Golem – Young Vic – 13th January 2015
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Hello and welcome to this introduction to Golem, created by 1927, directed and
written by Suzanne Andrade. Golem had its world premiere at Salzburg State
Theatre during the Saltzburg Festival on 22nd August 2014.
We’re looking forward to welcoming you to the Young Vic on Tuesday 13th January.
The show begins at 7.30pm. If you’d like to explore the set and costumes, come
along to the touch tour about an hour before the performance. Please contact the
box office to confirm the starting time and to book your place on 020 7922 2922. The
performance lasts for around one hour and 30 minutes, with no interval.
We’ll repeat this introduction live in the theatre 15 minutes before the show, so we
can let you know of any last minute changes and you can check that your headset is
working. The show will be audio-described by Eleanor Margolies and Ruth James.
The theatre company 1927 was founded in 2005 by animator Paul Barritt and writer
and performer Suzanne Andrade. They were later joined by performer, Esme
Appleton and composer and pianist, Lillian Henley. The defining feature of their
collaborations is the combining of live actors and musicians with projected animation.
The company is inspired by the early days of cinema and take its name from the
year the ‘talkies’ first appeared. As in early film, actors have whitened faces with
strongly outlined eyes and mouths and their expressions are stylised, recalling
Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. The performer directs the audience’s attention in a
way that now seems naïve and droll: a head turns – the actor pauses – eyes roll.
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The company is also inspired by the experimental art movements of the years before
the first world war, including Russian Futurism. This is reflected in the costume
design for this show – with bold colours and strong geometrical forms, often in thick
felted materials that hide the contours of the body. The animation, however, firmly
places us in a surreal version of the contemporary British city, with a streetscape of
poundshops and chip shops, sportswear outlets and sleazy pubs. The drawings use
a deliberately child-like black outline, and are incredibly detailed, full of verbal and
visual jokes. These drawings are then mixed with collaged photographic images that
recall artists such as Rodchenko or Hannah Hoch, and stopmotion clay animation.
The animated film is projected on a huge screen: the actors stand in front of it, or
sometimes pop out through openings in the screen. The effect is to place them in
detailed settings that can be instantaneously changed. By walking on the spot, an
actor seems to stroll down a long street. Characters played by live actors interact
with, and seem to exist in the same space as, animated characters such as the
Golem, a figure made out of clay.
In an interview for the Telegraph, Suzanne Andrade comments that 1927 often take
two or three years to construct a show; there is a very long rehearsal process. She
says: ‘People ask how we can possibly be in rehearsal for nine or 10 months, but if
you think about it, we’re making a handmade feature film at the same time as a live
theatre show with a full score – and the creations are being woven together.’
Golem is based on themes from the work of the same name by Gustav Meyrink, first
serialised in magazines from 1913 to 14. The Golem is a legendary figure of Jewish
folklore, a human figure made out of clay to perform menial tasks. It comes to life
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when the Hebrew characters of a prayer are scored into its forehead. Obedient but
clumsy, unable to think for itself, the Golem one day acquires a will of its own.
As David Tushingham writes in the Salzburg programme, Gustav Meyrink’s readers
‘encountered his version of the Golem story against the background of a conflict
which was becoming ever more mechanized in nature with the invention of the
machine gun, the tank and the aeroplane and whose ultimate victors were the
companies which profited from the manufacture of the machines and equipment
necessary for the practice of war. 1927 locate their Golem in a world where this
process has accelerated further, where technology and the market economy have
evolved to the point of transcending the boundaries of human control. In such a
situation the Golem becomes … a successful product, a must-have, an indispensible
ingredient of a better life. …In the words of one nineteenth century philosopher who
lived in London, a certain Karl Marx, “The danger lies not in machine becoming more
like man but in man becoming more like machine”. What happens when mankind
and machines become inextricably intertwined?’
The seating for this production is a bank of steeply raked benches facing a screen 30
feet wide and 15 feet high. There is a flat, open area in front of the screen, about 7
foot deep. The floor and everything else around it is black. To the left of the stage is
a full drum kit and to the right is an upright piano, with an electronic keyboard on the
top. Drummer Will Close and composer/pianist Lilian Henley, who both also perform
as actors, wear red tunics over black leggings with matching floppy red caps.
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As we enter, projections are being shown, one fading into another, looping until the
show begins. These are child-like line drawings of people and random words on a
lurid green background. We’ll describe these live.
The screen has a small, square window high up in the centre, and below it, a door.
Neither are obvious until they are opened or outlined by the projections.
Three central characters – a brother and sister and their grandmother - are played by
actors, their faces whitened, eyes outlined in black. All three wear spectacles with
thick black frames.
Annie Robertson is a slender young woman, with a shock of bright red curly hair. A
shiny silver CD is stuck in her curls as adornment. She wears a red smock over
black tights and flat black shoes and later a mustard coloured blouse and a beige
skirt with a book appliqued on it. Annie is tough and positive in her actions, her face
often screwed up in disapproval.
Robert Robertson, her brother, has equally bright curly red hair. His clothes are
beige, loose and shabby – a knitted woollen sleeveless v-neck jumper over a print
shirt, and baggy brown trousers. Perhaps more easy-going than his sister, Robert
walks with his shoulders forward, head down, his arms swinging rhythmically, close
by his sides.
