Animal Night - The Wasp Factory

 

On its release, Iain Banks' debut novel was shocking; gaining equal applause and notoriety. Cumbernauld Theatre’s decision to produce the Wasp Factory revives the story of perfectly ordinary sixteen year old serial killer Frank and his family of violent eccentrics - no doubt to further controversy. The Skinny caught up with director Ed Robson, and asked him about the genesis of the project.

Why did you choose to do The Wasp Factory?
ER: I've always been fascinated by Iain Banks' writings. I'm a lover of his work whether it's under Iain Banks or his sci-fi pseudonym Iain M Banks. Many years ago I saw a production of The Wasp Factory at the West Yorkshire Playhouse down in Leeds and thought it was fantastic, and I thought one day hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do it. So it's one of those projects that I've always wanted to do: partly because I'm fascinated by him as a writer; but at the same time this particular novel lends itself eminently to adaptation for the stage.

What is about The Wasp Factory that makes it suitable for the stage?
ER: With it just being three characters, and with the particular location – set on an island – means that it's very much a piece that will transfer very well.

Where did the adaptation come from?
ER: I didn't actually do the adaptation. The adaptation I'm doing is exactly the same one I saw at The West Yorkshire Playhouse, which was originally done for the Citizens Theatre in the late Eighties. This adaptation is particularly useful because it's done from the perspective of a director; it's very open-ended and it's got lots of potential for investigation and creativity. It's really a kind of leaping off point, more of a platform for making a new production.

Why have you decided to revive the play now?
ER: There's quite a lot of interest in Banks and his work, partly because he's just had a new book released and partly because, oddly, and this is purely coincidental, there's just been a talking book of The Wasp Factory released. The Wasp Factory was first published in 1984 which makes it almost 25 years, yet it still has an enormous freshness. Partly to do with the urgent violence of the novel and partly to do with its cult status – The Wasp Factory acquires a new audience with each new generation.

The book is known for its grotesquely fantastic scenes, like exploding animals. How do you go about staging this aspect of the book?
ER: Sadly, you can't blow up rabbits; that's a good thing of course. Instead, we've taken the idea of the grotesque fabric of the novel and we're creating a surreal and mad visual world so that we can find a theatrical representation within it. Through that, we can try to articulate some of the enormously violent images in a way that's visceral but more symbolic.

Specifically?
ER: Without giving too much away, we've got a version of a magician's cabinet in which things appear and disappear. In our version, there are only three characters: the father, brother Eric and Frank; everyone else is represented in some way by Frank's imagination. It's not enough for Frank to describe a flock of burning sheep, or a burning dog running along the skyline: while that's an incredibly visceral image if you're a solo reader, you need to find a mechanism to represent what are at times violent, at times grotesque and at times very darkly funny images.