TIle Play Produced "The Lion, The Witch and The

Wardro be" by c. S. Lewis. Adapted by Glyn

Robbins Wakefield Little Theatre, by Keith Priest, Director

liT .I he Lion, The Witch

and The Wardrobe" is essentially a play for children, but has an appeal for audiences of all ages.

The four central characters, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, are children who find themselves magically transported into the mysterious land of Namia when they enter a wardrobe in their bedroom.

While in Namia, they meet the evil White Witch, who has turned the country into snow and ice for a hundred years, and also the King of the Beasts, AsIan the Lion, representing all that is good and right.

With the assistance of various animals, the children help AsIan to overcome and destroy the White Witch and ensure the triumph of good over evil.

The plot is an analogy of the Christian message, with Asian sacrificed by the forces of evil to save the lives of the children (the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve), but overcom­ing death by the "Deep Magic" and finally defeating the Witch in a great battle. The analogy is not heavily drawn, however, and the play works well as a magical fairy tale for children.

The Cast The cast list in the script shows 17 main characters, plus assor­ted, "uglies, spirits, ghouls etc". Of the main characters, 4 are children, 4 are adults (The Pro­fessor, Mrs Macready, The White Witch and Father Christ­mas) and the rest are animais of various sorts, including fawns and dwarves.

The parts of The Professor! AsIan and Mrs Macready!The White Witch are intended to be doubled, and this is what we did. There was little opportunity for any other doubling, as virtually all the characters, including extras, were involved in the Battlefield scene in Act 2, and

PAGE 14

the only other actor who doubled played Mr T umnus (a fawn) and Maugrim's lieutenant (a wolf).

As the four central characters are children, we felt there was no way these parts could be played other than by children, and so we contacted a number of schools with a view to getting the maximum number of appli­cants to choose from. In the end we had an overwh e lming response, and were able to offer parts to 13 children, with the rest of the cast made up of 6 adults plus 3 co-opted stage crew for the ba ttle scene.

Auditions were held] 0 weeks before the play was due to start and selection was done in the society's usual manner by a committee headed by the direc­tor, with four others drawn from the society membership.

Rehearsals Rehearsals were held 3 nights a week over a period of 9 weeks, with a week out for Christmas. Due to the number of children in the cast, we finished rehearsals by 9.30pm, which gave us a little over 50 hours of rehearsal time.

The play is sub-divided into 18 scenes, each of which can be rehearsed independently. As we had adjacent rooms available for rehearsal, we decided that we would use an assistant director, and rehearse two scenes simul­

e main moves of each scene were set with the assistant, and once set were rehearsed separately, thus virtually doubling our available time.

The on ~y problem with this is that the children feature in most scenes, but by 'doubling' with understudies from some of the children with smaller parts, we found this system worked very well.

Scenery The playas written contains 18 scenes, or sub-scenes, each involving a change of "location". In general, the action is conti ­nuous, with the scene changing while dialogue carries on.

We considered sev e ral approaches to the problem, the most simple (and cheapest) being to use drapes and a minimum of furniture. However we felt that as we were performing in Wakefield ' s newly-refurbished Opera House, that this was something of an easy option. There is no doubt, though, that the play could be performed with a relatively simple set~ing.

Our next thought was hiring the scenery, and we followed up an advertisement in Amateur Stage, although in the end we felt we would be unable to afford the necessary outlay, when transport, insurance etc, was considered. we hired

Our solution was to go for a curtains and backdrops setting supplemented by a number of trucks of various sizes on which we built scenery to a height of 8 feet to suggest various locations. In order to keep trucks to a minimum, scenery was built double-sided, and scenes were changed by rotating a truck, ("Ir by removing one from the stage and replacing with another.

Three main scenery trucks proved sufficient for ~ur pur­pose. The first had the wardrobe, with portion of bedroom wall, on one side, and the forest with the door into Narnia on the other. The second was Mr Tum­nus's house on one side, forest on the other, while the third provided the setting for the Beaver's house.

Some scenes needed to be set behind curtains to allow actors to get into place - (Witch's Castle and Battlefield). The castle, whose walls are lifted out by the Giant at one point in the action, was flown.

Moving of the scenery

required a crew of five, plus t\';~ more on the fly gallery.

Lighting Due to the relative simplicity 0; the settings, the lighting playec an important part in the creatio of atmosphere, as well as form ­ing the link to cover scene changes performed on full stage.

The script details 46 lighting cues for just 38 pages of text, though in practice we used nearly 70, with the additional ones being necessary for the scene changes.

Lighting permanently avail­able in the theatre comprises some thirty 1000w Fresnels, twenty 1000w Profiles and a number of 500w Floods, and the lighting plot is programmed to a computer aIJowing consistency in lighting level and speed of change.

In addition to the " in house" a number of

special effect lights. These comprised two snow projectors to give a falling snow pattern across the backcloth in the winter scenes, a strobe light for use in Asian's flight through the air with the two girls, and ultra-violet lighting to pick up the UV paint on the forest settings, although this latter was not as effective as we had hoped, as it was generally overcome by the stronger lighting needed for the main scenes.

Colouring in the lighting was also used to create settings - the winter SceneS generally used blue or white lighting, while the scenes after the thaw used more ye Ilow. "Inset" Scenes, such as Tumnus's house, Or the Beavers's house, used local pools of ligh: onto the trucks, and scene changes on full stage were done by reducing lighting to a pool a the front of the stage whi le leaVing the rest of the stage i darkness. Stage hands dressed ir dark clothes to reduce the lik ll· hood of their being too distra:: ting to the audience.

Anwlwr Slllge July loJ~_

~ostumes

- r a play such as "The Lion, .e Witch and The Wardrobe·', e costumes, particular! y those

f the animals, are necessarily O;; oing to be extremely Important.

