Interview by Liam Rudden
The Baddies, an adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s children’s story arrives at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre ahead of a national tour. Ahead of opening, we heard from Katie Beard (Director and Choreographer) and Joe Stilgoe (Composer) about what it was like to create the show.
Q&A with Katie Beard (Director and Choreographer) and Joe Stilgoe (Composer)
How did this co-production of The Baddies between Freckle Productions and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre Company come about?
Katie Beard: Stick Man had been a great success at The Lyceum, it had gone beautifully well for them. David Greig, their artistic director, and Jennifer Sutherland, founder of Freckle Productions, started a conversation about possibly doing something as a co-production. The Baddies was a relatively new title at the time and David was really keen to adapt it… A year later, here we are.
How did co-producing with The Royal Lyceum influence the bringing The Baddies from page to stage?
Joe Stilgoe: I was attached to the production as composer from early on as the songs are such a huge part of the story-telling. David Greig really loved the book and right from the start we talked about it having lots of Scottish influences. The songs are the connecting tissue; they look behind or through the pictures in the book but also the text – I always think of that moment in Mary Poppins when Bert takes the children hand in hand and they jump onto the pavement picture… Suddenly they are in that other world. In The Baddies, doing that is my job.
David Greig and Katie Beard put the book on the stage beautifully, but if you just put the book on the stage it would take only nine minutes and there would be some very unhappy parents, so my job is to keep the story going while entertaining everyone. In this one, I loved the idea of using some Scottish folk soundscapes and it was lovely seeing where they went.
How do you stretch a nine-minute story into an hour-long stage musical?
Katie Beard: When I first came to the book, I thought there was so much potential with these three characters, a troll, a ghost and a witch, who are all incredibly colourful and vivacious and broad and exciting. You can do a lot with them and the world that illustrator Axel Scheffler created on the pages of the book, but although Julia Donaldson’s writing is wonderful, the story is a bit ambiguous, so there was a lot to flesh out and build into a bigger thing.
For me, David Greig and dramaturg Jackie Crichton’s script gives us conventions to play with, for example, the mouse character in the story who sets challenges for the baddies has become our narrator as well as their protagonist.
The mother mouse and the mouse children have also become integral to the stage musical – the three actors who play the baddies also play the three mice babies, which has allowed us to tether the behaviour of the mice babies so that it shares traits with the behaviour of the three baddies. In turn, that allows the children in the audience to recognise themselves in the characters on stage. It tells them they are allowed to be silly and big and boisterous and fun and builds the piece nicely.
How are the musical numbers worked into the action?
Katie Beard: Joe does write well for musical theatre. The girl in the story offers the perfect example of this. We don’t really know anything about her: she lives on her own in a little cottage, easily and deftly outwitting these three ferocious creatures, but Joe has given her a song which gives us her story. That also gives me the opportunity to tell the story through movement and choreography while giving us huge highlights in terms of theatre making.
What did the casting of the actors bring to characters until then beautifully, but fairly thinly drawn, on the page?
Joe Stilgoe: What I found incredibly useful was a workshop we did while formulating the piece. We weren’t casting, but invited three actors we liked to come along and play around with some ideas.
Something actors don’t always appreciate about themselves is the fact that they have the ability to make you see a character in a completely different light. Looking at these beautifully drawn characters on the page, it’s sometimes hard to imagine them being played by human beings, so to get these actors in a room suddenly sparks off so many different thoughts and ideas allowing us to go away and write a bit more.
What were you looking for in the actors you auditioned for the three baddies?
Katie Beard: We needed actors who were childlike and playful as we are trying to make the best quality work that will be enjoyable for everyone – there are layers to it for everyone to appreciate. No one should come to the baddies thinking it’s for little kids and that there won’t be anything for them.
So how do you transform a children’s book into a show for all the family?
Joe Stilgoe: We are aiming to make a glorious hour of theatre for everyone because if it was just three-year-olds in the room, that would be a very different thing. Aiming at age 3 is very hard because three-year-olds often haven’t seen anything before and have a quite limited frame of reference. For them there are silly gags but we also do little, what we call easter eggs, for the grown ups because the show is for them to experience as well.
Katie Beard: As with any piece of theatre you really have to keep your audience in mind, so with this we are always dancing on the line between a bit of scariness that feels thrilling and then becomes instantly funny. The baddies must never be a threat and the children must never be anticipating any darkness.
How do you ensure the baddies are never too scary?
Joe Stilgoe: When you’re writing it you’re having to think, what would I have found funny when I was three? In fact we borrow a lot from the physicality of the world of pantomime in this. One of the lovely things in our favour right from the start of this show is this device of having the baddies and the mice babies at the start being played by the same actors, partly because they are all the wrong size, which is classic panto.
Like the three bears we have a baby mouse, middle mouse and older mouse, but the baby mouse, who is all tantrums and wailing, is played by the actor who also plays the enormous troll. That’s immediately funny. So as soon as the children see him as the troll they know that he is playing. A show that pretends there are no actors or sets and that everything is real is madness because theatre is pretend, showing the children that these people are playing while sucking the audience into a make-believe world.
Did you rediscover your own inner child while making the baddies?
Katie Beard: You can’t help but do that and David Greig has a wonderful connection to his own inner child which shines through in the his writing – these baddies are the worst baddies, they are bad at being bad, they are goodie baddies and are very silly and so much fun that we just want people to have a joyous hour of true silliness and magical storytelling.
The Baddies is at The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh from 4 to 20 October, then touring
