Tintin Resources

A Young Vic Production HERGÉ’S ADVENTURES OF TINTIN Co-produced by BITE: 05, Barbican Resource Pack

1

CONTENTS Page 1. Hergé Biography 2 2. Tintin Biography 8 3. Family Circle Biographies 9 4. Tibet 11 5. The Yeti 14 6. Mysticism 18 7. Tibetan Buddhism 21 8. A Brief History of the Comic Book 22 9. Cast and Creative Team 26 10. Synopsis 27 11. Assistant Director’s Rehearsal Room Diary 29 12. Interview with Co-writer, David Greig 45 13. Interview with Designer, Ian MacNeil 47 14. Interview with Sound Designer, Paul Arditti 48 15. Interview with Composer, Orlando Gough 49 16. Songs 51 17. Further Reading 53 18. Interview: The Daily Telegraph 54 If you have any questions or comments about this Resource Pack please contact us: The Young Vic, 2nd floor Chester House, 1 – 3 Brixton Road, London, SW9 6DE t: 020 7820 3350 f: 020 7820 3355 e: [email protected] Written by: Joe Hill-Gibbins Additional Material: Lucinka Eisler Young Vic 2005 First performed at the Barbican on 1 December 2005


2

1. HERGÉ BIOGRAPHY ‘Hergé’ is the pen name of Georges Remi, the Belgian comics writer and artist who found international fame through his creation, The Adventures of Tintin. Taking his pseudonym from the French pronunciation of RG, the reverse of his initials, Remi wrote and illustrated the Tintin books from 1929 up until his death in 1983. The notable qualities of the Tintin stories include their human warmth, a realistic feel (created by Hergé's meticulous and wide-ranging research) and the artist’s ligne claire drawing style (see below). There are twenty-three Tintin adventures in total (not including the unfinished Tintin and Alph-art, which Hergé was working on at the time of his death). Childhood Georges Remi was born in 1907 in Etterbeek, near Brussels, Belgium. His parents, Alexis and Elisabeth Remi, were a middle-class couple who met and lived in Brussels. His four years of primary schooling coincided with World War One (1914–1918), during which the city was occupied by the German Empire. Georges, who displayed an early affinity for drawing, filled the margins of his earliest schoolbooks with doodles of the German invaders. Except for a few drawing lessons which he would later take at Ecole Saint-Luc, he never had any formal training in the visual arts. In 1920, he began studying in the Collège Saint-Boniface, a secondary school where the teachers were catholic priests. Georges joined the school’s Boy Scouts troop, where he was given the totemic name Renard Curieux (Curious Fox). His first drawings were published in Jamais Assez, the school's scout paper, and, from 1923, in Le Boy-Scout Belge, the scout monthly magazine. It was in 1924 that he began to sign his illustrations using the pseudonym Hergé. His subsequent comics work would be heavily influenced by the ethics of the scouting movement, as well as the early travel experiences he made with his scout troop. Early Career On finishing school in 1925, Georges worked at the Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle. The following year, he published his first cartoon series, The Adventures of Totor, in the scouting magazine Le Boy-Scout Belge. In 1928, he was put in charge of producing material for the Le XXe Siècle's new weekly supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtième. He began illustrating The Adventures of Flup, Nénesse, Poussette, and Cochonnet, a strip written by a member of the newspaper's sports staff, but soon became dissatisfied with this series. He decided to create a comic strip of his own, which would adopt the recent American innovation of using speech balloons to depict words coming out of the characters' mouths. Previously lines of dialogue had appeared like subtitles, outside of the panel of artwork. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé, appeared in black and white in the pages of Le Petit Vingtième in January 1929, and ran until May 1930. The strip chronicles the adventures of a young reporter named Tintin and his pet fox terrier Snowy (named Milou in the original French version) as they journey through the Soviet Union. The character of Tintin was inspired by Georges' brother Paul Remi, an officer in the Belgian army. In January 1930, Hergé created Quick & Flupke a new comic strip about two street urchins from Brussels, for the pages of Le Petit Vingtième. For many years, Hergé would continue to produce this less well-known series in parallel with his Tintin


3

stories. In June, he began the second Tintin adventure, Tintin in the Congo (then the colony of Belgian Congo), followed by Tintin in America and Cigars of the Pharaoh.

In 1932, he married Germaine Kieckens, the secretary of the director of the Le XXe Siècle. They had no children, and would later divorce in 1975 when Hergé began a relationship with a young illustrator, Fanny Vlamynck. The early Tintin adventures each took about a year to complete, upon which they were released in book form by the Casterman publishing house. Years later Hergé would express embarrassment over the old fashioned, colonial attitudes expressed in these early works. For instance, an infamous sequence in Tintin in the Congo has Tintin giving a geography lesson to native students in a missionary school. "My dear friends," exclaims Tintin, "today I am going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!" In a later edition, the scene was changed into an arithmetic lesson. Hergé would continue revising his stories in subsequent editions, including a later conversion to colour. World War Two The Second World War broke out on September 1st, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. Hergé was mobilized as a reserve lieutenant, and had to interrupt Tintin's adventures in the middle of Land of Black Gold. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1940, Belgium had fallen to Germany with the rest of Continental Europe and Le Petit Vingtième, in which Tintin's adventures had hitherto been published, was shut down by the German occupation. However, Hergé accepted an offer to produce a new Tintin strip in Le Soir, Brussels' leading French daily, which had been appropriated as the mouthpiece of the occupation forces. He had to leave The Land of the Black Gold unfinished, due to its anti-fascist overtones, launching instead into The Crab with the Golden Claws, the first of six Tintin stories which he would produce during the war. As the war progressed, two factors arose that led to a revolution in Hergé's style. Firstly, paper shortages forced Tintin to be published in a daily three or four-frame strip, rather than two full pages every week which had been the practice on Le Petit Vingtième. In order to create tension at the end of each strip rather than the end of each page, Hergé had to introduce more frequent gags and faster-paced action. Secondly, Hergé had to move the focus of Tintin's adventures away from current affairs, in order to avoid controversy. He turned to stories with an escapist flavour: an expedition to a meteorite (The Shooting Star), a treasure hunt (The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure), and a quest to undo an ancient Inca curse (The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun). In these stories, Hergé placed more emphasis on characterization than on the plot, and indeed Tintin's most memorable companions, Captain Haddock and Cuthbert Calculus (in French, Professeur Tryphon Tournesol), were introduced at this time. Haddock debuted in The Crab with the Golden Claws and Calculus in Red Rackham's Treasure. The impact of these changes were not lost on the readers; in reprint, these stories have proven to be amongst the most popular. In 1943, Hergé met Edgar Pierre Jacobs, another comics artist, whom he hired to help revise the early Tintin albums. Jacob's most significant contribution would be his redrawing of the costumes and backgrounds in the revised edition of King Ottokar's Sceptre. He also began collaborating with Hergé on the new Tintin adventure, The Seven Crystal Balls.


4

Post War The occupation of Brussels ended on September 3rd, 1944 and Tintin's adventures were interrupted toward the end of The Seven Crystal Balls when the Allied authorities shut down Le Soir. During the chaotic post-occupation period, Hergé was arrested four times by different groups. He was publicly accused of being a German sympathizer, a claim which was largely unfounded, as the Tintin adventures published during the war were scrupulously free of politics (the only dubious point occurring in The Shooting Star, which showed a rival scientific expedition flying the Flag of the United States). In fact, the stories published before the war had been unequivocally critical of fascism; most prominently, King Ottokar's Sceptre showed Tintin working to defeat a thinly-veiled allegory of Nazi Germany's takeover of Austria. Nevertheless, like other former employees of the Nazi-controlled press, Hergé found himself barred from newspaper work. He spent the next two years working with Jacobs, as well as a new assistant, Alice Devos, adapting many of the early Tintin adventures into colour. Tintin's exile ended on September 6th, 1946. The publisher and wartime resistance fighter Raymond Leblanc provided the financial support and anti-Nazi credentials to launch Tintin Magazine with Hergé. The weekly publication featured two pages of Tintin's adventures, beginning with the remainder of The Seven Crystal Balls, as well as other comic strips and assorted articles. It became highly successful, with circulation surpassing 100,000 every week. Tintin had always been credited as simply ‘by Hergé’, without mention of Edgar Pierre Jacobs and Hergé's other assistants. As Jacobs' contribution to the production of the strip increased, he began demanding a joint credit. Hergé refused and ended their hitherto fruitful collaboration. Jacobs then went on to produce his own comics for Tintin Magazine, including the widely-acclaimed Blake and Mortimer. Hergé started out drawing in a much looser, rougher style which was influenced partially by the great American comic strip artists of the late 1920s and 1930s. It was only after World War Two that his drawing style evolved into the famous ligne claire style. Literally meaning the clear line, ligne claire is a style of drawing which uses simple strong lines, all with the same thickness and importance (rather than different widths and colours being used to emphasize certain objects or for shading. For this reason it is sometimes also called the democracy of lines). Additionally, the style often features strong colours and cartoonish characters against a realistic background. Personal Crisis The increased demands which Tintin Magazine placed on Hergé began to take their toll. In 1949, while working on the new version of Land of Black Gold (the first version had been left unfinished by the outbreak of World War Two), Hergé suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to take an abrupt four month-long break. He suffered another breakdown in early 1950, while working on Destination Moon. In order to lighten Hergé's workload, the Hergé Studios was set up on April 6th, 1950. The studio employed a variety of assistants to help Hergé in producing The Adventures of Tintin. Foremost amongst these was the artist Bob De Moor, who would collaborate with Hergé on the remaining Tintin adventures, filling in details and backgrounds such as the spectacular lunar landscapes in Explorers on the Moon. With the aid of the studio, Hergé managed to produce The Calculus Affair (regarded by some as his most polished work) in 1954, followed by The Red Sea Sharks in 1956.


5

Last Years The last three complete Tintin adventures were produced at a much reduced pace: The Castafiore Emerald in 1961, Flight 714 in 1966, and Tintin and the Picaros only in 1975. However, by this time Tintin had begun to move into other media. From the start of Tintin Magazine, Raymond Leblanc had used Tintin for merchandising and advertisements. In 1961, the first Tintin movie was made: Tintin and the Golden Fleece, with Jean-Pierre Talbot as Tintin. Several Tintin animated cartoons have also been made, beginning with Prisoners of the Sun in 1969. Tintin's financial success allowed Hergé to devote more of his time to travel. He travelled widely across Europe, and in 1971 visited America for the first time, meeting some of the Native Americans whose culture had long been a source of fascination for him. In 1973, he visited Taiwan, accepting an invitation offered three decades earlier by the Kuomintang government, in appreciation of The Blue Lotus. Hergé died on March 3, 1983, aged 75, due to complications arising from anemia, which he had suffered from for several years. He left the twenty-fourth Tintin adventure, Tintin and Alph-Art, unfinished. Following his expressed desire not to have Tintin handled by another artist, it was published posthumously as a set of sketches and notes in 1986. In 1987 Remi closed Hergé Studios and replaced it with the Hergé Foundation – shifting the focus of the Hergé estate from production to promotion of existing work.


6

Hergé Timeline

1917 Born, Etterbeek, Belgium 1920 Attends secondary school at Collège Saint-Boniface 1920 Drawings first published in boy scout paper 1924 Adopts pseudonym Hergé 1925 Works for Catholic newspaper Le XXe Siècle 1928 In charge of Le XXe Siècle's children’s supplement, Le Petit Vingtième 1929 Tintin in the Land of the Soviets appears in Le Petit Vingtième 1930 Introduces cartoon strip Quick & Flupke 1932 Marries Germaine Kieckens 1939 Draws for Le Soir newspaper 1943 Meets artistic collaborator Edgar Pierre Jacobs 1944 Le Soir shut down. Barred from newspaper work 1946 Tintin Magazine launched 1949 Nervous breakdown 1950 Another nervous breakdown. Hergé Studio established 1961 First Tintin movie: Tintin and the Golden Fleece 1969 First Tintin animated cartoon: Prisoners of the Sun 1971 Visits America 1973 Visits Taiwan 1975 Divorces Germaine Kieckens 1977 Marries Fanny Vlamynck 1983 Hergé dies


7

Chronology of Tintin Books (in order of production) 1. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Tintin au pays des Soviets) 1929–1930 2. Tintin in the Congo (Tintin au Congo) 1930–1931 3. Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique) 1931–1932 4. Cigars of the Pharaoh (Les Cigares du Pharaon) 1932–1934 5. The Blue Lotus (Le Lotus Bleu) 1934–1935 6. The Broken Ear (L'Oreille Cassée) 1935–1937 7. The Black Island (L'Ile Noire) 1937–1938 8. King Ottokar's Sceptre (Le Sceptre d'Ottokar) 1938–1939 9. The Crab with the Golden Claws (Le Crabe aux Pinces D'or) 1940–1941 10. The Shooting Star (L'Etoile Mystérieuse) 1941–1942 11. The Secret of the Unicorn (Le Secret de la Licorne) 1942–1943 12. Red Rackham's Treasure (Le Trésor de Rackam le Rouge) 1943–1944 13. The Seven Crystal Balls (Les Sept Boules de Cristal) 1943–1948 14. Prisoners of the Sun (Le Temple du Soleil) 1946–1949 15. Land of Black Gold (Tintin au Pays de L'or Noir) 1948–1950 16. Destination Moon (Objectif Lune) 1950–1953 17. Explorers on the Moon (On a Marché sur la Lune) 1950–1954 18. The Calculus Affair (L'Affaire Tournesol) 1954–1956 19. The Red Sea Sharks (Coke en Stock) 1958 20. Tintin in Tibet (Tintin au Tibet) 1960 21. The Castafiore Emerald (Les Bijoux de la Castafiore) 1963 22. Flight 714 (Vol 714 pour Sydney) 1968 23. Tintin and the Picaros (Tintin et les Picaros) 1976 24. Tintin and Alph-Art (Tintin et l'Alph-Art) Unfinished work, published posthumously in 1986, and republished with more material in 2004


8

2. TINTIN BIOGRAPHY Tintin is a young man aged between 16 and 18 with an unquenchable thirst for adventure. He is a newspaper reporter whose first ever job is to cover a hot story in freezing Moscow. It is in this adventure that Tintinologists will find the only example of their hero actually doing any work (sat at a table preparing his story). We have to assume however that Tintin always keeps his readership up-to-date with his amazing adventures, sending scribbled dispatches back from the front line. Although it says journalist in his much stamped passport, Tintin spends most of his time acting like a detective – seeking out the truth and fighting injustice. One of Tintin’s most distinctive features is his world famous quiff. However ultra-observant readers can see that for the first eight pages of his debut adventure, the boy reporter sports a flat, combed down hairstyle. On page nine he leaps into a car to escape an enemy aeroplane, and the sudden acceleration creates a little tuft of hair from his ginger fringe. This little tuft inexplicably remains in the same position for the next 54 years. Perhaps that’s because from this moment onwards, Tintin is always on the run from one dastardly villain or another! Tintin is a free-spirited, moral person, with great personal integrity. He is a loyal friend and a tireless battler, who never stops fighting for what he believes in. More than anything else, these are the two qualities that define Tintin’s heroic status on his mission in Tibet.