Annie and Robert live with their Grandmother. Gran’s grey hair is piled high in a
huge bun studded with balls of wool and with a pair of knitting needles sticking out.
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She’s clad in a knee-length brown tunic dress decorated with an applique design of a
ball of wool and knitting needles, and sometimes adds a red shawl.
The drawings in a projected background create their home. It’s beige, with faded
patterned wallpaper, shabby furniture, a trimmed privet hedge at the front. Gran sits
knitting by a bookcase full of records, the shelves labelled like a library – modern
romantic, late romantic etc. An old wind-up gramophone plays at her side, under a
large portrait of her late husband Sydney. Robert’s room is minimally furnished, with
a telephone on the wall, a hanging light and a chair, while Annie’s room is plastered
with posters with slogans such as ‘Kill the Mayor’ or ‘Save the Whales’. In the dining
room, they sit at a long table, facing outwards – an aspidistra on the right and a
depressed-looking rubber plant on the left. Animated moths flutter constantly about
the room.
Robert and Annie play in a Punk band, Annie and the Underdogs. The four members
rehearse in a basement, standing against a black wall, with each red-clad individual
lit in their own triangle of light from above. Their name is written above them in
jagged pink capitals, paint appearing to drip from the word ‘Underdogs’. Robert
plays keytar in the band – a small keyboard with a guitar neck. Later, another view
of the basement shows posters of the bands that have influenced Annie: Poly
Styrene of the X-Ray Specs, the Slits, the Dead Kennedys and the Fall.
Robert works in an office known as the Backup Department. The four employees
wear matching outfits. Like Robert, Julian wears a sleeveless beige jumper over a
beige print shirt. The two women – who both happen to be named Jenny - wear twin
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sets of the same print. All four wear glasses. Each worker sits on a high stool in front
of a flat upright board showing a flickering screen. They all work with giant red
pencils, three times as large as usual. On the back wall, at an upper level, the
stationery department is shown through animation, with three machines to sharpen,
grind and buff the large pencils.
An applicant for a job at the Backup Department is Joy. She wears a cream raincoat
and a matching hat with a red feather in it. Joy holds a very large sheet of paper in
front of herself – it’s her Curriculum Vitae. Tall and pencil-slim, Joy’s rosebud mouth
often forms a sweet, hopeful smile – she’s very much like the innocent heroine of a
silent film.
The workers from the Backup Department rendezvous in the ‘Pig and Pistoleer’ a
pub near the office. Jerky photographic animation shows other customers as they
drink or play the ‘Stalinist’ fruit machine: it’s labelled ‘Property is Theft’, and its
spinning icons include the hammer and sickle. Ruby Tuesday is a dancer at the
‘Pig and Pistoleer’. An actor’s face appears on a cartoon body. Ruby has a high
beehive of blonde hair and swings tassels from her pendulous breasts. Her mobile
belly swings mountainously from side to side, above red harem trousers.
Another rendezvous point is the Cafe Parisien. Misspelt signs offer ‘Poison’ instead
of Poisson, and there’s an advertisement for a closing down offer: ‘2 for 1 Cocktails:
All Absinthe must be drunk’. A tank of lurid green absinthe is set at head height, like
a Victorian toilet cistern, with two taps at table level. The barmaid wears a black
beret and dries glasses listlessly. When the background changes to the dingy toilets,
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she instantly becomes the cloakroom attendant, slumped behind a barrier of black
and yellow warning tape and a sign that reads: CONDEMNED. The café singer is
Les Miserables, smoke curling up from his cigarette. He is accompanied by his
embittered, grey-haired wife on the accordion. They wear black in a cliché image of
French musicians – a black polo neck and beret for him and a black dress with large
white musical notes appliqued around the hem for her.
Everything changes when Robert visits the shop run by his friend Phil Sylocates.
Played by an actor, Phil wears a suit with a yellow bow tie and a large sunflower in
his lapel. This cheerful look is belied by his jerky, anxious movement and the dark
sweat patches under his arms. On the projected wall of the shop, to the left, there is
a large wooden display case of body parts made out of clay. Through the magic of
animation, the disembodied toes twitch, ears waggle, and fingers gesture obscenely.
To the right of the shop is the Golem-o-Matic. Three clay figures stand waiting,
heads fixed into metal cases. They are just over six foot tall, made of unfired
terracotta clay with traces of the maker’s fingerprints visible. Like a child’s model of a
human figure, each Golem has massive, undifferentiated limbs. A long penis, rather
like a back to front tail, hangs straight down between the legs. The Golems have
identical faces - just two indents for eyes, a blob of a nose and a line for a mouth.
Despite their simplicity, the faces take on expression when animated. The wordless
spell that brings a Golem to life is shown through the projected animation: it’s a
stream of black and white photos of anonymous faces. It flows out of the speaker’s
mouth, across the room and into the ear of the lifeless clay figure.
The performers are:
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Esme Appleton
Will Close
Lillian Henley
Rose Robinson
Shamira Turner
The voice of Golem has been recorded by Ben Whitehead
The costume is by Sarah Munro
Sound Design is by Laurence Owen
Associate Direction and Design is by Esme Apppleton
The music was written by Lillian Henley
The Film, Animation and Design is by Paul Barritt,
And it is directed and written by Suzanne Andrade
That’s the end of the introductory notes. If you have any queries or would like to
book for the touch tour, please contact the Box Office on 020 7922 2922.