Wyrd Sisters is a play by Terry Pratchett, adapted by Stephen Briggs and with absolutely nothing, no nothing at all, really very little indeed to do with Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Terry Pratchett writes lots of absolutely hilarious books.
Stephen Briggs adapts and performs Pratchett novels, and has written several Discworld spin-off books. We'd also like to thank him for taking time out of his very busy schedule to come and see our production!
We've also heard that this Shakespeare chap's plays aren't half bad. He doesn't support The Orangutan Foundation the selfish bastard but both Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs do. Click on the link to find out how you can help.
Our production of 'Wyrd Sisters' is a lot like Ankh-Morpork. We’re large, sprawling, vaguely medieval and subject to periodic outbreaks of comedic violence. And like Ankh-Morpork, actors who don’t learn their lines mime artists are hung upside down in a scorpion pit along with a sign saying "Learn the Words".
The greatest challenge with staging Wyrd Sisters is to ensure that the production is funny. Terry Pratchett's work is absolutely hilarious in its own right, but we can add to Wyrd Sisters is a sense of the visual- we are staging a novel. We aim to use the stage and the space provided by the O'Reilly Theatre to the fullest, using different levels and parts of the stage for different areas of the play.
What Pratchett so effectively does is tease out the moments of ridiculousness in the canonical text- he carries them to an extreme, but he does a subtle job. Our task is to emulate that teasing out of feeling and character within his text. Parody and satire are genres that rely on the original work being parodied, they are very consciously literary forms and I think we shouldn't be afraid of drawing upon and reminding the audience of the metatextuality of the spectacle that they are watching. We want the audience to feel taken care of by our production but by no means complacent- the production aims to be punchy, pacy and various- the audience should be constantly on the look out for the next joke, the next visual gag, the next literary reference, the next tableau.
It's a play about theatre and theatricality, and at the centre of the comedy lurk some serious and intriguing concerns. While our staging of the 'play within a play' scenes and so on shows that the production will allude to these core concerns, I feel it would be a mistake to be too heavy-handed with them. The text should really speak for itself, and it is the our job to make sure that it speaks loudly and arrestingly.
Meg Jayanth- Director
