The Hampstead Authors' Society
Zsuzsanna Ardó: Polyphony as Creative Principle
In conversation with Laurence Mark Wythe, composer and lyricist,
and Nick Winston, director and choreographer, about the polyphonic nature
of their recent collaboration, Tomorrow Morning.
Zsuzsanna Ardó (ZA): How did the polyphonic structure
of Tomorrow Morning emerge? How did you develop it?
Laurence Mark Wythe (LMW): For me, the polyphony of the piece is its most interesting aspect. There are opposites and echoes everywhere: in the score, the lyrics, the design, the lights. The audience discovers the truth about these two couples at different points in the evening. It never seems to be exactly the same response twice when I talk to people. It amazes me that people get to the end of the piece and haven't twigged it, there are so many clues. But it's good too, it's valid that these couples should stand alone too, with two interesting stories. But in rehearsal, for the cast and for Nick and me it was very clear that John and Kat are the memory that Jack and Catherine need to get through this night. The whole night is about seeing the wood for the trees. The plot is how the backstory unfolds through John and Kat – and saves them. But it almost doesn't. We as the audience don't know who the hero is going to be. That's the joy of a four-hander: we can set up four heroes and four villains because we can't have a single protagonist. The clock is the protagonist because it won't stop ticking.
So
the polyphonic development of the interweaving stories is really the
key to the piece. Without it you have a twee piece about two middle-class
and self-obsessed couples. This isn't really interesting to me. It might
be in, say, a Richard Curtis film, and that's good – but not in
a musical. If I'm going to ask an audience to buy into two hours in
the theatre, I want to give them a little more to chew on. For example,
about the difference between being in your twenties and your thirties;
about having no kids and being a parent. About a career spanning out
in front of you or a career that has seen its best days. A lot can change
in a short time, and sometimes we do not notice it until it is too late.
Nick Winston (NW): I worked with Laurence for about three months
on Tomorrow Morning before we started rehearsals for the show. I think
Laurence and I had a fantastic director-writer relationship. We really
bounced off each other and he was really open to hearing new and different
thoughts about the material.
As we worked through the show we made changes to both to the script
and the lyrics. I focused on the narrative of the piece, and the characters
objectives. Together we changed some of the structure of the musical
numbers and interspersed some scenes into songs. When I had some ideas,
we would discuss them together, and then develop them. But it was a
very easy working relationship, without ego.
ZA: What were the joys and pains of the creative process, the
examples of particular difficulties you had to solve? Where do you see
polyphony working particularly well, and why – in your authorial-directorial
point of view, respectively?
LMW: From the start, once the key decision was made, or rather made
itself – that there are not two couples on one night but one couple
on two nights – the challenge became how much and how little to
reveal to the audience. Where and when should be the clues? How explicit
can we be? And Nick and I became pretty obsessed with every line, every
prop, every move being connected to the collision of time. If we did
something with one couple, could we do an echo with the others at the
same moment? Or contradict it across time, or show how it had changed
over time? Finding how these elements can bleed into every aspect of
the piece became the real focus for us.
In the score there are echoes throughout the piece that tell us what
is happening. And lyrical clues. If the audience pays close attention,
they'll hear connect the through-line of his lateness, and the argument
over the time the wedding cars are booked for... There are clues in
the pizza, clues in how John calls his Dad on the phone, but Jack has
to pray to talk to his father because during that twelve years, we don't
know how or when, Jack has lost his father. Polyphony is a very cinematic
notion, something that can work extremely well in theatre. Most of the
time we cracked it. A few times it could be clearer, but then again
I'm quite a big fan of not being too clear for the audience, and having
them grapple with it a bit. I think musicals tend to either spell things
out too much or leave you completely at sea. Connecting with the audience
through polyphony is a cinematic thing really: you need close-ups. So
I try to write close-ups for the musical theatre. Jack's lament on losing
their sex life is a window to his soul, a musical theatre close up.
In a movie you could do it in a few frames and a flashback. I need to
paint the picture for the audience with his song, remind them that he's
the guy to whom when he's twenty-three, sex is pretty much everything.
And then it means more, and we understand him.
I try to clue the audience with the music into knowing more than the character is quite ready to reveal yet – to themselves, each other and us. The audience generally knows more about what is going on than the characters do on stage. This is much more true of a musical than a play, and, again, it comes from a cinematic notion of scoring, which can be useful in a play but cannot drive the piece itself in a play.
With four characters what you can have is four quarters so, at any given time, there are reflections and opposites. All the way through I am telling the audience that they balance each other, they should be together and you should want them to be together. Otherwise, a happy ending might seem trite. I don't really believe you can deny an audience a happy ending in a musical – it betrays the genre! But if she's downbeat, Jack will instinctively attempt to lift her, and John does for Kat. When she has a neurotic crisis, he is able to counter-balance it, to reset her equilibrium. When he is crushed by his son's apparent rejection, Catherine moves from hostile spouse to tender care-giver. The process is seamless, and you barely notice the shift. But it's there, deliberate, and constantly moving as the balance shifts between the two or sometimes the four of them.
