Blackout - Theatre Design

BLACKOUT 

How to Design Theatre - Creating a Model Box for a Play

 

Blackout by Davey Anderson is a play about a boy called James who goes off the rails when his grandfather dies. James is bullied and confused about his identity, struggling to grasp any control over his life in Glasgow. He turns to violence as an outlet and as he gets more and more lost the more and more dangerous he becomes.

-“When People upset me I draw pictures of them on buses going to Hell Disaster or OHIO” (Warren, 2006).

-“This drawing means love. Mum and Tim. I’m there. Dad and Harriet over there in their house. When I draw I get to make things up. Sometimes though I wish it were real, like that my mum and dad and Harriet and me were all still together in our old house” (Elliot).

Without writing the play up I'll simplify it down to its units here:
Wake Up
Confused
Broken family Life
Happy Days with Grand-dad
Observing the outside world from your bubble
Lonely
Creating your Identity
Punished for not knowing who you are
Delaying with loneliness by horror
All free will taken away
Taking control the Painful way
A new Identity
Your Own Rules
Not Scared Anymore
Feeling Pain to feel alive
Belonging
Raining the storm has arrived
Stakes Rising
Time Running Out
Dead Inside. Thirst for Control
Adult View of yourself
Escape to a Fantasy World
The fantasy world turns scary
Hollow
Rules save him
Mummy
What now?

The World of the Play:
Looking in detail at the script I found the world of the play...

I wanted to create two worlds – one that was James’s mind and one that was the reality around him. 
I chose to show his mind through a video game and his reality by what is on stage around him.
By looking closely at the text I wrote down all the things that existed in the world of the play and sectioned them according to the two different ones I wanted to create:

Things that belong in the Room (Reality)                            Things that belong on Screen (His Mind)      
“White Walls, Bright Lights, metal door, small room”                                    Under the Surface - lost      
Conform to society ‘Famous Doctor’. School                                                                  No School      
Jigsaws, cards, tea                                                                                           Alcohol and Drugs      
Black Combats and long Hair                                                                                         Skinhead      
Death                                                                                                                Jekyll and Hyde      
Belts and Laces                                                                                         No rules or constraints      
Time runs out                                                                                                          Serial Killing      
Words                                                                                                                       Screaming      
Law                                                                                                                             No Laws 
Storm and Rain                                                                                              Storm and Rain                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
Looking at the list you can see that the two different worlds start to merge together and become the same place. From the above table the ‘world on stage’ looks most like a mental institution and the ‘world on screen’ looks like a lost world (mutants in a remote place).

After reading the script there were several things I considered before creating my design, including the theatre venue.

Looking at the Theatre Space - The Arches in Glasgow:

(The Arches is an old venue underneath Glasgow Train Station -http://www.thearches.co.uk/about-us)
Trains – Travelling and Control
History
Thunder of the trains running over-head
Things that lies beneath

How do we connect with the character?

Through family: The protagonist, James, is sitting on his Grandfather's knee at the beginning of the play. His Grandfather is telling the protagonist a story whilst they both play a Play Station game. As his Grandads story gets more and more sinister so does the game. The game itself starts to come ‘alive’ and begins to control itself without the aid of a human being. As the play goes on James’s hair falls out in reference to when he shaves his head in the play.

The TV:
The video game being played resembles the set up of an older version of Super Mario, where Super Mario can only go forwards or backwards and going forwards is the only way to finish the game.


Instead of Super Mario, James is controlling an avator of himself. As he progresses through the game he and his avator start to get distracted. This leads to his avator dying at the mercy of another avator which looks a lot like his father. 
He starts again and his avator starts to lose its hair. It starts to rain and the avator gets lost in the game, no longer going the one way allowed in a normal video game - the space on screen become four dimensional.

Land of the Game:
I wanted the world of the game to feel like a horror movie so I started looking at the game Silent Hill, the movie The Hills Have Eyes and Play Station’s ‘Horror Special’ magazine for images. I also bought some graphic novels to see what I could do with contrasting real life depictions of human beings with cartoon ones.
“I make up fantasy stories because my real life SUCKS...And now my fantasy life is starting to suck too” (Warren,2006).

 
Thinking about what things are scary:
Learning that what you were told isn’t true.

