Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Louis Maskell as Grinpayne in The Grinning Man.
Louis Maskell as Grinpayne in The Grinning Man. Photograph: Simon Annand
Louis Maskell as Grinpayne in The Grinning Man. Photograph: Simon Annand

'T​his isn’t exactly Les Mis is it?': backstage at twisted musical The Grinning Man

This article is more than 7 years old

For Bristol Old Vic’s 250th anniversary, War Horse director Tom Morris is putting on a tragicomedy based on a Victor Hugo novel. In this diary he explains what it’s like to manage a ‘wild team of geniuses’ on a new British musical

Before it all started…

What on earth made us think this ridiculous novel could become a musical? Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs was published a few years after Les Misérables. Both were written while he was in exile in Guernsey, before he returned to France after the fall of Napoleon III. In The Man Who Laughs he imagines a savage English world – it’s a rich and strange brew, full of violence but with hope for a future against all odds. With this backdrop, he tells an impossible love story in vivid colours. Our musical director plays through one of the melodies for the dipped-in-gold musical theatre star Sean Kingsley to learn and I remember that it was the way in which our two composers, Marc Teitler and Tim Phillips, responded to Hugo’s extraordinary world that made me feel this might be something. Over the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether that instinct was right.

Scenic artist Joe Browne paints part for the set for The Grinning Man. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

First day of rehearsals

Everyone’s saying to us: “This isn’t very much like Les Mis is it?” It really isn’t, but as in Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo’s imagination takes you to the most extreme, emotional places. This is a world in which crazy, superhuman, but profoundly humane acts can happen – that’s the only thing that connects our story to the world of Les Mis.

When our lead actor, Louis Maskell, walks into the room, he has this kind of strange charisma – I’m watching him greet everyone and this warmth is clear to us all. But he’s going to play a monster in our show. The central character of Grinpayne is a vivid, charming creation. In Paul Leni’s 1928 silent movie adaptation, that character was played by Conrad Veidt, who had a gentle, monstrous quality, which apparently inspired the Joker in the Batman comics. Whereas the Joker is a savage fiend, in our version Grinpayne is an almost Christ-like freak whose charisma is transforming – that’s the character Louis is setting about to create.

The room buzzes with a sense of potential but already we can see there’s rewriting to be done. The show’s themes are clear and powerful (love, revenge, the impact of the wild outsider on a broken-hearted world) but how we structure the journey is not quite clear yet. Our writer, Carl Grose, is brilliantly unpredictable and it’s slightly terrifying when you ask him to rewrite a scene. He’s like Willy Wonka – you get a shower of new ideas with every page. You’re always certain that somewhere in the middle of it all will be a golden ticket.

Tom Morris and Carl Grose during rehearsals. Photograph: Simon Annand

Week two of rehearsals

I’m realising how difficult it is to put on a musical. The nature of the challenge is really the size of the creative juggernauts in each department who are having to collaborate. If you’re making a small show that builds over time, the pyramid of creativity is usually pretty clear: you have an author and then a director who is shaping the play. Here it’s like managing a wild team of geniuses, all bringing their own responses to the changes that happen in the rehearsal room. So my job, instead of just having to define what the thing is, is as much about trying to harness this fantastic team to be pulling roughly the same chariot in roughly the same direction.

Tech week

The marketing team ask me if I’m getting any sleep. There are no days and no nights when you’re working on a project like this. When I am sleeping, I’m afraid to say that I’m dreaming about The Grinning Man, about the world of the show, and about the technical schedule we have to go through in order to get this thing up and running on time. This week is about assembling a huge jigsaw of elements for the first time on stage – the puppetry, music, set, lighting, sound, choreography, costume and script all need to seamlessly blend together.

Stuart Neal and Louis Maskell in The Grinning Man. Photograph: Simon Annand

The first preview

I’m in the bar after the first performance with a mixture of extreme fatigue and exhilaration. I can barely speak! One of our investors came out at the interval and said he’d never seen anything like this collision of styles and that he cannot believe we completed the tech rehearsals in five days, that it’s an impossibility. What he didn’t know is that some of the set was still arriving halfway through the tech, so some of the show still hasn’t been technically worked through yet.

Between now and opening night, we need to make sure that all the elements match up, cut the show a bit, make the storytelling more efficient. It’s at this point that it becomes the cast’s show: the cast stop working for us and we start working for them. We’re in the Mercedes garage, they are Lewis Hamilton and we have to make sure the engine isn’t going to blow up on the last lap.

  • The Grinning Man opens on 20 October and is at Bristol Old Vic until 13 November.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed