Darkness, Darkness Soundtrack

Anyone who saw the recent production of Darkness, Darkness at Nottingham Playhouse will have been aware of the importance of music and sound in the creation of mood and the reinforcement of meaning. The soundscape – incorporating, in addition to  everything from police sirens and gun shots to the chants of Notts County supporters and striking miners, no less than 23 pieces of music – was created by sound designer, Drew Baumohl, working closely with other members of the design team, including filmmaker and video artist, Will Simpson, who was responsible for the projection design.

The initial idea of using the noirish slowcore music of the German band, Bohren & Der Club of Gore and the ambient post rock of the Canadian Godspeed You! Black Emperor to provide the atmospheric interludes and backgrounds, came from the show’s director, Jack McNamara, while the more obviously jazzy selections were mine. I think they work well together.

Here, for anyone wishing to follow up, is a listing of the music used …

Bohren & Der Club of Gore

• Midnight Black Earth
• Vigilante Crusader
• The Art of Coffins
• Grave Wisdom
• Maximum Black
• Skeletal Remains: all from the album, Black Earth

• Cairo Keller: from Gore Motel

• Im Raunch
• Fahr Zur Hollie : from Piano Nights

• Staub: from Dolores

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

• Moya: from Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada

• Asunder, Sweet: from Asunder, Sweet & Other Distress

Thelonious Monk

•  (I Don’t Stand) A Ghost of a Chance With You: from Thelonious Himself (1957)
• These Foolish Things: from Thelonious Monk Trio (1954)

Billie Holiday

• These Foolish Things: from The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Vol 2 (1936)
• For All We Know: from Lady in Satin (1958)

Joe Temperley

• I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart: from Easy to Remember (2001)

Coleman Hawkins

• One Note Samba: from Desafinado (1963)

Pablo Casals

• Suite No. 1 in G Major, Prelude
• Suite No. 1 in G Major, Allemande: from Bach Cello Suites (1939)

Cyprien Katsaris

• Waltz No. 10 in B minor, Op. 69. No. 2: from Chopin-Waltzes

Human League

• Together in Dreams

Frankie Goes to Hollywood

• Two Tribes

 

 

 

Darkness, Darkness in Review

So, one week in and one to go, and personal comments, tweets, emails and audience reaction aside, there have been reviews a-plenty, ranging from a miserly two stars out of a possible five in The Times to a resounding thumbs up The British Theatre Guide – “one of the best pieces of theatre I have seen in years.” The truth, to my mind veering strongly towards the latter, lies somewhere between the two.

The reviewer for The Times, opts to judge the play primarily as a police procedural and as such finds “little to distinguish it from any number of mediocre TV cop shows”, and although she recognises that other elements exist – the Miners’ Strike, issues around gender and social inequality – chooses not to allow these the significance I believe the play accords them. As anyone who’s read my novels, or, indeed, seen this production, might attest, the nuts and bolts of the plot – the who did what to whom – are not what interest me most. [Perhaps I should have taken up another line of employment.] I want the mechanics of plot to work, surely, but what I’m more interested in is the why – motivation and characterisation – and, perhaps just as importantly, what the telling of the story allows me to say about the society and values of the world in which its taking place. So it is exactly the Miners’ Strike and its legacy that I’m interested in here, as well as, yes, gender and social inequality, and, running through everything, the persistence of memory. And if those elements don’t come through for the majority of the audience more strongly than they did for The Times then, as a writer, I’ve failed.

What clearly hasn’t failed – even for The Times – is the production itself …

The good news is that Jack McNamara’s production, for Nottingham Playhouse and New Perspectives, is supremely stylish.

Ruth Sutcliffe’s design of gliding black panels and Azusa Ono’s arresting lighting conjure up a murky unease as the plot stops across decades. Figures lurk in shadows or in the sickly yellow glow of streetlights, jazz music curls like smoke around scenes of tense domesticity or police interrogation. Monochrome video imagery flickers – fingerprints, X-ray images, miners on the picket line hemmed in by battalions of uniforms.

Sounds good to me.

And what doesn’t fail – even at those moments – a few, but they’re there – when the script falters – are the actors, whose work has been universally praised and who can, night after night,  even knowing the piece as well as I do, make the back of my neck tingle, my heart beat faster, reduce me to tears.

You have to be a subscriber to read The Times review on line, but for anyone wanting to track it down it was in the Friday, 7th October issue. Links to other reviews follow.