The Set:

On stage are two dead trees each with an old television abandoned in the branches. At centre stage there is James sat playing the video game. There are four TV's hanging from the rigging above the audience and four more which are on stage. The only lighting in the whole play is the light that comes from the television screens which are positioned on stage. The floor design is a canvas of the outline of the box TV's.

THE RESULT

A boy in a hooded jumper is on stage shaving his hair with real clippers.

He is playing a Play Station horror game where in the game he is the main character. The image he is watching is reciprocated around the theatre on the other televisions.

On the screens we see his journey through the game which is interjected with flashing images of his hair falling out, and trees growing and dying.

As James gets closer to all his hair being gone he gives up on the clippers and pulls out his hair with his hands. He starts to bleed.

The game he is in control of turns on him and an enemy in the form of a masked man makes it ‘game over’

James begins to make up his own rules which excites him.

It starts to rain on all the TV screens and his character gets lost and no longer follows the linear route allowed in a game.

He gets frustrated and throws the controls at the screen breaking the connection between the box and the controller.

On screen he is given a life line.

He feels his bald scalp
His mother comes in and massages his scalp
A flower grows on one of the dead trees.

Power and Horror

POWER AND HORROR

LOOKING AT HORROR MOVIES AND POWER

The Hills Have Eyes (2006 version) is a fascinating and brutal film where a family are sabotaged in the middle of a desert and left to the mercy of a family of cannibal mutants. Stranded, they are attacked and forced to watch their loved ones brutally violated and murdered in front of their eyes. The characters in the film find power in trying to save the people around them. 

We can better understand what is meant by power by looking at the scene in the movie where most of the family dies.

This is a snippet of the scene from the 2006 remake:

The youngest daughter has just been raped screaming and crying when her sister rushes in to witness both her sister and her own baby in danger. The elder sister does not panic or give into her emotions like her younger sibling does but accesses the situation while she is forced to allow one of the mutants to breast feed from her. Following this she waits for her chance and shoots one of the mutants only to be shot herself soon after.

She self sacrificed for the ones she loves.  Strength comes from interaction with other people. Weakness comes from personal involvement.

The Hills Have Eyes Trailer (2006 remake)

The Tiger - "A teacher and his student were walking from one village to another, when they suddenly heard a roar behind them. Turning their gaze in the direction of the roar, they saw a big tiger following them"

“It’s about Power” (Whedon, 2002).

It Lives Again

 Axelle, Carolyn. 2009. It Lives Again! Horror Movies in the New Millennium,

In a lecture on Critical Theory Dr Steve Cramer told me about art which belongs to the semiotic order. Horror movies unashamedly portrayal of the human body is what makes them so popular with young audiences - the life or death situations that characters are forced into makes them act on an unconscious level driven by survival. In my mind these forced situations are ‘situations which reveal the real us’. It Lives Again is  book which looks at horror movies from the new millennium:

*Warning - Spoilers Follow!*

The Ring

A journalist investigates the legend of a tape which ensures certain death seven days after watching it, unless you can make someone else watch it first. The journalist unearths the mystery of the tape by watching it and finding the place it was made and the people it featured. The only way to stop it and save her son however is to make a copy of the tape and keep the cycle running.

 The Others

A woman looks after her two children while their father is at war. She and her two children are haunted by ‘ghosts‘ at the arrival of three new housekeepers. The woman and her children live in curtained darkness because her children have a rare intolerance to sunlight which means that all doors are locked once opened so that no sunlight from any window can enter the house. As the story unfolds the woman learns that she and her children are in fact dead and the ‘ghosts’ haunting them are in fact living people who have moved into their apparent vacant home. The reason she never realised before is because she was repressing the memory of killing her own children and then shooting herself.

Saw

Two men wake to find themselves in a  large bathroom, chained and separated by a supposedly dead man lying face down between them. As the movie progresses they discover they are part of a game conceived by a serial killer called Jigsaw who tests his victims desires to live. The ending is goose bumpingly amazing!


 

28 Days Later

The world has been overrun by zombies as a result of a fatal virus. A group of survivors search for more survivors. The young girl is forced to kill her father when he is infected. When the survivors find help they are panic-stricken to realise that the British army are killing off the male survivors and raping the females. To save a young girl the trauma of sexual abuse an older female gives her drugs to put her into an unconscious state of mind.