9

3. FAMILY CIRCLE BIOGRAPHIES Tintin is accompanied in his many adventures by his so-called family circle. There is Snowy (his most faithful companion), as well as Captain Haddock, the Thompson Twins, Professor Calculus, Nestor, and Bianca Castafiore. Snowy Known as Milou in French, Snowy is an exceptionally white, wire fox terrier. His name comes from Hergé’s one time girlfriend Marie-Louise Van Custem, who was nicknamed Malou. Snowy is Tintin’s oldest companion, appearing with his master in the first drawing of the first Tintin adventure. The dog appears on every single book cover (except Tintin and Alph-Art which was drawn after Hergé’s death). Snowy is unswervingly loyal to his master, even saving his life on a number of occasions. However it must also be noted that Snowy is a dog with normal doggy instincts. It’s not unknown for him to get distracted now and then by a scrap of food or a juicy bone. Initially Snowy’s stubborn, opinionated and reckless character was used as a counterpoint to Tintin’s positive and good-natured presence. However once the irascible Captain Haddock began to feature regularly in the series, Snowy’s character was able to mellow a little. Captain Haddock Haddock, an ex-officer in the merchant navy, first appeared in The Crab with the Golden Claws as a peripheral character. However the black-bearded seaman went on to become one of the most prominent figures in the series.

If Tintin is a man of reason, then Haddock is a man ruled by emotion. Impulsive, passionate and quick-tempered, Haddock is famous for his whiskey consumption and highly creative use of expletives. (Tintinologists have calculated that the Captain has a repertoire of over 200 unusual insults). After leaving the navy Haddock installed himself in the stately home Marlinspike Hall. However his dreams of becoming a gentleman farmer – tending vegetables and sitting by the fire – are constantly thwarted by Tintin, who enlists the Captain in his globe trotting adventures. Despite the fact Haddock spends much of his time complaining about this, he never fails to back his friend when the chips are down. Professor Cuthbert Calculus Calculus is an inventor, who develops through the Tintin series from an eccentric working in his garret, to a senior nuclear physicist in charge of a hi-tech laboratory. As well nuclear physics, the professor includes in his list of interests botany, the occult, underwater exploration and electronics. His most memorable inventions include the space rocket that takes Tintin to the moon, and an ultrasonic doom machine.


10

The professor is characterised by his scatter-brained absent-mindedness, his poor hearing, and his intuitive, sentimental nature. The Thom(p)sons Thomson and Thom(p)son are two bungling police officers, who blindly follow orders, no matter how moronic that may seem (an officiousness typified by their catchphrase “to be precise”). Despite their striking resemblance to each other, they are not twins, nor even brothers. Hergé helpfully provides us with a method to tell the two men apart: “Thomson has a straight moustache, whereas Thompson’s is more rounded”! Symbolically the men represent the idiocy of old-fashioned values and institutions. Their anachronistic bowler hats and antiquated phrases (“old boy” etc.) comically evoke a sense of mindless traditionalism – a stark contrast to Tintin’s youthful idealism and inquisitiveness. Nestor Nestor is the butler of Marlinspike Hall. Patient, efficient, discreet and stylish he is the perfect embodiment of the loyal butler. Bianca Castafiore A renowned opera singer from La Scala in Milan (hence her nickname ‘the Milanese Nightingale’), Castafiore is a drama queen and diva. Her staple aria is the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust, which she launches into at any given opportunity. Perhaps the strangest thing about Bianca is the fact that although she’s received worldwide recognition as an opera star, her singing is anathema to the rest of the family circle. Calculus is the only one who seems to enjoy her frequent performances, and he is partially deaf!


11

4. TIBET Tibetan Geography Tibet is a region in Central Asia and the home of the Tibetan people. Tibet is located on the Tibetan Plateau, the world's highest region. With an average elevation of 4,900m (16,000ft), it is often called the Roof of the World. Most of the Himalaya mountain range lies within Tibet. Its most famous peak, Mount Everest, is on Tibet's border with Nepal. The atmosphere is severely dry nine months of the year. Western mountain passes receive small amounts of fresh snow each year but remain traversable year round. Low temperatures are prevalent throughout these western regions, where bleak desolation is unrelieved by any vegetation beyond the size of low bushes, and where wind sweeps unchecked across vast expanses of arid plain. The Indian monsoon exerts some influence on eastern Tibet, whilst northern Tibet is subject to high temperatures in summer and intense cold in winter. In order to create an accurate depiction of Tibet’s landscape, Hergé kept a special file of photographs. Filled with clippings largely from National Geographic Magazine (to which Hergé was a keen subscriber), this collection of photographs, dubbed by the artist his ‘Alpinisme’ file, became the touchstone for his authentic renderings of the Tibetan terrain. Political Turmoil Tibet is currently part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In 1950 the People's Liberation Army entered Tibet, exercising by force China’s long held claim of sovereignty over the region. The Chinese crushed the largely ceremonial Tibetan army and destroyed as many as 6,000 Tibetan temples. In 1951 the Plan for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet - a treaty signed under Chinese pressure by representatives of the Bhuddist religious leaders the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama - provided for rule by a joint Chinese-Tibetan authority. In 1956 an uprising that started in the provinces of Kham and Amdo in response to communist land reforms spread across the region, reaching Tibet’s capital city, Lhasa. The rebellion, supported by the American CIA, was crushed by 1959. During this campaign tens of thousands of Tibetans were killed. The 14th Dalai Lama (the tradition head of the government) and other government principals fled to exile in India, but isolated resistance continued in Tibet until 1969. Although he remained a virtual prisoner, the Chinese presented the Panchen Lama as a figurehead in Lhasa, claiming that he headed the legitimate Government of Tibet in the absence of the Dalai Lama. In 1965, the area that had been under the control of the Dalai Lama's government from the 1910s to 1959 (U-Tsang and western Kham) was set up as an Autonomous Region. The monastic estates were broken up and secular education introduced. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards across the country (whose ranks included some ethnic Tibetans), inflicted a campaign of organized vandalism against cultural sites, including Tibet's Buddhist heritage. Of the several thousand monasteries in Tibet, only a handful remained without major damage, and thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were killed or imprisoned. The number of military and civilian Tibetans that have died in the communists’ so-called Great Leap Forward since 1950 is often quoted as between 400,000 and 1.2 million, figures which the Chinese Communist Party vehemently denies.


12

It is reported that when Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, visited Lhasa in 1980 he cried in shame when he viewed the misery and described the situation as "colonialism pure and simple". Reforms were instituted, and since then Chinese policy in Tibet has veered between tolerance and repression. Most religious freedoms have been officially restored, but monks and nuns are still sometimes imprisoned, and thousands of Tibetans continue to flee Tibet yearly. The government of Tibet in Exile claims that millions of Chinese immigrants to the Tibet Autonomous Region are diluting the Tibetans both culturally and through intermarriage. Exiled activitists say that despite recent attempts to restore the appearance of original Tibetan culture to attract tourism, the traditional Tibetan way of life is now irrevocably changed. The government of China rejects these claims, pointing to rights enjoyed by the Tibetan language in education and in courts, as well as public infrastructure projects aimed at improving the lives of Tibetans, and say that the standard of life is far higher compared to the Dalai Lama's rule before 1950. Many Tibetan exile groups vigorously contest these claims and to this day remain politically active in raising awareness about the political struggle and cultural heritage of the Tibetan people. Hergé and Tibet Hergé completed Tintin in Tibet, his boy reporter’s 20th adventure, in 1959, three years after the suppression of the anti-PRC uprising, and nine months after the Dalai Lama’s dramatic escape. This was no coincidence. Despite then fantastical nature of some of Tintin’s adventures, Hergé drew much of his inspiration from the real world around him. The character Chang, the raison d’etre of Tintin’s mission, is in fact based on a real person, whilst the Belgian artist’s choice of Tibet for the adventure was in part a response to the political turmoil there in the preceding years. Hergé’s political watershed came with The Blue Lotus, the fifth Tintin adventure. At the close of the previous Tintin strip, Cigars of the Pharaoh, he had mentioned that Tintin's next adventure would bring him to China. Father Gosset, the chaplain to the Chinese students at the University of Leuven, wrote to Hergé urging him to be sensitive in what he wrote about China. Hergé agreed, and in the spring of 1934 Gosset introduced him to Chang Chong-jen, a young sculpture student at the Brussels Académie des Beaux-Arts. The two young artists quickly became close friends, and Chang introduced Hergé to Chinese history, culture, and the techniques of Chinese art. As a result of this experience, Hergé would strive in The Blue Lotus, and in subsequent Tintin adventures, to be meticulously accurate in depicting the places which Tintin visited. As a token of appreciation, he added a fictional Chong-chen Chang to The Blue Lotus, a young Chinese boy who befriends Tintin. As another result of his friendship with Chang, Hergé became increasingly aware of the problems of colonialism, in particular the Japanese Empire's advances into China. The Blue Lotus carries a bold anti-imperialist message, contrary to the prevailing view in the West (which was sympathetic to Japan and the colonial enterprise). As a result, it drew sharp criticism from various parties, including a protest by Japanese diplomats to the Belgian Foreign Ministry. Years later in 1958, Hergé returned to his happy encounter with Chang for inspiration. Chang had since returned to China to complete his studies and the Belgian had lost track of him during the upheaval of Japan’s invasion of China, World War Two and the subsequent communist revolution. Hergé’s nostalgia was a key influence on Tintin in Tibet. Tintin’s


13

committed friendship to a long lost friend, thousands of miles away being a direct expression of Hergé’s affection for Chang. In a further parallel with the book’s narrative Hergé tried to resume contact with his Chinese friend at this time, although without success. Years later however, in 1975, Chang was traced. In 1981 he returned to Brussels for an emotional encounter with his old friend Hergé, before finally settling in Paris. But Hergé’s story, although deeply personal, is not without political content. Hergé had observed the brutal subjugation of Tibet by the PRC. His detailed and sympathetic evocation of Tibetan culture was created at a time when the PRC had done much to destroy Tibet’s indigenous culture. Ironically the nation he had signalled his support for in The Blue Lotus was now the aggressive oppressor. Again Hergé was on top of current affairs. And as so often with his choice of subjects, the topic has endured. In recent years – particularly after the fall of communism in Europe and the Soviet Union – politicians and human rights activists have turned their attention to highlighting the plight of Tibet. Bringing Tibet to Oval In the second week of the rehearsals, director Rufus Norris invited Tenzin Saphel from Tibet House into the Tintin rehearsal rooms near Kennington Park. Tibet House is a London based organisation set up by the Tibetan Government in exile to promote Tibetan culture and political resistance to the Chinese occupation. Norris was keen to be accurate in his portrayal of Tibet, and wanted to give his company a shared experience of its culture. Samphel conducted a lengthy question and answer session with the full company. Then Samphel went on to describe several Buddhist rituals, and to teach the actors playing the porters and monks some Tibetan phrases. He also demonstrated several prayer positions, which are utilised in the show by Tharkey and the monks.


14

5. THE YETI What On Earth Is A Yeti? The legendary yeti (aka the abominable snowman) is a large bipedal primate thought by some to live in the Himalayas. Its Western name is derived from both the Tibetan ‘gYa’dred’, pronounced yeh-teh, meaning “little man-like animal”, and yettin, the Old English word for an orc or troll. Scientists remain resolutely unimpressed by the evidence put forward for the existence of the elusive creature. Experts normally put a belief in the yeti down to hoaxes, superstition, and the regular misidentification of more mundane creatures. Nevertheless the yeti remains one of the most famous creatures in cryptozoology (the study of beasts unclassified by science). To die-hard yeti enthusiasts, compelling physical evidence such as tracks and nests provide proof of an as yet unknown primate, an evolutionary remnant of evolution (perhaps the supposedly extinct ape Gigantopithicus), or even an unclassified type of brown bear. A Yeti History For hundreds of years, natives in the Himalayas have been telling stories about a humanoid monster that stalks the mountain ranges. However, elements of this rich and complex mythology only filtered through to the west in the 1800s, as British travellers began sending their dispatches home. 1832 Trekking in Nepal, intrepid British explorer BH Hodgson sends reports of a tall, bipedal creature covered with long dark hair. Hodgson does not see the creature himself - instead it is sighted by his terrified Nepalese guides. Hodgson inexplicably concludes the beast is an orang-utan. 1889 LA Wadell (another intrepid British explorer) publishes his Among the Himalayas, containing reports of a hulking ape-like creature and the discovery of large footprints in the snow. Wadell is unimpressed by the natives’ stories. He concludes the so-called yeti is in fact a bear. The frequency of yeti sightings increases throughout the 20th century, as Westerners begin making determined attempts to climb the many mountains in Tibet and Nepal. 1921 Lieutenant Colonel CK Howard-Bury creates the nickname the abominable snowman entirely by mistake. The blunder occurred when Howard-Bury’s Everest expedition encountered many footprints at the inhospitable altitude of 20,000 feet. Howard-Bury excitedly related his discovery to a bungling journalist from the Calcutta Statesman, who misreported the story. The sherpas had said “meh-teh” (meaning “manlike thing that is not a man”) but the reporter wrote “metoh-kagmi”, which translates roughly as ‘abominable snowman’. 1925 Photographer NA Tombazi provides a detailed description of a naked, upright, darkly coloured, dwarf-like creature, seen from 300 yards. Returning to camp Tombazi discovers human-like prints that are only six inches long by four inches wide.


