ARABIAN NIGHTS – Production Day 5 – KATHRYN BEAUMONT

Leaving the Audience in Suspense

Brevity is the soul of wit, Oscar wildly proclaimed. Prescribing to the fashionable assumption that less is more when attempting to amuse. It certainly rings true for our production: each nip and tuck of the text brings us closer to comedy than suspense thriller- there just isn’t any time to suspend anything other than your disbelief!

Frankly, there is something inherently funny in trying to tell a story as big as Arabian Nights in 45 minutes. ‘They must be joking’ and of course, we are. We do not come close to telling our audiences 1001 stories, instead we offer an idiot’s guide to what the whole shebang is about (a clever lass called Scheherazade who spins 1001 yarns to save her neck) with a few headline stories from the 75,000 word tome. Ours are the big stories you could’ve, should’ve (?) heard of: Ali Baba, Sinbad, Aladdin, with the odd surprising detail thrown in for good measure: cyclops, sea monster, hairy midgets. Necessity is the mother of invention, and choosing what to leave out of our abridgement has been just as important as picking what stays in. We did sidestep the enchanted horse, for fear of making an ass of it.

Then we had to decide what to show and what to tell. I admit, we do hand a few things over to the audience’s imagination. 40 thieves with five actors? You do the math.