Sleepdogs (my inter-wotsit and cross-thingummy collaboration with Tanuja Amarasuriya) are showing our sound play The Morpeth Carol at a Bristol Old Vic near you, this December.
Developed through the really quite wonderful Ferment programme, it’s a funny and scary show where we tell the audience a bedtime tale in the near-dark, complete with a blanket of cinematic sound effects. And OK, whilst it’s not exactly the most visually spectacular piece, it’s still visceral and vivid in that way Sleepdogs have made our own… mostly because of how intimate and direct the show is. The idea is to strip the live experience down to its bare essentials*: if you want, you can just close your eyes and drift into the world we create; but if not, then never fear, because the cast are - for the most part - a right bunch of lookers.
*We did, at one point, speculate about performing the show nude. You know… for the publicity and that… maybe just to wind up the Bristol Evening Post. But this was quickly - and loudly - vetoed.
Sleepdogs have just completed a commission for Forest Fringe’s Travelling Sounds Library, too, a headphone piece with the unwieldy title of The Bells Of Vysehrad Church Explode And Become As A Cloud Over Prague. We’re also touring our 1-man-and-a-dictaphone space odyssey Astronaut, and our next project for Bristol Ferment in 2012 is The Bullet And The Bass Trombone, the story of a symphony orchestra trapped in a city during a coup d’etat.
So yeah — music and sound are integral to our work, and these elements are often conceived or designed in detail alongside the text itself, well in advance of any ideas as to how the story might be physically staged. Sometimes, as with The Morpeth Carol, the sound takes over completely.
