What's on Stage

From Middle Earth to Drury Lane via Toronto, it’s been a long journey for The Lord of the Rings. Sam Marlowe goes on a quest to find out how Tolkien’s trilogy has been transformed into the most expensive musical ever staged in the West End.

Middle Earth is in cacophonic chaos. Under designer Rob Howell’s louring canopy of interweaving tree roots, which stretches right out over the Theatre Royal Drury Lane auditorium, thick black cables wind everywhere like somnolent snakes. Glowing computer screens stud the stalls, unblinking, watchful eyes in the darkness. Drills and hammers whine and bang as if every dwarf in the Mines of Moria were busily toiling at this technical rehearsal, while a lone flute trills a minor-key flurry of quicksilver notes and on stage an actor – Michael Therriault, who plays Gollum – flings himself tirelessly, again and again, into a chasm that has become the Cracks of Doom.

I find myself wincing, as Therriault plummets on invisible wires out of sight for what seems like the fiftieth time, and pray there’s something soft down there. I’m far from the only one worrying about happy landings. With opening night looming for the £12.5 million musical The Lord of the Rings, based on JRR Tolkien’s trilogy of novels, everyone involved backstage (including 50 actors, 19 musicians and 60 crew), as well as an expectant public, is hoping that the show, five years in the making, will fulfill its promise and deliver genuine theatrical magic.

Bullish & buoyant

Kevin Wallace, the show’s producer, and its director ]Matthew Warchus ]make a compelling case for the work, an innovative piece of music theatre that was, says Wallace, stylistically inspired by “Trevor Nunn and John Caird’s Nicholas Nickleby, Julian Crouch’s Shockheaded Peter and Cirque du Soleil in terms of spectacle and scale, and by The Lion King in terms of storytelling through puppetry”.

The former actor turned producer is bullish and buoyant, insisting that adrenaline is seeing him through the punishing schedule leading to the big opening night on 19 June 2007, and that all he’s suffering from is hay fever. Warchus shows more visible signs of strain. Pale, angular, almost ethereal, he’s like a weary wood elf, and although he’s articulate and passionate, he’s clearly exhausted, his words punctuated by long stretches of painful silence while he rubs his eyes.

Any anxiety is understandable: they both have a lot to prove. The Lord of the Rings, with book by Warchus and Shaun McKenna and music by the Bollywood composer AR Rahman, Icelandic folk group Värttinä and musical supervisor Christopher Nightingale, had its world premiere in Toronto in March 2006 (the unexpected success of that other musical behemoth We Will Rock You at the Dominion meant there was no large West End theatre available to house it at the time).

The weight of anticipation

The weight of anticipation with which the Toronto opening was freighted was immense, and not only for artistic reasons; it was hoped that the musical would help revive morale and tourism in a city that had been hit hard by concerns over the SARS epidemic. In the event, however, the production garnered mixed reviews, with particularly negative notices in The New York Times, the UK’s Daily Telegraph, and worst of all, in the locally influential Toronto Star (“Bored of the rings”). It closed in September.

Wallace now refers to the whole Toronto episode as a “Pandora’s box” and admits it was “a painful experience”. But he insists that “we sweated blood to do the best show that we could – the best show that was in us at the time”, and both he and Warchus contend that despite the media furore, word of mouth on the show was good and audiences responded with enthusiasm.

Reviewing the show in Canada for The Times, I found it filled with breathtakingly beautiful spectacle, charm, excitement – and significant longueurs. Which brings us to a major problem: the length. The running time was a whopping three hours and 45 minutes – a bum-numbing prospect that proved more than enough to put off wavering potential punters. Wallace recalls how they were “obsessed with putting the whole of the books on the stage”, while Warchus admits, “people were concerned about the running time. It was demanding, the story was dense – so much so, it was almost overwhelming.” As a result, the book has been massively rewritten for London, with swathes cut, characters conflated and sub-plots omitted. This not only means that it now comes in at a more manageable three hours; it has also greatly enhanced the show’s clarity and impact.

