did some pickups using just Eve, Julia, Irene,
Alex and James and got some much better footage - we had time to work
out all the gore and blood and to choreograph all the fights properly.
Some of my favourite moments - Irene relishing repeatedly stabbing a
farmer with a pitchfork, Julia going berserk with a broken bottle - were
from this night.
It was August by the time we had a morning fine enough to go back
to Kaitoke and film Eve, Julia and Irene (again, availability of extras
had changed once again), drenched in blood, getting into the river to
wash themselves. Will and I agreed to go in the river with them when
it was pointed out how sadistic our requirements were. So we stood
knee-deep in the freezing water with them while they washed blood off
of themselves.
Pentheus' transformation:
This was one of the earliest sequences we filmed. This was shot downstairs
at James' house over a single afternoon against a white backdrop. I'd
wanted something akin to the sequence in
Alien in which the crew of the
Nostromo all wake up from
hypersleep and John Hurt, on his own, slowly sits up, stretches and
looks at his hand - it's all very white and each shot bleeds slowly
into the next. Basically we filmed a very long, slow zoom in on Alex
wearing his suit, and a very long zoom out on Alex in his Maenad disguise,
and a bunch of shots to be mixed into these two - make-up being applied,
his suit being ripped off etc. Will mixed it all with a pounding
heartbeat sound underneath, but this couldn't be heard over the live
music in the stage show. Inevitably this sequence elicited laugher
from the audience most nights as it finishes with Alex seemingly
transformed into a woman.
Pentheus leaving the city:
This was our homage to our own work - specifically the 8mm prologue for
Hamlet featuring the funeral
procession of King Hamlet through the deserted streets of Wellington.
I'd had the idea that we could have a similar,
The Quiet Earth/Day of the Triffids-style
sequence in which Pentheus, in a trance and attired as a woman, walks
through the deserted city heading towards the wilderness. We shot footage
in central Wellington between 5am and 9am on a Saturday morning in July.
Alex, of course, was the only actor in this sequence but besides Will and
myself, James, Eve and Mark were present as crew - because we really wanted
a lot of footage of Alex walking in the middle of roads, we needed enough
people to be able to spot traffic from all directions.
I was really in love with the notion of a shot of Alex walking down
the middle of the motorway and managed to talk the others into my crazy
plan. We'd estimated how much time we had between traffic lights on the
town side of the motorway tunnel. Will and I set up the camera on the
second overhead bridge out from the tunnel, while Eve was stationed on
the first bridge where we could see her and she could see the mouth of
the tunnel. Mark and James had Alex in the car and made sure that, when
the lights changed on the town side of the tunnel, they were the last car
to go through before the red light, giving us about 27 seconds with no
traffic in which to try and get out shot. Once they were through the
tunnel, Eve signalled us to start filming. Mark and James deposited
Alex on the road under Eve's bridge, sped on ahead until they were
clear of our bridge, and put their hazard lights on so they could then
retrieve Alex at the end of the take. As we filmed, Alex walked down
the middle of the motorway with Eve able to yell to him should traffic
appear behind him.
The adrenalin of this one moment in the morning of filming made the
whole thing worthwhile. Will and I were hysterical with terror on our
bridge. Only momentary seconds of this footage actually made it into
the show - every time we got a clear 5 seconds, Eve would yell and Alex
would break out of his trance to scramble like a lunatic for the side
of the road as a huge truck roared past.
Pentheus' death:
This was another sequence that was made up of many components and took a
long time to get all the necessary footage for. As a continuation of the
previous sequence, we had to show Alex as Pentheus arriving in the forest,
climbing a tree, witnessing all the dancing Maenads, being spotted, the
Maenads tearing down the tree and pursuing Pentheus, and then finally
tearing him apart on the rocks.
We'd shot Alex arriving in the Maenads' part of the forest during our
first major day of shooting at Kaitoke in June; Alex climbing the tree
and watching the Maenads dancing was filmed on that miserable rained out
day in Will's garage in August. Rather than at the top of a tree, Alex
was on his knees with strategically placed branches in front of him and
a green-screen behind him. Likewise, when he looked down upon the dancing
women, the over-the-shoulder shots of him were looking at a green-screen.
When we finally got to shooting the dancing women weeks and weeks later,
it was at a stage where we were no longer bothered by the lack of extras
and knew that we could just composite everything so long as the camera was
locked off. So we went up to Victoria University and set up the camera in
the carpark that looks down on the Boyd Wilson rugby field. Eve, Julia
and Irene danced around miles below with several changes of frock, so when
Will composited the whole thing together it looked like there were lots
and lots of them. In fact, once he added the green-screen shots of Alex
he discovered that everything lined up so well that he didn't need to
paint out the p153ower lines or the giant floodlights.
 |
| An early image of Will's work creating the shot in which thousands of Maenads are seen dancing. Seriously, only Eve, Julia and Irene are actually there. Note un-removed floodlights and power-lines. |
Back in Will's garage weeks earlier, we shot ridiculous footage of
Alex wobbling and then falling off the top of the giant tree (in other
words, Alex on his knees swaying and then falling out of shot). Even
more ridiculous was the footage of Eve, Irene and Julia trying to topple
the tree from below (essentially they were just pushing on a squat log
carefully framed up). Cut to Kaitoke even earlier on in the filming
process, where we'd achieved shots of Alex hitting the ground after
falling from the tree and then being pursued through the woods and
along the beach by the women.
It was a shame we only had Eve, Irene and Julia for the day in
September we finally filmed Alex's death - but the gruesomeness of the
sequence more than made up for the lack of extras (James, however, did
spend that day in a dress and wig for long shots but ended up not being
needed!). We even had a severed arm for Eve to wrench out of Alex's arm
socket, and with all the fake blood the rocks by the Kaitoke river were
an incredible mess by the time we were finished. In fact, as we scurried
away in our cars after yet another day of unauthorised filming in a public
place, the police arrived, alerted by members of the public that some
sort of violent act was taking place by the river. In the final cut Will
juxtaposed the violence with nice calm quiet nature shots, inspired by
Star Wars: A New Hope - the bit
where Luke gets attacked by a Tuskan Raider and, rather than show us the
final blow, George Lucas cuts to distant empty valleys and faraway noise.
Dionysus' final appearance:
This was one of the first things to be recorded, unfortunately. I say
unfortunately because it meant we had one section of the theatrical script
that would therefore be set in stone (I'd expected much more adaptation
and rewriting through rehearsals than actually took place - basically I
underestimated how playable the first draft was). I was never happy with
the speech I'd written because we hadn't really decided what the 'message'
we wanted to convey was - that gods are wrathful and humanity is doomed?
that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? that there is
some good to be found amidst all the play's suffering? It's the problem
with the whole ancient Greek notion of the
deus ex machina - in modern
productions it's merely a plot contrivance.
The idea was that, when Dionysus appeared in his godly state at the
finale of the play, he would do so on screen, enhanced by all manner of
special effects. Poor James had to learn an enormous, long, complicated
and unwieldy speech and perform it in a single take. We also shot
close-ups of his mouth, his eyes, intending to switch between them
rather than just play the entire speech as one shot ... but in the
finished show it ended up being the one shot. So James wore a white
hooded frock somewhat akin to a Jedi robe, stood in front of the
green-screen while smoke was pumped all around him, and tried to get
through the whole speech without screwing it up. I think we got one
complete take - it was done at the end of a long day and he'd only had
time to learn the speech the night before.
A few months later we came back to the sequence, because Will decided
he hadn't lit it properly. I had found the time to improve the speech
but still wasn't that happy with it. Effects wise Will put shimmering
watery effects on the background - in fact this was the one sequence
that he delivered a new version of most nights of the season as he
continually thought of new ways to improve on it.
Rehearsals and run
This was a glorious time for us. The luxury of all-day, every-day
rehearsals - and being paid for them - was one The Bacchanals had never
enjoyed before. Unfortunately, like the filming, rehearsals were beset
with timetable clashes. Eve stopped work on the pick-ups for The
Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King
so as to finally become available, Julia had university exams to contend
with and I finally wrapped up a busy winter/spring of back-to-backing at
Circa whilst also teaching at university with only two weeks to go until
production week. My final academic assignment for the year was directing
the finale of Euripides' Medea with
one of the groups in THEA203 at the university's theatre department (with
the title role being played by Erin Banks, who would go on to become a
Bacchanal in Romeo and Juliet -
but more of that in a different commentary!), and the
Medea piece became an excellent
opportunity to try out many of the plans I had for the stage side of
The Bacchae. I had a chorus of
twelve who were all identically attired and masked, and I was impressed by
how well the masks worked in the Medea
piece and learnt a lot in a small space of time about how mask-wearers need
to act in order to be seen and heard properly.
Unfortunately the brilliant masks Sar Ruddenklau had made for
The Bacchae proved to be totally
impractical - when Eve and I had seen the initial designs and the finished
masks while Sar was working on them they looked great, but once we got them
out at the rehearsal room and on the actors' faces, it was another matter
altogether. They looked amazing but obscured the actors' expressions badly
(they were built too high up off the faces) and only Julia could really
convincingly sell it. We decided to abandon Sar's work and start again
from scratch, following the same lines my
Medea students had tried of much
simpler, smaller masks. They were a huge improvement but, after having
already rehearsed much of the play with no masks it seemed an unnecessary
imposition and made scenes which had previously been fine not work. My
final realisation was that masks are only effective if you have a giant
chorus all doing the same thing (as we would with the fairies in
A Midsummer Night's Dream much
later - with masks tailor-made to fit each individual actor's face) so,
after going through three different sets, we ditched the masks altogether
and it was the right decision.
