Jon Nicholls had the somewhat envious task in creating not only music for The Seagull but designing a soundscape to bring the island to life. We caught up with him as the show continues at the Lowry.
One of the things I love about The Seagull is how full of life it is – real, complicated, banal, relentless life that carries on regardless of individual triumphs or tragedies. The characters are stuck somewhere rather dull, their lives have settled into very familiar patterns and yet things still happen from moment to moment which constantly surprise them. And so I think the first thought I had about the music was that it should somehow have a feeling of something that was constantly in motion, and which had a sense of repetitiveness without ever being exactly the same from one moment to the next. Sometimes it’s quieter, and sometimes it’s more dynamic and rhythmic, but it always has a slightly unstable forward drive to it.
I was also very interested in how isolated they are geographically – they’re stuck on an island, and although you occasionally hear sounds from beyond the water, they’re very much cut off. For some reason this made me think of old westerns where the action all takes place in small one-horse towns which no-one can escape from, and so there’s a slight Ennio Morricone influence that’s crept in (one of my favourite film composers!) – rattling shakers, slide guitar and marimbas amongst others.
Apart from the music for the transitional moments, another big sound and music challenge is Konstantin’s play, which he’s written to shock his famous actress mother. It’s his radical vision of what theatre should be and is performed by Nina. Our director Chris sent Ben and Sophie (who play Konstantin and Nina), Elisa (the assistant director) and myself off to a separate room to develop this, so it would come as a complete surprise to the rest of the cast when they performed it for the first time. We had a blast putting it together; we started by imagining what kind of sound equipment Konstantin would actually have at this rather remote house – we knew he had a laptop, and we also thought there might be a big 80’s-style ghetto blaster lying around in a cupboard somewhere which he could plug his laptop into. We decided he’d try to make the soundtrack as radical as the actual play and might have downloaded all sorts of free audio mangling software and scraps of sound, so we’ve ended up with a very strange montage of drones, glitches and mangled beats. It seems to work really well with the homemade, rough-and-ready look of the rest of his staging – and everyone else seemed to find it satisfactorily shocking!
As well as composing the music, I’ve also designed the overall sound. In Chekhov’s plays this always seems deceptively simple, but in fact he has very precise and often startling ideas about sound – the ‘distant breaking string’ in The Cherry Orchard is probably the most famous – and Anya Reiss has been similarly precise in the sounds she specifies. One of my favourite moments is when the characters all stop what they’re doing to watch a helicopter flying overhead before resuming their conversation, which is a lovely moment of everyday detail. I suppose you could read it as an image of escape, but I feel it’s equally something to do with how life is constantly punctuated by random passing events, which most dramatists tend to leave out but which in this world are as valued as any moment of high drama.
Jon has worked on many of our productions including Much Ado About Nothing, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia and The Heretic. You can find out more about Jon’s work on his website.
The Seagull runs until Sat 8 Mar 2014. You can book tickets online here or from The Lowry Box Office on 0843 208 6010.