Let's Talk About Sets: Jessica Curtis on Villette

I loved reading Linda Marshall-Griffiths’s script for Villette. I felt an instant sense of what the play was, and how it might feel to look at.

Linda often writes for radio and I think this gives her scripts a very visceral, sensory landscape – not because they are overly descriptive but because she suggests and evokes, leaving gaps for you to fill. Her language is lyrical and crafted, abstract and ordinary at the same time. This immediately gave us great licence in terms of creating a space and a physical language for telling the story in a non-literal way.

The story is quite complex. It is an adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s last novel, Villette. It deals in exile, grief, yearning and loneliness, and finally, the hope of continued life and love. Linda’s bold re-imagining follows the same arc, but places the protagonist Lucy Snowe 150 years into the future.

All my initial images were foggy, minimal, cool, and atmospheric

Her alienation comes from her state as a clone. She and her two sisters have been ‘created’ by a leading virologist trying to make a scientific workforce to save the world from a viral pandemic. The virus kills her sisters, but she survives to escape the facility and join an archaeological dig in Villette. Lucy’s arrival into their isolated and claustrophobic world triggers an upheaval that eventually brings her the hope of love.

There are practical challenges in the script, which is multi-locational, and edits between spaces in a filmic style. Linda described the movement between scenes with words like "melting", "shifting" and "blending", so it was clear that we would need to create a space from which multiple locations could emerge effortlessly.

All my initial images were foggy, minimal, cool, and atmospheric; often about the thresholds between nature and built structures that were clean and absolute. I considered floor-to-ceiling glass windows in office spaces that looked out over lush landscapes, modernist concrete architecture hovering over pools of water.

There is a cool detachment in Lucy and in the clinical environment she inhabits, so the "future" reference that I looked at was of the sleek and pared back variety- 2001 AD was an obvious example. In our text however, it seemed that the idea of the future was less a Tomorrow’s World prophesy, and more a way of removing the story into a no-time, to release it, while using the idea of the clone as a way of investigating identity and self.

We built a hole in the sub-stage with a half revealed skeleton in it

We refined our research, looking at the world of the archeological dig, and got excited about the way that science and nature converge there. All sorts of interesting relationships presented themselves; the living unearthing the dead to save the living; Lucy coming to life amongst the dead; earth and technology, the clinical and the emotional, the past and the future. It also gave up lots of activities – washing, scraping, digging, looking, measuring, testing – and boundaries that we could observe or break with particular effect.

We resolved the space by smashing these two juxtaposed elements together, creating a square platform with a metal frame supported by legs that sink into an earth floor, churned up by the digs, trenches and spoil heaps. There is a grave-sized trench – created by removing a trapped section of the stage – that serves as an entrance and exit. We built an earth hole in the sub-stage below with a half revealed skeleton in it. This space is filmed live and streamed onto the large screen that echoes the floor shape and hovers above it.

The screen has multiple functions – architecturally it tilts to provide a claustrophobic ceiling in some spaces and an angled screen in others which enables us to create a sense of constant surveillance as we look at views of characters continuing to exist in other areas we can’t see in pre-recorded sections linked to the action off stage. It gives us a reflection of Lucy’s psychic state, overtaken by multiple images of her, her sisters, her nightmares. It helps us tell the story in a shorthand we have all learnt from things like CSI and Minority Report, of forensic investigation – split images, graphs, and biometric data whizzing by.

Essentially, this is Lucy Snowe’s story, so it is her future, and we are conversing with a contemporary audience and must therefore use images they understand, so our imagined future is always built on our present past.

By Jessica Curtis

Villette runs at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until 15 October.