How two theatre makers brought the worlds of HP Lovecraft to life in their play Providence: The Shadow over Lovecraft, now playing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe until August 25, 2018.
“You know…” Dominic Allen looks up from his phone at me and narrows his eyes, “You kind of look like him.”
We’re sitting in the outdoor bar of one of the larger venues during last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s August in Scotland and the weather is doing its best to imitate a warm sunny day. We’re discussing the works and mythos of one of our favourite horror authors but it wasn’t until this moment that we sought to learn a bit about his actual life by reading up about him on Wikipedia. I gingerly take the phone from his hands and stare at a thin face, not unattractive but with a rather large forehead, he’s dressed smartly in a suit and tie and I can’t help but find some resemblance between our large, somewhat intense, eyes.
“His chin is bigger than mine.” I say as I hand the phone back.
“Yeah but you’re both tall, blonde… I’m just saying.” Dominic, my friend of over 10 years, is getting that creative glint in his eye that occurs when he’s about to suggest something huge:
“We should make a show.”
A chance to work with one of the most talented and hilarious people I know, playing the man who practically INVENTED the modern horror genre… How could I say no?
By the end of the festival we had begun our research into the life of HP Lovecraft. We had also applied for a spot at London’s VAULT Festival, and we started having a lot of fun with ideas for the show. Dom was cast as Edgar Allen Poe (the resemblance was too good to pass up) who was Lovecraft’s biggest influence and so became our spirit guide through the events of the show. We decided to make it a biography of Lovecraft’s life with short versions of his stories as they occured chronologically. There was however one issue that kept cropping up and wasn’t dealt with properly until we got into the rehearsal room for the run at VAULT (the application was successful) later in the year: how do two people with very little budget, stage the horrors of Lovecraft’s stories?
Lovecraft is largely known for his fantastical and monstrous creations. There’s the Dunwich Horror which is made mostly of eyes and can only be seen when covered in mystic dust. The fish people of Innsmouth with their green and bulbous features and perhaps his most famous creation, the great Cthulhu himself, tall as a mountain, bat-winged and tentacle featured. If we were going to do these monsters justice, we would have to rely on all our skill as performers and story-tellers.
The answers came slowly and with help from our friends. We enlisted the help of two incredible people, Ina Berggren, light designer and stage manager extraordinaire, and Wilfred Petherbridge, award winning sound designer. The four of us spent many hours together trying to find interesting and terrifying ways of adapting Lovecraft’s life and stories to the Fringe stage. We knew we didn’t have the means to try and actually create these beasts live, so we decided to use the greatest horror trick in the book: never show the monster. This approach works for horror, as well as theatre.
Let me explain. We have a saying in my company: never use the real car. This refers to a show a colleague saw years ago that was set inside a car. The company creating the show didn’t have the budget to put a car on stage so they found ingenious and unique ways to create what the audience ‘saw’ as a car (with the skillful help of the performers and carefully selected props). The show did well and got some funding off the back of a successful run. The team decided to use the funding to purchase a real car, and promptly killed the show. The skillful theatre maker knows that the audience’s willingness to help build the world in their own minds is theatre’s greatest strength. Never use the real car.
We had never created a horror show before but we have both been making comedies for a long time. We found that comedy and horror have a lot in common, they both rely on timing to achieve a reaction in their audience. This experience, combined with our avoidance of any actual car building (seeing the monster) along with some great sound and light design we were able to bring the worlds of HP Lovecraft to life.
By the time the first show at VAULT Festival began we had run it a grand total of twice. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever felt so nervous. The whole process had been enlightening, I’d ALWAYS wanted to try and put horror on stage and combining this with comedy (my other passion) and one of my favourite authors was a dream come true. And to our delight it did well! People laughed and jumped at all the right moments, one friend said to me: “I kept wanting to shut my eyes or leave but I couldn’t, it was so fun!” We won an award at the festival and got some excellent press. During all of this people kept saying: So… what’s next?
Good question!
Off the back of the success of VAULT we have decided to go one further and bring the show to the largest arts festival in the world, The Edinburgh Festival Fringe. So this August, one year on from its conception, the festival will host the show that hopes to have audiences laugh and scream in equal measure. If you’re up in Edinburgh this year, why not come and see how we staged the unnamable, how we married comedy and horror in one hour of madness or indeed, how we let your own mind fill in the gaps where monsters should be.
‘PROVIDENCE: The Shadow Over Lovecraft’ will be playing at 5pm from the 2nd to the 25th August, at Assembly Rooms, 54 George Street, EH2 2LR
Tickets available here.
Twitter: @providencecult
Facebook: /providencecult
Instagram: @providencecult
Guest post by Simon Maeder
