INTERVIEW: You have entered ‘The Twilight Zone’ … in London
Photo: The Twilight Zone pulls together narratives from several episodes of the iconic mystery series. Photo courtesy of Johan Persson / Provided by EHPR with permission.
LONDON — Anne Washburn, the celebrated playwright of Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, has followed Rod Serling into The Twilight Zone with a new theatrical adaptation of the beloved mystery series. Her show opened at the Almeida Theatre in London a couple of years ago, and now it plays through June 1 at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End.
The play features a number of memorable characters from a variety of original Twilight Zone episodes. Some of the best ones have been chosen for the drama: “Eye of the Beholder,” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and “Perchance to Dream,” among others.
Natasha J. Barnes, who has appeared in Wasted, Tryst and Funny Girl, portrays multiple characters in the West End transfer, including the seductress, Maja, in “Perchance to Dream” and the Bandaged Lady in “Eye of the Beholder.”
“I was in the middle of performing a good old-fashioned British pantomime, and I got a phone call from my agent saying, ‘They’re casting for The Twilight Zone, and they’d like to see you,'” Barnes said in a recent phone interview as she prepped for a Friday evening performance. “And my relationship with the show before then was that I was good friends with Lizzy Connolly, who played the part before me in the original production at the Almeida Theatre, which is where it transferred from. So I knew, from what she spoke about, that it was a great show, and I went in and met the director. The rest is history. They offered it the next day, and I was absolutely thrilled because it was such a great script when I got it. I really, really, really wanted to do it.”
The show, directed by Richard Jones, respects the atmosphere of the original black-and-white TV show. Everything is slightly odd, a bit creepy and devastatingly stark. Images that viewers have come to know and love — detached eyeballs, spinning spirals — are also present and accounted for.
For Barnes, she was familiar with the source material, but after landing the part, she wanted to conduct more research.
“You don’t realize how familiar you are with the legacy of The Twilight Zone until you then get cast in the play and start reading about it and realize that every episode of every TV series you’ve ever seen and loved has a reference to The Twilight Zone,” she said. “I started watching all the episodes after I got the part, and I just fell in love with it. I was amazed at how many little things crop up in an episode of The West Wing or an episode of The Simpsons. It’s always something that I knew was a big thing, particularly in the U.S., but I had no idea how much it has informed sci-fi and horror genres today.”
When Barnes joined the production, she was given the option of watching the specific episodes her characters appear in, or simply using Washburn’s updated script for inspiration. The actor decided that the reference material in the original episodes could help inform her performance, so she dove in and watched “Perchance to Dream” and others.
“We were given the choice whether or not we were going to look back for reference or not, and I chose to because the play itself is episodic in nature,” Barnes said. “So we touch on one of the episodes, and then we jump to another episode. And then we won’t maybe come back to that episode until Act II, and the story is then resolved. So to get a through narrative of all my characters, I watched all the episodes. It mainly gave an amazing insight into the culture and the style of America at that time, at the time it was put out. That helped me with technical things like body language. I play Maja, who is this seductress, an old Hollywood matinee idol. Her goddess-y movement was so great to watch in the original episode. It informed me.”
Throughout this process, Barnes has become enamored of Washburne and her writing. The playwright, whose controversial Mr. Burns split audiences and critics, has developed a relationship with the Almeida over the years, and London audiences have gotten to know her unique style and brave theatricality.
“The words in themselves they just come off the page,” Barnes said. “Anne is incredible in the way she writes. She writes for not just one time period. She writes timelessly, and it spoke to me as a person and as an actress. … I’ve not worked with her before. I had heard about the furor over Mr. Burns. Everyone was talking about it, and it was sold out by the time I tried to get a ticket. … The thing about Anne is that everything she does is so completely different that you want to see it because you know it’s not going to be anything like what she brought out before. She’s got this incredible imagination, and I’m a huge, huge Anne fan now definitely. And I probably will be for life. I think if you go and see one of her shows, and you like you what you see, I think you do end up being loyal to her as a writer.”
In the show, Jones has directed the cast in quite a unique manner. In some ways, the director was tasked with air traffic control because the actors, including Barnes, enter and exit so many times. In one moment, Barnes needs to have bandages on her face, and five minutes later, she jumps into another episode to play the seductress.
It’s a dizzying experience, which seems entirely appropriate given The Twilight Zone’s imagery.
“It’s like a finely choreographed ballet, I think,” Barnes said. “You’re pulling and pushing sets around to create a scene for your fellow cast-mates, or you’re in the scene playing. So you don’t stop. You don’t get off until the end of the show. Even during the interval we don’t really get a break. There’s just so many people to become.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Twilight Zone, by Anne Washburn, is now playing the Ambassadors Theatre in London’s West End. Click here for more information and tickets.