15

1942 After escaping from a Siberian prison. Slawomir Rawiz reports seeing two large, ape-like creatures while crossing the Himalayas. He claims to have observed the creatures for several hours from a distance of just 100m. However, it should be pointed out that many critics disbelieve Rawiz’s escape story, let alone the fact that he spend four hours watching a couple of yetis strolling around. 1950 Yeti-mania takes off in the British press with the publishing of Eric Shipton’s sensational photographs of large prints at 60,000 feet up the side of Everest. Detractors claim they are the prints of an everyday creature that have been enlarged and distorted by the melting snow. 1953 Sir Edmond Hilary scales Mount Everest and reports seeing large footprints. 1957 American oil millionaire Tom Slick (that really was his real name) funds a series of missions to find the beast. After an exhaustive search one expedition returns with a piece of suspected yeti faeces. Lab analysis shows it contains an unidentified parasite. Bernard Heuvelmans writes, ‘Since each animal has its own parasites, this indicates that the host animal is equally an unknown animal.’ 1959 According to outlandish Hollywood gossip, actor Jimmy Stewart smuggles the remains of a supposed yeti (the so-called ‘Pangboche Hand’) to London from India by hiding it in his hand luggage. 1970 Mountaineer Don Williams gives the most comprehensive account of the mysterious creature yet, including odd cries, footprints, scared sherpas, dark shapes moving outside tents in the night, and a sighting through binoculars. 1998 By now people have grown unbelievably bored of yeti stories. However, the reports keep coming, with Craig Calonica reporting two ape-like bipedal creatures on Mount Everest. 2005 Walt Disney World Florida opens roller coaster Expedition Everest featuring a 25-foot tall animatronic yeti. The once majestic beast is now an amusement attraction. To this day there remains no concrete evidence that the fearsome creature actually exists. However it must be stated that the Himalayas are remote and sparsely populated, and that there is far greater chance of the yeti existing than other legendary creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster or North America’s Bigfoot. Hergé’s Yeti Hergé’s decision to include the mythical creature in Tintin in Tibet is testament to how tales of the yeti gripped the public imagination throughout the 1950s. The numerous hunts for the abominable snowman provided thrilling copy for tabloids all over the world, and ensured the enduring popularity of the legend. Hergé is famous for his meticulous research of the real life people and places featured in the Tintin series, and his approach to the yeti was no exception. Hergé was friends with Bernard Heuvelmans, the scientist who had examined the


16

yeti faeces discovered by the Slick expeditions and who authored the book On the Tracks of Unknown Animals. Heuvelmans provided Hergé with material that supplemented his already extensive file of newspaper cuttings. In his excellent book Tintin: The Complete Companion, senior Tintinologist Michael Farr recounts Hergé’s descriptions of his comprehensive documentation of the yeti mystery: “I had a list of everyone who believed that they had seen the yeti; I had a very detailed description of his habitat, his behaviour, photographs of his tracks, etc… I also met Maurice Herzog, who had climbed Anapurna and had seen tracks. He assured me they were not the tracks of a bear, as this was a quadruped animal that only stood on its hind legs on rare occasions. The tracks were clearly those of a biped and stopped at the foot of a large rocky outcrop… With all this information, I was easily able, as in the Moon books, to avoid the pitfalls of the legend.” But what is most striking about Hergé’s treatment of the yeti, is not its authentic details, but the nobility and compassion that he attributes to this supposedly fearsome creature. Hergé saw Tintin in Tibet as a “song dedicated to friendship”. The notion is reflected on numerous levels in the story, and not least in the way that Tintin’s unerring devotion to his friend Chang is paralleled by the yeti’s tender care of the Chinese boy. “My yeti is a being that also seeks friendship” said Hergé. “Already at the outset I had the intention of making him more human and not at all abominable”. By overturning popular ideas of the yeti as a terrifying monster Hergé makes a broader point about how easy it is to fear things which at first sight appear, strange, alien or foreign to us. This idea was clearly an important one to director Rufus Norris and playwright David Greig, who preface their adaptation of the story with Tintin’s line from the final act: “You said ‘poor snowman’… how strange. The only one who knows him and you don’t call him abominable.” Yet Hergé’s somewhat romantic vision of the yeti is brilliantly tempered by the bitter sweet conclusion to the story. The creature is left alone and lonely again, with Chang lamenting: “I hope they never succeed in capturing him. They’d treat him like some wild animal. I couldn’t bear to see that. I hope no one ever finds him.” It also should be noted that Hergé’s vision of a caring, sharing type of yeti is not entirely a flight of fancy. He based Chang’s rescue by the beast on a real life sherpa’s story of a little girl who was picked up and looked after by a migou (the Tibetan name for the yeti). The Yeti Lives!: Creating the Yeti on Stage Early on in the development of the production director Rufus Norris and designer Ian MacNeil considered using puppetry or animatronics to bring the legendary yeti to life on stage. The initial idea was that technical wizardry could be used to create a huge, towering yeti - creating a thrilling theatrical coup for the play’s climax. However during the course of exploratory workshops undertaken by Norris before the start of the rehearsals his approach to the character changed. It quickly became apparent that at the heart of the Hergé’s yeti was the beast’s humanity.


17

Although it is vital the yeti should have an arresting physical presence on stage, the heart of the character lies in its emotional interior, namely the character’s compassion and loneliness. Not trusting a puppet or robot to deliver the required emotional subtly and richness, Norris and MacNeil began to explore the possibility of using an actor to portray the creature. Actor Miltos Yerolemu has the daunting challenge of embodying the yeti on stage. One of the breakthrough moments in Yerolemu’s creation of the role came at the recording session for the yeti’s distant cries. Veteran sound designer Paul Arditti kept the tape running throughout the session, whilst he and assistant director Lucinka Eisler encouraged Yerolemu to experiment with different types of cries: a cry of loneliness, a warning cry, a cry of rage, of joy. This playful approach to the yeti’s voice proved to be a useful route into discovering the essence of the character. What started as a deep, guttural, animalistic cry, eventually shifted into a higher vocal register in which the human qualities of the creature could be more easily expressed. Another useful tool in developing the character was introducing elements of the costume, created by costume designer Joan Wadge, into rehearsals. These included small stilts hidden inside the costume to boost Yerolemu’s height, as well as a realistic mask developed from a head cast taken of the actor’s head. But despite the intricate costume, the emphasis still remains on the actor, and the poignant, complex quality of Yerolemu’s characterisation.


18

6. MYSTICISM With its depictions of levitation, Buddhist rituals and prophetic visions in dreams, Tintin in Tibet draws greatly on Hergé’s interest in mysticism. In what is regarded to be his most heartfelt and personal adventure, Hergé chose to really indulge his fascination with the paranormal and spiritual. What is Extra-sensory perception? Extra-sensory perception or ESP is the name given to any ability to acquire information by means other than the five senses - i.e. taste, sight, touch, smell and hearing - or any other sense already well-known to science - e.g. balance and proprioception (information sent to the brain from muscles, blood vessels and internal organs). Because the definition of ‘sense’ is vague, the precise definition of ‘extra-sensory’ is as well. However the term ESP is generally used in reference to humans, and to imply sources of information unknown to modern science. Specific types of ESP include:

• Perception of events in other places (for example clairvoyance). • Perception of aspects of others not perceivable by most people (for example aura reading). • The ability to sense communication from, and communicate with, people far away (for example telepathy, or

hearing the cries of your Chinese friend who is stranded in the freezing Himalayas after a plane crash). This strand of ESP also includes communicating with those beyond the grave (via mediums, séancing, spirit walking), or in other dimensions (astral projection).

There are countless other terms to describe such phenomena, including sixth sense, female intuition and ‘doing a Derren Brown’. The word psychic is sometimes used as both a noun and adjective to denote a person capable of using ESP in any of its forms. Many who believe in ESP maintain that it is a power innate to only a tiny percentage of the population; yet some believe that everyone is psychic, and that most people have just not learned to tap into their innate extra-sensory potential. The study of these abilities is called parapsychology. Parapsychology also addresses a range of other phenomena outside the explanations of current science (e.g. psychokinesis, psychometry). ESP in Tintin in Tibet ESP plays a vital role in Tintin’s adventure. At the very top of the story Tintin’s holiday is disturbed by dreams - a familiar voice calling for his help across a freezing wilderness. Tintin soon realises it is the voice of his friend Chang, and links the vision to news of a plane crash in the paper. It is this inexplicable, extra-sensory vision that forms the basis of the entire adventure, propelling Tintin, Snowy and Haddock to Tibet, and convincing our hero to gamble everything on Chang being alive - despite a ton of evidence to the contrary.


19

ESP then makes an equally dramatic intervention in the final stages of the adventure - with Blessed Lightning’s visions of Tintin in the blizzard, and then Chang’s presence in a cave below the Horn of the Yak. Without these bizarre, paranormal happenings, Tintin, Haddock, Snowy would end up resting in icy graves, and would never be reunited with Chang. Typically ESP is presented in fiction as a sinister and malevolent force, featuring in countless ghost stories and horror films. Yet with Tintin in Tibet, Hergé presents a very different perspective. Here ESP is presented wholly as a force for good. The numerous extra-sensory visions in Hergé’s story, no matter how distressing they may be at the time, are all preludes to rescue and salvation. For Hergé, ESP is a supernatural extension of mans’ capacity for heroism, compassion and love. Hergé’s’ Nightmares Tintin’s disturbing nightmares, and his journey to triumph through doubt and despair mirror the real life events of his creator Hergé. In the late 1950s, before he began work on what he was later to regard as his favourite Tintin adventure, Hergé was enduring a period of intense personal crisis. Hergé’s deep turmoil had two sources. Firstly the relentless demands placed upon the artist by the success of the Tintin series had left Hergé feeling stressed and exhausted. Secondly his 26-year marriage to Germaine (whom he affectionately referred to as Hergée) had grown stale and loveless. During this period of strife Hergé was plagued by vivid and deeply upsetting nightmares. These dreams had many different beginnings, but always the same ending - Hergé being overpowered and enveloped in the colour white. One dream began with Hergé being chased by a white skeleton that emerged from a white alcove, before everything turned white. So disturbed was Hergé that he meticulously recorded each dream and hired a renowned Swiss doctor, Professor Ricklin to analyse them. Ricklin’s advice: stop drawing Tintin. Thankfully Hergé did not follow doctor’s orders. But in many ways Tintin in Tibet can be seen as a defiant response to the Professor’s verdict. In the story Tintin ploughs on despite everyone else counselling him to abandon his quest. Likewise Hergé remained resolute. Although it is certainly Tintin’s bravery that drives the story forward, it is also important to say he can’t complete the mission alone, and is reliant on the devotion of his companions Captain Haddock, Snowy and Tharkey. Likewise Hergé was helped on his way by the new love in his life, Fanny Vlamynck. Vlamynck was an illustrator who had recently joined the Tintin studio, and her vibrant, energetic attitude to life (she was half Hergé’s age) reinvigorated the artist and provided him with a more positive outlook. Divorcing Germaine distressed Hergé greatly, but he was able to throw himself into his work, and create Tintin in Tibet as a positive expression of love, companionship and the never-say-die spirit. From his nightmares he drew the story’s bleak white landscape. From the death of his marriage he drew Tintin’s fears of losing Chang (Tintin in Tibet is by far the most emotional of the books, with Tintin openly shedding tears at the beginning). And finally, from his new life with Fanny, Hergé drew the compassion and heroism of nearly every character in the story. Tintin in Tibet is notable as the only Tintin adventure not to feature a villain. Even the much feared Yeti is revealed to be a character of deep humanity. Development of a Dream Sequence


20

Rufus Norris and David Greig’s stage adaptation of Tintin in Tibet begins with a very bold choice. The opening scene of the production is a dream sequence. Here Tintin, over-tired from his constant adventuring, is plagued by nightmares - nightmares we discover contain an SOS message from his old friend Chang. Greig and Norris’s choice has many different reasons behind it. Firstly it allows the show to start with a bang. Tintin’s anxiety dream creates an intense opening, full of striking visual images and physical action. This starting point provides far greater opportunities for the production to grab the attention of the audience than Hergé’s more measured start (Tintin returning from an Alpine hike) that works so well in the book. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the non-realistic form of a dream, allows Norris to introduce the audience to all the elements that will be used to tell the story on stage. In the first few moments of the show the audience sees all the major characters, as well as being introduced to music, choreography and physical action (including a martial arts sequence). Not tied to creating a realistic, narrative-based scene, Norris is able to introduce the numerous characters and formal devices in quick succession right at the start of the evening. Tintin’s dream becomes a way of introducing the audience to the style of the production. This task is particularly important when the audience arrive with the memory of the comic books in their head. The dream sequence is a way of saying ‘you are now watching a stage show. This is how it will look and sound. These are the new rules of how the story will be told’. Also the dream provides the opportunity to introduce the plays eponymous hero. Norris’ idea was always to introduce Russell Tovey’s Tintin through the iconic image from Hergé’s books. That is why Tintin first appears in his trademark blue sweater and plus-fours and holding a real dog. The idea here being that once the audiences’ desire to see the Tintin as they know and love him has been satisfied they will be more willing to enter the new territory into which the stage adaptation must inevitably take them. Very early on in rehearsals some elements of the dream sequence altered greatly. Initially the dream was conceived as having the Tintin family (Professor Calculus, the Thom(p)sons etc.) all urging the exhausted Tintin to fight on – ‘You can do it if you put your mind to it’ while he himself pleaded with them to let him rest. It quickly materialised that this version did not fit the logic of the story, where Tintin battles on despite everyone telling him to stop. Consequently the exchange between Tintin and his friends in the dream was reversed.


