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The Dark House - Killing the Puppy | | | | | | | |  | | Award winning playwright of The Dark House Mike Walker outlines the concepts behind the interactive drama. This playwright's tale gives a fascinating view of the creative process and how important themes were interwoven into the Play.
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Someone once asked George Lucas how you made a villain. He said, 'it's simple, you have him kill the puppy.' Those thoughts echoed in our minds all the way through the passages and cellars, the stairs and dark corners of our own dark house. We wanted our audience to care about our puppies, we wanted them to share the fear and anxiety, to experience the threat, to try and protect the little fellows and to realise that sometimes the puppy can die!
We wanted to stand them at the door and invite them in to face the monster. Because each one of us has our own personal Horror, the spider in our mental bath, waiting to welcome us back to the bad place.
Even at this stage people were beginning to look at us oddly - there were hints of strange sounds (could it be the whimpering of a puppy?) emanating from our script meetings; people joined the project and left after weeks, shaking, pale, heading for the sun. Soon we had to find new venues for our discussions and experiments: dank, shade-haunted corners of London where nameless deeds had been committed and the very walls shrieked of blood and fear - and then we had it: Fear. Fear was the key that would turn the lock on the minds of our unsuspecting listeners. That's why we used its power in creating the Dark House.
We live in the common-sense world, doing our jobs, having a drink after work, knowing that there are no things that go bump in the night; but once the lights go out and we hear the bump, and the drag and the slithery laugh and the sound of fingernails scratching at the other side of the door, then we're lost and there's nowhere to hide - not even in our own heads because the fear is in there with us.
We wanted uncertainty, confusion, characters who were lost or trapped in their own nightmares. We wanted our listeners to share that uncertainty: who can I trust? Who should I believe? Which world is real?
We were creating a new kind of drama - a drama of complicity, in which the audience could, must, share the fears and dashed hopes of each of our characters in turn. In normal drama the audience gets to know exactly as much and no more than the writer wants. In the Dark House we decided that the audience themselves would choose the world of fear they would share; they would have no one to blame but themselves as they were driven into the very places they least wanted to be.
There would be no way to counter the unease and the shocks, no peeking through your fingers at the screen, there would be no good choices, only the fear inside. Worn down to a frazzle as we sampled endless dark worlds, we emerged at last with a final script, shadows of our former selves, slinking along the endless corridors of the BBC, avoided by all, carrying a strange scent of ancient evil about with us. But we didn't care, because we had unleashed the Dark House and the piteous horror of those who walk forever within its walls.
Mike Walker.
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