THE THIRD DAY: Is Dennis Kelly’s latest a TV show or performance art? You decide.
HOW CREATIVE MAVERICKS AND AN ALL-STAR CAST ARE PUSHING BACK THE BOUNDARIES OF TV DRAMA THE THIRD DAY
IT IS SOMEWHAT DISCONCERTING to be talking to Dennis Kelly just as the UK is getting to grips with the coronavirus outbreak. After all, he is the man responsible for creating Channel 4’s cult hit, Utopia: genre-bending, chilling and thrilling in equal measure, it explored the threat of global epidemic outbreaks and accompanying conspiracy theories.
And now, here he is ominously explaining that his new plan is to plunge viewers even more viscerally into his latest story, The Third Day — an unprecedented fusion of television and live theatre that will somehow collapse the boundaries between television and viewers. “It’s just mad that we’re doing it,” Kelly cheerfully exclaims.
It was around eight years ago that Felix Barrett, founder of immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, first approached Kelly with the suggestion they work together. Being a huge fan of Punchdrunk’s work, and finding Barrett “a sort of mad genius”, Kelly signed up straight away, but it took years, says Barrett, “for the stars to align and the right team to make it”.
The initial seed was planted by a broadcaster looking to better portray theatre on TV. “They suggested a backstage documentary at one of our shows,” says Barrett. “Just the most appalling TV I can imagine. But that was the initial impetus — how could TV be a portal into a live show and then back out again?”
The answer is The Third Day, which comprises three distinct but interconnected elements — a three-episode TV arc titled ‘Summer’ and directed by Utopia’s Mark Munden, then a live theatre event created by Punchdrunk, followed by a three-episode TV arc titled ‘Winter’, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe (Three Girls). The idea is that each element will work as a standalone story, but together will create an overarching piece of unique storytelling.
“The innovation that was really driving us was about a liminal space between the real and the fictional,” says Barrett. “And what would happen if what you were watching on television suddenly happened in real life.”
In the age of supposed Peak TV, The Third Day does genuinely seem to be attempting to push boundaries, even by getting such a bonkers-sounding proposal greenlit. “Every so often, people know you’re a playwright and you meet a channel or a producer and they go, ‘Oh, we’d love to do something with the theatre and TV’,” Kelly says. “But they don’t really want to do that because it’s actually quite scary.” Despite all this, Sky, HBO and production company Plan B have all been brave enough to get behind Barrett and Kelly, along with lead actors Jude Law and Naomie Harris, and a cast including Emily Watson and Paddy Considine.
“A few years ago it was a bit too crazy,” says Barrett. “And now our partners want us to go as far as we can... The theatre expression of breaking the fourth wall? This is literally the fourth wall of the TV screen being broken and you have a chance to fall inside the show.”
Where we’ll land is Osea Island in the Essex Blackwater estuary, connected to the mainland by an ancient Roman causeway and only accessible twice a day at low tide. Knowing Kelly’s work, it feels like an appropriately disconcerting setting.
In reality, the island has a bizarre enough history, having been one of the world’s first alcohol and drug rehabilitation centres, a WWI Navy base, a bohemian artist community, a hedonistic celebrity party island, and the backdrop for both the 1989 TV adaptation and 2012 film of The Woman In Black.
“I’ve spent many, many months now on Osea Island and it’s very dear to my heart,” says Barrett. “It’s got a strange, ethereal magic to it where it feels really isolated and inaccessible even though it’s in Essex... it feels at once welcoming and haunting.”
Kelly agrees: “People will have different responses to it. Some people absolutely loved staying there and thought it was just the best thing they’d ever done, and other people did find it difficult.”
Exploiting this teetering ambiguity of the land appears to be the sweet spot of
The Third Day, as the setting allows for a distinctly unsettling mood. “The ancient Celts believed that Osea was the soul of the world,” Kelly says. “They believed that it has healing powers, or it needs to be cared for: if Osea is sick, the world is sick. The idea being that if you let it, it can kind of heal you, but it also can go horribly wrong.”
It feels safe to say that with Kelly in charge, the possibility of things going horribly wrong will loom large over The Third Day’s first protagonist, Sam (Jude Law), a man who finds himself on a small and beautiful island where the inhabitants have rather odd customs. “When he gets there, it’s kind of cute and quaint and they all seem nice, but it gets increasingly weird,” says Kelly. “As time goes on he realises he can’t quite leave. Actually he sort of stops himself leaving. Things get stranger and stranger, and it uncovers some stuff about him that he didn’t know. It reflects the idea that you’re in a place and you might think that it’s nice and everything’s lovely but there’s something rotten there. You might not know that at first but you’ll soon find out.”
Barrett continues: “On this island, they’re getting ready for a festival — a local, sort of folkloric tradition that happens once a year, something ancient, something traditional, that’s part of their belief system. And [Sam] gets swept up into the middle of it.”