21

7. TIBETAN BUDDHISM What Is Buddhism? Buddhism is a philosophy based on the teachings of the Buddha, Siddh!rtha Gautama, whose lifetime is traditionally given as 566 to 486 BC. It has subsequently been accepted by many as a religion, and has approximately 350 million followers. The aim of Buddhist practice is to end the suffering of cyclic existence, or samsara, by awakening the practitioner to the realization of true reality, the achievement of liberation, or nirvana. To achieve this, one should purify and train the mind and also act according to the laws of karma, of cause and effect: perform positive actions, and positive results will follow, and vice versa. Buddhist morality is underpinned by the principles of harmlessness and moderation. Mental training focuses on moral discipline (sila), meditative concentration (samadhi), and wisdom (prajñ!). While Buddhism does not deny the existence of supernatural beings (indeed, many are discussed in Buddhist scripture), it does not ascribe power for creation, salvation or judgment to them. Tibetan Buddhism has a number of unique traits that distinguishes it from other schools of Tantric Buddhism, including:

• A belief in reincarnation lineages of certain lamas (known as tulkas) such as the Dalai Lama. • A practice wherein lost or hidden ancient scriptures (called termas) are recovered by spiritual masters. • The belief that a Buddha can be manifest in human form such as in the person of Padmasambhava, the saint

who brought Tibetan Buddhism to the Himalayas in A.D. 774. Monasticism is also a key feature of Tibetan Buddhism. It is estimated that 25% of the entire population of Tibet was monastic from the 16th century up to the Chinese invasion. There were thousands of monasteries in Tibet, and nearly all were ransacked and destroyed by Chinese communists. However most of the major ones have been at least partially re-established. Tibetan Tantric Teachings in Tintin in Tibet Hergé’s interest in Tibetan Buddhism was sparked by Alexandra David-Neel, a pioneering western Tibetologist. A prolific writer, it was David-Neel’s many books published in the 1930s (including such lively titles as With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet) that were the principle source of Hergé’s highly authentic and sympathetic depiction of the religion. The details of the rituals, costumes, monasteries and philosophy found in Tintin in Tibet were largely drawn from David-Neel’s writing. Hergé presents Buddhism as a positive and benevolent force in his story. Without the monks’ rescue party or Blessed Lightning’s visions Tintin would never complete his mission. By providing an enlightened depiction of Buddhist culture and giving the monks an active role in his narrative, Hergé went against the grain of conservative contemporary attitudes. The artist deliberately sets himself apart from the perspective of European colonists and Chinese communists. For Hergé foreign cultures were not something to be ignored or eradicated, but instead to be understood, protected, and learnt from.


22

8. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE COMIC BOOK Books, Strips and Novels A comic book is a magazine or book containing sequential frames of art work in the form of a narrative. Comic books are generally referred to as comics for short. However whilst this name implies comedy, the subject matter in comic books is not necessarily humorous. And in fact its dramatic seriousness varies widely. The earliest comic books were simply collections of three, four or five frame comic strips that had originally been printed in newspapers. The commercial success of these collections led to work being created specifically for the comic book form. In the late 20th century, a growing acceptance of the comic book form among the reading public coincided with usage of the term ‘graphic novel’, coined by Richard Kyle in 1964 to describe long-form, often hard-back comics. The term also implies a greater artistic value and integrity, although this highbrow definition is increasingly becoming needless. Comics continue to become ever more widespread in libraries and mainstream bookshops, and animation series such as The Simpsons have achieved great popularity with adults and children alike. A recent glut of film adaptations (including Spider-Man, Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Sin City) indicate the enduring popularity of the art form. An American Art Like jazz, rock and roll and Westerns comic books are a rare indigenous American art form. Since the invention of the comic book format in the 1930s, the United States has been the leading producer of comics, with only the British comic (during the inter-war period through to the 1970s) and Japanese manga coming close in terms of quantity. Notable events in the medium include American psychiatrist Frederic Wertham's criticisms of comics in his book Seduction of the Innocent, which led to the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency investigating the art form. In response to this attention from government and the media, the US comic book industry created Comics Code in 1954, which laid down rules of appropriate behaviour for comic book characters. Franco-Belgian Comics Both France and Belgium have a long tradition in comics and comic books, their two most famous sons being Asterix, from France, and of course Tintin from Belgium. In French-speaking countries comics are called BDs (from Bande Dessinée). La bande dessinée is derived from the original description of the artform as "drawn strips". It is not insignificant that the French term contains no indication of subject matter, unlike the American terms ‘comics’ and ‘funnies’, which imply an art form not to be taken seriously. Indeed, the distinction of comics as the ‘ninth art’ (le neuvième art) is prevalent in French language scholarship on the form, as is the concept of comics criticism and scholarship itself. The Great British Comic Although the first comic published in Britain, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday (1884), was marketed at adults, publishers quickly targeted a younger market. The fact that most publications were created for children quickly created a wide spread attitude that comics were somewhat juvenile.


23

Popular titles in the United Kingdom have included children’s comics The Beano and The Dandy (famous for their flagship characters Dennis The Menace and Desperate Dan); the sc-fi and action titles The Eagle and 2000 AD (home of Dan Dare and Judge Dredd respectively) and the adult-orientated Viz (home of Sid the Sexist and Billy the Fish) . The content of Action, a title aimed at children and launched in the mid 1970s became the subject of discussion in the House of Commons. Similar to investigations in the United States, it also led to a moderation of the content of comics, although such moderation was never formalised to the extent of a creation of any code, nor was it particularly lasting. Make Your Own Superhero Since their invention in the late 1930s, the superhero comic book has developed into a rich and complex genre. Like any artistic genre the superhero comic has its own clearly defined set of rules and conventions. These rules can act as useful guidelines for dreaming up your own comic book hero. Rule Number 1: Always pick a memorable name The name of your hero will doubtlessly be the name of your comic (Tintin being a prime example), so choose this very carefully. Above all keep it simple – the name Superman is hardly a work of genius - likewise Wonderwoman or Spiderman - yet these names have brought their characters huge popularity and lasting appeal. In fact your name cannot be too simple, and will preferably describe either what the character looks like (Batman), what their personality’s like (Dennis the Menace), or what they do (Elastigirl from The Incredibles). Rule Number 2: Decide what makes your hero so super For your hero to actually be super they need some unique and special abilities. Sometimes these are special powers beyond the capabilities of mortal human beings (Superman can fly, Spiderman can climb up walls etc), although this is by no means essential. Some heroes are just normal people, but normal people with extraordinary or extreme qualities. These characters are often defined in part by their job – Tintin for example is a newspaper reporter (an incredibly adventurous one) and Minnie the Minx is a schoolgirl (an unbelievably naughty one). Don’t be afraid to give your character more than one super power. After all, superman can fly, has incredible strength, x-ray vision, laser eyes etc, etc). Just always make sure that each of their powers is clearly defined. Rule Number 3: Devise an outlandish backstory The next question to ask is how did they end up being so special? To make comic book heroes authentic their past should be as ridiculous as possible. Some good examples include Spiderman (bitten by a radioactive spider); Superman (crashed to earth on a meteorite from the planet Krypton); Batman (witnesses his parents’ murder by muggers and decides to fight crime dressed as a bat); and most ridiculous of all Wonderwoman (from a race of eternally young amazonian women discovered on a pacific island and drafted in to fight the Nazis)! The text-book comic hero will also have an alter-ego, ie who they are in their everyday life. For example Batman is also Bruce Wayne and Spiderman is also Peter Parker.


24

However here it is important to decide how they change from one state to another. Clark Kent changes into Superman in telephone boxes. Wonderwoman meanwhile just twirls around very fast on the spot. Both these heroes actively choose to make this transformation, but not all heroes are afforded such a luxuary. The Incredible Hulk for example turns green and doubles in size whenever he gets angry, and consequently spends most of the time trying to stay calm. Simply deciding where the character lives can also be important. Where is their home? Is it Marlinspike or the Batcave beneath stately Wayne Manor? Also what city, village or town do they live in? Afterall, how can a hero be heroic if they’ve got no one to save! Does your hero live in the real world that exists around us, or in a fictional, alternative reality? Tintin is a good example of a character whose adventures are very much rooted in the real world. He visits real countries (eg Tibet or Scotland), and each adventure is underpinned by Hergé’s exhaustive research. Batman is different in that he exists in the made up world of Gotham City – a place that has many parallels with real life modern cities, but that doesn’t tie the artists to literal locations and having to make every event wholly credible. Rule Number 4: The Silhouette Rule When creating the now legendary Simpsons, cartoonist Matt Groening followed this most simple of rules: make sure your character is regonisable in silhouette. The most successful product of this rule is Mickey Mouse, as half the population of the world can identify him just from the outline of his head. Tintin is instantly recognisable too, primarily from his trademark quiff. Why not apply this rule to any existing cartoon character you can think of? The more successful the character, the clearer their outline. Rule Number 5: Get the right outfit The silhouette rule does not mean however that colour is not important. In a predominantly visual medium, superheroes are defined and identified by what they wear. The design of their costume – no matter how outlandish or simple – is crucial. Bold, primary colours are good (just picture Superman or Dennis The Menace), however something more simple can work too. Tintin’s blue jumper, or Bart Simpson’s orange t-shirt may not seem integral to the character, but if their clothing was suddenly changed it would immediately seem strange and disorientating. Rule number 6: Give them a catchphrase, symbol or iconic pose A well formulated catchphrase and strong pose or symbol will make your character more memorable. It will also help you generate millions of pounds in marketing revenue. Some good examples include: Catchphrases: “To infinity and beyond” (Buzz Lightyear); “My wings are like a shield of steel” (Batfink); “Eat my shorts” (Bart Simpson). “ Blistering Barnacles” (Captain Haddock). Rule number 7: Give them some friends Even the toughest superheroes rarely work alone. The trusty sidekick is a staple of the genre, and can prove very useful in creating variation and complexity in the narrative. Furthermore it is often essential for generating dialogue - as it gives


25

our heroes somebody to talk to about the challenges they face. Classic comic book partnerships include Tintin and Snowy, Asterix and Obelix and Batman and Robin. Another strategy is to band your heroes together in a gang like The Fantastic Four or The X-Men. Tintin too has a large team around him, including such colurful characters as Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus. If you’re undertaking this activity as part of a group, why not see if your friends have come up with heroes that might be compatible with yours? A good rule here is to create a strong group dynamic, where collaborations are based around differences as much as similarities. Rule number 8: Make the villain even more interesting than the hero What would Batman be without Catwoman, the Penguin, the Joker and the Riddler? What would Tintin do if he didn’t have baddies like General Alcazar and Rastapopoulos to contend with? Villains are invariably generated using the same sets of rules as the heroes, except of course that they use their special powers for evil, selfish causes. In addition to the eight rules above, it is also useful to apply the ‘James Bond villain rule’ here. This rule states that before attempting to kill the hero, the baddie must unneccessarily explain their plans for world domination in painstaking detail.


