Futuristic musical at the Hayes
Image: Josh Robson, Thomas Campbell in METROPOLIS Photo: Daniel Boud
When German director, Fritz Lang’s surrealist sci-fi film, Metropolis was released in 1927 it stunned audiences. No one had seen a film quite like this before. The effects and the story were ground-breaking and the film became a seminal work in the art of film-making.
Lang’s film was based on the novel written by his wife, Thea von Harbou. It is from this classic 1925 novel that Julia Robertson has created the book and lyrics to a new musical adaptation of Metropolis.
“I think Metropolis has been relevant for a long time and it just sort of continues to become more so – which is a little bit terrifying,” says Robertson about delivering this story to a modern audience.
Metropolis is set in a future city that is highly mechanised and which has a manifest disparity between classes. The wealthy class resides in a modern city with every convenience, whereas the poor occupy a subterranean world where they are slaves. An unlikely romance develops between the son of the city’s overlord and an idealistic woman from the underworld. Rebellion, deception, and a life-like robotic imposter shake the foundations of the false utopia. It is uncannily prescient in many ways.
Robertson is the artistic director of Little Eggs Collective which was invited by Hayes Theatre to create a new musical. She and composer, Zara Stanton already had sketches for Metropolis so this was a timely opportunity.
“What we really pride ourselves on is world building in small spaces and making them seem far bigger than they are,” says Robertson, alluding to the intimate size of the Hayes Theatre and the grand scale of Metropolis.
The set will feature abstract imagery to help create a sense of grandeur. It will retain the original art deco, industrial, expressionistic styling of the novel and film, which will give the production a mixed sense of nostalgia and futurism.
The android that is at the centre of the narrative and is iconic in Metropolis marketing imagery, will be rendered in the form of a life-sized puppet, controlled on stage by three people.
Musically, Robertson wanted composer, Stanton to move away from the current trend of pop tunes and towards something more classical.
“She’s [Stanton] very, very clever with big choral sounds and detailed harmony work and I knew that for the epic nature of something like Metropolis within a small space, I really wanted that big sound,” explains Robertson.
On stage will be a very small band consisting of a keyboard player, trumpeter, cellist and a violin played by one of the cast. This will be embellished by track music, and by ambient machinery soundscape and effects created by sound designer, Christine Pan.
Metropolis is a critical, perceptive examination of human nature, society, politics, and power that still, sadly, has currency in today’s increasing dystopia.
