The much-trailed Big Finish adaptation of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights is now out, retelling the much loved story in a longer form than ever before. Director Barnaby Edwards and stars Mark Gatiss and Louise Jameson took time out from recording to chat with SFX, Radio Times and Sci-Fi Bulletin’s Paul Simpson…

Can you tell us what your role is and your responsibilities in this adaptation of Box of Delights please.

Mark Gatiss: I’m playing Abner Brown, who is the big baddie AKA The Reverend Boddledale who is an ancient thing, posing as a clergyman, in search of the magical box… I’m going to say the titular box, why not!

Barnaby Edwards: I’m Barnaby Edwards and I’m the director of The Box of Delights.

Louise Jameson: And I’m Louise Jameson and I’m playing the gangster’s moll, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, who is also having an implied affair with one of the bouncer baddies.

What were your first experiences of The Box of Delights?

Mark: Mine was the TV [series]. I don’t know why I’d never heard of it before – and I know now it’s got a very venerable history, particularly in radio, as a children’s classic – but the Patrick Troughton and Robert Stephens and Patricia Quinn one was my exposure.

Barnaby: My first exposure was the classic BBC TV version and then inspired by that I then went and read the two Masefield books, The Box of Delights and The Midnight Folk and they are mad as a box of frogs!

Louise: It passed me by in the 80s and I really don’t know why because my children were the right age then – maybe I was in Jersey or something. In preparation for this, I watched the kids TV series and it was so innovative for its time. Some of the special effects are kind of laughable when you look at the sophistication that we view it with now but in its day – somebody told me it had a million pound budget which was unheard of in children’s TV back then.

And you’re right, Barnaby, it’s mad as a box of frogs, it jumps about all over the place but there is a kind of weird logic in there as well so you’re completely taken in and taken on the journey with them. My heartbeat went up reading your scripts and also watching the series. It really did grab me, I love it, I’m so thrilled to be in it.

Do you think there’s something about this story that lends itself particularly well to audio drama?

Barnaby: Yes, I think there is. It is, as we’ve said, a mad real world and imaginary world inside people’s heads – people flying, all that kind of stuff – and as Louise mentioned, it is quite expensive to do that on television and sometimes quite limiting, whereas you can do it fantastically in a book.

So the advantage of having an audio adaptation of it is that we can absolutely create those cinematic sound designs and soundscapes, and really take the listener, whether they be a child or an adult, into this weird and magical paganistic world of John Masefield.

Mark: What I think it has, even if you don’t know it very well, is a very English tradition of folk tale. There’s something special about it. The Victor Hely -Hutchinson music is so beautiful, it makes your hair stand on end, and the whole idea of the tale, I think, has that in it. There’s something fundamentally Christmassy runs all the way through it and it’s a really weird mixture of paganism and the old times and magic and snow.

I think one of the great bonuses of the TV one was they had this unexpected heavy snowfall, which even on video makes it look utterly magical. I think [the TV director] Renny Rye had snow machines and everything on standby and they didn’t have to use any. It really makes such a difference to see Patrick Troughton waist high in a snow drift, doesn’t it? I think it’s got such a magic to it.

Louise: And there’s no censorship between the writer’s brain and the page, it seems to me. All three of us write and I don’t know about you two but I often have a voice going ‘Oh no, can’t do that, that won’t be acceptable’ and this just does, it just dares. The best films are in the mind. I know it’s a cliché but the imagination can just give you the most wonderful visuals.

What’s the biggest challenge you found, Mark and Louise in terms of the roles themselves and Barnaby directing this?

Mark: Oh well, Covid’s a challenge but I’m lucky enough to be in the studio today because I couldn’t do it from home because my Wi-Fi’s down (laughs) and it’s actually such a treat to get out of the house, that’s a joy.

But actually in terms of the part, Robert Stevens [who played Abner in the 1984 version] looms very large and I love the classiness of that casting. It’s amazing to see him in a kids’ show like that as we did. It’s a great part, the idea of a corrupt magician posing as a clergyman and the wolves are running. It’s just gorgeous.

We’d just done a scene and I said to Barnaby, ‘That’s my favourite scene of anything I’ve ever done.’ It had everything I love, it was weird and mystical and also very villainous. It’s a gorgeous part. What can I say? That’s why you do it really.

Louise: I think the biggest challenge was filling the footsteps that have gone before. Trying to blot out somebody else’s performance and come in with something that you’re personally connecting with, without going so over the top with it that it’s not going to sound believable. It’s just treading that fine line of being as large as the writing without going over the top as a performer.

Mark: I disagree, The only way to blot them ou,t Lou, is to loom very large indeed.

Louise: OK, I’ll take that into the afternoon! You might regret having said that.

Barnaby: In terms of my casting of it, obviously the BBC one does loom large and I think it would be such a mistake to arbitrarily go against everything that that one did in order to be different. It would be a mistake to copy it and do everything the same – but this is going to be a five hour audio adaptation, which is longer than the BBC had.

Also I think I wanted to cast people who I knew would sit right in those parts, if the TV version didn’t exist. So, where sometimes the parts coalesce and sound like they’re the same sort of actor, that’s purely because that’s the right person for the part. The BBC one was impeccably cast and so I’m not trying to cast replicas of anyone who did the BBC one, I’m just trying to cast the right people for the right roles in this.

There are a lot more scenes that people won’t know about, huge subplots that people don’t know about from the TV version or indeed the original BBC radio version.

