In 2016 for BBC’s Dangerous Visions Sci-Fi season, Val McDermid has adapted John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes. Val, widely known for her crime novels, had been a fan of Wyndham since her teens and together we pitched to produce what Val initially thought would be ‘a quiet little radio drama’.
The Kraken Wakes is an apocalyptical tale of alien arrivals who inhabit the sea and, when humans fight back, flood the world. There’s nothing quiet about it. When Val decided to create a contemporary retelling of this prophetic allegory for global warming, the production became epic.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get
Of course, for an epic story on radio you need an epic sound world. So I approached composer Alan Edward Williams to discuss the music having previously worked together on Maxine Peake’s drama Queens of the Coal Age. Alan felt the drama needed an orchestra to cope with something on the scale of The Kraken Wakes. Hmm. Tricky. He pointed out the logistics for the whole of the Philharmonic orchestra to perform a scored two hours of Radio Drama was surely beyond our means. So suggested we instead have just a couple of players. Proving if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Simon Webb, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra General Manager, has a history of taking on exciting projects that reach the parts other orchestras don’t reach. Mutual appreciation of the novel, Val’s writing and Alan’s previous work allowed us to shape a project together. “If we were going to do it,” said Simon to me, “wouldn't it be exciting to do it live?” For the orchestra maybe, but for radio drama? As it turned out, radio drama commissioner Jeremy Howe was game.
A different kind of production
The process was different too. Before even embarking on the script Alan, Val and I met. The music was to be such a big part of the storytelling, it even took on some of the characters. For Alan the unseen Kraken was the subtext in an unspoken alien world. The band was also the catastrophic global devastation depicted in big set pieces: Sea Tanks grinding up the beach, tentacles grabbing people into balls of humanity; flooding.
With little time, Alan composed the score to the drama between 4.30am and 7am for 4 months around his work and family and Val wrote the script in just a few weeks. Meanwhile, I was also working with BBC R&D on object-based explorations of storytelling in drama and comedy.
Kraken was an opportunity to work with the BBC’s Research and Development to promote the drama using different technologies. Connected Studios and BBC R&D worked with my indie company Savvy, filming the event to create an interactive trailer. We also worked together to create a 360 short presenting viewers in VR headsets or on Youtube 360 with scientific data of global flooding by polar ice caps melting. In these VR experiences we posed the question: ‘What would you do?’
The Live event
Richard Harrington, Paul Higgins and Tamsin Greig rehearse with BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
While the devastating Christmas floods made the drama ever more prescient, in early January we brought the actors together for two days to block and rehearse to the music. Having the orchestra to rehearse with was not practical, so we timed their words to a Sibelius MIDI track.
Our ‘tech week’ with the orchestra was a 90-minute slot that meant we’d never rehearsed the whole thing with actors and orchestra together. But don’t underestimate the power of orchestral players to bring some electricity into proceedings.
We watched the audience’s faces in the Philharmonic Studio at Media City as Episode 1 climaxed with the sci-fi inspired music Alan had composed. My 8 year old described it excitedly as ‘too scary’. A totally exhilarating experience - I hope audiences at home have a similarly dramatic reaction.
Justine Potter is Producer/Director of the adaptation of The Kraken Wakes.
- Episode 1 of The Kraken Wakes will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Saturday 28 May at 2.30pm, with Episode 2 airing at the same time the following Saturday (4 Jun).
- Watch a trailer for Episode 1 featuring the cast and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
- Find out more about the 2016 Dangerous Visions season on the BBC.
