(HEARTBEAT)
"A strange multiplicity of sensation seized me
"and I saw, felt, heard
"and smelled at the same time.
"And it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish
"between the operations of my various senses."
The emphasis of the beginning of the production was to see him recognise things
that we go... "Ah! Yeah!"
The birdsong and eating and the rain — all the different things that you...
The sensations of childhood and, obviously, the actors, Benedict and Jonny,
concentrated on seeing it as though it was a child's performance early on.
What's fascinating is seeing something come alive that's in a 30-odd-year-old form
and have to re-educate itself.
I looked at stroke victims in recovery.
I looked at people who'd had severe injuries, both in wars or car crashes,
trying to re-educate their limbs and their bodies.
It's a blank canvas as a body,
but it's a fully-grown brain, so it's absorbing everything super quick.
Muscular coordination, hand and eye!
The perfect balance!
Excellent tissue. The sutures have held!
One of the things that we decided was that we were going to make it a complete body.
That's our approach to it, really, that he's been internally rebuilt,
not a body assembled from different external parts,
like the comical idea of one leg from one person being stitched on
to the torso of another.
Both the concept of the make-up and the engineering of it,
has to be something which can survive two hours of a very physical show.
I think the make-up people have done the most extraordinary job
in creating something which does have that sense of horror,
the terrifying work that Victor has done.
On a live theatre stage, what should the creature look like?
Should he be blue, as in the original productions?
Should he be nine foot tall, as in the original illustrations of him?
Or should he be, as we wanted him to be,
clearly human scale and much more resembling someone who's been through surgery?
These flashes of light were, literally the darkness and light in which he was...
It was to try and somehow suggest,
through a point of view,
what it was like to have your eyes closed then to open them and there be light.
What we did, by creating electricity,
by literally giving ourselves the power of lighting up the night,
we no longer had to thank God in the morning for bringing the sunlight back.
It hovers over the book and our adaptation in a literal way,
we came up with this idea of this roof of electricity, of light,
which connects you from the back of the auditorium down into the space.
[♪ HARSH INDUSTRIAL BEATS]
We wanted to do the Industrial Revolution at the beginning,
or create a theatrical visualisation of that.
We're still living in that era, really, of benefitting and suffering
from the consequences of the work that they did.
[WHISTLE BLOWS]
Music and theatre — it's about 15 years since I worked in the theatre —
and it's become a much bigger part of it.
[POUNDING AND FIZZING]
You go to see plays and they're scored
in a way that when I last worked in the theatre they never really were.
There was intermittent music, occasional, but very little illustrative music.
It's become much more the fashion to do that,
so we wanted to do it with a really interesting, quite a radical band.
I've been very privileged to work with Underworld a number of times.
They've done us a lovely job, yeah, creating an early version of the industrial age,
what was coming, what was just beginning to arrive,
right the way through to a kind of beautiful idea of nature
and his discovery of nature, really.
[♪ "Dawn Of Eden" by Underworld]
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