Calling all StageSiders, we have another installment of StageSide Stories here at StageSideUK. This time around we are talking to Alex and James, members of Bag of Beard company. In this interview we talk about making theatre, collaboration and how do you make a show that combines The Woman in Black with the Mighty Boosh?
Settle in and lets learn more about theatre making!
To start, could you both introduce yourselves and tell us a little about The Highgate Vampire and what audiences can expect?
I’m James Demaine. I’m a writer, actor and musician and I’ve been involved with Bag of Beard since 2016.
Alex chips in – Indeed, the very beginning. James was in our first play in 2016, and more or less every production since then. James is also a member of the band Wicker Wife and a member of BoxLess Theatre company, which is Bag of Beard’s sister company.
And I’m Alexander Knott. I’m the Joint Director of Bag of Beard, and I also write and perform in the show along with James.
The Highgate Vampire is based on unbelievable true events. It is a somewhat unknown story of two rivals who both set out slay the mysterious creature that was haunting Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s. We fictionalised these events and created a story that is far truer than anyone would like to believe – we can assure you is very very true indeed.
We are describing it as The Woman in Black, as performed by the Mighty Boosh. It’s wild and silly and strange and farcical and totally unbelievable, as two rival vampire hunters (a Priest and a Tobacconist) come together, put aside their differences, and tell the audience the story of how they both destroyed the Highgate Vampire – though along the way they disagree about how and why the slaying was done.
The show takes inspiration from a real urban legend. What first drew you to the story of the Highgate Vampire?
It was James who first brought the idea to the table.
James says, “Yeah, we often work through a process of devising, of having an idea and then sharing it with the rest of the company, which includes Ryan Hutton as Joint Director and the director of this play, and Samuel Heron as company composer. We’re all about original words and original music.
So, James brought this idea of the Highgate Vampire to me, Alex, this true story and we immediately went to Highgate, went into the Gatehouse pub looked around the cemetery and discussed the idea as we were touring the real locations.
We’ve fictionalised both of the characters and taken some creative liberties, but everything that seems completely unbelievable in our play is totally true and there are a lot of rabbit holes to go down if audience members want to dive into what is true and what isn’t.
James in particular loves British folklore Irish and English myths of Giants and strange creatures, goblins, sinister figures, and I am increasingly interested in magical realism. Not in a Harry Potter kind of way, much more in a social commentary sort of style – a little bit like Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem where by the end you’re not entirely sure whether or not an age old giant is going to arrive into the final scene.
I think our play reflects the fact that we’re both interested in that unexplainable side of things. James from a slightly more occult and shamanistic perspective, and myself from a desire to put a good story in front of an audience.
When you began writing, were you more interested in the horror of it all, or in the human side behind the myth?
James says, I think we were trying to balance both of those elements throughout. The more we improvised and wrote and rehearsed and cut and changed the more it felt that this was not really a story about a vampire. It is a story about two sad men who have a lot more in common than they would like to believe, but for arbitrary reasons and a bit of rivalry seem to hate each other. It seemed to become about loneliness and disconnection and a certain old-fashioned style of toxic masculinity where you took it for granted that if you hated someone then you must hate them forever.
And the fact that the form of this play is that these two characters have put aside their differences for one night only, to tell their story – and they can’t even do that for the first third of the play!
They’re constantly bickering and interrupting each other and rewriting the play as they go.
Alex says, There’s something really interesting about the fact that the journey of the play, from beginning to end, is in real time. It’s a story of these two men coming together before the audience’s eyes and hopefully realising that they have more in common than what divides them – and then of course there’s also a vampire to be dealt with!
So yes, equal parts horrifying supernatural story and a very human tale.
The piece mixes fact, folklore, and theatrical invention. How did you find the right balance between research and imagination?
We thought we’d ended up changing most of the scenarios a huge amount, says Alex, we thought we’d been very subtle and clever.
But when we workshopped this production at the Glitch Theatre in Waterloo we had old rockers and hippies and a occult practitioners from the 1970s coming to watch it – including people who had actually been part of the hunt for the Highgate Vampire in real life – And as soon as I walked out dressed as a Priest, I was warmly greeted by a member of the audience who said “hello mate”, he recognised exactly the people we were supposed to be. We triggered some memories for those people who were there.
