One of the most compelling plays on Broadway in recent memory, the Tony Award-winning The Pillowman stars Billy Crudup as a writer of morbid, Grimmlike tales that are being replicated by a child murderer. When the police of his totalitarian country (Jeff Goldblum and Zeljko Ivanek) haul him and his dim-witted brother in for questioning about the homicides, they are faced with issues of trust, truth, fate and freedom of expression. Further amplifying the dark drama unfolding onstage is the music of Paddy Cunneen and the sound design of Paul Arditti, which interlock to create an ominous, unsettling atmosphere for the show. Originally produced by the National Theatre of Great Britain for a season before going on a 10-week UK tour, The Pillowman won the Olivier Award last year for Best New Play, and Arditti was nominated for Best Sound Design. While he didn't reap that accolade, Arditti did win the Drama Desk Award this year for Outstanding Sound Design. Anyone who has seen the show will remember not only the cast's intensity and the foreboding sets, but also the modest yet powerful sound design that is used only during moments of storytelling and within the protagonist's imagination. It features a beguiling prerecorded score that includes fiddle, dulcimer, cymbalon, waterphone and other percussion.
Speaking from across the Atlantic, the award-winning Arditti–who has worked with BAM in Brooklyn and the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK, and whose credits in London and New York include Festen, The Weir, Four Baboons Adoring The Sun, The Chairs, As You Like It and the new British production Billy Elliott: The Musical–filled in FOH about working on the enigmatic Pillowman.
You won the Drama Desk Award for Best Sound. How did that feel?
Paul Arditti: I'm very proud to have received it. It's a great honor, and it's a great testament to the quality of production sound coordinator/live engineer Chris Cronin's work. I wasn't able to come over the States to do this because I was doing Billy Elliott in London, but the director and Paddy Cunneen, the composer, were there. Chris was fortunately able to come over to Oxford to see the first week of the British tour. I showed him how it all went together, we discussed it and he saw the show a few times. Then he took that knowledge back to New York and did a fantastic job.
Chris is a great engineer, and he understands the British mentality. We may be a little bit more minimal in our approach, and he really understands it when we say, "We don't want to do all that, but we would like to spend an awful lot of time getting this absolutely right." He's prepared to translate that for us so that we can get the most out of the way that the Americans work and keep as much of the show as it was originally intended. He's great at respecting other people's wishes and putting them into action.
It was basically the same sound design in New York, modified only in terms of equipment. The biggest difference was that in London, there were three musicians playing live at the back of the set. We thought there might be an American transfer in the offing, so we made the decision that while we had the musicians and they knew the music, we would go into a studio and record it all. So the music you had on tour and in New York was recorded. And we were very pleased with the results of the recording. We edited the music so it ebbs and flows with the actors in those two big stories that take place in the play.
Was there any miking on the actors at all?
We had to push very hard not to have it miked in New York because there is a tendency to at least have the opportunity to mike things. I'm perfectly aware that West End theaters aren't perfect, but I know in certain Broadway theaters, they are either quite noisy or the air conditioning is quite difficult. So there is a tendency to mic. We didn't mic, but there are two bits of miking for effect–during the "Little Jesus" story, the nails being hammered in and some of the vocalizing, and also at the very end, where Michael talks about the Pillowman and is up in his bed. It's just for reverb. There is no actual miking for reinforcement in the show, as far as I know.
When I discussed it with Chris, I said I didn't want any miking unless it was absolutely necessary. I know that John Crowley, the director, didn't want any, and I think the theatre was small enough for it to not really be an issue. It wasn't miked in London or anywhere on tour. That's really the British way with straight plays. It's only if they're done in really big places that we give in to that.
Do you think that heavily amplified sound design is an American phenomenon?
It is an American phenomenon, but I wouldn't dream of saying it wasn't absolutely necessary. As I say, the design of American theatres and the way the air conditioning works in New York–in my experience, it's a very difficult act to call. I did a show around 1990 or 1991 in New York with Peter Hall, and there were people stamping their feet and jumping up and down in the interval because the air conditioning was off, and it was reaching very high temperatures on the first preview of the show. Peter said, "We're not miking it, and if the only way to hear the actors is to turn the air conditioning off, then that's what we're going to do." That's obviously not a workable solution in the long run, to have the audience get boiled alive. You have to do what you can, and if you have a big, acoustically-unfriendly auditorium with equally acoustically-unfriendly air conditioning, then sometimes you have to make those judgments.
I do think that American audiences do like it louder, and American producers do like it louder. They like to deliver what's onstage to the audience at a particular volume, whereas I think in Britain, we're more used to making the effort to listen. But of course, as soon as you put anything musical onstage, then all bets are off. The musical I just did in the West End, Billy Elliott, is heavily miked throughout, even though there are large patches of dialogue.
One of the huge problems in recent years has been moving lights and the fans inside them. It's taken a long time for sound designers to persuade those around them that these are a real issue. Quite a lot of lighting designers haven't realized that incrementally adding noisy lighting units brings up the noise floor, so you have no choice but to mic. I think it's a great shame, but I think it's also rather wonderful that, at least in Britain, a lot of lighting designers doing straight drama are taking the noise their equipment is making into consideration. As a result of that, they are putting pressure on the lighting companies to provide equipment that is quiet.
There is minimal sound used in The Pillowman except for the two main stories, which had sound collages worked into them. What sounds did you use for each of those?
The first one has electric shocks and screams, and there is one very scary moment. It's so scary that I got a show report the other day that said a gentlemen had a heart attack in that moment, and I'm glad to say that he's okay. It is quite a frightening moment, and that is a combination of certain sounds that Paddy Cunneen and I came up with–rumbles, vocal and guitar sounds mixed with real screams and the electricity. That's quite a big moment. For that first story, we tended to use realistic sounds– when Crudup's character mentioned drilling, we used the sounds of drilling. We found that the sounds were quite sinister in themselves. What was lovely about the way The Pillowman is written–and it is written absolutely brilliantly–was that we were able to follow the lead-ins in the script, and it came across by timing and the right degree of sinisterness.
The second story, because it was done in a slightly different way with the moving screen at the back, had a slightly more metaphorical approach. It's quite an Expressionist realization of the story, so the sounds were less realistic and more representational. And don't forget, Paddy Cunneen wrote a score that was as closely edited to what was going on onstage as the sound effects were, so the whole thing worked together.
I think the reason the sound design works is that the sounds became very musical because they're all part of the score. They are played back from the sound machine. The way that Paddy and I work is that we interfere in each other's area. They become one thing, which in this case, is the best way to do it. It blends together and has a great deal of emotional impact.
I think any credit that's to come to me on this show is Paddy Cunneen's credit as well. We worked together from the first to last day. Every decision that I made was based around what he was doing and vice versa. Maybe it's come across in this case that the sound has been more noticeable than the music, but actually, that's not the way it was put together. They're one and the same thing.
