Make an Appointment with the Wicker Man

SAVAGE pagan fertility rites might not sound like a subject for comedy, but for the National Theatre of Scotland, a Wicker Man musical by Donald McLeary and Greg Hemphill is just the ticket for the winter blues

WATCHING The Wicker Man for round about the 20th time, Donald McLeary had a shiver-down-the-spine moment. Howie, the squeaky-clean mainland cop investigating a disappearance on a sinister Scottish island, is walking through a room full of coffins. “And one of them has my name. That was unsettling – McLeary isn’t even a common name!”

Time for Greg Hemphill, his co-writer on their new stage adaptation of the movie, to pipe up.

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“Of course that’s when I realised he was wearing Hemphill trainers,” he grins, because this is a comedy, and it never does to miss an opportunity for a gag.

An Appointment With The Wicker Man, which is being directed by Vicky Featherstone, is the National Theatre of Scotland’s big show for the spring. In a bold move, NTS has invited Hemphill (a household name for Still Game and Chewin’ the Fat) and McLeary (writer and actor on Radio 4 comedy Fags, Mags and Bags and CBeebies’ Me Too!) to create a new version of the 1973 cult horror. Hemphill also performs as Lord Summerisle (the part played by Christopher Lee in the movie), his first time on stage for 12 years.

Sitting in a little room normally used for costume fittings, eating sandwiches from the top of a box marked “socks”, both acknowledge the audacity of reinventing The Wicker Man as a comedy-horror-musical. The film is held in such reverence that die-hard fans attend academic conferences about it and make pilgrimages to the sites in Dumfries & Galloway where it was filmed.

“On the posters, they put, ‘Someone’s going to burn for this,’” grins Hemphill. “Which is brilliant, and hilarious, because we think it will be us writers.”

The idea of doing a straight adaptation of The Wicker Man for the stage lasted, McLeary says, “about 20 minutes”.

“We thought it would feel like something which had been trapped in amber since 1973,” says Hemphill.

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People might think they want to see it done straight on stage,” adds McLeary. “But in fact they’d just spend two hours waiting to see the ending.”

So the reinvention has a metatextual play-within-a-play. While the original follows devout Christian policeman Howie, who travels to Summerisle only to discover that the locals are keeping ancient pagan practices cheerfully alive, Hemphill and McLeary’s version features an amateur dramatics company on a remote island who are staging a version of The Wicker Man. When their leading man disappears 24 hours before curtain-up, Rory Mulligan (Sean Biggerstaff), an actor from TV cop show “Bloodbeat”, is drafted in, and events take a turn for the sinister.

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Both writers insist that the new version celebrates the film and echoes its spirit – but will also make sense to those who have never seen the movie. “The screenplay for The Wicker Man was by Anthony Schaffer, and when you look at his other work, it’s all about playing games,” says McLeary. “He was fascinated by games, and the islanders in Wicker Man are playing a deadly game. What we’ve done is an extension of that.”

And the film is already half-way to being a musical, Hemphill contends. Paul Giovanni’s folk-rock soundtrack (which is replicated in the play) was integral to the movie, underlaying seemingly innocent scenes with an eerie and unsettling soundscape. Many musicians claim it as a key influence, and it is rumoured that the film’s director Robin Hardy once considered a musical version.

Both are passionate fans of the movie – Hemphill calls it “one of the best films ever, not just horror films”.

“We felt that, if someone’s going to screw this up, it had better be us,” says McLeary cheerfully. Hemphill says: “The intimidation factor goes when you start to analyse it. It’s a story (itself heavily adapted from David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual) and we want to take from that to inform our own story. What we’re doing is not like Airplane! or Scary Movie, it’s not pastiche. It’s like a rap song, using original text to do something different with it,” He chuckles. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

Unlike many horror films of the 1970s, The Wicker Man still holds its own as an intriguing piece of cinema. While featuring Hammer Horror regulars such as Christopher Lee and Ingrid Pitt, it delivers almost no gore or violence and has been described as a thoughtful meditation on clashing ideologies. That is, until the closing scenes when it delivers a spectacular twist in the tale involving a burning wicker colossus.

All but shunned by the studio which made it, it was released in a bastardised cut as a B-movie alongside Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and seemed destined to languish in cinematic obscurity, despite some strong performances from actors such as Edward Woodward (as Howie) and Christopher Lee, who claimed it was the best film of his career. However, over the two decades which followed its release it became a slow-burning success (no pun intended) with a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic. Total Film magazine has listed it as the sixth greatest British film of all time.

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At the same time, conspiracy theories abounded. The original negative appeared to have been lost: some say suppressed, others buried by accident in landfill under the M3. Some accused Rod Stewart of allegedly buying up all prints of the movie in an attempt to preserve the dignity of his then girlfriend, Britt Ekland, who appears topless in it. A Hollywood remake in 2006 starring Nicolas Cage, which transported the action to the US, was widely panned.

Hemphill and McLeary say the play will address all the key elements of the film and its legacy – including the ending. “There are certain things that the Wicker Man must deliver on stage,” says McLeary.

“Fire!” puts in Hemphill.

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“Yeah,” agrees McLeary. “It would be like seeing Miss Saigon without the helicopter.”

“Or Jaws without the shark,” Hemphill agrees. But whether anyone will be burned, they aren’t saying. “Even answering that question will give something away,” says Hemphill cryptically. “The less we say about the ending the better.”

The biggest surprise, perhaps, is the reinvention of The Wicker Man as a comedy. The original version is many things, but it isn’t big on laughs. For Hemphill and McLeary, however, comedy and horror are natural bedfellows. Since Still Game finished in 2007, and Hemphill and co-star and co-writer Ford Kiernan went their separate ways, he has been working with McLeary on horror-comedy screenplays. The genre has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since Shaun of the Dead (2004) revitalised the zombie movie in one big blockbusting laugh.

“People frown when we say it’s a horror comedy, but to us they go together,” says Hemphill.

“We have a rule,” says McLeary. “You play the horror first and play it straight. The laughs come from the situation. The great horror comedies work because humour comes out of dark situations.”

“Comedy is a part of all the great horror movies,” Hemphill adds. “If you’re laughing at the characters, you like them, you don’t want them to be in peril. Horror comedy isn’t just horror with jokes, it’s deeper, it serves the audience.”

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That alone might not reassure diehard fans of The Wicker Man. On the other hand, the two writers know the film so well and hold it in such affection that they describe watching it as akin to “a warm bath”.

“A comfortable pair of slippers,” says Hemphill.

“Wicker slippers,” adds McLeary.

“Wicker slippers?” Hemphill half-shouts. “We need to get those on sale in the foyer!”

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• An Appointment with the Wicker Man is at MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, 17-18 February; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen 21-25 February; Theatre Royal, Glasgow 28 February to 3 March; Eden Court, Inverness 6-10 March and The Alhambra, Dunfermline, 21-24 March. For more information, visit www.nationaltheatrescotland.com.