Art of the Thriller: New Work at The Royal Lyceum

The majority of the shows in the Royal Lyceum’s new season for 2013/14 are thrillers of one kind or another, with new work from celebrated crime writer and Rebus creator Ian Rankin kicking things off. Dark Road is a newly commissioned work written by Rankin in collaboration with the Lyceum's Artistic Director Mark Thomson, who has programmed a complementary bill of plays all exploring the darker recesses of the human condition, with murder and mystery a-plenty.

Speaking to The Skinny at the new season's launch, Thomson commented on the challenges he faced bringing Rankin's distinctive, pitch-dark vision of this new tale of serial killers and corrupt police to the stage: “I think in particular with Ian’s new work, which is absolutely a thriller, the most important thing is creating tension on the stage; deploying all the elements of theatre,” he said. “In television, you're able to cut; switch angles and focus. What you’re trying to do is create unease and uncertainty. That’s the main thing which I think you have available on stage – uncertainty in the room. So you look to deploy everything you’ve got up there. But really it’s psychological. It’s not like trying to create an event-driven narrative, like you would in fiction or on television. It had to be psychological – the tension comes between the people.”

The plot of Dark Road concerns Isobel MacArthur, the first female Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police, now retired. She is drawn back in to a web of corruption, compromise and psychological mind-games when a serial killer she locked up years earlier comes back into her life. It’s new territory for Rankin: “In the Rebus novels, Rebus is fairly junior – he’s a DI, a Detective Inspector. He has no respect at all for people above him in the hierarchy,” Rankin told us at the launch. “This is about people further up the hierarchy, about what they had to do to get there.” The play asks some interesting questions about gender and prejudice in the police: “If you're the first female Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police, did you have to do anything to get there? Did you have to compromise your principles? Did you have to become ‘one of the lads’? Did you have to become less womanly?” asks Rankin. “We’re looking at the glass ceiling.”

The use of a female protagonist is a first for Rebus, although he has considered writing a Rebus novel from the point of view of Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke. “It was Mark’s idea, really,” Rankin explains. “I think Mark said to me, 'Look, I’d love something for a female Scottish actor. We’ve got so many good ones here, so instead of writing about a guy, for a change, could you write about a woman?’ I thought, yeah, why not. That changed the relationships, because when you get to the family element, suddenly it’s a mother, not a father. A mother and a daughter... so that changes that dynamic. It’s a very different set of relationships, because Rebus has no family to speak of – none that he spends any time with.”

Mark Thomson says that writing with Rankin has been “very much a collaborative venture.” Rankin agrees, saying: “Mark’s done most of the work. He’s done a lot of the writing. I’m not going to take all of the blame! I came up with the storyline and the central characters, and I did a wee bit of storyboarding, but he actually came up with the script and said, ‘This is how it will work on stage,’ because I’ve never done that. It was great to see how this kind of stuff would work on the stage and not on the page.” Thomson cites a recent stage production of The Woman In Black as an influence, indicating that their use of lighting, sound and set design was an inspiration for the look and feel of Dark Road.

Was Thomson tempted to try and convince Rankin to bring his most famous creation to the stage? “When we started, we were talking more broadly about Ian doing something for the stage, and we did talk about Rebus,” he reveals. “It wasn’t an agenda of mine, but I thought we should discuss whether or not it was aposite. But Ian was much more interested in creating something new, and I think that was down to seeing a possible loss in the transference from one medium to another. He was much more interested in asking what kind of story might fit a stage. We decided to be a little bit more adventurous.”

Rankin has expressed dissatisfaction with TV-based Rebus adaptations in the past, but Dark Road was created specifically for the stage: “We weren't taking something that should be much longer, and trying to whittle it down,” he says. “I’m not saying I was disappointed with the TV adaptaions [of Rebus] – I was disappointed that it was reduced down to 45 minutes per film. Especially looking at things like Borgen and The Killing, where they had 20 hours to tell the story and let the characters breathe. That’s not a problem here. And it’s not a problem with TV any more, because I’ve got the rights back. They won’t be making any more until I’m happy with the length they’re going to do them at.” 

Although he has never written a stage play before, Rankin created a libretto for a Scottish Opera production a few years back, for the Five:15 project. He has also written radio plays for Radio 4. “When Mark asked me if I’d ever thought about writing a play, I told him I had thought about writing for the stage,” Rankin explains. “We started bouncing ideas around. I gave him this notion of a cat and mouse game between a retired policeman, and someone they put away years ago. She’s writing her memoirs, she wants to talk to him, and he’s still wanting to play games with her. It’s also a family psychodrama. I don’t know if it’s a whodunnit or a whydunnit. I’m not exactly sure. But there are mysteries there, which will be solved by the end.”

Unlike his novels, which involve “a series of red herrings” and can contain upwards of 40 characters, Dark Road is a tightly-plotted psychological drama with five or six main characters. The crimes happen in the past, meaning: “There’s not going to be any gore on stage,” according to Rankin. “I don't like gore. There won't be a Macbeth moment with a severed head or anything. Go to the classics for that, go to the Greek tragedies, or go to Shakespeare. Unless Mark decides to change it and include a severed head, just to spice things up a bit. Let’s wait and see.”

