Night of the Living Dead - Liverpool PLayhouse
Format: Play
Directors: Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks
Location: Liverpool Playhouse Theatre 18th to 22nd February (now on tour across the UK)
Duration: 135 mins incl. interval
Night of the Living Dead was at the time a low budget horror film so cheap it had to be filmed in black and white. But capturing the zeitgeist of an American in 1967 suffering riots, assassinations and no longer feeling able to feel comfortable itself it became a classic horror film and introduced the zombie movie to the world and intriguingly for the time one of the main heroic characters is a black truck driver named Ben. Now imitating the dog bring a new spin on the play to live theatre recreating the movie scene for scene and shot for shot live
Barbara with her brother Johnny are visiting the grave of a distant relative in a small rural part of America. Her brother tries to spook her but suddenly a strange man attacks them both Barbara flees her attacker alone and finds herself trapped in a small farmhouse with a corpse. Slowly she gets joined by a band of feeling strangers as their hideout draws more of the strange attackers. Listening to the radio and TV they find this is happening all over the United States and the night is getting worse for everyone…
On a technical level its an impressive achievement. The stage is broken into three pieces. Top left the original movie being shown in real time; top right the footage from the video camera while centres stage a basic set comprises clever art projections of the scenes. The cast of seven actors perform key scenes and also hold handheld cameras on each other in order to move fluidly from scene to scene – all in a single stage setting. This is extremely physical acting and a feat of endurance and memory knowing exactly where they need to be not just for the scene but to recreate the same camera angles as the original movie. It was fascinating to see how the two screens matched each other.
The drawback is that the stage is really more a stage set and it felt to be a limitation on allowing the scenes to come to life. The main stage never really became the world and because of the general desire to match the original’s small screen look a scenes that should be tense or horrific felt strangely limited and led to audience laughter as the atmosphere rarely felt too foreboding.
However, there were some fascinating moments when the wider stage got used. The use of historical footage of riots and newscasts on Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy really helped explain why the social fabric of the time really responded to a film saying the world could soon be ending. There is a great use of Ku Klux Klan figures shown spookily on screen when newscasters discuss the merciless zombie attacks. The haunting ending of the film is even made more poignant by a mixture of screen footage and a particularly strong performance by the final survivor quoting words of peace when the world feels doomed.
It was a fascinating experience to watch and a lovingly affectionate tribute to the original film but by focusing on the idea of simply recreating the original movie it felt a lost opportunity to show how such a tense thriller could work in a very different environment and speak more to today’s equally uncertain world.