Our two weeks' full-time rehearsal out at Jean's was great fun - the
most I have ever enjoyed a rehearsal process. From the outset we were able
to run the entire play once a day and have the rest of the day to work on
music, choreography, everything. We were all going through traumatic times
in our various personal lives through
The Bacchae's rehearsal process, so
it was as though going out to Island Bay to rehearse was our sanctuary from
having to deal with the outside world for seven hours each day. With the
six of us being so close and getting on so well, the energy generated in
the room each rehearsal was amazing and exhausting at the same time - I
have never been so tired as coming home from
Bacchae rehearsals. For all our
time fears, two weeks' rehearsal was more than ample and most days we
would start late or finish early so we could run 'errands' - many of
these 'errands' involved detours via cafes so we could have long lunches.
The one major setback from the over-long filming process was that Will
ended up with one month instead of three to edit all the sequences together
and add the necessary visual and digital effects, so instead of everything
being carefully timed in with the visual aspect of the show, we didn't really
get to run it with any footage until production week. The production week
was incredibly relaxed in terms of where the show itself was at, but quite
stressful in terms of waiting for the film components - but no one was as
stressed as Will, who is an absolute perfectionist but had an immovable
deadline to meet.
On Sunday we painted the back wall of BATS white a la
Crave, on Monday we rigged lights
and the giant projector. Tuesday - our first run with the film footage -
was by far the worst day, with tempers frayed as we tried to get our heads
around this huge new component of the show. Also, James had been extremely
ill to the point where we drove him home that morning, forced him to get
into bed and confiscated his car keys and his cellphone so he could do
nothing but rest until Eve returned to pick him up for that evening's run.
Furthermore there were some complex lighting issues - the downfall of me
multi-tasking is that I was worried too much about the technical elements
when I needed to be giving the actors all of my support.
I came in on the Wednesday fuelled with aggressive energy - I
hate not being able to
crack a show - and we had a brilliant day. Late on Tuesday we'd made the
emergency decision that we needed a stage manager (a
huge defeat for The
Bacchanals as a company of multi-taskers) so Wednesday added many new
elements to the show - a stage manager in the form of Julia's friend Rachel,
Aidan's CDs of all the backing tracks of music for the show, the arrival
of the specially made Jedi cloaks that were a vital part of the costuming,
the first view of the 8mm with SOUNDTRACK (amazing!) and, most crucially,
the severed head we'd been made. That night's run was the first time Eve
played the final scene soaked in blood, and to this day it's the best
performance I've seen her give.
On Thursday we did a preview - a full house including three school
groups - and it was great to see how the show finally worked in front of
an audience. The Bacchae's run
was interesting in that it took quite a while to crack just how to convey
to the audience that the first few songs were meant to be tongue-in-cheek
and that it was okay to laugh. It was also interesting in that we had no
time off - from the Thursday preview through to the Saturday of the
following week we performed every night. In terms of the performances, it
took a while before the actors finally believed me that they were more
important than the film footage, and once they accepted this knowledge,
the show soared. It also helped that they stopped trying to turn 'Go
Toward The Light' into a cheesy emotional number and played the end of
the show with the numbness it needed so as not to look earnest.
What was also of great interest in terms of The Bacchanals' box office
history was that business was really good - five of the ten shows were sold
out and the rest did excellent business. The worst night - Sunday - was 50%.
My favourite night was the Tuesday where we started the day with 7 bookings
but had 60 in the audience. Word of mouth was excellent for the show and
began the weird trend for us of turning lots of people away on the last
three nights. We'd already begun work on
Romeo and Juliet before
The Bacchae opened, and with the
show only two months away, it was great to have such a big success with
The Bacchae to keep people reminded
of who we were for when the next show came around ...
Post-script: Irene's car crashes
It's hard to talk about The Bacchae
without mentioning Irene's mishaps behind the wheel, not all of which were
her fault. At 5am on the first major day of DV shooting out at Kaitoke
(filming all the women being discovered by the Herdsman) Irene, half asleep,
wrapped her car around a concrete pillar ten metres from her house. She was
fine but the car was not. This meant we were unable to start shooting at 6am
and get the sunrise - instead all sorts of strange people-ferrying had to
take place. This gave everyone strange attitudes toward being in a car
driven by her (especially as she was our designated stunt driver!).
During the second week of rehearsals, I needed to go out to Will's to
talk through some of the unfinished DV sequences. James was working at the
Lighthouse Cinema in Petone from 6pm-10.30pm, so we travelled out there with
him, then Irene and I borrowed his car to drive on out to Will's at
Silverstream, reasoning that we'd have enough time to look through all of
the footage and then get back to pick James up when his shift finished.
However Irene drove up the wrong gravel track out at Will's and reversed a
little too hastily. James' beloved car ended up stuck in a ditch and she,
Will and I spent three hours trying to get it back onto the road; a task of
some difficulty. It wasn't helped by our failure to realise until 9pm that
part of the reason the car weighed so much was that James had twenty litres
of paint (for the BATS walls) in the boot. I have never laughed so much in
my life. -David
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