The Day of the Triffids adapted for the stage
Platform 4’s Triffids! brings John Wyndham’s seminal post-apocalyptic novel to the stage with live music.
Dates include March 10 at The Showroom, Chichester (01243 816108, the showroom chi chester. 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.
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.
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 “This change helped bring the novel into the 21st century, cutting out many of the outdated comments the book indulged in.”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?
“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.
“I also wanted to do it at a time when I was wanting to move away from the work that we had done before...”