Transcript
[Music]
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers.
Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives
brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
Now today I wanted to talk about adaptations.
In particular, not film adaptations,
but the Lord of the Rings musical
versus The Rings of Power. Now, the Lord of the Rings musical was originally put on at the
Drury Lane Theatre in London, which is one of the biggest theatres in the country. And it didn't run
very well originally. It in fact was put up for 492 performances and ended pretty much a year later,
having had a budget of £12.5 million. It's not quite as disastrous as the famous or infamous
Spider-Man musical, but it's, you know, in that ballpark. Anyway, it's been quiet since,
but there's been a revival locally to where I live in Oxford, down at the Watermill Theatre
in Newbury, which is a very interesting independent arts venue. As the name suggests,
it's in a converted watermill. You know, Sandy Man's mill has been turned to an artistic purpose, which is rather pleasant. Anyway, they've put it on again. And so, sitting, watching it last night
made me have a series of thoughts about adapting Tolkien's work, which I thought I would share
with you and I'll also give a review of how the musical works. Before you go any further,
I am going to say book a ticket and it's quite a small venue so if you are anywhere near Newbury
in the UK, grab a ticket while they're still available. I think it's got about another month
to run. Anyway, when I was thinking about the production I went back to have a look at what
went wrong with the Jewelry Lane version of the same thing. It seems as though it really did
divide the critics. There was one critic who's a very well-known critic in the UK called Michael
Billington writing in The Guardian saying, "I don't know how it could be done better."
If you're going to do Tolkien on stage, this is what he expects. Whereas Kieran Quirk
in the Evening Standard said, "It was ill-fated at conception, tedious and vulgar in execution."
There is someone who really didn't like it, did he? Anyway, so digging further into the reviews
to see if it was the same show that I saw, here's a longer comment on it. Someone said,
"The books and lyrics have no more depth than spam a lot, and at times, such is the silliness,
One expects the knights who say "knee" (that's a Monty Python reference) to make a guest appearance.
Philip Fisher was that critic. And I think perhaps one of the reviews that summed up
feeling back in 2008 when it closed was this comment from another critic.
"The actors have been dwarfed in the process of making the show more gadgetrified" (is that a
word, than any other before it. So clearly the overwhelming experience of watching that show was
great special effects, not so sure about the acting and singing. So I of course then went back,
and you can do this too, to look at the production photos and also look at a few of the videos that
they got of the cast singing. What struck me looking at that, I know Drury Lane very well
as a theatre, because I've written books set in Drury Lane, it's one of my favourite places in
the country, was they did use the stage to make a vast effect. It looks as though it was pretty
spectacular. They kept with the scale thing, they were using people on stilts, they had, looks like,
orc-type warriors on sort of those bouncy blade things that you can do like parkour on.
It looks as though they did an amazing job visually. But Drury Lane, old theatre but very big,
does mean that you're looking at people from a great distance. So you lack the intimacy of a
smaller venue like the Watermill Theatre. And that must have added to this feeling of the
actors being dwarfed. And that critic isn't just referring to dwarves when he says that.
Okay, this was put to one side, people thought it couldn't be, couldn't succeed,
I've not heard of it having a successful run anywhere else, until the Watermill Theatre
took it up. Now, the actual adaptation was done by a man called Sean McKenna, who is experienced
in this field, and he is still involved in this process, obviously. The director at the
at the Watermill Theatre, Paul Hart, must have gone to him, one assumes, and said, "Okay,
here's my venue. I want to do this. How do we do it?" And they've changed the approach.
And it really, really works. And this is where you can say small is in fact beautiful. So,
The first thing to think of is, if you can imagine in your mind that this is being put
on in Hobbiton, this village on the edge of Newbury, it's actually a place called Bagna,
Bag End, Bagna, that's a match made in heaven, isn't it? The grounds are beautiful. So you
go and have your pre-theatre picnic or drinks in beautiful grounds and they actually start
the show outside. So with the mill theatre behind and this beautiful garden and the show
being introduced by the hobbits, all the cast do all pass, gives the impression or the sort
of conceit really that this would be how Lord of the Rings, the story of Frodo and Sam,
how it would be if the hobbits were memorialising it afterwards. And immediately, soon as you
think like that? All the choices make sense. I don't even know, it's not in the program notes,
I don't even know if this is a conscious choice, but it's the effect of what they've done.
