Shakespeare meets Frank N Furter in Fred Abrahamse’s sci-fi musical at the Baxter. MARC DEVENISH reports
RETURN to the Forbidden Planet, the intergalactic funfair that has bounced on to the Baxter Theatre stage in Cape Town, has been performed in 16 countries, from London’s West End to Norway, Alaska and Australia. It has even been translated into Japanese.
It all began, says director Fred Abrahamse, about eight years ago, with the United Kingdom’s Bubble Theatre Company. “The company was sponsored by its local council to popularise Shakespeare. What they decided to do was to put the play on in a tent and to combine it with rock’n’roll music.”
The result is an eclectic mix of genres, styles and influences, loosely based on The Tempest. On curtain-up, audience members find themselves about about to take off in a spaceship — on an interplanetary survey flight. Cast and audience are then drawn to the planet Deliria, where the ship crashes and we meet Prospero and his daughter, Ariel.
As Miranda in The Tempest falls in love with Ferdinand, so Forbidden Planet’s Ariel falls in love with Captain Tempest. And the dallyings with Shakespeare don’t stop here — – there’s a riot of misquotes, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet: “Captain, there’s a beep on my scanner. Captain, there’s another beep. Two beeps or not two beeps?”
The lyrics of many a rock’n’roll hit are woven neatly into the plot (there’s no prize for guessing which Jerry Lee Lewis song accompanies the spaceship’s encounter with a blazing asteroid belt). All the music is generated by the cast, 12 performers handling two drum kits, two trombones, three saxophones, four guitars, a keyboard …
“Technically, it’s a very complex show,” says Abrahamse. “Most of the cast are on the stage all the time — playing, providing backing harmonies, acting or singing. It’s a 100 percent energy show — that’s what makes it work and what has helped it become such a cult
“If you combined the musicality of Buddy Holly with the camp sci-fi of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you’d get Forbidden Planet. It’s an actor/musician-driven show, but it also has this tongue-in-cheek feel.”
The zany musical marks a departure for Abrahamse, a one-time sailor and Waldorf School teacher, who previously directed Beautiful Thing, the story of a young boy’s self-discovery, and the working-class hardships of the people around him. “As a director it was wonderful to work with a small company on something that intense and to see the reaction that it got from audiences,” Abrahamse says. “People came out of that show really moved.”
The two productions couldn’t be more different. “Beautiful Thing challenges the director in terms of getting performances out of young actors and making them believable. Forbidden Planet, on the other hand, challenges all your theatrical skills from lighting to staging to how to work with musicians and so on. All the training you ever had gets pulled to the fore.
“Within a song such as the Gloria in Act I, for instance, there are something like 10 different cues happening, from lighting and audio-visual to flying cues — and that’s all in the space of three minutes …”
Return to the Forbidden Planet runs at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until the end of January, after which it will tour the country
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