Strength Weekly

I had done the Wimbledon gig for three years and was pleased, towards the end of
2005, to be asked to do it yet again. This time Michael Pavelka had decided not to
do the usual Shakespeare but opt for Webster’s ‘The White Devil’, for a little light
relief. I read the play with the usual reluctance. Notable for its body count and
delirious bloodletting, the play as text still remained, as far as I was concerned,
intractable. It would have to be severely adapted. By this time I was entirely
comfortable with my inability to like any plays more than a few years old. I had,
after all, scarcely thought about the matter throughout my life as a writer and it
had only ever seemed to be an issue when the Wimbledon gigs came round. I’d
felt that the students expected something recognisably Shakespearean and it would
be wrong to withhold it because of my churlish fundamentalism with regard to the
olden. Once I realised that Michael simply didn’t care as long as the students were
suitably challenged, I cut loose.

I therefore use the term ‘adaptation’ very loosely indeed. For one of the two short
Webster pieces I was required to direct, I thought “Let’s just go with the blood part.”
The designers should endeavour to make concealed devices that would release, in a
controlled manner, copious amounts of stage blood throughout the show. I wanted a
bloodbath at the end of which the walls and floor would be awash and the actors
would be soaked.

I spoke at length with the designers about gore and how we might use it in an
excessive yet poetic manner. I put it to them that the set, its furniture and the
actors’ costumes should all bleed. The set would bleed from its every orifice: walls
would run with blood, sofas would leak it, lamps would ooze it, drawers would be
brim full of it. The characters would conduct conversations as blood ran from
beneath their hair lines, from their sleeves and trouser legs and dresses. It would
pump from their chests. They would put six blood capsules in their mouths and blood
would foam uncontrollably from their gaping gobs.

The bleeding would be gradual. Wherever the performers went, whatever they
touched, they would leave bloody footprints and handprints.

The space would initially be of a pristine cleanliness. By the end of the show it would be a charnel house.

The space would be as much a sculptural installation as drama site. The actors would not acknowledge the blood. Their conversation would contain unspoken tensions that were expressed by the blood.

It would be startling, beautiful and grotesque.

One of the actors, Chris Newland, found a website dedicated to the manufacture of
stage blood. A number of recipes were displayed, each offering different consistencies
and shades. The blood that would run down the walls had to be thick enough to
trickle rather than gush while the stuff seeping through the garments would need to
be thin so that it spread fast. The top drawer of the chest of drawers was to be filled
to the brim and, when the entire drawer was removed in the course of the scene,
the contents must splash like water, creating an effect similar to that obtained by
dropping a cow onto a carpark from a helicopter.

The most technically demanding effect involved bleeding the walls. The designers
rigged up lengths of concealed plastic drain pipe along the top of each wall of the
box set. The pipes had holes drilled in them at intervals like mighty piccolos.
Each pipe was then filled with 25 litres of blood. The holes, of course, were kept
uppermost and the pipes were rotated in order to release the gore. The effect
could not be rehearsed. The blood would stain the walls and we had no budget
to re-cover them. Small prototypes were tested on the back lot but the difference
in scale between the set and the test was unnerving. We would have to go into
performance with a major design function untried.

On the day in question not only did the blood run free but it formed undulating
vertical rivulets on the pristine white walls and made a completely
unpredictable regular splattering noise as it flowed onto the floor. The drawer of
blood was satisfyingly splashy but the costumes did not ooze quite as woundedly
as we had hoped. This was an academic misgiving, however, for the actors ended
up strikingly stained and the set was pleasingly pooled.