London Tide: with Ben Power

Dominic meets Ben Power backstage at London’s National Theatre who takes a break from rehearsals to talk about London Tide  - an exciting new staging of Our Mutual Friend -  which he has adapted with songs composed by the award-winning PJ Harvey

Ben is a Tony Award winning, and a BAFTA & Olivier Award nominated writer for stage and screen, and an Associate here at the National. His adaptation of The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Sam Mendes, has become an international theatrical juggernaut, playing in London, New York, San Francisco and Sydney. His screen credits include the BBC series The Hollow Crown and Netflix’s Munich: The Edge of War …

London Tide runs from 10th April - 22nd June 2024. You can book tickets here

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Today's episode is dedicated to Adrian Schiller, a fantastic actor who very sadly passed away this week and was a much loved friend and colleague of today's guest. Welcome to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire, a series that digs deep into the life and works of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Hi everyone, welcome back. I'm talking to you right now from inside London's Royal National Theatre. Down the corridor from where I'm sitting, today's guest is immersed in rehearsals. But in a moment, he will hopefully be able to extricate himself and come and talk to us. The show he is working on is London Tide, a new adaptation of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Ben Power is the man we're waiting for. Ben is a Tony Award-winning and a BAFTA and Olivier Award nominated writer for Stage and Screen, and an associate here at The National. His adaptation of the Lehman trilogy, directed by Sam Mendez, has become an international theatrical juggernaut, playing in London, New York, San Francisco, and Sydney. His screen credits include the BBC series The Hollow Crown and Netflix's Munich, The Edge of War. For London Tide, Ben is also collaborating with the multiple award-winning singer-songwriter PJ Harvey, which may perhaps lend us a clue as to what to expect from this show. This leads me on to think about the challenge of adapting a classic novel for the stage. How would you do it if you had the full creative forces of the National at your disposal? The River Thames, which I can actually see glistening outside the window right now, is a hugely important character in the novel. And so, would you flood a part of the stage to have characters row and dive in and out of? Or would you represent it another way? Dickens at one point in the book describes a grey, dusty, withered evening in London. And how Britain seems to have a national dread of colour. Does this impact on your choice of costume, set, and lighting? What about Dickens's quirky descriptions of buildings, such as a house impended over the water like a faint-hearted diver, or a hideous church with four towers like a petrified monster on its back with its legs in the air? Do we see these buildings in some form? A painted backdrop, a projection, or a physical set that revolves into view or drops down from the flies? What about the vast dust heaps too that crowd the novel? Do characters in this adaptation emerge and sink into these mounds? Do windows or mirrors cast reflections across the space, distorting the shapes of the characters, as in the overly varnished dining room of Mr. and Mrs. Veneering? Or is none of the above in any way useful once you set to work on the story with real actors on their feet in front of you? We're about to find out. And on a personal note, I last saw Ben over a decade ago, when we worked on a show about the great Spike Milligan, which was directed by the inimitable Tim Carroll, who I interviewed right back in episode two of this series. Ben. Hi. Oh, it's so good to see. It's really good to see you. This is so funny. Thank you. Thank you for uh abandoning rehearsals to come and speak to me in the Orange Room at the National Theatre.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

Yeah, newly renamed the Orange Room. It didn't used to be the Orange Room, but here it is. It's not orange. It's not orange at all, is it? I think they have to, it's such a rabbit warren of a building, such a huge sight that they've decided colour coding is the best way to do it. Do you still get lost in the building? All the time. All the time. And we've got uh so there's some actors in the company, there's some actors in this in the company London Tide who um have worked here a lot, but there's actually quite a large number for whom this is their first time in the building. Yeah. And they were just saying this morning it's uh it's a nightmare, you get so lost because it's uh yeah, it's a factory, a factory of theatre.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Yeah, it's astonishing. I had an audition here once, and um as I left the room I got lost and ended up back at the room, and I had to go to an office and knock and ask to be let out of the building.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

So I really maybe you could have been seen again.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Yeah, I wish I had been funny. But um so, Ben, we're here to talk about London Tide, which is your latest show based on our mutual friend. Could you tell us about how this has come about?

