Something special

Enthralled by Gene Kelly’s performance, Bradbury offered the actor and dancer a screenplay based on his short story The Black Ferris, a piece first published in the magazine Weird Tales in 1948.

Kelly never made the film, and Bradbury eventually recast the tale as his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It tells of a small town in the American Midwest taken by storm when a menacing carnival rolls in, tempting people with a sinister carousel that turns back the years. The townsfolk are offered their deepest desires – but they discover there is a price to be paid.

Fast-forward a little over half a century and the stage version of Bradbury’s novel, with effects that range from a house of mirrors to a free-flying blind witch, is a major new joint production from the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) and Catherine Wheels, a theatre company for children and young people.

Gill Robertson, the production’s director, is also the artistic director of Catherine Wheels. Her previous credits include Hansel and Gretel for the NTS’s launch event and, more recently, The Wizard of Oz at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.

“It’s a great rollicking adventure,” she says. “Film, live music, eight actors, it’s just a big show. The piece is quite epic and grand, it’s a classic good versus evil, a dark fairy story. People start getting transformed into circus freaks.”

A star attraction will be the blind but all-sensing Dust Witch, played by the aerial dancer Jennifer Paterson, who is better used to performing from cranes. She swoops up and across the stage on a counterbalanced harness, as her evil character does battle.

The show is suitable for children from Primary 5 age upwards, Robertson says, but is aimed squarely at teenagers and families. “It’s a show for kids, but basically it’s a great adventure story and a thriller about the two lads saving the day with dad’s help.”

The heroes of Something Wicked… are two teenage boys, James Nightshade and William Halloway. Born minutes apart, they are about to turn 14 as Hallowe’en approaches in Green Town, a small town in the Midwest, when Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives, uninvited, out of a storm.

Bradbury’s tale has inspired horror writers such as Stephen King, but also became a coming-of-age classic, thanks to its teenage heroes. The Simpsons and South Park have carried episodes referencing the novel, while both book and simply its title have become a pop culture theme, picked up in several rock albums.

For the new theatre production, the two boys are played by Patrick Mulvey and Michael Gray, both recent graduates of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

“We knew we could never go down the route of child actors, they go through big emotional journeys,” says Robertson. “We have shaved their legs, and put them in shorts, and cut their hair.”

Their chief antagonist, the deadly Mr Dark, is played by Andrew Clark, whose resum includes the title role in Hamlet, and the joint roles of Captain Hook and Mr Darling in Peter Pan at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. “He’s been delightful and terrifying at the same time on stage,” comments Robertson.

Bradbury’s title is from a phrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth – “by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes” – uttered by the second witch as Macbeth approaches.

Robertson first read the story in her twenties and fell in love with it. “It is fantastical and really beautifully written, but it’s a big story,” she says. “I have always wanted to do it but it was too large.” The collaboration with the NTS, she says, has enabled her to put together the cast of eight in a much more ambitious production than Catherine Wheels could undertake alone.

The carousel that can make riders older or younger, a key device in the plot, is staged with live action, music, and film, and has begun to work well in rehearsals, she says: “People have to accept that characters have gone from being an adult, to being a ten-year-old boy, to being 150 years old.” The show also boasts elaborate animal masks and suits.

Bradbury was born in Illinois in August 1920, and began to publish science fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. He first achieved real recognition after pressing a copy of his 1950 book The Martian Chronicles into the hands of Christopher Isherwood, the author of Goodbye to Berlin, when they met in a Los Angeles bookshop. Isherwood delivered a glowing review.

By 1983 Something Wicked… had been made into a film, with Bradbury acting as screenwriter. The play is also Bradbury’s own adaptation, written for his Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles, where it debuted in 2003.

For Catherine Wheels it has been edited, with the approval of the 88-year-old author, partly to cut back the sections dwelling on the way dad Charles Halloway, in the throes of a mid-life crisis, is tempted by his desire to be young again.

But its “real revelation”, says Robertson, is Paterson, as the Dust Witch, an ancient, mummified creature with eyes that are sewn up, who can sense weaknesses in people – and can fly.

Paterson is a dancer and aerial performer whose work has included outdoor spectacles hanging from boats and buildings, bursting through glass ceilings and even flying from cranes. Her work in Something Wicked… uses counterbalancing by aerial technician Jonathan Campbell, climbing up and down ladders in a harness that supports her weight. It enables her to take off and land dramatically from different points on the stage.

“We imagined lots of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon moments,” says Robertson, recalling the aerial combat effects of Ang Lee’s breathtaking film, “where she’s leaping in the air and chasing the boys and hopefully terrifying the audience.”

She battles the boys across the rooftops and in the library tries to cast a deadly spell on Mr Halloway, Will’s father, who is tempted by the carnival’s promise of making him young again.

Paterson, from Stirling, says her witch character is ancient, gathered from dust, but her portrayal has some echoes of Tim Burton’s animated film The Corpse Bride. “She seeps into people’s souls and under people’s skin to work her magic,” she adds.

After training as a contemporary dancer, her first aerial work was with Fidget Feet, an Irish company who brought circus skills into their dance work. She used a cocoon – a material trapeze – in some very basic work. More recently, the Circus Space show in the Millennium Dome in 2000, for which 90 aerialists were trained, has helped make it a booming field, she says. Her work has run from displays from fabrics at corporate events to flying 40m or 50m in the air, playing in character, suspended from a crane, sometimes swooping low over audiences below. She abseiled from the Baltic arts centre with Scarabeus Theatre in Newcastle, watched by 200,000 people assembled for the send-off of the Tall Ships Race in July 2005.

“You have a very healthy respect for heights and safety is important,” she says. “On the fabrics, we don’t have a safety net or harness, so you practise all your tricks low and you gradually get higher and higher so you are confident with the tricks.”

The work in Something Wicked… is integral to the story rather than merely a stunt. “I jump from parts of the set and flip over other members of the cast, but I won’t be flying over the audiences’ heads,” she adds.

With Jonathan as the counterbalance, she has been working hard on timing. In rehearsals she wore shin and knee pads as she often went crashing into the set. “When he goes down, I fly up, and if he goes up I come down, but there’s a lot of timing to get quite subtle jumps across the set, to pounce from one place to another. It’s really a duet, we have to work on the timing. I land on one of the characters’ shoulders, so we have to get the timing right so everyone is in the right place at the right time.”

Something Wicked This Way Comes previews at Platform at the Bridge, Glasgow, on 19 September and the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 27 September. It then begins its tour at Dundee Rep on 1 October, visiting Stirling, Inverness, Edinburgh, Salford and Glasgow, where its run ends on 1 November. For more information about the show, log on to: www.nationaltheatrescotland.com