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headphones ready?
NOV 6, 2016 | AUDIO, ROMEO AND JULIET
A month away from the Romeo & Juliet launch… are your headphones ready?
Romeo and Juliet: A Novel goes live on Audible worldwide a month from today, on December 6.
I can’t wait and I know many of you can’t too. I wrote the opening scene in my little rented apartment in Venice in January 2015, almost two years ago. A couple of weeks later I was in Verona during carnival working on the locations.
Richard Armitage (in the studio, hard at work as ever, above) began recording in London last July and finished the job in New York as he went into rehearsals for his off-Broadway play, Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love. Before that there was a considerable editing process for the words. Then afterwards another editing job for the audio. This is more than eleven hours of drama, the biggest audio project I’ve ever undertaken. It took a lot of time and a lot of work, not just for the two of us but a supportive team at Audible as well.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be trying to give you some insights into what to expect when we launch. There’s still time to take part in the contest too, which won’t just give you the chance to win one of five free copies but also fill you in on some of the background to the story. This isn’t, you see, one more narrated book. It’s an original work written specifically for audio, one that’s deliberately pushing hard at the boundaries of what’s possible in this fast-developing medium.
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Venice: the Arsenale in January 2015 when I began work. The city has a cameo role.
How did that come about? Before starting work on R&J I decided to listen again very carefully to the amazing job Richard did on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel. Like Macbeth: A Novel before it, this was a collaboration with my good mate A.J. Hartley, a dramaturge and Shakespeare professor, someone who knows stuff. I’m just a writer who knows very little except what I’ve read and now I’m flying solo. Which meant that with R&J I felt free to extend the territory even further.
Hamlet, if you haven’t heard it, introduces a new character to the story: Yorick, the jester who takes the part of the other half of the call and response mechanism inside Hamlet’s soliloquies. I did wonder if this was a step too far when we wrote him, whether the work was simply too difficult to narrate. Then Richard walked in, took masterful ownership of the whole cast and story and produced something that deservedly got us another Audie nomination.
Tuning into the production once again it dawned on me that we were no longer in the field of conventional narration. Richard was, as it now states on the cover for R&J, performing the work with an incredibly subtle and theatrical skill. So my job ceased to be the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful novelist. Instead I needed to become a dramatist, an architect whose role was to draw up a blueprint in the form of a script Richard could use to build the richly textured world of Verona in 1499 and breathe life into the colourful characters who inhabit it.
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Verona, a month later, queuing for gnocchi during the fantastic carnival which was taking place when I started my research.
I’ll write a little more later about how I tried to achieve this. How Richard manages it all… well that remains beyond me frankly. This is dangerous territory. It would be so easy to overstep the boundaries and turn drama into theatricality. Yes, he uses many voices but he does so in a very clever and representational way. In other words they’re designed to lead you into the character, not necessarily an attempt to be the character directly. Charles Dickens used to tour giving readings of his work, ‘playing’ everyone from Little Nell to Fagin. I imagine he must have used much the same skills. No one, after all, expects a male actor to adopt the voice of a sixteen-year-old girl and it would feel very odd if someone tried. What works is a change of tone and nuance to let the listener create a picture of the world and the characters behind the words using their own imagination.
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Romeo and Juliet, Ford Madox Brown
Imagination. That’s the inner door we need to unlock. Pretty much everything in this work depends upon firing up the immensely powerful CGI engine that lives inside us all.
We don’t so much want you to listen to this story; we want you to enter it. To be consumed by the heady, dangerous Renaissance Italy of 1499; to hear the awkward teenagers spoiling for a fight in the marketplace at the start; to smell the perfumed garden where Juliet first meets her Romeo; to feel the ever-rising heat of summer in the Veneto; to warm to the thrill of our fated couple when they finally find themselves alone in Juliet’s room, for one precious night only; to recoil from the vicious thrust of blade and dagger on Verona’s cobbles when Tybalt and Mercutio and Romeo fall to their lethal games; and, near the end, to shiver at the damp and bitter cold inside the crypt where Juliet, seemingly dead, lies, unable to move but hearing all too clearly the final, grievous conflict around her.
That’s the hope at least.
You can, of course, listen how and where you like. But my favoured position would be reclining at home with a decent pair of headphones, eyes closed. Download in the highest quality otherwise you’ll be missing the nuances of Richard’s many rich and subtle tones. A glass of wine to hand perhaps. I know I’ll be taking one or two come December 6. A Verona variety, of course. For red a Valpolicella Classico or perhaps the slightly heavier ripasso. For white a Soave Superiore, all Garganega of course.
Hand on heart I have to say that, in all my long career, this is the most exciting, adventurous and, yes, terrifying project I’ve ever been fortunate enough to be involved with.
One part of the theatre’s rubbed off at least. A month to go and I now feel the distant twinge of first night nerves.
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Da hast Du absolut recht, Laudine. 
:
Über Strecken passiert einfaaaaaaach niiiiiiiiix und dann kann Richard noch so toll vorlesen, es zieht sich wie Kaugummi bei mir. Knapp 20 Stunden verbleibend. 
