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Megan HowettSpace and Environment: Cinematic Spaces

Online Greenlight Review

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Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan

'Titus Groan' is the first of the three novels in Mervyn Peake's

Gormenghast series. The book centres around the Groan

family and spans the first two years of Titus Groan's life. The

story begins with the birth of the heir to the throne of the

House of Groan, Titus. The plot follows the inhabitants of

Gormenghast castle including Steerpike, the kitchen boy and

Cora and Clarice Groan.

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a British writer and artist, best

known for his 'Gormenghast' series. His influences include Charles

Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson and his work is sometimes

compared to that of J.R.R. Tolkien. Peake featured amoung 'The

Times' 50 greatest British Writers since 1945 in 2008.

Major themes featured in the Gormenghast trilogy include freedom versus tradition and Gothicism.

The theme of freedom in competition with social duty and tradition is portrayed through Titus

Groan, who longs to be free from his bonds to the House of Groan. This conflict is reflected in the

outer world of the castle which is raw, untamed and elemental, contrasting with the dry, dusty

lifeless halls and corridors within Gormenghast.

Gormenghast is often referred to as the only true example of Gothic Expressionism in English

literature. The overwhelming presence of Gormenghast castle with its 'umbrageous ceilings' and

'empire of red rust' and the personalities of the inhabitants marks Gormenghast as one of the greatGothic edifices.

Adaptations

1984 Two 90 minute plays based on Gormenghast and Titus Groan

Adapted by Brian Sibley, BBC Radio 4

2000 Miniseries called Gormenghast based on the first two books in the series

BBC

2011 Six one-hour episodes titled The History of Titus Groan

Adapted by Brian Sibley, BBC Radio 42012 Stage adaptation ofTitus Groan

Blackshaw theatre company

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The Room of Roots

It was certainly a room of roots. Not of a few simple, separate formations, but of a thousand

branching, writhing, coiling, intertwining, diverging, converging, interlacing limbs whose origin

even Steerpike's quick eyes were unable for some time to discover. He found eventually that the

thickening stems converged at a tall, narrow aperture on the far side of the room, through the upperhalf of which the sky was pouring a grey, amorphous light.

...that every one of those twisting terminals should be hand-painted was even more astonishing.

The various main limbs and were painted in their own especial colours, so that it appeared as

though seven coloured boles had forced their leafless branches through the window, yellow, red and

green, violet and pale blue, coral pink and orange.

At the window there was a little more space, for the seven stems which wedged their way through

its lower half protruded some four feet into the room before beginning to divide and subdivide.

Alongside the window there were steps that led up to a small platform which rested on the thick

horizontal stems.

Featured in my thirdexcerpt, 'The Room of

Roots' is a room within

Gormenghast castle filled

with the dead intertwining

roots of a tree that once

lived on the side of the

castle. This is my influence

map made up of images and

textures that will help me in

completely my designs for

this space.

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Here are some of my thumbnails from this

space. In my paintings I want to focus on the

shapes and textures of the roots. In the

description of this room, the roots are

painted in different colours. It is my hopethat in my designs the colours of the roots

will contrast with the grey palette of the

stone walls.

The Attic

From my second excerpt, the Attic is made up of three rooms. The secret hiding place of Fuchsia,

the lumber room is filled with decades worth of clutter and discarded belongings. Below is my

influence map for this space, including images and textures.

The third, the smallest attic, with its steps leading upwards from the gallery with the banistered

verandah was the best lit, for ti boasted a window with shutters which, when opened, gave upon a

panorama of roof-tops, towers and battlements that lay in a great half -circle below. Between high

bastions might be seen, hundreds of feet beneath, a portion of quadrangle wherein, were a figure tomove across, he would appear no taller that a thimble.

To her right was an enormous crumbling organ. Its pipes were broken and the keyboard shattered.

Across its front the labour of a decade of grey spiders had woven their webs into a shawl of lace.

...the lumber room. Through very long and lofty it looked it looked relatively smaller than it was,

for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted

head of a broken toy lion... spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent

room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at

a sharp angle to the right... what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and

toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind... the hide and head

of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose beyond the dim ranges of this atticmedley.

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The Great Kitchen

the heavy wooden door of the Great Kitchen stood ajar... the sun's rays streaming into the room at

various points through the high windows, but, in the riot of the festivities, the fires had been banked

dangerously.

The walls of the vast room which were streaming with calid moisture, were build with grey slabs of

stone...

...the floor littered with stock-pots, basting pans, broken bowls and dishes, and oddments of

food...

Divided by the heavy stone wall in which was situated a hatch of strong timber, was the garde-

manger with its stacks of cold meat and hanging carcases and on the inside of the wall the spit. On

a fixed table running along a length of the wall were huge bowls capable of holding fifty portions.

The stock-pots were perpetually simmering, having boiled over, and the floor about them was a

mess of sepia fluid and egg-shells that had been floating in the pots for the purpose of clearing the

soup. The sawdust that was spread neatly over the floor each morning was by now kicked into

heaps and soaked in the splashings of wine. And where scattered about the floor little blobs of fat

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had been rolled or trodden in, the sawdust stuck to them giving them the appearance of rissoles.

Hanging long the dripping walls were rows of sticking knives and steels, boning knives, kinning

knives and two-handed cleavers, and beneath them a twelve-foot by nine-foot chopping block,

cross-hatched and hollowed by decades of long wounds.

On the other side of the room... a capacious enormous copper, a row of ovens and a narrow

doorway acted as his landmarks. The doors of the ovens were flying wide and acid flames wereleaping dangerously...

A prodigious twisted beam, warped into a spiral, floated, or so it seemed in the haze, across the

breadth of the Great Kitchen. Here and there along its undersurface, iron hooks were screwed into

its grain.

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This influence map is for the overall feel of the castle. I researched gothic castles to help me picturethe world in which the spaces I design come from.