“We wanted to take on a classic novel, because we really believed that you could use the language, the extreme physicality of circus to communicate really specific and subtle things”, Charlotte Mooney told me as we discussed the creative process behind Okham Razor’s new take on Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Mooney is one of the two artistic directors of the company. Alec Harvey and herself have been making work for almost twenty years, which she describes as being: “on the edge of where circus meets theater”. Both coming from backgrounds of circus training but also physical theatre, Harvey and Mooney took the novel apart to try to figure out how they could adapt it – what could be executed physically and what needed text. Laughing, Mooney says: “We sat down in our kitchen and basically deconstructed the whole novel”. What followed was a long period of research and development where the directors alongside their team of designers thought through what could be physically achieved. She tells me: “it was a lot of how do you make a horse? How do you make a cow? Can you make a whole vast journey across a landscape with just five bodies and some planks?”
Mooney explains that once they had figured out the physical language of Tess through movement experiments, they set out to rewrite the novel and understand how the poetry of Hardy’s book could be retained. This, then, allowed them to move forward with casting and begin a creative process of seven or eight weeks, working with acrobats as well as a choreographer to: “create all the physical language and work out how the narrator would sit alongside that”. The company’s Tess is framed through Tess at the end of her life, reflecting on her past: “There is an actor that speaks to the audience kind of in a storytelling way and she speaks all the words from the novel and then behind her there are images and scenes that are recreations of her memories that are done with circus, acrobatic language”. According to Mooney, this decision came about partially because of the directors’ interest in memory and our relationship with it.
When asked why Tess of the D’Urbervilles specifically, Mooney responds that first and foremost, both herself and her co-director have always loved the novel. But it was also their first time working with non-original material. In describing their ambitions, Mooney explains that they both knew there was something in the physical language of circus that could be used to depict novelistic interiority, despite circus’ reputation for the contrary. Mooney also adds that they loved how visual this novel was: “it’s incredibly visual, it’s so physical, it’s so much about bodies and the physical experience and its range of emotions is epic and vast”. She says that they both felt that these are things that circus does well. Her second reason was the resonances of the novel for modern day audiences: “The things that it has to say about consent and sexuality and desire and agricultural reform and exploitation are still completely relevant”. The decision to not modernise the text came from their belief that setting it in the 1800s would not detract from the audience’s identification with the themes, but the distance would: “make it land slightly different”.
Mooney explains that her biggest challenges in taking on the novel related to the sheer amount of characters and plotlines that she had to cut in order to make the show function in a theatrical context. She tells me that the section which cost her the most to cut was: “the bit where her boots get ruined. It’s such a small thing and it’s such a tragedy. It’s so relatable and I am so sad that we had to lose that”. However, Mooney adds that she took great pleasure in devising all the scenes that involved powerful physicality: “the hard physical labour, the joy of may dancing, the threshing, all of the physical labour that’s in the novel was a real pleasure to put into physical language”. She says that one of the things which she decided to focus on in her adaptation were female relationships and how to bring out the idea of a female network of support through physical scenes. Mooney explains: “The thing that I found about other adaptations in television and film is that they don’t make her a very physical character, she suddenly becomes very faint. But when you read the book she is a labourer, so it felt like this [the show] could actually be quite close to the novel in that”.
Mooney and I then moved to discuss Hardy’s own complicated relationship with female bodies. I mentioned how at times Hardy’ narrator seems to participate in the very eroticisation of Tess that he otherwise criticises and asked Mooney if these ideas of the male gaze were at all present when they were devising the show. She immediately replies: “Absolutely, it was incredibly present when we were making it”. She explains that the main reason for making Tess the narrator of her own story was precisely: “to take the words out of the male gaze voice and put it back into a woman”. Mooney comments on how, interestingly, their show became very much centred on the female gaze since they chose to emphasise all the female characters’ erotic desire for Angel Clare. Mooney also laughingly mentions the happy coincidence of casting an actor to play Alec D’Urberville who has really long hair. This then enabled her to use the hair of both male and female performers without placing an erotic focus on the women.
She also tells me how the very physical language of the performance was adapted to centre female bodies in a new light: “There is something in circus language, someone who we call a base which is the person who does most of the carrying. We have bases and fliers. So, we have two incredibly strong female bases as part of the ensemble. We were very aware during the group acrobatic scenes of making sure that the female bases were carrying as much as the male bases, and so that just what you saw onstage were depictions of incredibly strong bodies of both genders”.
Finally, discussing the challenges of set design Mooney explained to me the logic behind the set: “The reason the company is called Ockham’s Razor is, from the philosophy of Ockham’s Razor: to simplify. All of our sets have always been a few very simple elements. So we knew initially that we wanted to work with planks and we knew from our past that you could do interesting stuff with planks and then we quickly realised that they could evoke whole landscapes”. She then explains that she worked with their Set Designer to understand how minimal staging could both create open outdoors spaces and evoke interiors.
Crucial in executing this was the decision to hang rope around the edges of the stages covered in cloth: “when they are at the sides they can look like forests or trees, but when they are pulled across the stage you get the interior of Tess’ home with all the washing and the hanging everywhere and at the end it can be the gallows”. Mooney describes the importance of the gallows scenes by telling me about Hardy’s teenage experience of watching a woman hang and what caught his attention was her dress in the rain. Years later, this image would come back to him and serve as the source for Tess. She tells me that: “There is a part of the design concept that is how at the end when she has been hung that image has been there the whole show, even if you are unaware of it. So you can essentially take that one image of the gallows, the rope and the woman and the dress and then create the whole show from that”. The image of Tess hanging is one that will stay with the audience long after the show has finished.
Photograph credit: Kie Cummings