WeHeartHorror

They made the British version in 1940 and it did well. Four years later, it was remade in Hollywood with Ingrid Bergman as the female lead - for which she won the Oscar. The producers of the second movie worked to ensure no-one could see the first one! They suppressed the prints and made sure it wasn’t distributed, so that their movie made money. To be honest I enjoy both movies. Charles Boyer starred in the second one. Both have interesting strengths. The original stage play that the movies are based on starred Vincent Price. The British Film Institute is re-releasing the British version of Gaslight staring Anton Walbrook on DVD as part of their Gothic season.

 

Green Eyes the other story that I made into a play was written back in the 1980s, and that was inspired by a painting called We Must Always Turn South.

 

I usually have a particular scene in mind or maybe just a phrase or words; that starts me off on a story.

 

WHH: What challenges do you face as a writer?

 

NV: Oh, wading through all my boring ideas (laughs). Facebook is obviously a challenge - a huge challenge at times.

 

I’m writing the second book at the moment which was supposed to be out months ago. One of the reasons it was delayed so long was because my father passed away in April, at the age of ninety seven, so it has been tough doing the second book.

 

Some of the feedback I got from the first book was that people wanted longer stories. In the first volume they are all about three to five thousand words. Now, they are averaging about eight to ten thousand words in the second volume and they take a lot longer to write.

 

There’s always the moment during the day when I think “Why on earth did I think I could write?” (laughs). I remember my friend Pete Atkins telling me this when I first started out, saying “Once a day you’ll get that! You just will!”. Of course the inspiration comes, as it did last night at half-past midnight. I was writing through till three in the morning, so I’m fairly shattered at the moment, but I think I have cracked the story which has just been driving me up the wall for the last month or so.

 

I think the challenges for any writer are more or less the same. There is a combination of; “Will people like this?”, “Does it make any sense?” and, “Is it interesting? “Am I entertaining enough?”, “Am I being scary enough in this genre?”, “Are my characters likeable or dislikeable enough?” -  All those things writers go through. But it’s fun. I’m very grateful I’m in a position where I can write and just share these stories with people. That’s a very privileged position to be in.

 

WHH: What inspired you to turn two of your short stories from page to stage?

 

NV: It came about because I was interviewed by the Hellraiser Podcast - Peter Davis and Philip North. They asked me if I would like to come along and see their plays at last year’s London Horror Festival. They did two. I went along and one was a really dark piece called Puppetry of Flesh. I was really impressed, and I thought I’d like to do something for this next year because it’s a very nice venue at the Etcetera Theatre. It only sits forty people, so it’s very intimate. There is no escaping!

 

Having seen the shows last year, I spoke to the guys this year and said, “Would you be interested in working together?” and they said they absolutely would. Great! I sat down and started writing plays, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wasn’t writing a play from scratch though - I think that’s going to be something slightly different. I plan on writing a full-length play early next year. It will be an evening of horror probably using some of the material from the current show.

 

I started off doing amateur theatre, so I love it. If theatre’s done well, it can be extraordinary - there is nothing like it. That’s not to say that film can’t be wonderfully effective. I saw The Cabin in the Woods and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was sitting by myself in the center of the cinema and a lady was sitting next to me. I think I grabbed her hand a couple of times - a complete stranger! I was buzzing for about an hour afterwards thinking this is the sort of thing that I want to write - really thoroughly interesting.

 

WHH: How did you go about adapting the stories into a theatre play? It’s a very different medium.

 

NV: There were some challenges. The brief at the Etcetera Theatre is that you have an hour; they always do two shows a night - one show at 7.30pm and one at 9pm, so you have got to deliver a show which runs under an hour. Phil and Peter asked me to adapt the stories so both pieces were twenty-five minutes long. When I did the initial draft of Green Eyes it came out at twenty-minutes, so I then had to add a scene that is only referred to in the story. It happens in the ‘off stage’ in the story, but I had to bring that on stage, which meant creating new dialogue and action.

 

The other challenge was how to deal with the narrator’s voice. In Tunes from the Music Hall, the narrator is a character in the story. In Green Eyes, the narrator is just a narrator - the normal voiceover. Because the whole thing was written like that, I kept looking at it and I couldn’t think of doing it any other way than having a narrator on stage. Then the immediate challenge was, “Ok, how do you make the narrator not a narrator?” In other words, how can he be on stage but not be like a puppet master narrator? He’s got to be involved in the action somehow - not sitting at the side of the stage saying this and that happened. He had to be involved in the action on stage. I won’t say too much more about it but if you see the show, I hope you enjoy the solution I came up with.

 

Of course, it’s not just me who has created this. There are the actors, and Phil the director, and everybody working back stage. I just wrote words on a page. They are the people who have learned those lines and brought them to life - fleshed them out. Phil had added action to help deal with the problem of the narrator.

 

When I was writing the show, the second thing I did was read a book on playwriting by Alan Ayckbourn. I wrote the plays first, then thought I’d better check I hadn’t done something hideously wrong. I was conscious of the advice not to write all the stage directions. I did write one half page of stage directions that has very little dialogue and dictated what I envisaged. They stuck with that and used it, but they have added so much more to it. So, everything you see happening is based on my words but these guys bring them to life.

 

WHH: What made you give up acting?

 

NV: I very definitely gave up acting to go into writing, and I supported myself by writing comics for over two years.

 

I really felt that when Clive Barker left the country and went to the States - obviously I wasn’t going to be able to work with him anymore and the Hellraiser franchise was going to number three, with Pinhead but no Chatterer. I thought, “What do I really want to do?” I really wanted to write, so when I left acting it was to write.