“Without betraying the richness and subtleties of Tolkien’s trilogy by oversimplifying things, I wanted to focus on and draw out those elements of the story that are emotionally engaging, and lose some of the density,” explains Warchus. “Now it’s clearer, sharper, more magical, less heavy, more streamlined. It moves in a more dynamic way. The Sam/Frodo/Gollum story is intensified, and I’ve tried to make it thematically more clear. It’s a story about growth and loss, and I’ve tried to make that come across more strongly, and also to clarify the different species and cultures. In the story of Arwen and Aragorn, you really feel that this a relationship between an elf and a man separated from each other by space and culture and circumstances, who are trying to bridge that in this romantic union. I’ve generally sharpened the separation of all the species – Hobbits, dwarfs, elves, humans, Orcs and so on.”

Sociologically pertinent spectacle

If that sounds like sociologically pertinent stuff in our own fraught, religiously and racially divided modern world, then that’s no accident. Citing the theatre of the ancient Greeks as well as medieval drama, Warchus regards Tolkien’s story as the universal stuff of myth and ritual – “theatre has been telling big, epic stories of journeys or quests for thousands of years” – but he also points out its contemporary relevance. “Written in the 20th century, The Lord of the Rings describes a slide, or a corruption, from innocence to loss through war, a fading of the world, the end of a golden era. It rings all sorts of bells, politically and with environmental issues.”

Both Wallace and Warchus are keen, however, to stress that above all the show – involving stilt-walking, awesome acrobatics, amazing choreography (by Peter Darling, whose last West End show was Billy Elliot) and stunning scenery rooted on a massive revolving stage – will add up to “a great night out”. Which should come as a relief to those of us who find the anorak-ish intensity of some die-hard Tolkien fans off-putting. Indeed, that po-faced humourlessness initially made the project unappealing to Warchus himself: on the face of it, the idea of all-singing, all-dancing Hobbits and Orcs does appear rich in Spinal Tap-style absurdity. “It seemed to me that because the books are so earnest, the easiest thing would have been to do a spoof,” Warchus says. “It’s difficult to convince an audience to overcome a prejudice that says, it’s impossible and it’s ridiculous.” He confesses wryly, “I could really identify with that feeling.”

What won him over was the realisation that the books are full of music – songs steeped in the history of the various peoples of Middle Earth. “I discovered it’s a musical world, which allows a musical version to not be anachronistic or contrived. I felt the songs could naturally be born out of the novel, as long as the music was the right kind of music – not too Broadway, not too West End musical, but somehow connected to the texture of Tolkien.”

The right kind of music

Creating “the right kind of music” was a quest in itself, with Nightingale supervising a process that sought out what Wallace refers to as “musical voices from roots of other cultures that could be traced back centuries, so that there would be a sense of antiquity. Yes, the composers had to write for a contemporary audience and ear – but there must be a sense of history.”

AR Rahman, says Wallace, brought to the project “something exotic, steeped in tradition, and an ear for a commercial tune”; Värttinä supplied the “dark side, disturbing and compelling, folksy. Christopher (Nightingale) said, it’s a whole world, Middle Earth, so why not have more than one composer? So we invited Rahman and Värttinä to listen to each other’s music. They respected each other, so we put them together in a sort of shotgun marriage in an Indian restaurant in Charlotte Street!”

The results of that unlikely union of fire and ice are enchanting: a score that moves fluidly from the earthy to the mystical, that shimmers, thrills and delights by turns. And as well as the new, tighter book, the London production benefits from having Olivier Award winner Laura Michelle Kelly (the original West End Mary Poppins) as the as elf queen Galadriel and ex-RSC actor Malcolm Storry as Gandalf, and Howell’s freshly refined designs – with terrifying Black Riders, a venomous giant spider that squirts ink over the audience, vertiginous bearded Ents and swarms of leaping Orcs.

It’s been a long, arduous journey, with some perilous moments along the way. But with so much talent, imagination and ingenuity among its creators, with the problems exposed in Toronto put right, and with audiences eager to be dazzled and enthralled, we should all fall under the spell of the Ring this summer.