![]() “The horror is in the imagination and you hear rather than see it. Hastie used a different strategy for his production of Macbeth. We had makeup tests and asked ourselves, ‘Should we stick his head in a bucket or fire him with blood as he comes off stage?’” We had to make the decision on how to do this with his clothes on. That’s when he will have a lot of blood on him. So when he walks on stage covered in blood, it’s an incredibly powerful moment. You need to see it.”īut there are some navigations off stage, too: “You hear a lot about Coriolanus single-handedly detonating the city, but it all happens off stage. “We set it within a naturalistic, recognisable world – therefore the blood needs to seem real. While some productions can amp up the gore for darkly comic or surreal effect, naturalistic plays need special effects that create a life-like semblance for the drama to stay convincing, says Robert Hastie, artistic director of the Crucible in Sheffield, who is directing Coriolanus. Tom Bateman and Theo Ogundipe in rehearsals for Coriolanus. It had a nylon string that he could pull to make the creature move in the vomit.” “You think, ‘How can we create that?’ In the end, we used an oatmeal bubble that the character hid in his mouth. As stage manager of The Antipodes at the National Theatre last year, Cobbold had to think laterally when the script stated that a character vomits a sea creature that then moves. Some effects come with imagined props (daggers that emit blood, for example) while others must be made. It is sometimes a challenge to turn a scripted stage instruction into reality, she adds. “When you are three feet away at the Garrick theatre and a man is not just shot in front of you but you see his blood spurting on a wall, it has a shocking effect. “There was gasping and shrieking from the audience when that happened,” she says. When the central character, Padraic, gets shot in the head, the audience is shown its impact by the blood spraying on to the wall behind him. “We needed a thump sound to be made, so we used prunes in the original staging and then jelly mixed with blood and a hard base in 2018, so that it would both thud and dribble on the stage floor.” When a man is shot in front of you and you see his blood spurting on a wall, it's shocking. He comes up with blood all over his face.” They used gas to create a splatter effect and “to get it just right, I rehearsed it on myself first”.Ĭobbold’s team also assessed how best to replicate the effect of a cat’s brain falling to the floor. “There is a scene when a cat gets shot and a man’s head is pushed into the cat basket. Lorna Cobbold, company stage manager of the RSC’s 2001 production and Michael Grandage’s 2018 revival starring Aidan Turner, says a host of special effects had to be deployed. The drama deals in such eye-watering detail as spilling cat’s brains and the hacking of human limbs. Some productions choose to accentuate graphic violence, such as Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, an Irish black comedy about a violent member of a Republican splinter group and his missing cat. Ormerod’s design team used a Kryolan product, and rehearsed with liquid of different consistencies to find the right effect. Special effects companies such as Pigs Might Fly deliver ready-made fake blood at different colours and consistencies, but some productions teams choose to make their own. Its weight as it falls to the ground has a genuine sound.” Ormerod says the production team assessed various options: “We tried a latex substitute but nothing had the right effect of a tongue falling on the floor, so we bought fresh meat, which we keep in the fridge. A bowl with a fake is hidden behind his chair for when his tongue is sliced and thrown on to the floor. As his throat is cut, fake blood is piped up the chair in which he sits, and the effect is heightened by a magnet in the actor’s shirt collar and a foot pump, which he controls. Blood erupts graphically on stage, an effect created by tubes and pumps hidden by the actors’ bodies and behind props. There is one central bloody scene, though, in which the Duke is tortured.
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