26

9. CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM Castafiore / Mrs Rama Nicola Blackwell Remi Michael Camp Haddock Sam Cox Pandit / Overcast Day Graham Kent Blessed Lightning Steven Lim Calculus / Head Porter / Grand Abbot Mark Lockyer Chang Kenon Mann Thomson Jason Rowe Thompson Nick Tigg Tintin Russell Tovey Snowy Simon Trinder Nestor / Pundit Duncan Wisbey Tharkey Tom Wu Yeti / Mr Rama Miltos Yerolemou Direction Rufus Norris Adaptation David Greig Rufus Norris Set Ian MacNeil Costumes Joan Wadge Lighting Rick Fisher Sound Paul Arditti Music Orlando Gough Choreography Toby Sedgewick Musical Direction Duncan Wisbey Casting Director Julia Horan CDG Voice Jeanette Nelson Illusions Mike Stuart Costume Supervisor Hattie Barsby Assistant Director Lucinka Eisler Fight Technical Advisor Jonathan Waller Movement Captain / Martial Arts Tom Wu


27

10. SYNOPSIS Switzerland Exhausted from his many adventures, boy reporter Tintin is holidaying in the Swiss Alps with his friend Captain Haddock and pet dog Snowy. He is unable to relax, plagued by nightmares containing the desperate cries of an (as yet) unidentified boy. The play opens in one of these dreams, with Tintin struggling in vain to reach the voice - fighting goons who get in his way and egged on by his friends Nestor the butler, Professor Calculus, the opera singer Bianca Castafiori, and police officers Thompson and Thomson. Tintin is woken from his nightmare by two snooping newspaper reporters and begins a game of chess with Haddock. However, the young man cannot keep his eyes open, and soon falls into another dream. When Tintin awakes with a cry he discovers a newspaper story about a plane crash in the Himalayas. A letter is delivered to Tintin from his dear friend Chang, a Chinese boy who had saved Tintin’s life on one of his earlier adventures. The letter announces Chang’s intention of visiting Tintin. But joy turns to grief when Tintin learns that Chang was on the crashed plane. Tintin, however is now convinced that his dreams are telepathic visions. Chang is alive and needs his help! Kathmandu Tintin jets to Kathmandu, dragging Snowy and a sceptical but loyal Haddock with him. Here Tintin visits a highly-strung official at the Department of Mountain affairs to obtain a pass for the perilous ascent of mountain Gosain Than. The trio then visit Pundit and Pandit’s Mountain Travel Agency to find an expert guide. Their enquiry leads them to a Buddhist temple, and experienced sherpa Ang Tharkey. Like everyone else they encounter, Tharkey warns that such an expedition will result in certain death for all those who attempt it. Yet Tintin is unrelenting, and Tharkey, moved by the boy’s devotion to his friend, agrees to join him. Gosain Than The expedition gets off to a decidedly shaky start – Haddock falls out with the Head Porter and gets delirious from exhaustion, whiskey and altitude sickness, whilst Snowy gets too drunk on whiskey. Crossing a rope bridge Snowy falls into the river and has to be rescued by his master. As the party beds down for the night, the Porters tell terrifying tales of the legendary Abominable Snowman, or Yeti. Haddock remains unconvinced of the creature’s existence, despite inhuman howls that carry on the wind around them. The team awake to find their camp surrounded by giant footprints and Haddock’s whiskey gone. The Captain flies into a rage, and falls into a crevasse, while the porters, terrified the beast will return, dump their packs and head home. The search party continues undeterred to the aeroplane crash site. Crash Site Haddock searches the planes’ fuselage and reports that there are only dead bodies within. Tintin is distraught. However that night he decides that he has to see the grisly sight for himself. Braving the piles of frozen bodies, Tintin discovers that Chang’s seat is empty and the seatbelt unbuckled!


28

Tharkey turns back – he has taken them as far as he promised, and grows afraid that the approaching snow storm will engulf them. Tintin however, buoyed up by the sighting of Chang’s yellow scarf at the top of a cliff, persuades Snowy and Haddock to press on. INTERVAL Cliff Face Climbing a sheer cliff, Haddock loses his grip and hangs perilously over the edge. He wants Tintin to cut the rope that joins them, but Tintin refuses, saying that they must either both be saved or they’ll die together. Tharkey (honour bound as their guide to lead the party to safety) rejoins the expedition just in time to save them. They climb further. Haddock – at the point of exhaustion – sees visions of Professor Calculus, Nestor, the Thom(p)sons and Bianca Castafiore. They set up camp before an avalanche, triggered by Haddocks’ sneezing buries them. Snowy struggles on in search of help as Tintin lies unconscious in the snow. Tibetan Monastery Buddhist monk Blessed Lightning has a vision of the stricken party. When Snowy arrives, the monk leads a mission to rescue them just as Tintin reaches the point of collapse. Tintin, Snowy and a by now particularly grumpy Captain Haddock regain their strength in the monastery. Here they encounter the Grand Abbott. Another of Blessed Lightning’s visions – a boy in a cave below the Horn of the Yak - leads our heroes back out into the snow, this time without their guide (Tharkey, alive but incapacitated, remains with the monks). The Yeti’s Cave Tintin finally finds Chang, sheltering in the Yeti’s cave. Haddock frightens the beast away before Chang can explain that it was the Yeti who saved him and cared for him after the crash. A procession of monks appears to herald their triumph, and they all begin their journey home. The anguished cries of the Yeti, alone once more, are heard in the distance.


29

11. ASSISTANT DIRECTOR’S REHEARSAL ROOM DIARY WEEK ONE Monday 10th October Day one begins with a meet and greet session for everyone involved in Tintin and who works at the Young Vic. We’re given a warm welcome by David Lan, Artistic Director, and an address by Mark Rodwell from the Hergé Foundation. The Young Vic has been working closely with the Foundation on Tintin from the very start, and Mark expresses great excitement about the project on their behalf. Next up is a deceptively simple name game, a game which quickly establishes the rule that if you’re in the rehearsal room you get involved, whether you’re an actor or not. The game involves passing a ball in a circle: calling the name of the person you pass to, and making eye contact as you throw the ball. Eventually the element of saying the names out loud is eliminated, and the ball is thrown in silence, now always following the same pattern. More balls are added in, until a steady rhythm of passing and receiving is established. Before long a quiet concentration has fallen on the room, with everyone alert and engaged in the steady rhythm of the game. The key to the exercise is being alert to what’s going on around you at all times, so you’re ready to receive each of the balls when they come to you, and ready to them pass on. The analogy with acting in an ensemble is clear, and Rufus points out that for this piece it will be very important to keep a tight rhythm going within the group at all times. Next there’s a read-through of the script. A few of the smaller parts are yet to be distributed and Rufus asks us to bear with him in this. It’s becoming clear that many of his decisions will only be made as he gets to know the actors and sees how they work together. This is also the first time that David Greig, who wrote the adaptation with Rufus, has heard this draft of the script read aloud, and already he’s making adjustments on his laptop. There’s the odd joke that's unashamedly out of place (references to Coronation Street and garibaldi biscuits) but David mentions that he likes to put in a few touches for the cast to enjoy even though they’ll never make the final piece. He also refers to that little window an architect puts in the most awkward and unlikely of places and then obligingly agrees with his client to remove, while his less glaringly quirky ideas slip through unnoticed… Next is the model box showing, led by Ian MacNeil, the designer. A big part of his challenge – and the challenge for the whole show - is the need to appeal to young audiences who’ve never heard of Tintin, as well as to the seasoned Tintin fan. The emphasis will definitely go on pleasing the former – telling a good story that is self-contained – but wherever possible, there’ll be references to iconic Tintin images. Initial ideas for the set design incorporate the moon rocket, the giant mushroom and the Sir Francis Haddock statue from the Tintin books. Other ways that the piece will play homage to the cartoon is by playing with the switch between 2-D and 3-D, and by working with the familiar Tintin colour scheme. For example, the specific blues, whites and greys that Hergé used for the mountain scenes were particular to the photo-developing techniques of his time, and the images he would have worked from. These colours have been used in the set-design. Also Tintin aficionados will recognize period details amongst props and costumes specific to the late 1950s and early 1960s - when the story is set.


30

A further challenge for the creative team has been contending with the epic Barbican stage. From past experience (the Young Vic’s Sleeping Beauty transferred there last year), Rufus knew they’d have to make the space more intimate. To this end the production team built outward from the front edge of the stage, bridging the gap with the auditorium, and allowing the back of the stage to move a good way forward. It’ll be essential, though, for the actors to get training vocally and physically, as they’ll still have a vast space to fill. The afternoon involves a movement session with Toby Sedgewick, Movement Director. We look for ways to theatricalise the action of walking up the mountain. We need to show Captain Haddock speeding ahead and then falling behind the rest of the team. We explore different ways of doing this in a 2-D frame, where the characters are seen in profile – an image taken directly from the book. Ian has explained that this framing is unusual for the Tintin books, where the action nearly always happens on the diagonal – bottom left to top right or top left to bottom right, a convention which has been incorporated into the set design. This scene is a light one – the place for gags. The session is a chance for Rufus to establish that actors in his process are invited – and expected – to pitch in with their ideas. Most suggestions, from the inane to the inspired, are given a whirl. We end up with a very rough structure for the scene, to be drawn on at a later stage. The company are then taught a couple of songs by Orlando Gough, the composer. The first, Himalaya, is based on the musical style of Bhangra. Orlando makes it clear that he doesn’t want to try and replicate Bhangra, which isn't in the immediate culture of anyone in the company, but to use its rhythm and its feel to create something new. The other song is Save Us Tintin (aka The Corpse Song) , which Orlando and Rufus are unsure will make the piece. In its current form the song only achieves part of what it needs to do in narrative terms, i.e. to become increasingly frantic and agonized. But it’s a catchy number and everyone is humming it for the rest of the day. Tuesday 11th October A daily half-hour warm-up will be led by Tom Wu, the actor playing Tharkey, to build stamina and prevent the illness and injuries that can occur with a long winter-time run. This show will be especially demanding as it involves flying, climbing, fight scenes and a steeply raked stage. Tom has a background in martial arts and he uses elements of tai chi and yoga to get us moving and focused. We watch a documentary about Hergé, which fuels a company discussion about the project we’re embarking on. The documentary flags up a difficult aspect of this production – Hergé’s politics. Hergé worked for a strongly right-wing organisation. It’s hard to tell how much he was expressing his own feelings through his work and how much he was obeying his employers. Some of the early books in particular have been accused of depicting racial stereotypes – e.g. Tintin in the Congo – but Mark Rodwell of the Foundation points out the importance of putting Hergé in the context of his times. By the time Hergé gets to Tintin in Tibet, his approach to depicting characters of different races has changed – the level of cultural research is far deeper and for the first time there’s a non-white hero, Tharkey the sherpa. Tintin in Tibet stands out from the other adventures in many ways. Hergé was going through a moral crisis at the time he wrote it – he was having an affair with one of his illustrators – and the book's themes of loyalty, faith and confrontation


31

with one’s demons seem an echo of Hergé’s own experiences. David points out that during the course of the story, Tintin becomes an adult, in the sense that he’s forced to develop his own moral code. In principle, this makes for good theatre, but must be made more explicit than it is in the book. David feels that he’s engaged in writing the story Hergé might have written had he been more in touch with himself. Rufus and David had originally wanted for Tharkey to die in the play, so that Tintin would be forced to weigh up the success of rescuing his friend Chang against the tragedy caused by leading other friends into danger. The Hergé Foundation felt this would be too large a diversion from the original, so this moral dilemma will need to be expressed in other, subtler, ways. We start reading through the play, this time stopping to address structural issues. In the hotel lobby scene we play around with inserting the crooner’s song at different stages. What function will the music have? How can it help to structure the scene? Once the opening dream sequence is finished, it’s essential to establish a normality in the hotel scene, to let the audience know that we’re at the top of the show and everything is, at least on the surface, safe and calm in Tintin’s world. We then discuss how to represent Snowy, Tintin’s dog. There’s a plan to have a real dog that morphs into a puppet and then into the actor Simon Trinder. It’s still to be decided how or when this will happen. Having a real dog allows us to show the iconic comic book image, but the second transition into human being then has to be properly justified. Part of the problem is how to do the transition in a clever, meaningful way, without setting up a whole separate story. David feels the justification needs to come out of the story itself, e.g. that Snowy has two sides - the angel and devil that feature in the book – one more carnal, the other more intellectual. Perhaps this is a key to why he becomes human – trying to behave in a logical, ‘civilised’, way but always tempted not to. Is Snowy a cross between Tintin and Haddock? The gallant hero and the lovable but irresponsible drunkard? At one point Rufus has enough of talking theory and sends us off in groups to try out different solutions. Quite a few interesting ideas come out but the issue feels unresolved. The best thing has been getting people on their feet and working together in small groups for the first time. Other points that come up: The dream sequence is an overture and to some extent we need to know what it’s an overture to, before we can make the scene. The dream sequence needs to establish three main things: Chang, the energy of Tintin; and the key family members (i.e. Thompson and Thomson, Castafiore, Calculus and Nestor) What do we show of Chang in the dream sequence? David had decided to cut the letter Tintin receives from Chang in the book, to simplify the story, but we realise from the reading that we’re missing a vital bit of information: Tintin’s relationship to Chang. Why are they friends? The audience need to actually feel something for Chang and his friendship with Tintin, before they can care about Chang dying or not. David and Rufus decide we need to find a ‘happy Chang’ moment. Lots of structural questions are coming up - Rufus refers to the growing ‘what-in-god’s-name-do-we-do-with-that’ pile. He's putting a lot of emphasis on letting the actors in on the process of writing at this point, taking their ideas on board. Some


32

of the group’s suggestions are bound to be covering ground he and David have already discussed at length, but it seems important to be establishing this collaborative approach. Wednesday 12th October Orlando teaches the Tintin song for the overture. The group is quick to pick up the song and sounds surprisingly together for such an early stage. Several of the actors also play an instrument and there'll be no extra musicians playing in the show. Rufus says that the process at the moment – with Orlando but also with other aspects of the show – is about putting together a palette of material to draw on, which will be refined more and more as we go on, especially during the previews. We spend the afternoon exploring ways of portraying the monks in Tibet. Tom proposes a way of walking based on a Beijing Opera technique, where the feet are very active but the body hardly moves up and down, almost as if it’s floating. Working within the 2-D frame, various variations on this are tried. Most ideas are irreverent and silly (e.g. a monk on a skateboard which is hidden from view, so the monk appears to be floating). Rufus is becoming more and more clear that we’re working towards a ‘poor theatre’ aesthetic, but one that is framed by very beautiful and well-crafted design. Simple ideas, without apology for the mechanism behind them, seem to work best. We begin to discuss the Head Porter / Haddock relationship. The Head Porter as the anti-Haddock. At last he has met his match. Thursday 13th October In the warm-up we learn a simple martial-arts sequence. This will be useful for when Haddock tries to fight with the Monks. Rufus asks that the actors keep rehearsing this one sequence to learn it properly, rather than try and fail to become martial arts experts. We continue reading through script. Points raised in discussion include the following: How can Tintin giving orders to porters be more dynamic? A constant rhythm of Porter! Yes! ‘Instructions!’ Yes! etc is established. Should the Head Porter speak Nepalese? Or do we find some other convention for the language issue? A direct translation of the Nepalese insults into English? Some kind of nonsense language with the rhythm of Nepalese? Or Nepalese with the rhythm of a London cab driver? Is there any English language equivalent of the porters that we could draw on? Not clear for now. For now everyone having fun inventing their own version of Nepalese, but no practical solution as yet. David and Rufus have come to an important decision about the dream sequence. It should be a true anxiety dream and play on Tintin’s self-doubt. For Rufus this opening sequence is about inner demons – a person who’s extremely driven and hard-working usually has some small voice inside telling them that they’re lazy and going nowhere, so they work all