NW: Once in rehearsal, working with the four actors, things evolved further. We would break down every moment, every line in the show and if we couldn't find reason or truth in the material we would rework it. I would then discuss this with Laurence in the evenings, and he would offer new text or lyrics.
The number that we worked and reworked the most is The Secret Tango. I think we went through five rewrites. The style of number has a heightened reality, and finding the balance was a challenge. But the finished result was definitely worth it. I think the show benefits from having a lighter comedic moment and a new musical style.
ZA: What have been the major creative influences on your work?
LMW: I'm not really the sort of person who sits and listens to musicals
on a sustained basis. I like to hear new stuff, I'm curious about what's
around, but I try not to get bogged down in the form itself. As a writer
and a composer, musical theatre is perhaps the most natural middle-ground
for me to work on. It is a world where these two languages can collide
for me and I hope enhance my ability to tell the story. I think if I
am working with just words, I sometimes yearn for the ability to use
music to help me tell the story, help me tell the audience a little
more or open it up emotionally in a way I can't do with just words.
And sometimes in the musical form, it's necessary for the singing to
stop and for the dialogue to become paramount. That's why I don't really
like opera, I suppose. I need the balance between the two.
Tomorrow
Morning sometimes feels like a sitcom, and certainly for pace and the
snappiness of dialogue that is needed for the way the scenes hang together
and cross time, and the ease with which they converse is as influenced
by Friends and Frasier and so on, as it is by musical theatre. People
keep making comparisons with Sondheim which I think is never a bad thing,
and it's actually about characters grappling with self-obsession in
a kind-of Woody Allen type of way, more than it is about musical style.
There are certain things about Sondheim that have influenced me. I think
that to take something small and make it huge is a lesson from a master
– and certainly for me he is at his best when he is domestic.
And I have had the opportunity to tell the man himself that I believe
Into the Woods to be the most masterly construction of a musical theatre
plot in the repertoire. He seemed quite pleased that I thought so. And
yes, I consider Into the Woods to be Sondheim at his most domestic,
fairy tales aside. So Sondheim I think influences you to believe that
you can write about people who live in houses and go to work every day
and come home and have lives. Just like sitcoms do. Musicals are usually
about more extreme lives. But what appeals to me, and I suspect will
remain to do so, is how the un-epic becomes epic in a musical setting.
NW: My major creative influences are Bob Fosse, Hal Prince, Gower
Champion, Michael Kidd, Steven Spielberg and Alan Parker.
ZA: Tell us about the tradition you see your work fitting in,
and how it is different from other pieces in the contemporary musical
scene.
I rather think that the British musical has been foundering for a while,
and actually feel a sense of responsibility to do something about that.
It's essentially an American art form, but in Britain it's really low
art to most people. I do think of musicals as art, which can sound a
little arrogant, but nonetheless. It's an art form we hijacked and bent
out of shape and tried to make European, which was still seeped in the
history of music theatre for five hundred years, i.e. grand opera. And
we got a bit confused about form, and that confusion sometimes created
a fission and a few people did amazing things. A few shows rewrote the
book. I'm talking about a handful – enough to count on one hand
– a few are so good that actually it made it harder for everyone
because they raised the bar.
People have been trying to write the next Les Miserables, (even Boublil
and Schönberg) and you can't, because in one sense Les Miserables
could not have been done better. young writers coming through have to
forget almost about Les Mis, and move on, try to push the form in a
different direction. For a while I was caught in the same trap as a
young writer, and struggled with the form because those shows wrote
their own rules. Our shows now need to write new rules, and not be too
influenced by the last twenty years, which I think in the extreme long
term will be an anomaly. Some shows will survive, but only a few. Not
anything like the volume of work from, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein
whose almost entire list of works became classics. That won't happen
to Lloyd Webber, but one or two of his shows will still be at the forefront
of musical writers' minds in fifty years. But not all of them. If you
look at the form of Tomorrow Morning and its use of different musical
textures and, for want of a better word, styles, it's a much more old-
fashioned type show. It is much more vaudevillian than contemporary
American musical theatre. (Post-Rodgers, who rewrote the rules, and
embedded style within Hammerstein's settings much more deep rootedly).
But that is fused with what is an unavoidable predominance of American
pop-culture in our lives, which is what will actually give it an edge...
at least this is the challenge I wake up with each morning. As I say,
I feel that responsibility to start writing some new rules for the British
musical. Not low art, but maybe new art.
© HASNotes and Zsuzsanna Ardó 2006
Tomorrow Morning is playing at the New End Theatre,
London, till Sunday 13th of August