War of the Worlds

The world is overtaken by aliens and a father and his two children fight for survival. The father spends most of the movie literally shielding his young daughter’s eyes from the horrors around her however by the end, after so much has happened, he can no longer protect her from seeing the devastation that surrounds them.

Jeepers Creepers

The beginning scene is the most haunting



A young boy is working in a field which is scattered with DIY black clothed scarecrows. Out of the corner of his eye he thinks he sees something move but when he looks around everything seems normal. However to his immediate horror the Jeeper Creeper has been spying on him in the guise of a scarecrow. It violently flies over him and carries him away.
The magic of this scene is the director making something apparently normal, sinister. It helps that the ‘normal’ thing (the scarecrow) is a thing without a soul already.
This scare effect is used again in the movie when two young kids are chased by a blacked out old truck - we have no idea what is in the truck because we have not seen the Creeper but the mystery of what is inside is terrifying.

Gothika

Gothika is a psychological horror where a Doctor finds herself a patient in the asylum she worked in without knowing how. When everyone else around her seems sure that she is supposed to be there because she is 'crazy' she begins to think the same. Like in Flight Plan when a majority rules it is hard to stand against them even if you know you are right.

The Descent

A group of women go cave diving and get trapped underground with a race of deformed human cannibals adapt to living underground. One of the most heartbreaking scenes I have ever seen was in this movie. The last survivor sees light and follows it upwards to the world above. Free of the underground and the mutants she runs to her car and drives away. She pulls over about a mile away and throws up out of her window. When she sits back up in her seat she sees her friend she left to die underground in the passenger seat. She blinks and when she opens her eyes again she is back underground, the noise of the mutants impendingly close -
we realise that she blacked out and dreamt she escaped.

Grindhouse

Another zombie film descendant of I Am Legend where Quintin Tarantino physically disables all of his characters to make them stronger.

30 Days of Night

A vampire film set in Alaska where every year for thirty days and nights there is no sunrise. A group of survivors are forced to hide from the unconventionally romantic vampires and the protagonist sacrifices his humanity to save the woman he loves at the end.

The Strangers

A game of hide and seek in a couples own home as they are invaded by masked intruders. At the end as the sun comes up they are tied to chairs and stabbed as we hear the wind chimes chime in the wind outside, the shuffle of chairs, the cough and snobs of the characters.

http://youtu.be/LiqeyLevrNU

The Blair Witch Project

A home movie which was marketed as a real tape found in the woods where the characters in the film get lost.

Open Water

A couple are stranded in shark infested waters.

Silent Hill

A deserted town inhabited by deformed human beings (based on a game)

In all of these films the characters remain in one place throughout. The world  in the horror movie is created by a set of circumstances which holds them there against their free will e.g. a car breaks down in a desert, two men chained in a room, a group of women trapped underground, a family forced to avoid sunlight inside their home, lost in the woods, stranded in the ocean. Perhaps there is something in creating a world where your protagonists are unable to escape which makes a performance able to really affect it’s audience…

On Desire, Why We Want What We Want

ON DESIRE, WHY WE WANT WHAT WE WANT

A BOOK

Irvine, B William. 2006. On Desire Why We Want What We Want. Oxford University Press: New York.

The Ebb and Flow of Desire

 “When we are lovesick, we lose a significant amount of control over our lives…Freud called lovesickness ‘the psychosis of normal people’” (Irvine 2006, pg 12).

Our desires choose us and not just the loving kind but the commercial kind as well.

 Other People

 Irvine helps us understand how the strongest purpose in our lives derives from caring for someone “To be alone is one of the greatest evils for man” (Irvine, pg 31). He says that even if we were totally fulfilled by our rituals we would still seek out people, illustrating this using The Last Man theory where a man wakes up to find himself all alone in the world, realising that the things he ‘wanted’ he no longer does without the presence of people. What he longs for is company, “If we compare the lifestyle of the last person with our own we will quickly recognize the impact the presence of other people has on our lives” (Irvine 2006, pg 42).The movie I Am Legend is a perfect example of this where one man continues to live utterly alone in the hope that someday he will find more people.

 The Wellsprings of Desire

Irvine explains that we do what we do to feel good and to avoid feeling bad, where the intellect is the thing in charge of our ‘needs’ and our emotions are the things that drive our ‘wants’. We need things to stay alive; we want things to make us happy, but sometimes it is quite difficult to listen to the intellect. Irvine compares our emotions to that of a whining five year old child – if we always give in to them then we lose our power over them (like a parent with a five year old child) but by listening to the intellect we can maintain power.

