An interview with Clare and Sam
Elevated Horror
On Adapting Hans and Gret for the Modern Age
On the day we head to Windmill Theatre Company’s office, there is a horror movie being shot in their building. The halls are pulsing with bloody red lights. Our chats about their new show are punctuated by screams and wails and the frantic echo of footsteps as they bounce off the walls around us.
“They’re really going for it out there… that’s so fitting because we’re doing the same thing in the rehearsal room,” laughs Windmill’s incoming Artistic Director Clare Watson after a scream comes from the shoot. She’s in Adelaide to direct Hans and Gret, a new work which takes the traditional Hansel and Gretel fairy tale and transforms it into anarchic psychological thriller. The work, co-produced with experience design studio Sandpit, is set to spook teenage audiences when it premieres at the 2023 Adelaide Festival.
“Horror,” says Watson, “is difficult. Because what it relies on is the audience’s imagination, actually. It’s like… you’re really asking the audience to do most of the work because it’s about accessing their deepest fears.”
She points to a crack in the ceiling, “The trick with that onstage is doing less. You see that crack. I could, if I wanted to, make that terrifying with my imagination. I wouldn’t have to do a lot. It could be a sound or a flash of something… it’s about restraint.”
Based on an original concept by director Rosemary Myers, Hans and Gret is breathless take on the classic that sees two teenagers come of age in a world that has miraculously reversed the ageing process and unpacks the horror at the core of the work.
“I think the original story is full of terror. The idea of bringing horror to the story is not something we’re placing on it,” says Watson, “Horror sits deeply and fundamentally underneath this story. Even in advance of the Grimm fairy tale in the 1300’s. The idea of famine and the truth of children being ejected from the home and left to die in the woods is scary. It’s all wonderfully terrifying.”
Key to the success of the adaptation has been embracing the originality of award-winning writer Lally Katz, who is returning to the Australian stage with the work.
“Lally’s ability to create a the familiar/unfamiliar and give us this sense of the uncanny is remarkable. There’s something about her work that, to me, that presents a story and the truth of character intention and it’s often hilarious… but at the same time you can come away from it and have that unsettled feeling. It’s like when you’ve had one of those morning nightmares that wakes you up and then the whole day you can’t quite shake it? It’s like just below the surface of your reality.
“Lally’s work shows us that the film between what’s really familiar and what’s really scary, or a nightmare is really thin,” she says, “It’s so much fun. I feel like that’s how her work functions best.”
Getting under the audience’s skin is very much a literal part of the work. Sam Haren and the team from Sandpit have designed a sound system using SHOKZ bone conduction headphones that will deliver personalised missives from the tale’s infamous villain directly into your skull.
“The experience we’re creating is that every audience member when they come and see the show wears a pair of bone conduction headphones, which don’t cover the ear but sit just in front of it,” says Haren, “The way that these headphones send sound to you is that they’re vibrating through the bones in your skull and in the bones in your inner ear.
“They’re mainly used for cycling and swimming because they allow you to hear the world around you in addition to the audio they’re transmitting. But we’re using them to deliver this personalised layer of audio for the show in addition to the space as you would normally in a theatre show. It feels quite exciting given that all of this is connected to this witch character who is trying to seduce and control us. It feels very close. Too close.”
In addition to the use of the headphones, each audience member will receive a smartphone device that will additionally mediate and augment the truth of what is being presented onstage.
“In a way what we’re doing with the technology is interrogating one of the cultural rifts that we’re – especially young people – currently dealing with; that technology can be very effective in creating delineated versions of the world that may, in no way be true, but because it’s filtered to us in such a personalised way, we accept it as such.
“Dramatically, we’re finding there’s really exciting things there where the witch can be speaking to everyone at once, but also speaking to individual audience members at different points in the show.”
Hans and Gret, then, presents audiences with a challenge to rethink what their time in the theatre could be, placing them at close quarters with the horror at the centre of the story.
“The function of the witch in any fairy tale is put people under a spell. To manipulate. We’re thinking about ways we can use this technology to cast a spell and shift the audience experience to the whim of the witch,” says Watson.
“There’s a lot of fun to be had in upending that world and in the realisation that the idea of storytelling itself is really slippery. That a narrator can be unreliable.
“When you come to the theatre and you sit in your seat, you’re getting a very individual experience. Because you’re seeing it on a particular night which is different to another night and you sit in a seat that’s different to another seat,” she says, “And what we’re doing with the technology is amplifying that experience. You’re getting that collective communal experience of theatre, and you’ll have the very intimate experience of someone speaking directly in your ear.”
Suddenly there’s another scream from the shoot just down the hall. We both jump out of our seats a bit and Clare laughs, “It’s going to be a real rollercoaster ride… we might even get a few screams for the audience.”