Yeah, says James, we wanted creative freedom to reimagine as much as we can and make our own decisions but whatever happened in the alchemy of writing has ended up that the most ridiculous elements of the story are the bits that are true, and the more everyday parts are our own inventions.
Maybe the myth of the Highgate Vampire is just too strong to be suppressed.
You’re both performing as well as writing. How does being in the show influence the way you shape the text?
We will often begin the writing process by dividing up the scenes and writing separately, and then when we come back together around the kitchen table. We cut and edit and rewrite as we go, improvising as the characters, so whatever we write (even if we’re not going to perform it), we’ve always spoken in those characters voices and we’ve always taken on those characters. Maybe because we trained as actors together, so that’s not unfamiliar to us.
Alex says, I think we knew from very early on that we were going to play these characters, so we were constantly shaping the gags and the lines and the one liners so that they would sit very comfortably in our own mouths
Although we do keep saying that the ultimate goal of this could be that we ship it off to much bigger names who could run with it – so if Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton or McKenzie Crook and Matt Berry want to have a go at performing the Highgate Vampire in the heart of London’s glittering West End, then they’re absolutely welcome to do so. For the right price….
We’re joking. Are we joking?
We’re not joking.
What were some of the biggest creative challenges in bringing this eerie story to life?
We wanted to combine our influences with this – Inside Number Nine and The League of Gentlemen, all that Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson, Steve Pemberton, Shearsmith material was very much in the forefront of our minds – as was Toast of London, Monty Python and The Mighty Boosh, so in many ways it’s bringing those influences into this story and mixing them all together.
Alex says I’m a big believer in theatre and writing being a “Magpie” art form. Simon Stephens, the playwright who we collaborated with on our first revival of Nuclear War in a Triptych of Plays at the Old Red Lion Theatre, has often said “you should read like a thief” and I often think that I watch and direct Theatre like a thief.
I often think “I’ll add a bit of this and a bit of that”, and it always comes out new and fresh minted, because it’s different every night and always going to be.
But in terms of challenges – we wanted this story to be fresh and new as well as something familiar and somewhat comforting, which sounds a bit hard ask such a spooky play, but we’ve been told that there is something heartwarming about this story. So that was a challenging tightrope to walk, a real balancing act.
The Highgate setting has such atmosphere, did the location itself shape the tone of the piece?
It’s a remarkable place to go and visit and that first trip to Highgate really gave us an insight into the energy of the place. We did send an email to the team at Highgate Cemetery letting them know what we were up to and asking whether or not they wanted to be involved in any capacity with bringing the peace to life, or having an advert in the program or anything like that.
But they wished us luck with it and said no they wouldn’t like to be involved.
Now whether or not that’s because they’re afraid that there truly was a vampire or whether some of the more shocking events of the play itself might be repeated in the future (spoilers – there is a section of the play entirely based in truth where amateur grave robbers stormed the cemetery) we don’t exactly know – but they were very polite in their email!
How do you approach fear and suspense in theatre, where the audience can see everything unfolding live?
That’s one of my favourite things about the play the fact that wherever we do it, whenever we do it it’s an almost immersive experience because the two characters are always performing this lecture for one night only – and the audience is part of the play. They are actually there in the room with us and we acknowledge them and talk to them throughout.
We wouldn’t want to spoil anything that happens in the plot, but let’s just say if you attend Sheffield and Farrington’s lecture, no matter what night you come, it is always going to be for one night only and there’s absolutely no guarantee that you were going to be safe in the company of these two hapless vampire hunters….
Of course you will be really. But will you really?
Perhaps it’s a little bit of a dark Christmas treat, like a particularly bitter, bizarrely decorated chocolate.
Ryan our director said to us in rehearsals – “Do we want this moment to be scary, or funny?” And the answer was Both.
The Woman in Black traumatised me (Alex) when I was 13. So it isn’t as scary as that. But it’ll send a shiver down your spine. Then hopefully make you laugh quite soon after.