Today we have more wants than we have needs and most of these are un-fulfilled. Marketing knows that the way to penetrate human happiness is to make us want things.

Imagine you lived only by needing things, you’d be like a puppy or a tree, content and totally in the present however you’d also be pretty robotic and dull without desire. We’d also maybe all be the same. Our desires give us personality.

The Psychology of Desire

Sometimes we miswant because we fantasise about what will make us happy, so Irvine suggests tying to only want things we will like having when we get them. He says that miswanting and adaptation lie at the heart of all human instability like a satisfaction treadmill: want, get, and want something else. He also says that “The mind commands the body. The mind commands itself” (Irvine 2006, pg 115).

Religious Advice

Buddha, the Enlightened One, believed that the best way to end the evil and sorrow of the world was to overcome desire. He advised overcoming desire through recognising a series of ‘Noble Truths’:

1/ The First Noble Truth is that life is full of suffering (our lives are not satisfactory).

2/ The Second Noble Truth is that this suffering is caused by desire and ignorance.

3/ The Third Noble Truth is that by overcoming desire and gaining wisdom we can overcome suffering”.

4/ The Fourth Noble Truth tells us that the best way to deal with desire is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.

Buddha rejected hedonism and asceticism and advises us to follow the ‘middle path’ i.e. between the two extremes of self indulgence and self mortification.

How can we overcome desire? Not, says Bondhi, by repressing our desires but by “changing our perspective on them so that they no longer bind us. By not stealing, causing pain, lying etc mind free of unwholesome thoughts e.g. sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and worry, and doubt. (Irvine, 2006)

Zen practice is supposed to allow us to overcome desire without desiring that we overcome it. The enlightened person is spared much of the anxiety of decision making, able to make decisions very easily.

In Christianity the goal is not to extinguish desire but to overcome sinful desire by means of prayer with the incentive of going to heaven.

The Islamic take on desire is similar to Christianity: Muslims pray to overcome forbidden desires.

Philosophical Advice

Hellenist Philosophers believe the primary reason for doing philosophy is so we can have better lives.

The Stoics argue that the key to a good life is to master desire “The Key insight of Epictetus is that it makes no sense to fret about the things that aren’t up to us” (Irvine 2006, pg 241).

What I love about the Stoics is their attitude to power: they say “Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to he declares but instead want them to happen as they do happen” (Irvine 2006). Irvine describes having power as something achievable if we listen to our intellect and don’t give into our desires.

The Sceptics valued tranquillity and believed that the key to happiness was to refuse to form beliefs about the world around us: “The Physical pain might be identical to that inflicted by the doctor, but the psychic pain will be extreme (this claim echoes the Stoic claim that what hurts us is not so much the world around us as the thoughts inside our heads)” (Irvine 2006, 252).

The Eccentrics are people who live without feeling like they need to fit in with society. “Aristotle said that a man who feels no need to live in society must either be a beast or a god” (Irvine, 2006). Some remove themselves from society as is seen in the movie Into the Wild a real story about a man who ran away from societal pressures to be self sufficient and reliant in the ‘wild’.

The eccentrics don’t feel compelled to prosper financially, pray, meditate - instead they suggest watching other people and learning from what these people call ‘success’ and seeing how miserable it makes them. Most eccentrics are not that way by choice.

Eccentrics are like children because they take obvious and intense delight in things the rest of us find commonplace or boring. “Many elderly realise this and take to eccentricity like a duck to water. At long last they can be themselves, a right they feel they have earned” (Irvine 2006, pg 275).

The Last Man - I Am Legend

THE LAST MAN - I AM LEGEND

Matheson, Richard. 1954. I Am legend. Orian Books: London.

Reading Irvine’s Last Man theory made me think of the film I Am Legend. I Am Legend is set in a world where a deadly plague epidemic has turned the world's population into vampires. The protagonist of the story, Robert Neville, finds himself to be the last living human being on earth. Neville locks himself inside his house at night when the vampires come out, and then during the day he roams the empty city killing the sleeping vampires as they hide from the sun as well as studying the vampire virus in a bid to try and cure it.