We were faced very early on ,",ith the choice of hiring or m~king . If we hired, could we afford it and were the costumes we wanted going to be available in the right sizes? If we decided to make them, did we have the necessary in-house skilL as well as the time to complete them, remembering that casting was done only nine weeks before the show.

The society was fortunate in having availahle the skills of our wardrobe mistress, Pat Killingley who designed, aQ.d supervised the construction of, all the animal costumes.

One of the first things we needed to take into account was our audiences expectations. The BBC television production had finished only a few weeks before our show. Did they anticipate seeing exactly what they had seen on TV? We decided early on that Asian, unlike the TV seriaL was not going to be four-footed, and this lead us to the question how human-like should our animals be. hecies recalled.

The masks were built by first creating a skull-cap from chicken wire to c10sel y fit each actor's head. Onto this base, to give it strength and shape, layers of papier mache were fitted, foll­owed by a layer of thick foam, which was then trimmed to the required shape. The whole mask then covered in fur fabric. and highlights were painted onto the fur.

The human costumes pre­sented no problems, being gen­erally available from our own wardrobe, and the various extras in the battle scene were fitted out with capes etc., again all from our normal stock.

Music One feature of our production which promoted considerable favourable comment from our audience was the music. Some of the compositions of Andrew Thompson, a member of our group for a number of years, are already starting to attract the attentions of profeSSional film and TV producers, and he was "commissioned" to write a suite of music especially for this pro­duction.

The script makes mention of music in one place only, when "mystic music" is played when

An easy option would have been to use only heads, with ordinary clothes below, but we felt it was important to create the illusion that these were real animals, albeit walking on two legs. Consequently we decided to aim for as much reality as pOSSible, subject to the restric­tions already discussed.

Bodies produced little prob­lem, and we were fortunate in finding a supplier of fur fabric at very reasonable rates. The main part of the animal costumes were thus basically furry boiler-suits, padded as appropriate, with matching fur boots and gloves.

The heads presented more of a problem. While we felt it 'llight be possible to achieve

·hat we wanted using make-up alone, we were unsure whether

'e had the ability to actually :--oduce this. The other alterna­

·,te was masks, and this is what e finally went for, although it as necessary to keep in mind

en designing the masks that actor needed both to be able

;ee and be heard.

" Siage J"ly 1989

However, to this must be added the necessity of opening and finishing music, and there are several other points in the play where music can usefully playa part in the creation of the right atmosphere.

We decided that as well as the opening and closing themes, music would be appropriate whenever the children were passing through the magical door into Narnia, when prophe­cies were told, when the thaw started and when Asian is killed. In addition, we introduced a "theme" for each of the White Witch's entrances, making a total of seven different pieces.

Melodies were composed on the piano, and then orchestrated using a computer sampler, which translates the notes into various instrumental sounds. The various instruments were then multi­tracked, sometimes up to 24 times, to achieve the final orchestration, and this was recorded to tape for playing over the theatre's amplification system.

Sound Effects Additional sound effects prcscn t little problem, and were all obtained from standard sound effects records. A tape of the necessary effects in sequence was produced, and was played back over the amplifiers.

Properties Most of the props required were easily obtained, and very little needed to be purpose-made.

We were able to obtain a number of metal swords, but for safety's sake these were not used on stage. Instead the battle was fought using wooden swords, with the entire stage crew having a battle of their own in

in the middle when the central support was removed. This support was placed on the trap, which was lowered at the appro­priate time to the accom­paniment of thunderous noise and lightning Aashes in full sight of the audience.

Make-Up The nature of the characters in this play requires more extensive make-up than normal. and for the main body and face colours we used water-based make-up, which we found both quick and easy to use. It is also quick to remove, which helped in fast changes where actors were doubling.

the wings with real swords which produced a very satisfac­tory sound.

The Witch's wand needs to be broken in two during the battle, and to avoid having to construct one for each performance, it was made so that it could be pulled apart by Edmund, and rewired and retaped before each new show.

Furniture was kept to a mini­mum, and was pre-set on the revolving scenery trucks.

The lamp post was con­structed from timber and cardboard, and brought on dur­ing scenery changes as appro­priate. The lamp was lit from the stage Aoor-dips, although this did result in the presence of a rather obvious lead acro~s the Hoor.

Other Special Effects The Witch's magical production of a goblet and later a box of Turkish Delight was achieved using PyroAashes hidden behind a tree stump and fired from off stage as the Witch pOinted with her wand. The goblet and box were pre-set immediately behind the proscenium and recovered from there by the Dwarf.

The splitting of the stone table, which ideally (but not necessarily) should be seen by the audience, caused some prob­lem. We were fortunate , however, that the stage has a proper trap and the table was constructed so that it collapsed

Face make-up for the animals generally matched the costume colour - yellow for Asian, grey for the Wolves etc. Fine detail where required was added on top of the water-base using grease paint.

The Dwarves (all played by children) were made up in yellows, greens and whites with the addition of beards and false noses bought from a novelty shop.

Conclusion This play presents a considerable number of problems to be over­come in order to achieve a smooth and Aowing production. While we were fortunate in having a whole range of facilities available in our theatre to help our presentation, it could cer­tainly be staged on a Simpler set than we used.

Once we had opted for a solution to a particular problem, it usually worked well. One of our concerns was that the items on castors - the scenery trucks and the sleigh - would prove difficult to move, but the oppo­site was the case, with one of the dwarves almost being swung into the orchestra pit during dress rehearsal when he tried a fast corner on the sleigh! This was solved by the addition of a further brake before opening night . The play proved extremely popular with our patrons, and was seen by our largest ever audience, with 95% of the seats sold. 0

PAGE 15