SPEAKER_02 4:35

I I I would love to. It's been first and most important thing to say is it's been a very long journey to get here. I first read this book in I guess like 1996, um, when I was making my way through or trying to read all of the novels, all of Dickens' novels, and I'd read Bleak House and loved Bleak House and had this kind of epiphany experience reading Bleak House, which I think is, you know, one just maybe my my favourite novel ever. And then and then I read Our Mutual Friend, and I was so energized by the process of reading it, and kind of disturbed by the reading of it, and sort of really became completely fascinated with who this writer was at this point in his life that led to this book and the uh connection between the city and the novel, because it seems to me that this is before it's anything, is a London story, and that's certainly what the adaptation is foregrounding. Uh, and then so I read it and loved it, uh, but was, as I say, kind of disturbed by it. And then I remember very vividly watching the BBC adaptation of Our Mutual Friend, which was great. It was one of the kind of great 90s Dickens adaptations to Keeley Hawes and Anna Friel and Stephen McIntosh, and just fantastic actors and very vivid. And the the same scenes came out of that adaptation for me, which had struck me in the book, scenes like Gaffer Hexham and Lizzie Hexham on the river.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

With the body beginning the opening of the book, and Bradley Headstone's proposal to Lizzie Hexham in the churchyard, which if you've not seen the BBC adaptation of the 90s, David Morrissey plays Bradley Headstone, and it's an extraordinary bit of acting and an extraordinary bit of drama. So I had those kind of the idea that those scenes were dramatic and alive, sort of somewhere in my head. And then I, you know, life went on, and I started working at the National Theatre in about 2010. So every day I was walking over the river and coming to this bend in the river where the National sits. Uh it used to be called King's Reach, the only bit of the river where you can see Parliament there and the cathedral there. Um sorry, that's terrible uh on the podcast, but I'm gesturing with my hands in one direction. Stage left and stage right. So this the theatre has really right been built right on this crux of the river, right in the centre of the city. Um, and I thought how great it would be to stage a London story and even more specifically a river story here. So I talked to some people about our mutual friend, and I think everybody quite gently tried to put me off, saying, you know, this is a enormous book, a vast, sprawling, complex novel.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

800 pages.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

800 pages. You know, of incredible, dense prose. Some of his sentences run on for entire paragraphs. Um, but I sort of kept kept hold of these images, the girl with her father in the boat, and the proposal in the graveyard, and bodies going into the river, bodies coming out of the river, people being lost to the river, people also being redeemed by the river. Uh the idea of rebirth, the centre of the book, is all about somebody being reborn uh thanks to the river. And so Ian Rickson, the director, and I started doing a series of workshops. The National has this fantastic resource, the National Theatre Studio, which is on the cut by the old Vic, and it's a sort of research and development laboratory. So we went in there with a bunch of actors and just started staging little sort of just readings of the book, really, just little bits of snatches of dialogue, and found that you know those things were yielding. And at that stage, Ian suggested that music could potentially be a really great way of sort of broadening the scale of the piece and capturing some of the vastness and sort of emotional scale of the novel. And he introduced me to PJ Harvey, who he'd been worked with for a long time, and PJ Harvey and I began to write these songs, which are now in the show, and she's written 13 new songs. Um so none of these songs have been published? No, they're brand new, all new, the world premiere of the songs as well as the adaptation, and um and so we've got this. It's not a musical, it's a play with songs, but it's a sort of new hybrid form. And it, yeah, in the course of two and a half hours, it's gonna cover the sort of the landscape of the novel. It's necess by necessity a very free adaptation because that's a lot of book uh to get through, and so there's a lot of conflation, there's uh some changes, uh, and I think we've got something new that emerges out of the world of our mutual friend and does its own thing, and I'm just so excited about showing it to people.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Oh no, I think it's a fantastic title, isn't it? Because if you'd proposed great expectations, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, it comes with all this baggage, and people feel that they already know it.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Magnificently and very famously adapted already. Um whereas, you know, yeah, there's a six-part TV version, but our mutual friend, it seems to me, is just thrumming with dramatic material, and it's great to find it.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

It's amazing. And the fact that here at the National, I counted 25 paces from here to the river.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