So they start off outside as you arrive with the Hobbits at Bilbo's party, playing games,
involving the audience, there's quotes, there's Splat the Rat, there's people dancing,
people playing music. And just sidebar here, incredibly talented cast. Everybody plays
an instrument during the course of the show except I think perhaps Frodo. And even Gollum
is wonderful playing the guitar because he stays as Gollum doing all his movement. It's just
brilliant. Anyway, that's a bit later. So you start outside and you're already as an audience
participating in the same way as if you remember the Peter Jackson film. Everybody cheering,
somebody shouting out, "Proud feet, proud foot!" You know, that line. It's all enormous fun and
it breaks down the barrier between you and the audience so you're on board for the adventure.
And then soon after Bilbo leaves, you are moved inside into the theatre itself for the majority
of the rest of the evening. It's quite a long run, about three hours, but boy do they rattle
through the material. They do some really good choices. So you might be wondering how do they
put this enormous three volume story into three hours? Well, they do it by making radical cuts,
which you have to do. Sean McKenna, the adapter says, "The heart of the story is of course Frodo,
Sam, Gollum, that triangle. The story of Aragorn and the lands of men provides the
narrative framework above them all sits Gandalf, Galadriel, elves, dwarves and the mystical
mythology of the Valar. Pippin, Merry and their fellow hobbits give us warmth and humour.
Anything beyond those four threads was ripe for cutting, eliding or reimagining."
So that's the storyline they've taken. I would say they've actually really concentrated on
things relevant to the hobbits. That seems to be the way, even more so than the supporting
characters of Aragorn and the elves. And it's really strong in the first half. The first half
is the Fellowship of the Ring book. Pretty much all the top moments in that, they've made an
interesting choice for reasons of time. I was wondering where the cuts were going to come.
So the first meeting with Aragorn is conflated with the attack on Weathertop. It makes sense
theatrically the way it's done. The second half I think is less strong. They've got obviously the
bigger canvas to fit. They've got two books. The strongest part of it is as Sean McKenna says the
Frodo, Sam and Gollum triangle. It's very, very well done and it must be horrible for anyone
playing Gollum to come in after Andy Serkis. But he does very well. Very well indeed, I would say.
He's an actor with the fantastic name of Matthew Bug, which B-U-G-G, which seems perfect somehow
for Gollum. He's an expert on movement, which he uses really well. And he does his own version of
of the two-sided voice without being a pastiche of Andy Serkis.
So, well done, Matthew Buck.
And the weak part of the second part is that for reasons of time,
they've had to conflate Rohan and Gondor.
And this annoyed me when I was sitting there a bit.
Well, not annoyed me, I mean, I was thinking,
"Oh, pick a side, you know, either do Gondor or Rohan.
Don't kind of just make it the City of Kings
and conflate Theoden with Denethor."
But actually, once I was thinking about it
and reminded myself that the conceit that is--
that this is the hobbits telling the story,
I kind of thought, "I bet those hobbits back in the Shire
when Merry and Pippin were telling their tales
down the Ivy Bush or the Green Dragon,
they probably did say,
Uh, oh, didn't they tell us about some king who lost a son
down in some city of kings down there?
So, it's almost like a sort of, uh,
a story about the reception of the story in Hobbiton.
And once you do that, you can relax about the fact
you haven't got your favorite, um, characters from Rohan present.
There just isn't time we'd still be sitting there
if they wanted to be so complete.
And they're admirably swift about the end as well.
But they do include an element of the scouring of the shire, because the story has an environmental
message which obviously is very allowed by the source material.
And as you leave they hand out seeds to go and plant.
So all of that is beautiful and beautifully done.
So the other thing I haven't mentioned or looked at in detail is the fact that it's
a musical.
