Triffids! brings John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic novel to the Chichester stage

Platform 4’s Triffids! brings John Wyndham’s seminal post-apocalyptic novel to the stage with live music.
Catherine Church (c) Tom HouserCatherine Church (c) Tom Houser
Catherine Church (c) Tom Houser

Dates include March 10 at The Showroom, Chichester (01243 816108, theshowroomchichester.co.uk).

They are promising an “incredible collision of music, text and rich visual imagery,” in a production which takes the audience deep into John Wyndham’s classic cold war novel The Day of the Triffids with a live soundtrack featuring instruments including Moog, double bass, theremin and hammered dulcimer.

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Building on their past collaborations with local people, Platform 4 worked with the community at Highcliffe allotments, interviewing people on their sites.

Asking them questions about weeds, climate change and their memories of Wyndham’s book gave a whole set of disparate answers which creator Catherine Church mashed together to act as interventions in the adaptation of the original novel.

Catherine is promising beautiful elegiac violin solos, melancholic wistful melodies inspired by a lost world plus wacky, psychedelic 1990s acid house.

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As Catherine explains, Platform 4 made a crucial change in their adaptation with the main protagonist Bill becoming Jill. “This change helped bring the novel into the 21st century, cutting out many of the outdated comments the book indulged in.”

The rest is directly relevant: “None of us knew how weirdly prescient this piece would be.

“The novel essentially asks the question – what would you do if a deadly germ invaded the world? Would you stay in your immediate community? How would it make you feel about the many things we take for granted? How would it change your priorities in life etc etc?

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“All of these questions are covered in the novel and finally, finally we get to perform this live… quite a challenge with the amount of sci-fi instruments on stage!

“It’s based on the novel, the classic which came out in 1951 but we have had to cancel the tour twice. We started working on it at the start of 2019 and then at the top of 2020 before everything went wrong. We did a lot of work on it in the February of that year. Then the pandemic hit but we did get to do a recording of the project and made an album just partly so that we could remember it and also to just help us keep going so we managed to do that in between lockdowns.

“And I suppose it just gave us a longer time to think about it. We were able to change various things in it and rearrange it and just really to think more. Also the structure is slightly changed.

“To start with I just really wanted to adapt it because of our sound designer who I have been working with for 25 years. He has a collection of real sci-fi type instruments and he’s a real electronic specialist and I wanted him to feel that this was his baby in a way.

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“I also wanted to do it at a time when I was wanting to move away from the work that we had done before which was based around groups of people that had early-onset dementia and then we have been working with people that were learning to lip read.

“I wanted to do something that was a bit more like drama but at the same time had the potential to combine the sci-fi sounds and the story element and also to use real people’s voices in the texture of the show.

“But over three we could never have realised just how incredibly prescient the novel was given that it is all about this germ that comes into the world. The novel is about how do you deal with that, how do you carry on, how do you escape, how do you grow your own food, just about how you survive really and then there are all the conspiracy theories. What are the germs? Are they satellites? All the kinds of conspiracy theories that we have been getting now…”

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