Across the hidden hallways, humming workshops and bustling backstage spaces at the National Theatre, preparation is well under way for a musical version of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Everyone is busy. Very busy. The wham (wigs, hair and makeup) team are working at full capacity on more than 50 wigs, including a fair few that emit smoke on cue. The armoury department has been tackling robotic mice and runaway chefs’ hats for nine long months, the costume department is handling its largest workload in 10 years (300 costumes and counting) and, over in scenic design, the painters have been sampling colours – including 20 different types of pink – since early summer.
(Clockwise from top left) Johanna Coe, costume designer; Kim Kasim, wig maker; Grace Cowie, armoury and special effects technician; and Daina Ennis, set painter
The production team is one of the biggest to work at the National in some time, with each department facing a series of unique and enticingly baffling challenges, most linked directly to Dahl’s singular plot: how to help tap dancers perform with giant marshmallows balanced on their heads; how to animate a show led by two children, who spend most of the show transformed into mice; how to handle a Grand High Witch with a fondness for zapping her foes. And, above all, how to manage all these challenges while adding a whole lot of song and dance into the mix.
(From top) The costumes department, hand cutting and stitching the stage wear
Then there are the more nuanced complications that come with staging the story today. Dahl’s book has been accused of being misogynistic and antisemitic (the witches’ long noses are seen as problematic, as is the idea of a secret cabal with exceptional riches and influence). On top of this, there are Dahl’s more openly antisemitic outbursts to consider, as well as the recent furore over the publisher Puffin’s decision to quietly edit out some of the more problematic elements from Dahl’s writing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the press and production team will not be pressed on these controversies. However, the quality of the team working across the production – including book-writer Lucy Kirkwood, director Lyndsey Turner and designer Lizzie Clachan – suggests that the National knows this is a work that needs to be treated with great sophistication and care.
(From top) Johanna Coe and the team customise shoes and hats in the National Theatres’s costumes and dying department
As I weave my way around backstage – along corridors lined with neon lighting and over platforms suspended way up in the rafters – it is clear that every department is up against it. And relishing the challenge. First on my backstage tour is a bursting-at-the-seams costume department, led by the indefatigable associate costume designer Johanna Coe. From outside the workshop things seem relatively calm, but as soon as the door opens, it is all colour, movement and chatter. The workspace is crammed with costumes at various stages of completion, racks brimming with finished goods and walls papered with sketches, photos, inspirational images and vast colour-coded schedules.
Coe has been working at the National for more than 30 years and her face lights up when she talks about her craft. I try to get her to sit still at her desk (heaving with sketches and scraps) for our interview, but it’s a near impossible task. Coe has helped to source almost every fabric, repurposed costume or vintage outfit nestled inside this bustling workshop, and seems intent on showing me every last item. She quickly traverses the room, grabbing at costumes and pointing out details: “Those there are the Hotel Magnificent costumes, which have a slight Wes Anderson feel to them. Harry is doing some customising work on the children’s smoking jackets; over here are my customised Norwegian outfits, and this is me inventing my Paddington 2-esque policeman look.”
A fitting for Katherine Kingsley, who plays the Grand High Witch
Coe seems to take great joy from the practical conundrums that come with creating costumes for theatre – and staging The Witches has thrown up some particularly unusual dilemmas. Perhaps most tricky of all is how to make the witches look “normal” yet unsettling with just a few choice props (“Here’s my dog-walker witch. Her jewellery is a poo bag and lead, and why on earth not?”), not to mention which fabric might best accommodate purple splattered-mouse goo?
On top of all the witch-based conundrums, there are also an exceptionally high number of costume changes. “Because it’s an ensemble piece, every actor – except for the Grand High Witch – has several parts to play,” Coe explains. “So you might start off as a witch, but you soon become part of the emergency services, and then you’re straight into being a cupcake before coming back to being a witch.”
The costumes department at work on the stage wear, including Johanna Coe’s book of designs that are still to be realised
Some of the kids will be hidden inside a rather grand purple dog cage that appears near the beginning of the show. “The dog cage is one the spookier elements in the opening song,” enthuses the deputy production manager Zara Janmohamed. “There’ll be a kid inside the cage and then the kid becomes something else. It’s chilling – but in a fun way.”
Just how scary to make the world of The Witches is something that each department has had to grapple with. The original book, after all, opens with the unnamed seven-year-old boy losing his parents in a car accident and ends with him permanently transformed into a mouse, destined to die young. Dahl was never one to pull his punches – it is one of the reasons questions have been raised about his work in recent years – but it’s also one of the driving factors behind his enduring appeal, especially with younger readers.