So it works because the performances are fantastic.
is strong. There isn't a weak link in the cast. I would say that the standout character
for me though was probably Frodo, which is nice to hear because normally Frodo, I don't
know, because he is suffering so much at the end of his story, he sort of disappears a
bit. But this Frodo kept this sort of physical addiction, tension all the way through.
It's played by an actor called Louis Muskell. They also didn't bother about scale. They don't
have the resources of Drury Lane, so they just accepted that people were these, you know,
different heights. They did refer to it at certain times by using staging to sort of emphasize
heights, but Fredo is quite tall. Sam is beautifully short. He's a real hobbit. And Rosie. Sam and Rosie
are just perfectly short. But I think it was the right decision not to worry about that because it
would have been too much of a weight on the story to do that. Plus also if we go with the conceit
that this is a play played out by hobbits, then of course they're all the same size. So I like,
you know, that's absolutely fine. You aren't getting a film, you're not going there for that
purpose. That sort of very similitude that you get in the Peter Jackson, you're going for a
theatrical interpretation of it. And they're all very musical. So you've got people playing harps,
Boromir plays the trombone, well done Boromir. Gimli is great on the drums. You know, there's
all sorts of wonderful little moments you catch going on in the background. Everybody plays an
instrument. And so the numbers of the full chorus participation are really, really moving.
Exciting. So, like the dance at the beginning and at the end. The song in the Prancing Pony is
great fun because it's done as a sort of call and response between the Hobbits and the Brelanders.
and that captures the interaction between the two in music. That's what music should be doing. It
should be providing new information about relationships, which is what it does. The elves
have a sort of...there's an element of eastern, maybe Indian sort of tones.
I think we saw that actually in the Howard Shaw score for Laurian, and maybe that gave the idea,
or it was their own idea, but they've sort of expanded that and their costumes reflect an
Eastern influence with the sort of long tunics and the drapes of fabric. It's a really good
interpretation of the costumes actually. And the best singers are Arwen and Galadriel. Arwen plays
a harp. How nice. So that works well. The Galadriel is more hoppity than Elphie, but she's got a nice
voice and she's staged impressively. So again, you just go with it. The other, looking at the music,
it definitely works in performance. I'm struggling to remember any of it now. It doesn't have like a
standout song like you might get in a Lloyd Webber or something, a memory or whatever.
Maybe that's on purpose, maybe it's because it's about a fellowship and a group is actually
seeing it live that matters. And the other thing about it is I don't think they were allowed to
use Tolkien's actual words. There was some Elvish in it which had been translated into Elvish,
but for the songs I think there must be copyright issues, so they've had to use an interpretation
of things like 'The Road Goes Ever On and On'. It doesn't give that information in the program
notes, but I'm actually quite interested in what rights they were able to get, because
you could see another iteration of this where they are allowed to use the music.
So, the overall impression of the evening is one of huge fun, huge inventiveness in what is
is a small space. I don't want to spoil some of the coup de theatres in it, but they do
use very clever, not too complicated special effects to create magic. There's some good
puppets. Shout out to the She-Log puppet and the Black Riders, Horses' Heads puppets. Simply
done. We all know now how wonderful puppetry can be on stage thanks to War Horse and Lion
King and things like that. So they've got a simple, country-fied version of that. Absolutely
great. So I would say that between them, Paul Hart and Sean McKenna and the rest of the
excellent team, they have found a way of interpreting this huge production which bombed or didn't
do very well at Drury Lane. And actually made it a production, which I'm sure should go
around lots of theatres around the world, lots of regional theatres. It's well within
the scope of local regional theatres to do festivals. It's a cast of 20. What you need
is good actors who can play instruments and who are good at movement. And then you don't
actually need a huge vast theatre with lots of CGI, anything projected, you can go back to
the stage magic that has been developed over the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries
and have a really magical evening. And a particularly nice touch in this production
is that they take you outside the theatre again. So when they return to the shard,
you return to the garden to an empty stage when you have the sense of the scalloped shire.