Was there a particular moment in rehearsal where you felt the show really came together?
The first time we ran the show all the way through with Samuel Heron watching, composing new music for the play, on his laptop, on his lap. To be able to start looking into an audience’s eyes is really important for most plays, but particularly for this one, where we are talking directly to YOU.
I think then we knew we were cooking with some interesting ingredients.
The other important person to mention is Zoe Grain who is our producer for this production and also plays the role of Audrey the Technical Operator.
Audrey is a thoroughly long suffering character. She has been hired to be the characters’ technician, but throughout the play strange things happen and we feel like the audience can relate a lot to Audrey. She’s certainly almost stolen the show in our workshop productions of this play despite the fact that she has three lines or so!
Zoe not only produces the play but she is actually technically operating for real so she has to both act and operate the lights and sound – so we’re trying to give her a big shout out wherever and whenever we can.
How would you describe your creative partnership? Has it evolved through this process?
It is both warm and comforting and always new and challenging both an old blanket, and a new pair of shoes simultaneously.
But in all seriousness this is the third time we collaborated together on the writing – first with ‘Renaissance Men’ at the Old Red Lion and with ‘The Messiah Complex’ at VAULT, which in all honesty took seven years to come to fruition constantly being written and rewritten.
Possibly this current show has been the easiest to write – it seems to have flowed quite naturally. The great thing about collaborating is that the other person’s cultural horizons and imagination fuse with and spark off your own and so all the ideas head in new and interesting directions.
It’s a lot harder to get stuck when there are two people sharing the workload, and James and I seem to work very well together in that regard – but the collaboration continues into the rehearsal room where Sam often throws in ideas and Ryan‘s direction brings everything to dynamic life and as a four we are cutting and rewriting as we go, so it’s all a very collaborative experience.
The play deals with obsession, mystery, and belief. What do you hope audiences are left thinking or feeling as they leave the theatre?
We hope that they have come to feel a certain fondness and maybe a pity for these characters, however it is Christmas and the play is a comedy so we hope that they have a small scare a good laugh and that this play tees them up nicely for the festive season.
Though we may have ghosts, vampires, an exorcism, a song on a ukulele and a contemplation of eternity in an almost Beckett like scene in a graveyard, ultimately we hope that the audience leave having remembered a few of our one liners.
You’ll never look at Bailey’s in the same way again. You’ll wonder whether that Bailey’s could be bigger. Maybe you’ll even make yourself a Quadruple Baileys.
For anyone tempted to go vampire-hunting after seeing the show, what’s your best advice?
They should’ve been paying attention when they were watching it – because the song on the ukulele is all about how to slay a vampire! We really hope people were paying attention because they may need to put their skills to use!
You want your garlic, your stake, your silver bullets in case you happen to come across a werewolf, and just be wary of the long darkening shadows in the wintry Clapham night….
And finally, do you have any advice for aspiring theatre makers and performers looking to focus on folklore or myths as their stimuli?
One of the most useful ways to think about this kind of thing is to find the central allegory of the story. What are you really saying?
With ‘The Messiah Complex’ we were interested in talking about a censorious culture, that dictated what was allowed to be believed and what was forbidden, and so we came up with this notion of state that was run by authoritarian scientists, coming up with a kind of inversion of a lot of contemporary discourse.
With ‘Renaissance Men’ we wanted to talk a little about our generation and the sort of artists we were surrounded by drama school, and we turned that into a story of a lost masterpiece painting found in a charity shop, and what this did to a group of artistic friends.
And with The Highgate Vampire, we’ve got a story about loneliness and disconnection but wrapped up in a fairly farcical comedy. So whatever myth or strange tale you might be looking at writing – have a think about what you’re saying underneath, or what you want to talk about really and see whether you can smuggle that inside the tale.
I think that’s what theatre is really good at, and that sense of an allegory can make for fascinating storytelling.
A huge thank you to Alex and James for taking the time to answer my questions. It was great to understand more about the show, writing for theatre and ho collarboration sits at the heart of making art.
The Highgate Vampire is playing at the Omnibus Clapham. Tickets, show information and dates are available using this link.
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