Dark Road is followed by a new adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic Russian novel Crime & Punishment, which premieres at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow before coming to the Lyceum, and then on to Liverpool’s Playhouse theatre. Directed by the Citz’ Dominic Hill, and written by award-winning scribe Chris Hannan. Gemma Bodinetz, Artistic Director at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse Theatres, promises “an epic telling of a classic tale that resonates in our times.” At the launch, Thomson also promised that this particular adaptation would emphasise the thriller elements of Dostoevsky’s paranoid literary classic, in keeping with the tone of the season.

This year’s Christmas show, a much-loved highlight of the Lyceum’s annual calendar, will be A Christmas Carol. The Dickens classic will be staged by director Andrew Panton of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and incorporates performances from members of the Lyceum Youth Theatre group. Panton commented: “If there’s one story that needs to be told in December, it’s this one.”

Next up is Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill. Regular Lyceum affiliate and official Associate Artist Tony Cownie will helm the production, which explores the internal conficts of an emigré Irish family. Asked what attracted him to the much-admired play by O’Neill, Cownie commented: “He gives us a haunting and shatteringly honest insight into what it is to be human.” Although not strictly speaking a thriller, this claustrophobic tale of a family in crisis nonetheless promises tension, drama and pertinent themes for a recession-hit society where family units are threatened by a lack of money, internal pressures and dissolving national identities.

A bit of light relief is provided next by a new production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, helmed by writer, director, composer and choreographer Martin Duncan, whose work was last seen at the Lyceum in Man of La Mancha. “Martin is Noel Coward,” commented Thomson at the launch, describing Coward himself as “a sublime example of a wordsmith,” whose play is “a lacerating dissection of two marriages” with razor-sharp wit and scintillating dialogue.

The next play in the new season is a rare beast indeed – Tim Barrow’s Union, an ambitious retelling of the story of the 1707 Treaty of Union which saw Scotland incorporated into the newly-emerging super-state of Great Britain, was not a comissioned work. Rather, Thomson chose the script from the Lyceum's huge stack of unsolicited script submissions. “It arrived on my desk out of nowhere, and it stayed on my desk because of its title,” Thomson explains. “It was the subject matter that made me feel I ought to read it; it was the writing that grabbed me. I was very prepared for it to be a laudable subject matter, but for the writing to make me want to turn off and run for the hills. I was perfectly prepared to abandon it after 20 minutes, make myself a coffee and move on, but I kept reading. There’s something about the energy of it; it won’t do what it’s told. It surprises you. Anything that does that interests me immediately. It’s bustling, foul-mouthed and theatrical. It takes you from Kensington Palace to the taverns of the Royal Mile in 1707.”

Barrow was in attendance at the launch to elaborate upon the play’s genesis: “Politics got very interesting in the last few years, and I realised that my knowledge of crucial events in Scottish history was lacking, so I started researching the times,” he says. “It’s a cast list to die for – you’ve got poets; spies; monarchs who’ve had 18 pregnancies and they're 40 years old; countries which are tearing themselves apart; you’ve got wars of religion... it’s really dramatic stuff. Within an hour of researching the Act of Union I started writing. I started looking at who was there, filling in the gaps in my history.” Far from being a polemic advocation or abnegation of the case for independence, Union is a rambunctious, anarchic play which examines Scottish society in the 1700s from the castle to the gutter. Thomson clarifies: “He didn’t write the play to tell you how to vote.”

The final play in the Lyceum’s ambitious new season is another world premiere – Pressure was written by veteran actor, director and playwright David Haig, most recently seen on the small screen in new BBC comedy The Wright Stuff. He spoke a little about the genesis of Pressure, which is based on the exploits of James Stagg, a meteorological expert who played a surprising and heroic role in the D-Day landings. “It is about this quiet, though subtly tenacious and obstinate Scottish hero,” Haig says of his play. “Son of a Dalkeith plumber, he went to university in Edinburgh, and became the chief meteorological officer for the D-Day landings. What he did was persuade Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, to delay D-Day by at least 24 hours, against all the advice of the American met officers, who were Ike's buddies, and had been fighting with him and predicting for him for years. He persuaded Eisenhower to delay, and by doing so, saved – and I'm not exaggerating – between 50 and 60,000 lives.”

Although not widely known, Stagg is the kind of man Haig thinks we should celebrate more often: “James Stagg, to me, is the quiet hero. They should be celebrated – those people in history who just through their own strength of belief – their tenacity, obstinacy, integrity – changed the world.” For Haig, the big challenge in creating a drama with the backdrop of one of the key moments in World War Two was “making a thriller offstage.” The world-shattering events of the Allied fightback play second fiddle to another intense, interpersonal psychodrama.

Haig, who is about to begin a production of King Lear at the Bath Theatre Royal, is full of praise for the Lyceum’s bold and innovative approach to this year’s program: “One of the saddest things, as an actor and writer, which I’ve seen over the past twenty years has been the demise of substantial theatres putting on varied and provocative seasons like this,” he commented at the launch. “To see this list of projects up is heartening and exciting.”