I Am Legend 2007 Trailer

Neville's only companion is his un-affected dog, but sadly one day when they are out his dog is attacked and infected and Neville must strangle his beloved companion as it turns into a vampire. In anguish he decides to end his own life and drives his car into a den of vampires only to be rescued by a woman and her son who are still human. They are cornered in his home by the vampires and in one last act he tells the mother and son to hide and gives them the antidote as he self sacrifices himself for their safety.

Sam the dog dies in I Am Legend (2007)

I researched the film and found that it was originally a book by Richard Matheson. Further I realised that most ‘end of the world’ and ‘zombie’ epidemic movies and stories originated from this original one written in 1954, for example, The Last Man on Earth in 1964, Omega Man in 1971, I Am Legend in 2007 and I am Omega in 2007. It was also the inspiration behind the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.

The Last Man on Earth Trailer (1964)

The Book Version of the Story:
In the book Neville is completely alone at the beginning and spends his days drunk and depressed about the loss of his daughter and wife: “He stared into blackness. What’s left? He asked himself. What’s left anyway?” (Matheson 1954, pg 69). One day he sees a dog and spends several weeks trying to befriend the scared canine with food at his doorstep. His hope at a companion is destroyed when one day the dog looks ill and he realises that it has been attacked and infected by the vampires. Haven given up on the dog, he one day spots a woman walking across a field in daylight. He goes to her and takes her back to his home where he begins to grow suspicious of her assurance that she is human: “His throat moved. Such thoughts were hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope” (Matheson 1954, pg 130). In the morning following his discovery of the woman, he wakes to find her gone and a note telling him to leave the house because a society of half infected 'half human’s' are coming for him to exterminate 'the last human'. He doesn’t listen and is captured and executed by the society.

 Matheson hits on the concept of history and time:

The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed deathly still in the open as it did inside a building. Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a worlds dead…The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped? (1954, pg 71)

When investigating the virus Neville stubbornly rejects that germs are the cause of the virus. However soon he changes his mind:

He felt a shudder run down the back of his neck. Was it possible that the same germ that killed the living provided the energy for the dead…He took a drink now; he needed it. He held up his hand until it stopped shaking. All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Cruesoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death” (Matheson 1958, pg 76).

Further he proves how vampires can scientifically exist much like the shuddering possibilities in the movie 30 Days of Night:

Vampires in 30 Days of Night

 'Eventually the poisons would reach the blood stream. Process complete. And all without blood-eyed vampires hovering over heroines beds. All without fluttering against estate windows, all without the supernatural. The vampire was real. It was only his true story had never been told.' (1954, pg 81)

 He further thinks about how it had been for the vampires:

'And then, Robert Neville thought, to have this hideous dread vindicated. To regain consciousness beneath hot, heavy soil and know that death had not brought rest. To find themselves clawing up through the earth, their bodies driven now by a strange, hideous need. Such traumatic shocks could undo what mind was left. And such shocks could explain much. The cross first of all (because in life it had been a focus of worship had failed them)…the soil (seeking solace in the only thing they feel safe and native in). ' (1954 pg 108)

What struck me most about the story was the power of companionship, especially with the dog. What gives Neville hope and reason to live in the 2007 movie is his dog which he cares for and lives with. When the dog dies he is utterly alone and who wants to live alone for an eternity? I’m pretty sure most of us would contemplate suicide. Food and Water may keep us physically alive but mentally PEOPLE keep us alive, or maybe I should say love:

 “Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog” (Matheson 1954, pg 90).

 In Matheson’s novel Neville remains alive for years utterly alone before the presence of the dog. What kept him going? Matheson hints that it is something Neville himself doesn’t understand and puts it down to human instinct:

And he hadn’t yet killed himself. True he hadn’t treated his body welfare with reverence…But using the body carelessly wasn’t suicide. He’d never even approached suicide. Why? There seemed to be no answer. He wasn’t resigned to the life he’d been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague’s last victim, nine since he’d spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on. Instinct? Or was he just stupid? (1954, pg 89).

What he does have is his memories of love but even this he realises is a mistake because otherwise he cannot move forward with his day to day surviving if he dwells on the past. Maybe Neville never turned to suicide because he had hope of finding people again and perhaps that is enough: “That didn’t make him any happier. For always he, in spite of reason, he had clung to the hope that someday he would find someone like himself -a man, a woman, a child, it didn’t matter” (Matheson 1954 pg 94).