Paul Auster's City of Glass: Behind the Scenes
They've turned water into stone and 70,000 people into pixels: now, groundbreaking visual design company 59 Productions are bringing Paul Auster's debut novel to the stage. Master of illusions Leo Warner tells us about working on City of Glass
A castle floats, suspended in space, the sky afire with stars. Wolves pursue deer through a lattice of trees, then soar in a storm of white light.
If these sound like scenes from your dreams, it's because their creators traffic in magic. One of the world's leading companies specialising in video and projection design for live events, 59 Productions have spent the last decade creating immersive, bewitching environments – all the way from the intimate spaces of theatres and opera houses to the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. (It was their work that illuminated Danny Boyle's 'largest show on earth'.)
This spring sees their wizarding team of artists and technicians bring nearly 15 years of innovation to the world premiere of Paul Auster's City of Glass – an adaptation for the stage of a novel long thought unadaptable.
"Different levels of reality"
“The feeling of it has never left me,” says 59's creative director Leo Warner of Auster's story, recalling reading it for the first time as a teenager. Considered a landmark work of metafiction on its publication in 1985, City of Glass is a multi-layered mystery in which crime writer Daniel Quinn becomes embroiled in a thriller of his own. After an anonymous phonecall requires him to turn detective in a case of shifting identities, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern who is who, what is real and what is imagined – and Auster himself even enters the text in ineffable forms.
As Warner explains, while the novel exhibits some characteristics of genre fiction at first – “you think you're in a world of hard-bitten detective fiction, of noir thriller” – it has at its core a deep well of emotion. “The main character, whose family have died recently, is looking for some sort of purpose and is given this opportunity; and he gets drawn into this thing that he thinks he understands, but it becomes increasingly apparent that it's going to turn him inside out.”
It's this richness that appealed to Warner and his team, who were attracted to the idea of a character “switching between different levels of reality.” Their approach has been to create a design that is as convincing yet chameleonic as the dimension Quinn finds himself in, able to shatter and rearrange itself in a split-second.
“One of the technical challenges is using our projectors to incredibly accurately transform what feels like a very solid space,” Warner explains. “We do a lot of transformative work on the outside of buildings – in the case of Edinburgh [International Festival, where 59 Productions are artistic associates] last year we projected on to the castle and the rock, and made that appear to transform and travel through time. It's doing that degree of transformation but on a very small scale; transforming the inside of a world rather than the outside of an object completely.”
This is a huge technical challenge within the confines of a theatre, and is one of the company's responses to scriptwriter Duncan Macmillan's stage directions which often begin with the exclamation: “Impossibly!” (“We've kind of encouraged that, really,” Warner laughs.) And it's not just the built environment that will appear to morph, either. Without giving too much of the magic away, let's just say you'll want to keep a close eye on the actors.
An impossible task?
The 'impossibility' of City of Glass has been contested once before, with a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli first published in 1994 – and while the new production does not strongly reference that book, Warner credits it with giving him confidence to tackle the story. “That was when I first decided it was possible,” he says, “because it's largely seen as being too complex and too literary to ever be rendered into any other form. And the graphic novel actually did an extraordinary job. It's a really beautiful bit of dramaturgy and an amazing storyboard.”
Perhaps the real alchemy, however, lies in none of this difficulty becoming apparent. “It's about the technology serving the drama,” Warner emphasises, “and therefore we're going to great lengths to hide that technology. It's about this character, it's about what's happening live on stage – and the world that we're conceiving, constructing and transforming around him is part of that living world, really. We're trying to make the stage a performer in the piece as much as the actors are.”
Paul Auster's involvement
For the man who first got inside Daniel Quinn's head more than three decades ago, this must all be a bit of a trip. “He's been absolutely fantastic,” Warner says of Paul Auster, with whom he has worked closely on several visits to New York. “I had to go and meet him in person to persuade him to even give us the option; he was sort of pleasingly incredulous that we wanted to attempt to do this at all, like, 'Are you sure you don't just want to make a film, an animated film or something?!'
“He's been involved in the script process, he's seen and been very excited by the latest draft. That's been a real vote of confidence, it's given us confidence to be bold.
“It's his first ever work of fiction,” Warner reflects on what would become the first instalment in The New York Trilogy, “and you can see how it sets the agenda for 30 years of writing – there are so many themes he establishes in City of Glass which he then explores further in his later writing. It feels like everything's in there, and that's one of the other things that drew us to it – it's such an extraordinary, extraordinarily detailed and exciting piece of writing because you scratch away at the surface and suddenly all of this other stuff bursts out of it.”
The distinct urban eeriness of Auster's tone seems well-suited to the work of 59 Productions, whose portfolio – bar those mass celebratory spectacles like the Olympic ceremony – has often tended towards the dark and complex. For American composer Nico Muhly's debut opera Two Boys, which was based on a true story of online grooming that led to murder, Warner's team envisioned a slinking, slithering darkweb that unspooled across the stage.
They're responsible for bringing Susan Hill's chilling ghost story The Haunting of Hill House to life at Liverpool Everyman in 2015, using discreet projections to make the wallpapers reveal faces and shadows move through the rooms. And even the eye-popping, candy-coloured wonder.land – Rufus Norris and Moira Buffini's take on Alice in Wonderland, commissioned for Manchester International Festival 2015 – had a sinister brightness to it, from the Cheshire Cat's thousand-yard stare to its always-on platform-game aesthetics.
“I'm personally attracted to mystery, things where everything is not all it seems,” Warner says. “That's partly personal taste and it's partly about what we're able to bring to productions, which is often a layer, an augmentation of what appears to be real or solid. Establishing a world which then shifts uncomfortably and imperceptibly is, I suppose, one of our specialities.
“That isn't necessarily true of some of the work that we've done for ceremonies or the opening events for Edinburgh, where that is much more a sort of celebration of energy and light. But they're always narratively driven,” he considers, “and there are very few, very strong narratives that don't have an element of tragedy, or at least don't provide emotion through contrast.
“Even things like War Horse [for which 59 developed the famous 'paper strip' screen], which are ultimately very euphoric, it's really only in the final closing minutes because the horror that you go through in order to come out the other side has to be so intense and profound.”
The future for 59 Productions
Bringing together all elements of the studio, from architecture to lighting to sound design and even a specially devised virtual reality experience that runs alongside the play, Warner sees City of Glass as a culmination of everything 59 Productions have learned so far – and the first chapter in a new era of originating their own projects.
“It's all the skills and creative thinking that we've been developing for over a decade, focusing in on this one story,” he says. “It's very exciting for us to both be the originators and the driving force behind this whole thing, but then also work with this amazing network of collaborators.” Naturally enough for them – the future is bright.
Paul Auster's City of Glass, HOME, Manchester, 4-18 Mar