Behind the scenes at the wigs, hair and makeup (wham) department, including a collection of authentic roots to base the designs on
Associate wigs, hair and makeup designer Kim Kasim has spent a lot of time considering how frightening to make the witches’ gory heads, which are revealed once they whip off their wigs. “During the prototyping we played with the levels of what was too scary and what wasn’t scary enough,” she says. “We’ve had to be mindful that it is a children’s show and we do want them to be drawn in. We want to shock – but we also want the children to come back.”
I am given a preview of the final design, which looks like a cross between a large piece of rotting fruit and a crusty scab. Not pretty. Definitely frightening. The witch heads have taken months of trial and error and were created using a combination of latex, tissue and sponge. There have also been a lot of practical issues to factor in to the design: how to hide the heads underneath their wigs, how to make those wigs easy to remove on stage, and how to incorporate microphones and smoke-machine pipes – called into action every time a witch explodes or, perhaps, a magic trick is performed – into the final design.
The Grand High Witch’s head mould and death mask, plus a mood board of potential looks for the scary reveal
Kasim is still tweaking the final version of the scariest prop of the lot: the Grand High Witch’s mask, which can only be described as a sort of oozing death mask, with blackened eyes and a brutal slashed mouth. It has a nightmarish but near-real quality to it that echoes one of the most chilling lines in Dahl’s original text: “This is not a fairytale. This is about REAL WITCHES.”
The set for The Witches takes shape in a backstage workspace, under the brush of scenic artist Daina Ennis
Over in the cavernous Paint Frame – a huge backstage workspace where the scenery department spend most of their time – scenic painter Daina Ennis has just finished working on an enormous floral wallpaper flat. Nearly five foot high and filled with intricate designs, the wallpaper will provide the backdrop for most of the action at Hotel Magnificent. It is intense and sometimes lonely work (Ennis does a lot of her painting from an elevated platform) but it’s clear she takes great pride in what she does.
Daina Ennis at work on the wallpaper for the Hotel Magnificent
“It was such a nice piece to work on,” she says. “Often a cloth will be an old wall or a load of bricks or something like that. But this piece had nice colours, nice painting. We look at the wall in just the same detail, it’s just more abstract. Like a large abstract painting.”
Grace Cowie of the pyrotechnics department, at work on her robotic mice
Grace Cowie in the pyrotechnics department; the mice are controlled over two separate radio frequencies in case one goes down
In the armoury department, which we reach via a corridor packed with the National Theatre’s entire collection of swords, guns and weapons, witches are not a problem. Not the main problem, anyway. Instead, armourer and special effects technician Grace Cowie has become utterly obsessed with motorised mice: how to make them stand, how to make them run and how to keep them under control. Cowie picks up a completed mouse to demonstrate her dilemma: “I first put it on stage nine months ago and it just spun around in circles.”
The motorised mouse is controlled by radio signals but in the Olivier theatre – encased in concrete and packed with people, chatter and mobile phones – the instructions can easily get lost in the noise. The solution? Connect the mouse up to two different radio frequencies. If one of the signals gets confused, then the backup signal kicks in. At least, that’s the theory: “We’ve trialed it in the Olivier with sound and lights, and a couple of times in the back during the Dear England matinees, but we haven’t tried it with a full evening audience yet. It’s going to be a fun first preview!”
The armoury and pyrotechnics department have been testing their robot mice during matinees of Dear England to see how they cope with the concrete environment, busy crowds and other potential interference
Cowie glows when she talks about the various ways in which the upcoming production of The Witches could go wrong. Her favourite scene? One that might well end in absolute pandemonium. “At the beginning of act two there’s a song called Don’t Say Mice,” she explains. “It’s the robot mice’s longest appearance on stage; a 10-minute sequence with them revolving, turning, mice running around and actors popping out of various places. I’ll be holding my breath all of that tech day.”
But she doesn’t look worried. In fact, the precariousness of live theatre is clearly one of the perks of the job. Cowie beams as she describes a blood fountain that failed spectacularly during previews of Othello at the end of last year. She adds with a twinkle: “Things go wrong all the time. The actors, the lights, the sound, even the building. One of the fun parts is not knowing if everything will work on the night.”
The Witches is at the National Theatre: Olivier, London, to 27 January.