Right, exactly. So it's every single audience member who comes to see our play will either on their way in or their way out, or both, have some kind of encounter with the Thames. And, you know, in a the remarkable thing it seems to me about London, I mean, this is true of all great cities maybe, but specifically London, is how much changes and how much stays the same. And the kind of psychogeography of the stones and the water that they hold, you know, when Dickens walked the north and south banks of the Thames, this is where he walked. You know, these were the bridges he stood on. This is the water that he looked into and that fed his imagination at this point of you know great personal turmoil and change for him, uh, and that he manifested that in the book. And, you know, we're at this point in this city where I think a lot of the questions that the book raises about opportunity and education and the ability anyone has to change the circumstances of their birth, those things feel very alive in London in 2024 to me. So that's what we're trying to explore.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Absolutely. And something I find from the original novel, which is very interesting, is a character like Charlie Hexon, uh, who is spoilt by education. We can all think about money corrupting, that's out there as an idea already, and it affects a lot of people in the story. But the idea that education can be weaponized and you can turn on the people who have helped you to gain it in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Well, I think, you know, there's a something very profound, and it's true, of character after character in this book, that it's possible to be removed from your family and from your background by some kind of difference, whether in the case of Bella Wilfer, she is exposed to money and and she suddenly can't you can't really go home again after that. You can go home and you can engage with your family, but you are different and changed. And Charlie Hexham is separated, severed from his father and sister by the fact of literacy and education, and then yeah, a great distance grows between him and his sister, particularly, um, because of that, and because of the kind of the rigidity of the sort of educational system that Bradley Headstone and his academy represents. And that's really interesting. You know, my family are all teachers. Uh, I think a lot about education, I think about new audiences and young audiences, and the power of theatre in education and the arts in education, and this is a story which is really engaged in the benefits and the cost of that resource and what happens to people when they encounter it. Um I'm really I'm really interested in that.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

So as you sit down to adapt this, yeah. At what point does PJ Harvey come in with you? I I mean, you describing the nineties adaptation. I think already you seem to suggest that there are fixed points, such as Lizzie and Gaffer on the river, that you didn't feel you could do without.

SPEAKER_02 13:13

There were some things that I really held on to, and then there were some other things that I loved from the um from the 90s adaptation, which we have lost. And that's just that that's just the nature of the beast. Though they had, I guess, six hours. You know, when I think about the legendary RSC Nicholas Nickleby, yeah. Uh David Edgar adapted, you know, there is a sense that part of the project there is not completism for the sake of it, but a certainly a sense of delivering the entire book for an audience. And that's wonderful. But we're not doing that. I'm saying inside this book is a story or a collection of stories, a series of interlacing narratives which I think speak to each other and which speak to us now. Um so it's all about choice, it's all about what you keep and what you uh let go of. And that's not to say that the things which aren't in the play, I'm not interested in the in the book, I'm fascinated by them. Um characters like the veneerings don't appear on on stage in the in the play, but they're amazing, amazing, vivid, wonderfully drawn social commentary in the book, but just not what the play is doing. I think adaptation is like whatever your source material is, is like a huge lump of clay or marble, and then you chisel it and shape it and make your new object out of it, and it's all made out of that stuff, but it's something very different to the to the entirety of that source material. Um so with with Poly, with PJ Harvey, the process was really I would sketch out a bit of potential action, story, and then we would look for moments where a song might illuminate a moment or deepen a character's emotional expression, or just enlarge what was happening. So an example might be um you know, incredibly moving moment in the in the story where Lizzie Hexham looks at her father's dead body, and you know, she has this almost like Leer and Cordelia, this moment of putting her ear to him and saying, Did you speak? Um, and you know, the the people who've brought the body into her are are there sort of not really knowing where to put themselves in the emotion of the moment, and she's left alone with the body. You know, seemed to us like a fantastic moment for her to articulate the fear, grief, despair, possibly even kind of sense of opportunity that this moment represented to her, a sense of freedom. And so then I would sketch sorts of very basic shape of lyrics, then uh PJ Harvey and I would work on those lyrics and shape it into a song, and then she would write the music. And I think she's written these truly beautiful songs. And as I say, some of them are for there's 20 people in the company, some of them are huge, kind of choric London chorus ensemble numbers, and some of them are like that, very personal solo expressions of a particular moment for a character.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Talking about Polly, right? I was listening to Let England Shake, her album on my way in, and I just thought, My God. Yeah. And this is 13 years before she's working on this with you, and she says, Let me walk through the stinking alleys to the music of drunken beatings, past the Thames River glistening like gold, hastily sold for nothing. Right. And you think she started this process over a decade ago.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

Exactly. And actually, you know, you look like go even further back in her career to, you know, like down by the river, you know, these songs which are all about engaged in the kind of um some of them in a with a kind of gothic imagination, others with like that one, a sort of really vivid and particular sort of social observation. Her musical voice and her lyric voice is so invested in the exploration of rivers, the s the city and the field, the individual and the collective, and the kind of broad, imaginative, poetic landscape of that, and that just feels like that sits so completely inside and alongside Dickens' voice. Um it's really exciting.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

