Having decided I wanted to
direct a horror play to submit to the group I then had to find something to
perform, at first I considered existing plays but really ask most people to
name a horror based play and they’ll give you “The Woman in Black” and that’s
about it.
Maybe a few others but
mostly serious gothic pieces that are intended as ‘serious theatre’ and require
big special effects budgets and other such things.
As such I decided to
continue The Company’s longstanding tradition of adaptations by trying my hand
at one myself,
I’ve had some experience
with script-writing during past experience writing some stuff for the small
press self-published comic scene so had the basis, all I needed was something
to adapt…
I’d been a fan of the
Cthulhu Mythos of one Howard Phillips Lovecraft for a while and had considered
adapting one of his tales, however due to his work often falling into the
‘cosmic horror’ genre coupled with the first person viewpoint of the
often-nameless narrator (often an avatar or analogue of Lovecraft himself) of
many tales few lend themselves to the stage.
Which is a shame as the man
has quite a reputation amongst various geek circles and a loyal fanbase who
would likely be quite excited about seeing his work on the stage.
However a few stories do
break away from this mould, one of them being The Dunwich Horror, while most of
his ‘bigger’ stories are similar to his short tales but on a much grander scale
this one is very different.
For one thing it has a much
more traditional element of Good vs Evil due to having an actual hero and
villain along with breaking away from some of Lovecrafts usual “all that
mankind does is naught but dust in a grand universe of uncaring chaos”
malarkey.
One of the reasons could be
that Lovecraft wrote this tale with a clear influence from Arthur Machen’s
earlier tale “The Great God Pan” (even working a name drop into the text) which
itself had previously been adapted to stage,
The Dunwich Horror also had
an advantage in that it had a large cast of characters from University
professors, inbred yokel villagers and a family of deranged monster-people. It also had something that a lot of Lovecraft
stories lacked, women.
Lovecraft was not afraid to
admit he was not too good at writing characters of the female persuasion with
only a handful of women playing main roles in his tales (often villainous),
however Dunwich has several village woman and also given the large cast it
would be easy to write several characters as being able to be played by either
gender based on who auditioned well.
It also had the potential
for our cast to ham it up due to the cast including the aforementioned
professors, villagers and crazy folk.
The fact it included an invisible monster (thereby sparing us a bad
costume) was just the icing on the eldritch cake.
The final deciding factor
for me was the fact the book contains one of my favourite pieces of writing out
of all of Lovecraft’s body of work, that being the long extract from the
Necronomicon read by Professor Armitage.
The extract has a strange almost poetic feel to the dialogue while at
the same time giving a real undercurrent of ‘something being wrong’ that sums
up the feeling Lovecraft loved to work into his work.
With this all in mind less
than a month after the fateful party that gave me this idea I sat down with a
copy of the original tale, an empty word document and a large cup of tea,
cracked my knuckles and began writing.
But that’s the story for the
next update…
