A group of actors stand behind microphones, reading from scripts, delivering their lines directly to the audience. They do not look at each other. There is no set. There are no costumes. Their words are accompanied by music, from a ten-piece orchestra, and a sound technician who dashes about replicating gunshots, shoes walking on the street and dripping taps.
Theatre of the New Ear is a “sound play”, though for this do not read smart-arsed conceptualism. For one night at the Festival Hall, the event — a piece of theatre stripped of visuals — will bring together the cream of Hollywood indie talent. The evening comprises two plays, the creations of Joel and Ethan Coen (Fargo, Miller’s Crossing) and Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The actors taking part include Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis.
The Coens marshalled the big names — a testament to the respect they command. “The actors are doing it for fun, they’re attracted to its uniqueness,” says Carter Burwell, creator of Theatre of the New Ear, who has written the score for many Coen Brothers and Kaufman films. He says the actors are relishing the rough and ready preparation. There has been only a week of rehearsals before the three New York performances (from Thursday to tonight).
All cast and crew are getting paid the same fee — $6,000; all are paying their air fares and accommodation. So far the only star treatment has been for Meryl Streep, who couldn’t find a parking space on the morning of the first rehearsal: staff opened the freight door and she parked her car in the theatre lobby.
Theatre of the New Ear came to Burwell while he was sitting with his baby son Tor on his knee. “I suddenly had this idea of combining music and text. I don’t know why . . . I’m not working on any new film scores — it’s not very easy to write when there are young kids around — so maybe I was casting around for something to do while taking care of him. I spent my twenties gigging in bands. Music has always been about live performance.” He laughs. “This seemed like a way of doing it while remaining a responsible parent.”
Around the same time, Glenn Max, the Festival Hall’s contemporary culture programmer, approached him to perform his film scores at the venue. Burwell wasn’t interested, but he approached the Coens and asked them if they had any stray scripts which could be set to music. They offered to write a sound play from scratch, stripping the action of all cinematic shorthand.
“We want the audience to be forced to construct the experience with their ears, to build an idea of character and location without visual cues,” Burwell says. The Coens, initially keen to write a full-length play, began to see it as “the deep end of the pool”, so Kaufman came on board and two one-act plays took shape.
In the Coens’ play Sawbones, Seymour Hoffman is the title character in a TV western, a frontier veterinarian with a nemesis, “the snivelling coward”, played by Buscemi. Typically for the Coens, the action has many levels. Brooke Smith plays a housewife who watches Sawbones, the show, knowing that her husband, played by John Goodman (of Roseanne fame), is watching the show thousands of miles away. It provides an intimate connection between them.
However, her fidelity is tested when a handsome salesman comes calling during the episode played out on stage. Besides the action there is a delicious roster of sounds — horses’ hooves, Seymour Hoffman extracting a bullet from Buscemi’s leg, and Burwell’s own pastiche score recalling old TV westerns.
“The whole thing is presented as a melodrama, the acting is over the top,” Burwell says.
But you’re asking these first-class actors not to act, I say. Just to speak, nothing else. It’s torture for them, surely.
Burwell laughs. “Meryl asked the first time we got together, ‘Do we even look at each other?’ And we said ‘No.’ OK, it would help the audience to understand the relationship between the characters but by not having them look at each other it makes the audience work harder to figure out where they are and who they are to each other. We don’t even want the actors to gesticulate. It’s a lark, to have this amazing cast and see how they cope with the restrictions. We want to explore the disjunction between what the audience sees and what it hears.”
To make matters muddier, the music will not necessarily match the action — in the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing Burwell composed a romantic score for what was quite a violent film; for Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, a fantastical picture, he composed a very gritty, “real” soundtrack. “The music is pretty heavy on the irony. We really like to make audiences feel uncomfortable and to present contradictory levels of meaning,” Burwell says. “Only one thing is for sure — by the end of the evening, the auditory parts of their brains will be well worked out.”
Kaufman’s piece, Hope Leaves the Theatre, is even more trickily self-referential; a play within a play. The piece begins with us — the audience — coming into the auditorium and seeing Hope Davis, Peter Dinklage and Meryl Streep playing three actors getting ready to perform a play. Then the trio become three members of the audience returning from the interval. Then the play begins: Davis assuming the voice of a woman musing about her life — ranging across ageing, thwarted achievement, not being able to attract men, what she thought of the preceding Coen Brothers’ play.
Then Davis “leaves” the theatre — while remaining on stage — and we follow her outside, coming across a homeless person, travelling by bus, going home, chatting to people over the internet, making a call to her mother. Streep and Dinklage play all the people Davis encounters.
“The play is changing all the time. That is part of the concept,” Burwell says. “When Hope turns the TV on and it’s the news, the idea is it’s the news of that day. It’s all in the present.”
“As a film score composer I don’t usually work with actors,” Burwell says. “But sitting next to Meryl Streep when she’s reading her part has been a revelation. We all know she has the amazing facility with voices but to hear her exercise it in an unguarded, unrehearsed way has been incredible.”
On the night Burwell will conduct the ten musicians, the sound technician, Marko Constanzo, and cue in the actors. There has to be an absolute synchronicity between all three elements. “I have to read the score and play at the same time. I have to stay ahead of the action and be ready to go back if we trip over. I lie awake at night thinking this over all the time.” As for lighting, Kaufman’s initial dictum — “let’s turn ’em on at the beginning and off at the end” — seems to be holding.
Will the audience keep pace? “I don’t know whether it will be too much work for the ears,” Burwell admits. “We keep asking ourselves, ‘Does the audience need to just hear dialogue?’ Do they need more music? Is there too much of one, not enough of the other? The structure of film is so much better defined, but we will find a solution.”
He knows that, unlike film scores, he doesn’t have the luxury of post-production to iron out glitches. As for the audience, he strikes a note of dry optimism. “We’re hoping sheer novelty will force them to be forgiving.”
Theatre of the New Ear is on May 13, 8pm, at the Festival Hall, London SE1 (0870 3800400; www.rfh.org.uk)