Where The Third Day takes more than a flying leap of a departure from normal television is that the next “episode” is, in fact, this festival brought to life by the magic of Punchdrunk’s immersive world-building, and which viewers can actually attend.
“With our normal theatre work, we’re trying to put the audience at the heart of the action,” says Barrett. “We spread whatever show we’re doing across a hundred rooms of a building and then you’re free to explore that building and follow whatever narrative you want. What we’re doing with The Third Day is scaling that up. It’s almost the ultimate invisible theatre because it will feel real for the audience. It’s not a show. It’s actually a real, living, breathing event.”
Most tellingly, it is inspired by “those amazing festivities that the British Isles is famous for; like Lewes Bonfire Night and the burning of the tar barrels in Ottery St Mary, that feel really ancient but still exist today in 21st-century Britain. Things that are traditional but feel slightly out of control.”
What Barrett will neither confirm nor deny is whether the live event will take place on Osea Island itself (which seems inevitable) or whether any of the TV cast will be involved in it. But with the emphasis Barrett places on Law’s theatrical background, it would seem logical that the actor must be involved somehow, especially given how long he’s been involved in the project. “I immediately knew we needed a lead actor who was both screen and stage, so I approached Jude about seven or eight years ago. He’s a master of both forms and understands them both, and that’s what we needed.”
Is there a risk that this could all come across as a gimmick? “It could,” says Kelly. “But you can’t let the fear of that stuff stop you from doing it because otherwise you’d never do anything unusual. Everything would always be about a fucking cop with
a drink problem, which is what everything always seems to be about these days, doesn’t it? It’s always a cop with a past.
“We didn’t want the live event to ever feel like it was just an add-on, like a sort of weird cosplay thing, or a red button ‘you can also see this’ thing. We always wanted it to be a fundamental part of what it is we’re doing.”
Barrett is on the same page: “The biggest risk is that we don’t push it far enough. That at some point we relent or try to back down. If we’re going to continue to try to do something that hasn’t been done before, we should really go all out.”
It makes sense then that Barrett sought out Kelly as a creative partner, when Utopia was its own singular brand of weird. “The thing I’m most proud of with Utopia is that it didn’t feel like anything else,” says Kelly. ‘Obviously it’s got its influences and stuff, but it felt like its own thing. It felt British. I think we make some amazing TV, but I sometimes worry that what we do is a version of something else. When we’re brilliant, we do something that no one’s ever seen and when we’re less confident, we do something where it’s a bit like a Scandi noir, or it’s a bit like this or that.”
Which is why he is adamant that The Third Day is its own beast, despite citing references ranging from Rosemary’s Baby, The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now to the HP Lovecraft novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which Barrett introduced him to.
“I wouldn’t want to call it a horror because it’s definitely not,” continues Kelly. “But in the same way that Utopia probably toyed with some genre stuff but was hard to define, there’s something similar here. I’m not sure this is down to any great intelligence on my part, by the way. I think I just don’t understand genre, I never know what it means. It’s just a French word, innit? I don’t really know how to obey the rules of genre, I just try to write the stories as they feel like they should come out.”
What was vital for him was establishing believable but puzzling inhabitants at the heart of both Osea Island and The Third Day. “They’re a cut-off community. Their belief system is Christian, but a lot of early Christianity was peppered with a fair dose of paganism,” he says. “It became quite clear that we didn’t want it to be supernatural, but a lot of it is about belief. These people believe in certain things, and if you believe strongly enough in something, it can make you do terrible things. If you believe that you have a mission from God to save the world, even if that mission is to do something awful, then you’ve got to do it, haven’t you?”
Knowing just the kind of nastiness some of Kelly’s previous characters have encountered, how worried should we be? “It is unsettling, and it’s quite intense, and I think it becomes quite emotional. There are bits that are probably going to be difficult to watch,” he admits. (Although Utopia viewers will be relieved to hear Kelly’s assurance: “No eyeballs. I don’t think I’ve done any eyeballs in this one.”)
But if Kelly and Barrett pull this off, The Third Day’s characters won’t be the only ones put through the wringer. As Barrett says, “The whole reason we’re called Punchdrunk is because we want to imbue the audience with the sense a boxer has when they’re punched in the face, and they’re reeling and they’re seeing stars.”
Ultimately though, the makers as much as the audience are stepping into the unknown. “It’s kind of an experiment,” Barrett admits. “It’s not like there’s a model or we’re following in the footsteps of anyone else. We’re dipping our toe in this water not knowing whether it’s a beautiful lagoon or a vast abyss. We’ll soon find out.”
AT THE TIME OF GOING TO PRINT, THE THIRD DAY WAS SCHEDULED FOR SUMMER ON SKY ATLANTIC/NOW TV, WITH THE CREATORS TAKING ALL APPROPRIATE ADVICE TO PROTECT ITS AUDIENCE AND TEAM IN THE EVOLVING CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC.