Guest Blog: Director Luke Sheppard On Thriller NIGHT MUST FALL

Director Luke Sheppard is currently helming a revival of Emlyn Williams' renowned psychological thriller 'Night Must Fall'. The show begins a national tour at Eastbourne's Devonshire Park Theatre on 19 August.

I like to think that directing a play like Night Must Fall has some affinity to the duties of an inspector at Scotland Yard: you have to seek out the clues, dodge the red herrings and corner your suspect, extracting information without divulging all the evidence you've assembled.

It's an enormous responsibility but there's also an undeniable thrill to the process, and, as soon as I read the play, I knew it was something I wanted to take on. "Everybody likes a good murder," says one of the characters, and I don't think I will be giving too much away to say that this oxymoron perfectly describes the challenge Emlyn Williams has set us.

Williams himself had a deep fascination with the most unusual real-life crimes, and the fingerprints of those cases are all over this text. The characters are there too - a certain gentleman in the piece bears more than a passing resemblance to a lover in the author's life who conned him out of a great deal of money. So unwrapping the play 80 years after its birth has been like opening a hatbox of secret letters, full of hints that suggest Emlyn had a keen eye for observing the human condition and a strong understanding of the mindset that shapes these characters.

However, to treat this play simply as a murder mystery would be to miss the most rewarding layers of the piece, not least because the author takes great delight in allowing the audience exclusive access into the mind of someone we might perceive to be the killer early on in the narrative. With this early hunch at whodunnit planted, our focus can be given to the far more urgent questions of why they might have done it, are they going to do it again, and if so... when. It's that which I think defines this play as a shining example of the paranoid theatre style, where the pleasure lies in the chase itself and not just the kill.

It needs a committed cast to pull that off and luckily I'm surrounded by an extraordinary team of actors who care deeply about the text, but still manage to make these treasured words sound like new writing. In our production, the characters still live and breathe as Williams left them in 1935, but we've been repeatedly struck by how contemporary their struggles, urges and desires feel in a modern rehearsal room; if you read a scene one way it's a study of class injustice, read it another and it's deeply sexually charged.

We're now in our last week of rehearsals and I'm watching our actors find new nuances in the text. There's great pleasure in watching them take ownership of a show they will be the guardians of on the road for the coming months.

In fact, it's the first time I've had a show of this scale tour, which I'm looking forward to; I was brought up going to my local receiving theatre and I'm a strong advocate of what our co-producer The Original Theatre Company is achieving in these venues.

It does feel strange at the moment that I won't be packing a suitcase and heading around the country with the cast, and, while I could never be an actor, I do envy the romanticised version of that narrative. There must be something rather brilliant about arriving in a new town ready to tell a story you know so well but your audience are yet to discover, and I'm proud that by working with Salisbury Playhouse we are offering a show that equips our actors with such a high level of craftsmanship and production values to tell their tale.

Touring does bring extra production considerations, but I've very much enjoyed working with a design team to make the show feel "made" for each theatre space it will visit, much like In the Heights is made for its current space in King's Cross.

I'm lucky I get to make many different types of work in my job, and while I try not to think about genre too much, I believe in every instance we must focus on telling the story and conjuring the world that is needed to serve that. Ultimately every production is about taking an audience on a journey, and the connection between a live storyteller and an audience member will always be theatre's strongest asset.

As I close the inspector's notepad for the evening and look ahead to tech week I've made a note to always keep that top of my mind: this is a play that isn't just to be read, heard or seen, it's to be experienced live. I hope you might be able to share it with us on our travels, and unravel for yourself the web that Williams has crafted.

See full touring dates of Night Must Fall and book tickets

Photo credit: James Findlay

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