I was grateful, of course, for Steve Orme’s wholehearted response in The British Theatre Guide and particularly enjoyed reading the piece by Emma Pallen in Impact, the University of Nottingham’s Official Student Magazine. And I was especially delighted – nay, thrilled – to have the play’s authenticity attested to in the Traffic Light Theatregoer blog by Francis Beckett, who, together with David Heneke, wrote a history of the Miners’ Strike, Marching to the Fault Line, published by Constable.

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/darkness-darkn-nottingham-play-13546

https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2016/darkness-darkness-review-at-nottingham-playhouse/

http://www.thereviewshub.com/darkness-darkness-nottingham-playhouse/

http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-darkness-darkness-nottingham-playhouse/

http://www.nottinghampost.com/murder-and-miners-darkness-darkness-at-nottingham-playhouse/story-29779840-detail/story.html?gvc

http://trafficlighttheatregoer.blogspot.co.uk/

Darkness, Darkness in Production

The Nottingham Playhouse/New Perspectives production of Darkness, Darkness, directed by Jack McNamara, began its two week run at the Playhouse on Friday, 30th September. The set was designed by Ruth Sutcliffe; the lighting designer was Azusa Ono, sound designer, Drew Baumohl and projection designer, William Simpson. The final performance will be on Saturday, 15th October. All production photographs © Robert Day.

The body of Jenny Hardwick, who disappeared during the Miners’ Strike, is unearthed after 30 years.

David Fleeshman as D.I.Resnick & Simone Saunders as D.I.Catherine Njoroge, both very much on the case

Elizabeth Twells as firebrand supporter of the striking miners, Jenny Hardwick

John Askew as striking miner, Danny Ireland

Chris Donnelly, as Jenny’s former husband, Barry, facing up to some probing questions

The older Danny under interrogation

Martin Miller as retired P.C.Keith Haines & Emma Thornett as his wife, Jill

Catherine enjoys a reunion with her former boy friend, Adam, played by Jonathan Woolf – or does she?

Resnick and a fellow Notts County supporter at Meadow Lane

 

An Actor Speaks Out …

The actor Martin Miller, who plays Keith Haines in the Nottingham Playhouse/New Perspectives production of Darkness, Darkness, wrote this piece for the New Perspectives blog, and gave his permission for it to be reproduced here …

And so it’s all over bar the shouting. After 4 weeks of intensive work on John Harvey’s excellent stage adaptation of his final Charlie Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness, we now leave the relative safety of the New Perspectives rehearsal room in Basford and move into the Nottingham Playhouse from next week to start the technical and dress rehearsals for what will be the next show of the Sweet Vengeance season. If anything, this is where all the hard work needs to come together. The actors need to adjust their performances from the intimacy of the rehearsal room to the theatrical space without losing any of the subtleties and truth of their characterisations that have been developed through the rehearsal process (so rule one: don’t panic, rule two: don’t start shouting). Our hardworking technical crew including Kathryn Wilson (Deputy Stage Manager), Drew Baumhol (Sound Designer), Azusa Ono (Lighting Designer), Ruth Sutcliffe (Set Designer) amongst many others will be collaborating with our director Jack McNamara to bring the world of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike and Harvey’s CWA Dagger award – winning Detective Charlie Resnick seamlessly to life, and from Friday 30th September audiences will see the finished product.

I have been impressed throughout this process by the collaboration between Jack McNamara and John Harvey. It is rare for directors and writers to cooperate so effectively. I worked with Jack on a previous New Perspectives play about Alfred Hitchcock and he has a strong sense of how to engage with a piece visually, almost filmically, and in collaboration with our Video Designer, Will Simpson, audiences will find themselves transported to the heart of a mining community bitterly divided by the strike, and of a murder investigation 30 years later which threatens to open these divisions once more. Harvey’s skill has been in not only placing Resnick front and centre of this action in the theatrical space, but also in bringing the world of this torn mining community to life. One could argue that the work is even more politically charged and relevant today with the recent announcement of an inquiry into the events at ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ . Harvey’s play explicitly references Orgreave and its aftermath, indeed Resnick finds himself conflicted by the police conduct on that day, and we see the casual brutality of the Met. The recent inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster laid bare the failings of South Yorkshire police and the Hillsborough families had to fight courageously and persistently for years to get any semblance of justice. The Orgreave families have had an even longer wait. Indeed, post-Brexit result, it appeared the issue could conceivably be dropped from the government agenda altogether. How can one even begin to disentangle the bloody events at Orgreave, of systematic and systemic state and police collusion, the very worst example and excess of what Tristram Hunt MP called ‘legalised state violence’?

