Dangerous Visions: The Sleeper
Michael Symmons Roberts
Playwright and poet
Original production photographs for WNYO production of The Sleeper
It started with an opera, my dystopia. And there aren’t many dystopias that can claim that. The central idea for The Sleeper came out of various conversations in Cardiff bars between the composer Stephen Deazley and me. The two of us had been brought together by Welsh National Opera to develop a new piece for its youth company WNO Max. We were given free rein, but the more we talked, the more our ideas circled around dystopias. I believe there is a growing appetite for dystopias in films, books, games and even news bulletins at the moment. Maybe we need them to warn us where we are heading? Or maybe we need them to tell us we’ve already got there? (I’ve explored some thoughts on this in an introductory talk for the season.)
Maxine Peake ( Harper) and Jason Done (Davis) star in The Sleeper
Whichever way you see it, drama doesn’t come from ideas. It begins in character and story, and the ideas come from them. So we decided to tell a story set in a parallel present Britain, but we would change one thing. No-one sleeps. This would be a society driven to breaking point by its loss of the gift of sleep. What would this Britain be like? And what would happen if one sleeper, a teenager, suddenly appeared? Would they be hunted? Worshipped? Lynched? The Sleeper was performed by WNO Max in 2011, and when Radio 4 commissioned us to remake it as part of a Dangerous Visions season, focusing on dystopian visions, we leapt at the chance.
Where did the idea for The Sleeper come from ?
For both of us, the transition from opera to radio drama was not so much an adaptation as a reinvention. Opera’s power comes from the interior world being made exterior, but radio works the other way round. Radio drama works most powerfully through intimacy, as the voice in the character’s head, or the listener’s head. I rewrote the opera entirely as a radio drama, introducing a narrator and a new strand to the story (played by Maxine Peake and Jason Done holding a series of secret meetings in Room 210 of a seedy hotel). Stephen then reworked his music for the opera to function as the radio equivalent to a film score. Director Susan Roberts and her team in Salford assembled a great cast and performed their alchemy to bind these disparate elements into a radio drama with a full life of its own, drawing on its roots in opera, but amounting to something unique to radio.
Listen to clips about The Sleeper
Discover more Dangerous Visions
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