You saying about Lizzie, when her father dies, she has this sense of freedom and a key theme in the book being the control of women by men. Absolutely. Is that a strong feature in your adaptation? Because I feel like that speaks so powerfully to now some of the male characters are driven to appalling violence, believing it's because of the woman.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

Exactly. And I think you know, there's it's really interesting when you're collaborating with writer like Polly Harvey or actresses like the actors we have playing Lizzie Hexham, Bella Wilfer, Jenny Wren in this uh in this story that you know we have to find a way to dramatise and articulate that kind of those moments of possession, objectification, control, um, and find for the women in the story a kind of agency, which I think Dickens gives them. I mean, I think it's you know one of the great miracles of Dickens' writing is that he manages to invest his female characters with so much imaginative, emotional life. There are some places where we have subtly and sometimes you know more overtly shifted things to allow for our 21st century perspective on some of those dynamics. Um that I think is quite exciting. You know, I think you feel hopefully the 1860s and the present day kind of in some sort of synth synthesis or conversation um during those moments. And you know, certainly I think we want to push a bit harder at exploring where Lizzie Hexham and Bella Wilfer end up and the ability they have to control their own futures or not in those sort of final um resolutions. But certainly I think you know, I think when Dickens writes Lizzie Hexham's rejection of Bradley Headstone in the churchyard and his response to that, you know, he's that could be a that could be a scene from something, you know, in present day. It's very, very alive to us, I think.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

In a way, that's not even a 21st century perspective being thrown on it. It's so much in the pages of the novel, isn't it? It feels like that's the same. It's there, yeah, isn't it? I'm so struck how in the book characters observe women through glass, they approach windows and peer in. Is that anything in the staging? How are you?

SPEAKER_02 20:01

It's actually quite open and it's quite simple. Uh there aren't a lot of glass windows. I'm disappointingly Dominic, I'm sorry. Um, but there is a sense, I think, that you should feel you know what I'm trying to describe with the city, that the two things live on top of each other, the modern and the ancient, sort of exist together. So it's not modern dress by any means, but nor is it absolutely rooted in its in the period that the book was written in. It's somewhere between the two, and it's really about an act of collective storytelling. So, as I said, there's a lot of people in it, there's a lot of bodies in the space, and they do a lot of the storytelling for us. Um, it's a play with an awful lot of scenes in a lot of different locations, and I don't think it's a spoiler to say we don't bring on an entire pub and then take it off again when we go to a pub. It's trying to be a bit more fleet and elegant and kind of simple than that, really, because what I'm interested in is the actor, the words, the body and the space, and then this music. So there's a you know, there's the uh a band, musicians are on stage all the way through, there's music all the way through, and then there are these amazing new songs uh that punctuate the action.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

I'm looking at the cast list on the website, and I noticed that there's an inspector bucket, and there's also a Nancy.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

So what's happening here? So there is an inspector in the book who doesn't have a name, and I needed a name. I did sometimes it's a shame for an actor, particularly an actor as good as uh Josh Lacey is playing The Inspector, and the Inspector is a fantastic character, this sort of river policeman who has a takes a sort of macabre interest in the bodies that he deals with and is always sort of trying to seemingly sort of trying to freak out the people he's with with these descriptions of the blood pooled under the eyes, or the uh the description of how Gaffer Hexham died at at his own on his own boat. Um uh but I needed a name for the inspector, and I it's a little um It's an Easter egg. Because I love Bucket, he's one of my favourite characters in Bleak House. And yes, Nancy is a landlady who l a different landlady from Abby Potterson, who Lizzie Hexham encounters on her uh on her journey through the play. And uh so she's given the appropriately Dekensian name Nancy.

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Of course. And and I'm also curious about Jenny Wren and Reg Wilfer. Yeah. Because something else from the book which I think really resonates today is that feeling of generations swapping places. So you have Jenny Wren, who's a very young girl being the grown-up, and Reginald being described through the book like a cherub, or being very boyish. And I think post-Brexit, it's fair to say that there's a sense that the older generations aren't always thinking about the future that's being left for the upcoming generations.