Over thirty years on, the events of the Miners’ Strike still divide communities and we see in the play how these divisions are just as raw today. All of this plus at the heart of the play we see the dogged determination of Charlie Resnick to solve one last murder case before his impending retirement. John Harvey first created his famous Nottingham Detective back in 1988 and I am confident that with the team Jack McNamara has put together and the strong collaboration between cast, production team, director and author that we can do it justice. As we head into our final rehearsal week, John Harvey’s beloved Notts County have just beaten Leyton Orient 3 – 1. Surely a good omen? Hope to see all you Resnick afficionados in the theatre bar afterwards for a drop of Highland Park. “No sense arguing, Resnick raised his glass and drank…”.

Here’s Martin, during rehearsals, with Emma Thornett, who plays his wife, Jill.

Photo © Robert Day

Darkness, Darkness in Rehearsal

Here they are, the cast and director of the Nottingham Playhouse – New Perspectives production of Darkness, Darkness, busy in rehearsal at New Perspectives HQ in Basford, Nottingham. All photos ©Robert Day.

David Fleeshman as Charlie Resnick, Simone Saunders as Catherine Njoroge

Director, Jack McNamara, with Kathryn Wilson in the background

Elizabeth Twells as Jenny Hardwick

John Askew as Danny Ireland

Jonathan Woolf as Adam Uttley

Chris Donnelly as Peter Waites & Barry Hardwick

Emma Thornett & Martin Miller as Jill & Keith Haines

Emma/ Jill Haines talks it over with David/Charlie

The author gets into the spirit as the cast record the voices for a miners’ picket

Simone/Catherine & David/Charlie mutually supportive towards the end of another gruelling day

 

Light in the Darkness

Here we are, meeting and greeting at Nottingham Playhouse this Tuesday just past, the cast of Darkness, Darkness – most of them – along with the director, Jack McNamara – that’s him far left in the snazzy shirt– and the designer, Ruth Sutcliffe, looking suitably designery in black at the centre. Otherwise, left to right, you’ve got Martin Miller, who plays Keith Haines; David Fleeshman, who is Charlie Resnick; Chris Donnelly, who wears, as it were, two hats, those of Peter Waites and Barry Hardwick; Emma Thornett, who plays Jill Haines; Elizabeth Twells, playing  Jenny  Hardwick and John Askew playing Danny Ireland. And that’s me, nicely squeezed in between Emma and Elizabeth.

That afternoon, we all headed up to the  New Perspectives’ home in sunny Basford, north of the city centre, to begin rehearsals. And here we are – having been joined by Simone Saunders who plays Catherine Njoroge – reading through the script.

That looks suspiciously like the stage manager about to make her escape through the window and into the waiting bus!

Rehearsals continue through the month, with me in attendance on occasion, but certainly not all the time. The actors have got to be able to rubbish the lines without worrying I might be in earshot.

Tickets are selling well and if you’re thinking of coming along and haven’t already booked, you might be well-advised to do so. Details here …

We’ve got a great cast, the set design is really exciting, and I’m excited, also, about the other elements such as visuals and sound that will add immeasurably to the final work and help to bind it together.

I would say more, but it looks like another email has just arrived from the director asking about a few more rewrites …

 

Resnick Takes to the Stage

Well, after last night’s Season Launch at Nottingham Playhouse, the not very well kept secret is out; this coming autumn sees the redoubtable Charlie Resnick step on stage for the first time in what the Playhouse like to call – well, it’s true – the World Premiere of my dramatisation of the 12th and final Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness.

This is something I’ve been working on for some eighteen months now [writing for the stage, as I’m discovering, is a long and arduous – if, one hopes, ultimately rewarding –process] during most of which time I’ve been greatly assisted, prodded, cajoled – I’m tempted to say, occasionally goaded – by the play’s director, Jack McNamara, Artistic Director of New Perspectives. And despite the occasional less than polite thing I’ve said about him under my breath during this process, I know full well that without Jack’s input the script would be but a pale shadow of what it is now. Which is, I’m emboldened to say, pretty damn good. And still with room to get better.

At the Playhouse it sits at the centre of three-part Sweet Vengeance season, beginning with Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and finishing with Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.

To say I’m excited and not a little terrified would be an understatement.