Get Carter
IMBUED WITH TEXTURES, TONES, SOUNDS AND SMELLS OF ITS TIME
Northern Stage
Newcastle
59 Productions was commissioned by director Lorne Campbell to design the set for Northern Stage’s gritty theatrical realisation of Get Carter.
It is impossible to separate Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home from its roots in the North-East of England in the late 1960’s. Inspiration for 59’s set design was drawn from Ted Lewis’s prose which is imbued with the textures, tones, sounds and smells of those landscapes and locations: the orange-red skies above the steel factories; the blackened buildings; the hard, dense, watery red of the clay bricks dug from the earth nearby and baked in the vast brick ovens.
When Jack returns home from London for his brother’s funeral, he enters a world which he knows from childhood, yet which is inexorably changing under the influence of new seismic societal shifts brought about by money, power and politics.
As Jack’s story ends – as we know it must – in his death and isolation, we see him embedded into this landscape of the North-East, returning somehow to the land from which he was wrought. In Torben Betts’ adaptation, the place where Jack and his brother Frank most like to play as children is also the place where he dies: amongst the detritus of the failing brick factories, stuck inside a defunct building, buried under an ever-increasing mountain of dank, heavy, stinking bricks, whilst outside “the rain rains”, as it always has.
59’s haunting set design for Get Carter takes this mounting pile of detritus and turns it into a symbol of the overriding sense of decay that surrounds the text. Flooding the stage with a wave of broken red bricks, the design gestures towards the wider themes of the piece without ever separating the audience from its material reality.
Selected Reviews
‘Betts retains the cinematic conceit of transplanting the action to Tyneside, while the arc of Lorne Campbell’s production, set beneath a dank and dripping railway bridge, is broadly familiar. It remains the story of a remorseless gangland enforcer who returns from the Big Smoke with an almost Jacobean purpose: to avenge his brother’s death.’
The Guardian
‘The set, by specialist company 59 Productions, really is something. Those bricks, which look and sound real, evoke a landscape of decaying industry while the wall of the railway bridge is perfect for the casting of long and menacing shadows. It grabs your eye while the music – Nadine Shah melodically growling out a reworked Animals number – grabs your ear. Both are wonderful.’
Chronicle Live
‘Taking its cue from the hard-bitten narratives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Lorne Campbell’s production places primary importance on characterisation and the painstaking creation of atmosphere. Off-stage characters and some of the more violent episodes are conjured up by throwing shadows on the bridge that forms the centrepiece of the set, an impressionistic re-creation of Newcastle’s cityscape, designed by 59 Productions.’
The Times
[59 Production’s] striking backdrop, a huge grey bridge that spews red clay bricks from its gaping mouth on to the shoreline of the muddy river, is suitably imposing.
The Stage
CREDITS
Writer
Torben Betts
Director
Lorne Campbell
Set Design
59 Productions
Costume Design
Imogen Clöet
Lighting Design
Kristina Hjelm
Sound Design
James Frewer
Music & Arrangement
Nadine Shah
Ben Hillier
James Frewer
Vocalist
Nadine Shah
Fight Director
Paul Benzing
Dialect Coach
Samantha Dye
Assistant Director
Anna Ryder
Dramaturg
Rebecca Frecknall
Produced by
Northern Stage