SPEAKER_02 22:55

I think that's really true. I mean, I I think in the end the book is an awful lot about parents and children. Uh I speak as a parent and a child. And uh, you know, I think the way in which the Wilfer children have to teach their parents, the way in which the Hexham children have to teach their parents, the way in which the legacy of old Harmon uh affects John Harmon, all of these things are um are absolutely embedded in the dynamic of the play. And again and again, it's about the offer of parenting, the rejection of parenting, or the acceptance of unlikely parenting. I agree, Jenny Wren, one of the most incredible characters, I think, in the whole in all of Dickens. She's sort of a child and an ancient at the same time. She's like a sort of sage, seer, prophet, um, oracle, and at the same time, this sort of haunted sort of victim of of abuse and uh addiction and poverty. Uh, and she's just given the most incredible imagination and and ability to see. I think she's wonderful. And for, you know, one of the great things about that I think is unusual as a playwright in in this kind of story is that Jenny Wren comes in. We're nearly an hour into the evening when we meet Jenny Wren, who's just spent a lot of time with Gaffa Hexham, who seems like he's going to be one of the central figures in the play. Dead. You know, Dickens kills him off, no spoilers, but he's he's dead. And then this new group of characters emerge, Jenny Wren and Bradley Headstone, and they are protagonists. You know, Lizzie Hexham, you sort of think you sort of get a sense of where she's going, and then suddenly she's she's got this new roommate who is this incredible force of energy and imagination and life, and it's wonderful. It's really it's really thrilling. Um and so, yeah, trying to honour that plotting and that that theme of parents and children and the the way one can teach the other, not always in the way you expect.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

You very kindly, a moment ago, came out of the rehearsal room itself to talk to us, and you will be going back straight away after this. How is it all going? Where are you at? It's really exciting.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

It's that point where actors are coming off book, so they they're starting to learn it, and we're all starting to sort of see it. It's like a uh what's the Dickensian image? It's like a steam ship sort of emerging from the mist, and you go, Oh wow, I didn't know it looked like that.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

Uh it's surprising, you know. Amaz it's amazing to write plays because you get this, um, you have it in your head, and like I say, I've had this in my head for a long time. And then something happens, like somebody did something this morning, read a line, just delivered a line, and I thought, oh, that's completely, completely different to what I ever expected. I'd never heard it like that. And it's so much better than what I had in my head. And you go, oh wow, this thing is constantly growing and um and evolving and taking shape in front of us.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Something that always struck me, looking at your scripts written down, is how much they encourage the actor to get their eyes off the page. There's so little in terms of um well, looking at your Lehman trilogy script, there's never a bracket next to a line that says angrily or something.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

I know, and actually, Ian Rickson, the director, had been really encouraging me all the way through to remove anything that feels um in overly instructive because you know you can always have that conversation with the actor, but but when it's written down, it feels somehow fixed and limiting, and what you want is like I say, that process of discovery, so that things are happening that you never expected, and that something that you assumed had to be delivered as an angry rebuke turns out actually to be a sort of loving act of charity. You go, Oh my god, that's that's so much more complicated and so much more human. And that that's why actors are amazing, as you know. It's you know, they they can because each actor is looking after one part of this huge hole, and I'm thinking all the time about the whole thing and the shape of the whole thing, but now the actress playing Bella Wilfer knows much more about Bella Wilfer than I do. You know, she's inside it and so is doing things now with that performance that I never, you know, could never have dreamt of. So it's really it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 27:24

And in terms of the dialogue, are you having moments where characters describe their actions in the third person, a bit like with the Lehman trilogy?

SPEAKER_02 27:32

It's uh it's first person, not third person, but it is there is uh uh some direct address all the way through and bits where I hope you really feel the book the voice of the book in those characters in those moments. And that's a balance, you know, you want to keep it alive and dramatic and present tense, but you know, when I'm trying to think of a good example, when Lizzie Hexham realizes that her father that there were whispers about her father's complicity in the death of this man, she says, Well I stand on the river's brink and look into the at the vastness of a life accused. You know, this extraordinary Dickensian image where the river go flowing to the sea becomes a life spent haunted by allegations and potential sin. It's just breathtaking writing. I think you feel that when you when you're reading the book, and to abbreviate it slightly to make it speakable, but really try and hold on to its uh to it as an as the authentic voice of the author and give that to an actor like Amy Tradere, who plays Lizzie Hexham, who just simply comes to the audience and you know, the 900 people in the Littleton Auditorium and speaks that, it's really uh breathtaking. For me, I'm I love that.

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Gosh, this sounds so exciting, Ben. I think audiences are in for a treat. And I think our time's up and you have to go back. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. All the very best, Ben. I look forward to it. You'll come and see it. I will absolutely come and see it. Okay. Thank you for listening to Charles Dickens of Brain on Fire. If you're enjoying these episodes and would like to make a small donation towards the costs of producing them, please follow the link at the bottom of the description and you can make a donation there. Every coffee you buy makes a huge difference. Thank you ever so much, and see you next time.