33

the harder. In the new version, rather than supporters, the family circle of Nestor, the Thom(p)sons etc, become the manifestation of Tintin’s inner demons, the nay-sayers in his head. This immediately makes more sense of the play and also gives it a darker edge. The change will necessitate quite a bit of rewriting, especially of song lyrics. Friday 14th October We spend the afternoon on research into Tibet. We’re paid a visit by Tenzin Samphel, a Tibetan who grew up in exile in India and was recommended to us by Tibet House, the London-based organisation set up to promote the Tibetan cause in the UK. Tenzin talks to us about Tibetan culture, the religion, rituals, language and traditions. Rufus is keen to honour Hergé’s own commitment to cultural authenticity that is evident in Tintin in Tibet. It’s clear that we won’t be trying to recreate Tibet, rather to pay tribute to it. Tenzin teaches us some prayer positions and rituals to use in the monastery scenes, and answers a host of questions from the cast. We record him speaking Tibetan and singing a Tibetan song at Rufus’ request. He begins to sing with timidity but quickly seems to forget we're there, closing his eyes and singing with passion. Although he's by no means a trained singer, nor even sings especially in tune, it’s very audible in his voice that his culture and language lie close to his heart. It’s an inspiring way to end the week. WEEK TWO Monday 17th October We work on the porters’ scene in the hotel lounge, where Tintin makes preparations for the trip, while Haddock protests. There’s general excitement about possible visual ideas, as well as ways of creating a musical rhythm underneath the text. Rufus remains very focused on how to keep the scene clear for the audience despite its chaotic energy. We have a brief yodelling class from Orlando, in preparation for the crooner song, which will underscore the hotel scene. It’s nice to get an insight into another medium but no major yodelling talents emerge. We then explore ways to shift between the hotel lobby and Tintin’s dream – which happens several times during the first scene. Rufus tries using the crooner song as a means to achieve this shift. He asks Russell to stand in the centre of the circle while the others sing. The chorus start to respond vocally to Russell’s movements, discovering different ways of warping the song in relationship to what Tintin’s doing physically. Eventually a system is found whereby each time Tintin drops off, his head falling, the music falls with him and the note is held. When he wakes up, the song picks up where it left off. Rufus has a very musical approach to text and has an obvious ability to interweave the different strands of the production to whatever ends the storytelling requires – he's as likely to find a musical solution to tell the story as he is to find a visual or textual one. Tuesday 18th October A production meeting in the morning flags up just how many unresolved questions there are. Rufus must come up with lots of answers very soon. A number of pressing costume, props, and set issues all hang on decisions that will be made in the rehearsal room. He has been asked for a costume plot for the whole play to be ready asap, which effectively means


34

that he needs to know where each actor will be at every moment in the piece (i.e. who’s doubling which roles, and where will each change be made etc). It becomes clear to me that Rufus’ structure of the first week of rehearsals (including the time spent on testing out the 2D frame and finding out if using a real dog will work) was partly designed to find answers to the many outstanding production questions. Back in rehearsals, we have a recap of music for the initial dream sequence and play with inserting text into the music in different places. We then start putting this first dream on its feet. Rufus tries a simple choreography based on the whole cast running on the spot and changing direction in unison – a bit of a tribute to the Tintin TV animation. He appears absolutely confident of his idea, but afterwards mentions that he’s never attempted ensemble choreography in his life and is relieved to have got the first time out of the way. Wednesday 19th October The office of mountain affairs: The premise of this session is to find the logic of the Official scene. It needs to be a farcical situation, one that Tintin manipulates to his own end. We need to discover the rules of the scene - where does the gag lie? For example does the Official insist on everyone being very quiet (as he's afraid of loud noises) but then complains that he can’t hear what’s being said? Nicky questions the character names – Mr and Mrs Patel – and asks if it would be possible to have a more Nepalese name, which would have less baggage attached to it (i.e. unavoidable images of UK corner shops). David will come back with a list of possible alternatives. David mentions that he has never written old fashioned slapstick comedy before, and although he could try his hand at it, he feels it'd be more productive if the rules of the scene were found in rehearsal. We read the scene and Rufus makes changes to the text and charts the actions that will be played. It's striking how much he works by listening to a scene and shaping it to sound right, before wanting to look at it. Thursday 20th October David aims to have a new version of the text by the end of the week, which the actors will be able to use as a basic script. He’ll be in rehearsals full-time until then, working on the logic and structure of the piece with Rufus, and a large part of rehearsal times is being devoted to this, with the actors’ input. In the midst of one of these discussions Rufus jokes that ‘one day we’ll talk about character development’ and several of the actors look relieved. Rufus tells the cast that it might feel strange to be working this way round, but that putting these structures into place now will make it much easier later in the process. It feels important that he has acknowledged this, as some of the actors are keen to get their teeth into the parts. Also important to have reiterated that this structuring is an essential part of the process and that the actors are integral to it. Whilst looking at the hotel scene, Rufus has a word about ‘quick-hit characters’, such as the reporter, Remy. ‘Whenever you get one of these characters who aren’t developed, make a strong decision each time you play them. One day try them


35

with a stutter, another day try something else. Nine times out of ten you’ll look like an idiot but then you'll find something. Don’t worry about looking like an idiot’. We do some individual work with Simon (Snowy) to explore the physicality of a dog. We spend time on being 100% dog, to find the state, physicality and characteristics that Simon can draw on later, when the character will probably be much more humanised. Friday 21st October Orlando brings in the music for the Marlinspike Song that Haddock sings in a state of exhausted delirium. Orlando points out that he forgot he was supposed to write a sea shanty and wrote a waltz instead, but that it can easily be turned into one, which he proceeds to do – the song seems to adapt naturally to Haddock’s salty-sea-dog world. The song is beautiful and Rufus is very taken with it. He’s also worried because this is a Haddock moment. If this becomes the big musical number of the piece (which also involves the spectacle of flying the family in), it will place great emphasis on the wrong character. This is all the more problematic since the Ice Tintins – ice replicas of Tintin that haunt him at the peak of his exhaustion – are in doubt for technical reasons. However, as the music is so rich, Rufus feels the Marlinspike song could become a bigger number than planned, incorporating all of the characters rather than just Haddock. Each character would take a verse, singing about whatever it is that’s keeping him going. Orlando has also rewritten The Corpse Song, which he feels he got wrong the first time round. He has cut most of the original lyrics, feeling it was distracting and unnecessary to get involved in the stories of individual corpses. The call is divided into two groups – the main characters work on Act Two scenes while the rest of the cast looks at music. We’re discussing Snowy’s “butterfly, tree trunk, squirrel” text, a kind of mantra he repeats so as not to think about the precarious position he’s climbing in. We discuss whether these are the right images for Snowy to use, or if images of food would suit him better. Rufus is reminded of a food story from when he and David first worked together, in Ramallah. The telling of stories from Palestine, most of which involve near brushes with death, take over most of the rest of the session. The link to the rehearsal is tenuous but we're all riveted. It feels good to be working in more intimate groups now, and for the main characters to start spending time as a group. We discuss the moment where Haddock falls and tells Tintin to cut the rope. How can we make the fall a surprise? Build in a distraction from Snowy, like peeing in Haddock’s eye? How to create a light moment that is suddenly undercut by the fall? WEEK THREE Monday 24th October Most of the cast work with Toby on the introduction to the world of Kathmandu, while Rufus works with the main characters on the moment where Tintin rescues the drunken Snowy. It’s an opportunity for Russell to confront some key questions about the character – would Tintin ever hit Snowy? If so, what is it in this situation that would drive him to it? What are Tintin’s weaknesses and why does this situation make him confront them? We’ve been returning again and


36

again to the idea of Tintin’s fear of failure and to the fact that in this story his determination to save one friend puts other friendships on the line. We discover that the recording we did of Tenzin speaking in Tibetan didn’t record properly and arrange a proper recording session with him. It has been decided that the porters will definitely speak Tibetan, rather than English with an accent or some made up language, so there’s a big learning task ahead. Tuesday 25th October We work on music for the Snowy Song and the wedding procession with Orlando. Rufus listens to the wedding band music and asks the actors to do a rendition where they put down their instruments and imitate the sounds with their voices. The result is quirky and surprisingly dynamic. This may or may not be used but it’s useful to have options like this in case there are times when getting instruments on stage isn't practical. Rufus finds a basic shape for the Tharkey scene. It's clear that this scene will have a strong emotional weight. Tom Wu and Russell Tovey have very different energies on stage and the contrast between them is potentially very dynamic. Tom has a different energy to the other actors in general and brings a particular focus to the stage. Perhaps the fact that he has been leading the company warm-ups, where he passes on an expertise that most of us lack, is also helping him fall naturally into the role of Tharkey the Sherpa guide. Thursday 27th October Everyone comes in looking tired today and Tom adapts the warm-up to involve work on the floor with a focus on relaxation. The angle of the rake has been marked out on the wall of the rehearsal room and a scale model of the set brought in. It's a bit of a shock to realise just how steep the rake will be in places. Rufus asks Tom to incorporate calf and ankle exercises into the warm-up in preparation. Steven Lim points out that the rake will also have a knock-on effect on voice, as it will be much harder to relax the neck and throat muscles. We have to reduce the number of people who can play both porters and corpses due to quick costume change issues. Rufus is careful to involve as many people as possible in each group scene, reluctant to have actors sitting in the dressing room for any length of time. The Himalaya expedition takes shape. Some of the actors are beginning to get anxious to spend more time on character development. Rufus also very keen to spend more time rehearsing scenes and less time on structuring. But it seems the nature of the process that character, narrative structure and the time-consuming group scenes all need to develop in conjunction. Friday 28th October


37

We work on the Haddock and Head Porter scenes, running them in sequence to get the development of their conflict right. We try confining them in a tent together to see what heights of childishness their fight can reach. Helpless giggling in rehearsals for the rest of the afternoon. I go on an excursion to the park with Simon Trinder, who plays Snowy, for a bit of method research into being a dog. Rufus suggests that Simon plays the state of a dog, (finding the way he looks at the space, the way he responds to other people or animals etc) on a very small scale. No-one else need know he’s playing this, it’s just for Simon to find out what the impulses are. As it happens, self-consciousness doesn't present a problem, and before long Mr Trinder is sticking his face in puddles, peeing on trees and stalking old ladies. It's a wonder we don’t get arrested. Simon is encouraged by the experience, which gives him a lot of material to draw on. WEEK FOUR Monday 31st October Reading through from Act Three (discovering the Yeti footprints) to the end, cutting lines that can be played out in physical action instead of stated. Most of the focus is on establishing what the power relations should be. There's an interesting power struggle developing between Tintin and Tharkey. What’s the trigger for Tharkey leaving the expedition? This is the first time Tharkey will ever have let himself be led in the mountains by a westerner. Tintin is faced for the first time with an older person who is wiser than he is – normally he’s used to the opposite (Haddock is a drinker, and the family characters who all obstruct Tintin as much as they help him). We need to go back and chart Haddock and Snowy’s relationship through the play – moments of irritation with each other, moments where both are afraid. Also moments of unity, especially when Tintin is angry or stubborn. Do they share a joke about Tharkey behind his back? When Tharkey returns and rescues Haddock, we need to wow the audience with his mountaineering skills – he must have an ease of climbing by comparison to the others. Russell is keen to simplify his text in places, to make it feel less formal. This makes it more naturalistic and often more believable, but also raises the question of tone – Snowy and Haddock’s text is quite heightened – should Tintin’s be more ‘normal’ by contrast, or does he also need a more heightened style? Rufus is concerned that the last part of the first half (the arrival at the plane wreck) is too long-winded. His experience of family shows tells him that by this point the audience will be gearing up for an interval. The scenes will need to be cut down or compressed so more than one thing is happening at once. One solution is to cut Tharkey’s story about Ang Tsering, Tharkey’s sherpa friend who died on the first rescue expedition. The point of the story is to draw a parallel with Tintin - being over ambitious in the mountains can cost lives. The lines could be adapted so they are directly about Tintin.