It's very, very good. Very clever. So well done. In terms of stars, I give it overall
a kind of 4.5 out of 5 stars, something really quite high. I would say the first half is
definitely 5 stars and the second half is sort of 4 stars. That's why there's that little,
you know, quibble there. And as I was saying, go and buy a ticket.
So, I'm talking here about adaptations though, because what it made me feel afterwards,
I went with my son, and we were talking about Rings of Power, which he's just finished watching.
He was late to the party on that one. We were talking about the contrast between doing Tolkien
in this rural setting compared to the most expensive TV program made ever.
And it's absolutely fascinating to see how small is good because you can't match what
your imagination is doing even in Rings of Power. Rings of Power had moments where the backgrounds
seem to work quite well, like Numenor for example. But when it came to certain set pieces like
saving the people in the southern lands, when Numenor goes over to help the people there,
it came down to basically a village and a fort run by elves. It didn't really add up to a convincing
land. Also, the armada that they sent, the fleet of ships, was very uninspiring too.
So, I'm sure it cost a huge amount to make, but there wasn't enough power or ships to
match the grandeur of some of the other settings. The other problem, of course, is that they forgot
totally about interpersonal relationships and having a key relationship in the middle of your
story. Galadriel is strangely cool. We know she's grieving her brother and she's on a mission,
but her actual personality is very dampened down. There was a hint of a flirtation kind of thing
between her and the, I say Halbrand, isn't it? I think they call him the one who turns out to be
the bad guy. She, he was not really developed. And when you look in the law, other options would
have been one of the versions of the story about Galadriel, which never settles to a final version
in Tolkien's work, is that Celebrimbor actually loves her. So rather than cast the older actor
playing the smith, you could have had somebody who's actually doing it in order to impress
or to woo Galadriel, even though she's married at the time to Celeborn, who is conveniently missing
during the first season. So you could have actually had much more of a relationship spark
between Galadriel and other characters by looking at what goes on in Tolkien, which they completely
missed out. And all the other sort of sets of characters seem to be very isolated. So
the hobbits and the proto hobbits and the Gandalf figure are just completely off on their own.
they don't connect. Elrond and Durin, they connect with each other and that's the strongest
sort of storyline really. But the connections to other parts of the story are intermittent
and not really very interesting. Yeah, so it just fails really as a story about relationships.
A fellowship, huh? Who would have thought that was a good idea? Whereas what they do
in this small-scale production, which won't have cost a million pounds to put on,
they said, "Okay, at the center of this is Frodo, Sam, and Gollum." And Gollum mainly because he's
the potential of what Frodo is, and that's very clear and expressed in the way it's staged.
you've got nothing as interesting as that or as heart-wrenching as that.
And the problem about the Rings of Power is it falls apart on the fact that you lose interest
in some of the stories. So when the story goes back to that, you think, "Hmm, okay,
let's go make a cup of tea." So I really hope, and this comes down to the fact that the problem
is script. It's not anything else. I've had my quibbles with the costumes and other aspects of it,
but the problem is script. Somebody needs to actually sit down and say, "How do you make
this a good story?" You've got this material, you're stomping through it with as much grace
as an olive oint. Sorry, but that's what they did. I mean, just take, for example, the making of the
Rings of Power. You've got a series called the Rings of Power. They get made really rather
quickly at the end of the series and handed out. Here you go. There was no dramatic tension about
that. No conflict really. It just kind of happens. Really not a good idea. So I'm hoping they'll
learn their lesson or they'll get some more experienced writers on board for the second
series so that they can salvage some of this because they've still got good material to come.
But they need to remember to connect things together. It's really basic. This is what
surprises me that you can spend billions on this thing and forget the basics. I don't know, crazy.
Anyway, so if you've got a choice between going out to theatre and watching Lord of the Rings
the Musical or sitting down to watch Rings of Power, I would definitely pick Lord of the Rings
the Musical. And it's very encouraging to see by taking a different approach to material that
failed, the Watermill Theatre has been able to make a success. And I'm hoping that the people
in charge of the Rings of Power think, you know what, we've got some good things here,
got some good casting and some good looks and all the rest of it.
Let's have another go at this material and make it a success.
Thank you very much for listening.
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