Night Of The Living Dead Remix

Dundee Rep Theatre, March 13 to 14

“I was born in 1960 and I think a lot of my generation who grew up in the 1970s were kind of haunted by the 60s,” says Andrew Quick, co-director with Pete Brooks of their theatre company Imitating the Dog’s acclaimed new stage adaptation – of sorts – of George A. Romero’s classic 1968 zombie film Night Of The Living Dead.

The pair had hoped to do something with a stage version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho yet the rights proved impossible to unlock so they turned their attention to Romero’s classic, the godfather of the modern zombie story, and realised it was perfect for all of their purposes.

“It’s shot in this B-movie style, almost rough and ready, with unknown actors and filmed very cheaply,” Quick says. “It’s black and white, told in semidocumentary style, cut in with news footage. The central character is a person of colour, which is very unusual for a late 60s horror film, and as we watched it and explored it further, we realised it was metaphorically dealing with a lot of the racial politics of America in the 1960s.”

The method of actually staging the film is new and boundary-breaking, and sounds like it might only be fully appreciated when seen live.

“We remake the film shot-for-shot, whilst playing the original at the same time,” says Quick. “We’ve got two screens above the set, one showing the original film in its entirety, while – using four cameras and some props and models – our actors remake the film on the other.

“It’s a lot of fun, and the energy of the movie is matched by the energy of the actors trying to get all the shots. Of course, you’ve got all the zombie action, and the way we’ve done it is – I would say this – quite clever, quite humorous but serious at the same time. The stage action is always very dynamic and, in fact, there’s a kind of chaos to the attempt to create the film, but on-screen you see it all come together.”

And what is the experience like for the audience? “It’s playful, it’s scary, and it’s a great story...” says Quick. “It’s the kind of thing that people really get to their feet and applaud at the end because it’s an achievement for the actors. They’re filming it, they’re moving props, they’re acting in it, and you can’t take your eyes off them.”

There’s a sharp political element to the original, and Quick notes that Romero’s point still applies – that the zombies are a force of nature, and it’s the humans’ lack of cooperation that does for them. “We frame the film as a historical document,” he says, “and hope that the audience see the parallels with what’s happening now.

“Doing this now, with the coronavirus around, is really interesting because that panic is in the film – the zombies are almost like a disease themselves. It’s very relevant to the fear we feel now about whether society will hold against something that’s out of our control.” imitatingthedog.co.uk dundeerep.co.uk

“The way we do it is thrilling when it goes right and thrilling when it goes wrong,” says Andrew Quick of the show.