38

Simon Trinder is keen to find an accent for Snowy that’s different to his own. He tries a range of UK dialects, even having a go at French, before settling on Scots, which he feels gives Snowy a light, playful quality. Simon’s dog physicality is improving all the time – he’s keeping the centre of gravity low, with the weight in the hind quarters, using the nose for direction and keeping a flexible spine. Later Rufus tells Simon to be careful the Scots doesn’t make him camp. At the moment Rufus prefers Simon’s own accent and feels the Scots risks imposing something on the character. He sees that Simon is inspired by it though and keen to see him explore it further. Tuesday 1st November The Ice Tintins idea has been abandoned for technical reasons, so it will now be the family who will encourage Tintin to give up the fight after the avalanche (assuring him that he’s “useless, helpless” etc) – the demons inside his head reappearing. Most of the day is spent on the monastery scenes. We see the Grand Abbott for the first time. He’s played by the same actor as the Head Porter and there’s an interesting resonance between the two characters – one at the top of the cast system, the other at the bottom. Rufus points out that although the Grand Abbott should be an interesting character, he must be played absolutely straight – his status and his sense of humour should be created by the other monks, in reaction to him. Wednesday 2nd November Toby Sedgewick works on the Kathmandu sequence, focusing on creating the immediate impression of a lively city for when Tintin, Haddock and Snowy first arrive. Working out the logistics of a scene of organised chaos is proving quite confusing. The more chaotic the scene appears, the more in control the actors need to be. We're also aware that this scene will be hugely affected by the set design, and will probably need a lot of adaptation once we're at the Barbican. Thursday 3rd Nov How should the porters describe the Yeti to Haddock? It has been decided that the porters will speak in Tibetan, and someone suggests throwing in occasional English words, the more unlikely the better. Rufus is tempted but not sure this is the right place for that kind of gaggery. The porters have to be in absolute terror at the prospect of Haddock attracting the Yeti and it’s important not to undermine them. We explore ways for the porters to describe the Yeti physically, by becoming the Yeti as a group. After lots of failed attempts, we discover a very silly but effective way to create the illusion of long arms, using several actors’ arms in combination. This becomes the basis of the monster and gives an instant playfulness to the scene. Also puts everyone in a good mood. An evening session is spent with Simon, for work on exploring Snowy’s character. Rufus breaks the character down into four basic states:

• Dog


39

• Idle dog • Tintin’s dog • Dirty dog

Rufus is particular about naming each state in the right way – giving Simon something very specific to refer back to. These labels take him through a range of states: obedience and loyalty to Tintin; a dog-world where everything is governed by carnal desires to eat or sniff or sleep; a lazy state where he’d rather have the easy life than climb up mountains; or on the rampage where he gives in to inner demons that lure him to drink whisky and seduce other dogs. We do a long improvisation that allows Simon to move through these different states. Friday 4th November We look at the scene with Pundit and Pandit. A first read through – Duncan and Graham have a natural complicity and have quickly fallen into a rhythm for the scene. What they’re offering works in itself, but Rufus has worked with Duncan before and is keen to push him into new territory. He encourages them to try different variations on the characters over the next couple of weeks. “Just make sure that you’re balanced – whatever one does, the other is diametrically opposed. The main thing I want is to get you away from what’s comfortable for you – from what you already have in your bag”. Some more surprising and much funnier variations on the duo start to emerge. Saturday 5th November A shorter session today, with the main characters only. A mock-up of the fly piece has been rigged in the rehearsal room, and we work out the main configurations of the actors for the climbing scenes. This is going to be the most daunting aspect of the technical rehearsals once we get on stage at the Barbican, and everyone takes the opportunity to terrify each other with set disaster stories from Christmases past. We work on Haddock’s fall, still searching for a catalyst that can involve Snowy. Russell asks why Snowy needs to be involved – can’t Haddock just grab a loose piece of rock? For Rufus it’s about one piece of action coming out of another. The value of a domestic row is too good to miss – people scrapping in such a precarious situation will heighten the stakes. Russell is keen to cut various bits of his text, which feel convoluted or unnecessary to him. Rufus doesn’t always agree with the cuts but does takes Russell’s instinct seriously, as he’s often flagging up something in the text that needs clarifying or developing in some way. The climbing section will have four types of sound: Internal – breathing External – wind, snow Wishful – Marlinspike song Fantasy – the family visions As with the four Snowy states, Rufus is very specific about the names he gives to each sound element, which allows everyone to be on the same page. This feels especially important for a sequence that can’t be developed fully until the tech.


40

The Tharkey / Tintin confrontation: Rufus tells Tom to not let Tharkey get too angry. “You’re a man who never normally gets angry, least of all in the mountains, where it’s vital to have self-control. This moment of conflict is a warning sign to you – to have lost your cool with Tintin lets you know that you’re all in danger, and that you must pull back immediately. Tintin, in the meantime, has never had to apologise to anybody in his life – he’s normally the hero - so apologising to Tharkey is a big moment for you.” WEEK FIVE Monday 7th November We work on the first Tharkey scene, exploring ways of using the space to tell the story visually as well as through the text. The main metaphor is Tintin trying to get on the same level as Tharkey, in order to convince him to lead the rescue expedition. We explore visual ways to express this: Tintin sits when Tharkey sits, or stands when he stands. Rufus’ notes to Snowy: “play with mirroring Tintin, or with being his shadow. Think of yourself as Tintin’s eye’s – if you can’t see Tharkey then as far as you’re concerned Tintin can’t either. Once you’ve moved to a position, have the confidence to stay there.” All of these notes give Simon concrete, practical tasks to focus on and less time to think, which seems to give him an immediate freedom with the character. Tuesday 8th November A good part of the afternoon is spent on improving the on-the-spot walk of the porters in the expedition. At the moment everyone is doing slightly different things and the image doesn’t yet read clearly. We break the walking movement down to see what works best and to try and get everybody using the same technique. By the end of the afternoon the sequence is already much stronger.

Wednesday 9th November In the afternoon a class of seven to eight year olds comes to watch a run of the first half-hour of the show. It’s nerve- wracking for the actors to have an audience at this early stage, but is an incredibly useful exercise for the whole team. The overall feeling from the children is that they enjoy what they see, which is encouraging for everyone. They’re a brilliantly transparent audience, feeling free to talk amongst themselves the moment they lose interest. It’s also obvious that they engage more readily when the story is being told visually. Minimal text seems to work best (one of the children, when asked if there was anything he found boring, replied ‘when they were talking’), but it’s striking that when the text is very strongly supported physically, the children’s attention is held far longer. This is most obvious in the scene where we first meet Tharkey, where the tensions in the space between the main characters are very strong. Tom Wu (who plays Tharkey) has a very focused physical presence that seems to mesmerize the kids. One discovery from the run is just how high energy this first sequence is. The next step will be to modulate the pace and to make sure the audience have time to breathe. Sue Emmas, Associate Artistic Director of the Young Vic, is very positive about the run, but points out that it’s good to be aware of the effect it’ll have on the kids to be so stimulated in the first 20 minutes of the show. It’s important to find a balance between spectacle and the need for them to engage on an emotional and intellectual level, which could be that much harder after such an explosive beginning.


41

A second discovery is that Snowy is poised to steal the show. The kids love him and sometimes seem to engage more with the character of the dog than with the content of a scene. For example, when Tintin discovers that Chang was in the plane crash, the kids go very quiet and seem to engage with his sadness, but then start giggling the moment Snowy speaks. We’ll need to work on making sure that Snowy doesn’t split the focus of scenes though, as Sue points out, it’s a good problem to have. After the showing we break off into groups with the kids to talk about what they saw. They seem to have understood the basic storyline and got a grasp on the characters. Some of them were confused by Snowy turning from a dog into an actor but I hope this will be much easier to grasp once we have the proper set and props. WEEK SIX Monday 14th November Stephen and Tom choreograph the fight scene between the monks and Haddock. The whole fight is based around Haddock mistaking the monks’ appeasing movements for gestures of attack. The choreography is great but it’s not yet clear what the catalyst is for all the commotion. Is it enough for Haddock to be unsteady on his feet because of frostbite? The fight ends in a very satisfying moment of Haddock head butting a large gong, which surely does Hergé proud. Tuesday 15th November What is the dynamic between Blessed Lightning and Overcast Day? Overcast Day is played by Graham who also plays Pandit, the grumpy half of the Expedition Agents duo. Overcast Day is written as a similar character to Pandit, but while exploring the scene Graham hits upon a much more naïve, anxious character, who can’t stop eating. Rufus decides that this is more interesting and wants to try putting him in a fat suit to push the character further. Wednesday 16th November A number of dramatic character haircuts today – Simon’s bleached white for Snowy, Sam’s and Kenny’s black for Haddock and Chang. Sam now has flashes of looking quite uncannily like the Haddock of the cartoons. The new images give a boost to the company – it feels that we’re one step closer to the show. It’s been decided that Snowy’s attitude in the Snow Dog song is a bit too macho to suit the character and could be less self-assured. Rufus wants to try Snowy being more drunk. Simon professes to being the world’s worst drunk actor and Mark Lockyer is called in to give a master class. Mark is a ridiculously convincing drunk - even when he’s demonstrating how not to do drunk acting, he’s believable. He’s also able to break down what he does into very technical stages and has Simon looking legless in minutes. We work with the Snow Dog backing band on the theme of drunkenness to create a general swaying, unstable world to support Snowy. The scene in the Yeti Cave gets to the very heart of what the play is about, and several fundamental questions come up. What stops Tintin from striking the Yeti? How would this moment be different if Tintin hadn’t first met the Grand Abbot and been told to stop fighting? Is that what gives him the strength not to fight the Yeti? It’s important that Tintin comes to the


42

cave in some way wiser than before his time at the monastery, or at least more open to learning something new from his encounter with the Yeti. Should Chang have a Chinese accent or is the range of accents in the piece eclectic enough to accept a UK accent (in this case Welsh) for this character? The scene feels a bit wordy and we work on making the storytelling more visual (for example Chang runs in front of the Yeti to stop Tintin from striking him, in support of the line ‘He’s my friend!’). We run Act Two. Afterwards Rufus decides to cut the Haddock versus Monks scene, feeling it doesn’t add to the story. He also feels the monastery scenes should happen one after another. The restructuring creates a technical problem, as the family will have less time to get down from their flying positions during the Marlinspike Song. It also means there’s now nothing between the avalanche and the scene of Snowy carrying the unconscious Tintin. Rufus asks David to write some extra lines for the family, a kind of interlude, or outside commentary, on Tintin’s predicament. Something along the lines of an obituary. Thursday 17th November The decorated bikes arrive – an exciting taster of the visual world of the show that’s being prepared outside the rehearsal room. Company warm-ups have had to fall by the wayside a little as time pressure mounts and at least half the cast has been unwell, so there’s been a bit of winter hibernation feeling. Bringing new props into the rehearsal room helps lift the energy. We look at the plane-crash victims scene. How to make it clear that the corpses come to life in Tintin’s head and not in reality? We discover that it helps to keep Tintin facing away from the corpses. So long as he’s seeing them stand up and lean in to him it feels like a zombie movie. But having them creep up and sing behind him while he wills them to disappear, and then sit abruptly down again when the song ends, becomes a clear illustration of Tintin’s mounting terror and the moment when he snaps himself out of this fear and into logical thought. Rufus spends some time with Nicky (Blackwell) on the air stewardess character. She creates a character that’s jaded by the job and wears a fake smile for the customers. She becomes an interesting character, but when we run the scene, it feels that developing her downbeat side hasn’t helped the rhythm of the scene. All the minor characters in the show are very engrossing; there’s a constant process of having to find a balance between adding colour in a way that serves the scene’s narrative, rather than distracting from the overall rhythm and focus. Friday 18th November We return to the Pundit and Pandit scene. This scene and the preceding Ramas’ scene are too similar in their dynamic. We work on changing Ramas’ scene. Mrs Rama now becomes a long-suffering wife, down-trodden by her chauvinistic husband and struggling to repress her independent instinct. By the end of the scene, a rebellious side to her emerges and she abandons the bully. The new dynamic in this scene feels important for the play. The Tintin books have few female


43

characters of any substance – other than Madame Castafiore they’re nearly all secretaries, airhostesses or the like. This isn’t something that could easily have been changed for the stage adaptation without diverting radically from the original, so it feels all the more satisfying to see a scene where traditional roles are openly - and comically - upturned. We end the day with a look at the monastery procession to the cave, which involves Chester, the dog playing Snowy. There’s a general air of distraction and fatigue among the cast, which isn’t helped by Chester’s inevitable free spirited approach to rehearsal. Some of the actors feel anxious that they’ve still a lot to discover about their characters, but at the same time it feels that everyone is very ready to make the move to the Barbican. Everyone keen to start working on the actual set, with costume and props, so they can start envisaging the fast approaching first preview as a reality. Saturday 19th November After a fairly exhausted few days, everyone comes in with a bright energy this morning, excited by the prospect of the first full run-through of the show today. The family obituary lines have been replaced with a haunting variation on the Marlinspike Song. Rufus had tried to rewrite the script but nothing felt right; the song basically does the same as the obituary text only better. The moment is immediately more effective and running the sequence makes it clear this section could be very powerful. We work on the scene after the porters abandon the expedition, where Tintin insists that he’ll go on despite the dangers and speeds up the mountain, Russell accidentally goes in the wrong direction. It’s a fortuitous mistake and Rufus quickly works it into the scene, getting Tharkey to point out to Tintin that he’s heading the wrong way. It’s a tiny moment but adds a new colour to the Tintin character. Tintin is not the source of much laughter in the books, nor is he in the play. It sometimes feels that Haddock and Snowy provide the comedy while Tintin and Tharkey are in a world of tragedy. Although this provides a good balance, it’s also great to have a moment that acknowledges Tintin’s seriousness and undercuts him. Seeing him made to look silly, however briefly, makes him all the more likeable, and allows us to empathise with him in a new way. Rufus seems to have shifted overnight to a higher gear and is using every spare minute to run moments and to throw in new ideas for clarifying scenes. He encourages the actors to use the run as an opportunity to chart their journey through the play, and not to feel they have to stop exploring the possibilities. For a first run things go pretty smoothly. The work that Rufus and David have done throughout rehearsals to restructure the script has emerged - the structure now offers the main characters strong and consistent support for their emotional journeys. There are holes that remain but they feel relatively minor. These include: The flying family after the avalanche: it feels wrong for them to tell Tintin that he’s “useless and helpless” here. It’s repetitious and doesn't fulfil the function of the scene, which should be about Tintin being tempted into giving up the fight. David will rewrite the lines.


44

Is it clear for the audience that when Snowy speaks, the other characters hear barking and that only the audience understands his words? We need to know a bit more about who Snowy is before The Snowy Song - otherwise we're not sure where his whisky drinking side comes from. There is also a lot of general shaping and clarifying to do. The main characters’ journeys through the piece need to be brought to the fore, part of which will be in the actors starting to really own what they do. It’s clear that there’s still a lot of work ahead and that the show will go through many mutations during the upcoming technical rehearsal and preview period. Above all though, it feels that the arc of the piece is very strong and that there’ll be a lot of fun to be had with the show. The main characters have also made a big step in the past week in terms of their emotional journeys through the piece. It feels that for all the fun and chaos and bright colours and loud noise, the weight of the story and the characters’ relationships give Tintin the potential to be a very moving piece, as well as an entertaining one.


45

12. INTERVIEW WITH CO-WRITER, DAVID GREIG Assistant Director Lucinka Eisler spoke to David Greig at the start of the second of six weeks of rehearsals. How was the first week of rehearsals from your perspective as co-writer? During last week the script was comprehensively trashed and torn apart. On the train down from Scotland yesterday I worked on finishing an ‘Ikea flat pack’, modular version of the script, which is broken down into units of action – essentially scenes – that can be removed and replaced with updated versions as we go. I’ve tried to be sure that I know what Tintin is actively doing in each moment. e.g. in the opening sequence, Tintin tries to reach a voice that is calling him. I needed to put together a story that I could tell in clear, simple sentences. How did you begin adapting Hergé ’s book into a stage play? The very first version of the script was the result of a process that I needed to go through to find out what the problems of adapting Tintin in Tibet were, and to have some preliminary material to present to the creative team. I knew that most of it would go. Rufus and I then spent a week putting together the play in pictures (from the book). Then there was a preliminary workshop with a group of actors that informed the writing of a new draft. This draft was sent to the Hergé Foundation for them to approve and is the basis of what we read on the first day of rehearsals. By the end of this week, I aim to have a kind of ‘pre-final text’ that the actors can have as their basic script. We’re close now to having finished the task of structuring the piece, of finding the main skeleton of the play. What have been your guiding principles in this work? As a writer I have begun to be pulled towards simplicity. It’s easy for a writer to get distracted by dialogue, but that’s not what makes a play - it’s just froth if you don’t know what you’re trying to say in each scene. Writing can easily crush everything else. This is probably an awful analogy but it’s a bit like when in your 20s you dress very sexily and then in your 30s you realise that actually you don’t need to try so hard and that what is attractive is something much simpler. You can’t start writing by trying to create elegant thoughts and moments, or trying to give images and ideas. All of those things will only be appreciated if the overall piece is about something. Often new writers are interested in creating very fragmented, open-ended and ambiguous stories. But I think that often leads to a play only having one thing to say. In fact there is nothing more complex and open to interpretation than a simple story. Has the writing process thrown up any particular challenges? A major one is knowing how Tintin should speak and how to make him likeable. In the first workshop we did, we found that Russell Tovey’s voice had a very contemporary quality – he doesn’t speak in RP - and this felt absolutely right. Another question was can you lift dialogue directly from the cartoon? I quickly discovered that you couldn’t. Also - how do you structure the piece in time and space? I’ve tried to congregate it around a number of main locations – Geneva, Kathmandu, the mountain and Tibet. When I write, I try to imagine real situations, not something that will happen on a stage. My stage directions reflect this – they describe what is happening in reality. The theatrical interpretation of that is left to the rehearsal room.


46

What do you think are the central questions that you will have to confront through the rehearsal process? When does Snowy speak and how does this fit into the overall structure? How do we make all four central characters (Tintin, Haddock, Snowy and Tharkey) active and dynamic at every point in the story? It’s difficult to keep the four balls in the air. How much should people know about Tintin and his world? Ultimately the show has to speak to people who know nothing about the books.


47

13. INTERVIEW WITH DESIGNER, IAN MACNEIL Looking at the set in the Barbican space, does it do the things you envisaged it doing? Yes I think it does. It puts the human body in an interesting relationship to the space, with the figures popping out from the stage at you in a cartoon kind of way. The stage is high and the frames are low, creating a tableau effect. What was your experience of adapting the comic book images into a design for the stage? I never normally work on material that is already visually laid out for you. In many ways it's not helpful - the job is already done for you. What you end up having to do is a different job. At first I was intimidated by just how good the books are, but you quickly realise how different it will have to be to work on stage. In the books, Hergé takes a 2D form and makes it look 3D. He creates a dynamic by shifting ‘the camera’ to different angles. In theatre we have to use other skills to create variety. For example, by creating a very dynamic floor, a space that has a strong relationship to the portals where actors make entrances and exits. You're energising the space by creating a visual rhythm that will be satisfying for the audience. It's a bit like serving a good meal - you have to anticipate what will be pleasurable. How has attending rehearsals developed your design ideas? I've been delighted by what I've seen in the rehearsal room and how that works with the design. Ultimately everything has to be story led. As a designer you have to sense when to do something and when to hold back. It’s to a large part instinctive - you can't legislate for things. Overall I'm surprised at how fast the whole process has moved. It's almost sad - the journey is the most interesting bit. What is particular about designing for the Barbican stage? It has been exciting to design the show for this space, though we have adapted it to suit our needs. The safety curtain is built in such a way that the stage takes the actor upstage before they can go downstage. We've built on to the front of the stage bringing the whole show closer to the auditorium. We've tried to put the actor in a more poised, dynamic relationship to the audience. You have to enjoy how stupidly big this space is. It has a reputation as a problem space and I now know why, but in the end things happen here that you couldn't predict and that couldn't happen elsewhere.


48

14. INTERVIEW WITH PAUL ARDITTI, SOUND DESIGNER What is particular about working on a sound design with Rufus? Rufus is very interested in absorbing influences from others. It’s a running joke that if you leave any object lying around in his rehearsal room, it’ll end up in the show. He is also immensely musical (he plays the violin) and has an ability to think in sound and music terms beyond most directors. Our working relationship is based on trust. It’s usually at some point quite late into rehearsals when you realise the enormity of what you’ve committed to. For example with Sleeping Beauty we’d set ourselves the task of doing a lot of sound acapella. However it proved difficult to create a really good sound this way, and we ended up using recorded sound to back up the actors’ voices. We get into some kind of scrape on every show. With Rufus, his ideas tend to come thick and fast in the later stages of rehearsal so I keep an open mind right up until the last possible moment. He’s very generous about who the ideas come from but really most of them come from him. It’s a very collaborative process – Rick (Lighting Designer), Ian (Set Designer), Rufus and I have worked together before so there is a lot of trust. At this early stage my role is all about absorption. Rufus’ productions tend to be extremely detailed and the best way I can serve him is just to be around as much as possible. I then need to gather together a kitbag of sounds that I can draw on in rehearsal once I’m needed. What challenges has Tintin posed you so far? One of the challenges on this production is that the set is very wide, with no room for speakers on the side or at the front of the stage. We have now found ways, with Ian, to adapt the design so that speakers can be hidden inside the set. Following our experience of transferring Sleeping Beauty to the Barbican last year, we have decided to use radio mikes for the actors. With each new production, I try to listen to some new material, to bring fresh blood. I also listen to a lot of sound recorded for previous shows, as very often sounds can be re-used for a different, unexpected purpose. The world of the Himalayas is a pitched world. The wind, the Yeti cry, the call of Chang and the Tibetan pipes, all have notes to them. This is the kind of sound world I think we’ll be playing with. A slightly abstracted soundscape; a world of hollow, slowly modulating, pitched sounds, where perhaps you don’t know which of the sounds is which. This will also allow for tricks - like giving the cast a start note for a song - in and amongst the general soundscape. The other thing we have to find is the Hergéness of the sound world. This might be in the way we edit between external and internal sounds. The main thing with sound design for theatre is to always leave plenty of room for the actors.


49

15. INTERVIEW WITH ORLANDO GOUGH, COMPOSER I was intrigued to hear that you hardly composed any of the music before rehearsals began. I’ve discovered that I’m completely uninterested in writing incidental music for theatre – what interests me is writing music where everything comes from the company, from what’s happening on stage. If you make that decision, it becomes very important to work with who you’ve got. I also find it extremely useful to hear a read-through of the script by the company. You could compose all the music beforehand, but hearing the actors read the script tells you so much about the mood, etc. The other reason for not starting to write too early is that the script on this piece is still evolving, it’s not like having a Shakespeare script where you know the text will stay pretty much the same. So how important is mood as a starting point? With the Marlinspike Song, I spent quite a long time trying to get the mood right – I needed to create something nostalgic. But ultimately the most important thing is the narrative, and finding ways to help that along. In this piece for example, although there is a lot of music, it isn’t a musical. We get through the narrative at a much quicker pace than you would in a musical, so the score has to help this along. I’m very in favour of the one minute song. Most pop songs have a minute’s worth of material and the rest is variation on that theme, and is about drawing that material out. There’s a lot to be said for that. Any longer than one minute and it has to contribute significantly to the telling of the story in a narrative way. This is what ‘Marlinspike’ does – Haddock and Snowy are singing about something very different to Tintin, the song takes us on a narrative journey.

Have your compositions been influenced by the fact Tintin is a family show? Well the fact that it’s based on a cartoon means that I’m not going to write the most profound music ever. It’s a Christmas show so we’ve gone for tunes, for something a bit pop-y, a bit pastichey - like the do-wop song or the bhangra song - which is not something I would normally do. It feels important not to be too clever, to keep it simple and perky. So for example when we’re in the monastery, the monks sing a tune, which would never happen in real life. It is consciously a Christmas version of what they might actually sing. We’ve given it a Christmas show twinkle in the eye, but I think this is still in the spirit of Hergé. What does the spirit of Hergé mean for you, and how does it affect your composition? It means that we give a distilled version of things, everything is essentialised. On the one hand this means there is a danger of being Mickey Mouse: over simplistic. But it also gives us a freedom – we’re creating the idea of something rather than actually trying to be it. So we create the idea of monks, but they can stop being monks at any moment. We’ve got the freedom to do the ironic version of things, such as the Marlinspike song (which at the end turns into a sea-shanty version of itself, completely undercutting itself). This is typical of Hergé, who goes to Tibet but actually everything remains very European – it’s giving a nod to something rather than actually trying to be it. The main thing is that it wants to be good on its own terms. Which song has posed the biggest challenge?


50

The Corpse Song was one I wrote too early – ready for the first day of rehearsal in fact - and I got it wrong. Every song has to do the right bit of storytelling and as soon as I heard the read through I knew that what I had written was too sentimental. It needed more energy. Now that I’ve rewritten it’s more like a zombie march, with much more edge. Often the function of a song changes so it’s good not to put too much effort into detail when you’re writing, so that you can remain adaptable with it. For example with the first dream, I wrote it in a form that was very adaptable. I knew that I needed to provide something that was quite hyperactive rhythmically, with a lot of tension in it, something that could rise and fall. I presented the piece to Rufus as an ‘Ikea flat pack’ version with four sections, A to D. The sections could then be used in any order and repeated in whatever way would be most useful to the scene.


51

16. SONGS Porters’ Bhangra Song The Porters’ Bhangra Song features as Chang’s rescue party begins its ascent of Gosain Than. It is a work song that the Porters use to alleviate the strain of their backbreaking job. In narrative terms the song is about the journey up the mountainside, its rhythm mimicking the movement of walking. We’re a walkin’ all the day ah For to get a little pay ah And we climb the Himalaya And we climb the Himalaya Hey hey hey hey Where there’s very little air. Hey hey. Watchah sayah? HIMALAYA! Hey

Blisters make your skin ah fray ah Backpack cuts you straight away Well it ain’t a holiday ah No it aint a holiday ah

Hey hey hey hey When you climb the Himalaya Hey hey Watcha sayah? HIMALAYA! When your life is full of care And to bed you do repair Then you can say a little prayer Yes you can say a little prayer Hey hey hey hey Take me back to Himalaya Hey hey Watcha sayah? HIMALAYA!


52

Snowy’s Song Snowy’s Song appears at one of the bleakest moments in the play - as an exhausted Tintin collapses in the snowstorm. The dog sings his song as act of defiance and self-affirmation. It message is simple: even when it looks that all is lost, if you believe in who you are you can always pull through. I’m a dog my name is Snowy I’m a snow dog Got a bark I got a bite I’m not a show dog Woof woof woof woof I’m not shy, I’m a show you what I got dog I can’t deny, you get the eye Cos I’m a hot dog Woof woof woof woof What’s my name! I am the snow dog. Say it again! I am the snowy snowy snow dog! I ain’t a lap dog, I’m a low dog, I’m a bad meaning good I’m in the know dog. I’m a road hog, I’m a go dog. In the street the dogs all know that I’m the snow dog. What’s my name! I am the snow dog. Say it again! I am the snowy snowy snow dog!


53

17. FURTHER READING Two excellent sources for budding Tintinologists are the official website and Michael Farr’s companion to the series. www.tintin.com is a colourful, interactive site. It includes original artwork; biographies of Hergé and all his major characters; as well as a guide to each of the stories. Particularly interesting is a map of the world that marks the location of each adventure, confirming Tintin’s status as a truly international hero. TINTIN The Complete Companion by Michael Farr (published by John Murray, 2001), is an accessible and detailed book. With a comprehensive chapter on each of the Tintin books, The Complete Companion is full of fascinating ‘behind the scenes’ insights. Particularly interesting is the way that Hergé grounded all of his outlandish ideas for adventures in meticulously researched fact. Farr lays out pictures from Hergé’s personal archive (newspaper cuttings, adverts, technical drawings) next to actual frames from the comics, proving how the real world directly influenced the artwork.


54

18. INTERVIEW: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH


55


56

All of Tintin's adventures are published by Egmont. Visit www.egmont.co.uk/tintin for more details.

Documents

Tintin Resources