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The Deluge at New End Theatre |
Bright talent from the dark side
Horror creator Robert Wynne-Simmons used schoolboy bullying and horrific nightmares to his advantage, writes Simon Wroe
NIGHTMARES were the reason Robert Wynne-Simmons began to write.
As a child, bullied severely at school, he would be visited at night by ghastly, terrible dreams: people were possessed with the souls of the dead, a twin killed his other half and went insane, one man crumbled into ashes.
“I had a breakdown occasioned by the way I was bullied at school,” he says. “And the dreams I had at that time were always around the theme of people losing their identities or having their identities taken from them.
“I suppose by writing about it I was trying to get rid of my fears or at least lessen them, and my marriage with the Gothic has lasted for the rest of my life in some form or other.”
Now 60, Mr Wynne-Simmons – who until recently lived in South End Green – has devoted his life to the macabre, penning numerous stories, plays, TV shows, and even two feature films.
Two of his recent adaptations for the stage, Kurtz and The Deluge, can currently be seen in a double bill at The New End Theatre, Hampstead. The former mortuary is a fitting site for the author’s uncanny material, whose teenage-born themes of porous identity and disintegrating selves are still markedly present.
“The presence of death is never very far away in these stories,” says Robert.
“Kurtz is the archetypal Gothic villain – a noble individual who becomes a monster through his own misunderstanding of the situation. His character foreshadows people like Hitler who came later on.”
Prior to his stint at The New End, Robert wrote for the Channel 4 TV series When Reason Sleeps and a feature film in Ireland called The Outcast.
The defining moment in his career though, when the horror became a reality (so to speak), was when Robert was 21, working as a script editor for Tigon, the low-budget British horror house responsible for Witchfinder General.
“It happened by chance,” he says. “Tigon had booked Pinewood Studios but they weren’t happy with the script they had. They asked me to produce a script for them in five days.”
Panicking, the young Robert rehashed
a school story named Legends of Torment of Body and Soul which he had written when he was 15, turning it into Blood on Satan’s Claw.
The 1970 finished film, also known as Satan’s Skin, became a cult classic, homaged by The Goons, The League of Gentleman, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (the creators of Shaun of the Dead) among many others.
Martin Scorsese is said to have watched the opening scene more than 100 times.
“It involves people whose bodies have been taken over – the hair on them belongs to a demon,” Robert explains matter-of-factly.
When Robert is describing his stories an excited smile hovers around the corners of his mouth, and his voice threatens to break into laughter.
Does he find the whole thing funny?
“When you’re dealing with very dark material the audience is looking for a few laughs,” he admits with a grin. “They can’t stay in a petrified state too long or they’ll rebel.”
Robert also created The Gothic Game – a board game he describes as “something between Cluedo and Dungeons and Dragons” – as “an antidote” to more po-faced horror fare.
Players must try to murder the other characters in a haunted castle, home to vampires, gradually unravelling mummies and “the insatiable leech”.
For his next project, Robert is planning an Inuit opera. The story, told to him by an Inuit shaman, is of a girl who rejects the suitors her father puts forward and falls in love with a severed head.
When her father discovers the head in her bed and throws it out into the snow, she follows the trail of blood into another world.
It sounds grisly, but Robert is adamant his work is not about terrifying his audience.
“The main intention for me has never been to scare people – just to make them face up to the dark side,” he says. “The Gothic tradition believes in facing up to death – it can actually be quite uplifting.”
• The Deluge is at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, until September 29. Kurtz runs until September 30. Tickets: 0870 0332733
The Deluge, currently at the New End Theatre in Hampstead along with Kurtz
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