I worked with Christopher Hill on the script and we’ve tried to create a proper full blooded adaptation of the novel. We have strayed away from some of the novel’s timelines and stuff like that because in the TV version it is just Kay Harker who goes into the past, whereas in this version we’ve got Kay Harker and Peter as well, because having one person going into the past is a bit boring on audio. You can’t hear what they’re doing or anything like that; with two people, they can talk to each other and explain what’s happening.

We do expand the novel but hopefully we’ve tried to keep it in keeping with the writing and with Masefield’s original vision.

Can we expect any Easter eggs or hidden nods to the TV version?

Barnaby: Well, we are recording a whole series of little prequels which will be coming out, so we are expanding on the world of the novel and the TV version. There’s one in-joke in one of the prequels so you’ll have to just listen to the prequels and see if you can get the in-joke but everything else is basically from the novel.

The ending of the television series is rather ambiguous. Can you give us any hints as to the approach the audio version is taking, whether it does stay closer to the novel in that respect?

Barnaby: You mean waking up on a train and it had all been a dream? Well, that is a feature of the novel, that is how the novel ends, so we are doing that but what I have tried to do with Christopher in the script is to really lay the foundations for that.

I think it’s very nicely done in the TV version but we’ve got the luxury of time here so what we’ve tried to do with this adaptation is to seed a whole series of little bits that make sense. So Kay’s journey in the real world contains all the elements his mind needs to manufacture the journey that could or could not be a dream on the train.

So the ambiguity is still there as it is in the novel but I’ve tried to just give a bit more nods to people he sees, things that people say to him before he falls asleep on the train.

This is the first adaptation in four decades after multiple ones in the four/five decades before that. Are there things that you can do in an adaptation in 2020 that they would have had to shy away from in the book in 1984 or earlier? Both in terms of the writing and direction of it but also in terms of playing the parts? Because presumably you can be a little bit broader?

Barnaby: Well, if I leap in first. What we have tried to do with the adaptation, which certainly wasn’t there in the 1935 version and was only very vaguely there in the TV version, is that we have tried to up the female quotient. In the book they’re all a bit mimsy, apart from Sylvia Daisy and possibly Maria, but nothing really happens, they’re all kind of victims, so we have rewritten all of the female parts to make them a bit more spunkier villains and pluckier heroes and things like that.

So that’s a big change I think and in terms of performances, I’ll hand over to Mark and Lou on that. I think it’s a much more nuanced performance that you’re able to give now than the one that’s in the book because you’re playing with a much more sophisticated palette of colours I think.

Mark: Good God, have you been listening? (laughs) I love in the TV version there’s a sport of carnality to Abner and Sylvia Daisy Pouncer, I think they’re really at it (laughs). There’s something hungry about the whole thing, his hunger for the box and everything, there’s something very vivid about that which is rather good. And also, there’s a nice streak of nastiness which all great children’s literature should have. We’ve just done a bit where Sylvia talks about grinding naughty children up into dog biscuits and stuff like that and that has a nice Brothers Grimm feel to it, which is essential.

It’s not mimsy at all, it’s quite a dangerous world, and I think that’s as it should be. Magic is exciting but terribly dangerous and Kay’s journey is everything we all wanted to happen to us on a steam train when we were little but it’s also frightening and I think that’s good.

Louise: I think it’s a really interesting question because of course you’re absolutely right, the children’s audience is much more sophisticated nowadays. I do think we can be more nuanced, but as Mark said earlier we can just push it very far in one direction but we can also bring it right down –  and that’s the joy of a microphone as well, of course. You almost read the thoughts even though they’re being said out loud.

Can could talk a little bit about who’s playing some of the other parts.

Barnaby: Well, this project is very special to me, I really loved the book when I was a kid and I loved the TV series. I have tried to assemble my favourite ever cast for it and I have achieved it, so I’m very pleased with the cast.

So in addition to Mark and Lou as the chief villains, Cole Hawlings is being played by Derek Jacobi; Arnold of Todi, who’s this mysterious person who created the box, is David Warner; and we have Annette Badland as The White Lady and Raj Ghatak as well. We’ve got Tim Bentinck, Lisa Bowerman is in it, Mina Anwar, Clare Corbett… and I’m very pleased to say the lead is a 13 year old boy as well, Mack Keith-Roach.

Kay Harker is in pretty much every single scene and I’m very fortunate that I’ve just come off the back of directing a two year project for Audible where I cast Mack as the lead. I’m really lucky to have just nicked him from that and put him in this because it’s very difficult to get children who can do audio acting. They may look very pretty on screen but to get a proper child to hold the central role in this drama… Mack is incredible, he’s just brilliant.

Mark: Yes, he’s really great.

Barnaby: And we’ve got lots of other people: Homer Todiwala is in it and Damien Lynch, Nicholas Pegg and a whole collection of lovely people. Basically it’s twenty of my favourite actors.

One of the stipulations Robert Stephens had for being involved with the TV version was that the music had to be the theme that he recalled from a radio version, so I wondered where you were going to go with the music of this production.

Mark: Oh that’s interesting.

Barnaby: Well, funnily enough I can hand over to Mark because Mark is the one who found this out for me.

Mark: I always thought it must be Roger Limb’s genius composition and then found out it was Victor Hely-Hutchinson and his Carol Symphony which has been associated with The Box of Delights since the first radio version, I think, and it’s just perfect.

Barnaby: We are getting it, I can tell you that now. It is an arrangement that’s out of copyright thankfully but as with every single adaptation of The Box of Delights, we’re getting it re-orchestrated by Joe Kraemer who wrote the Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation music and has won various quite big Hollywood awards. Joe’s written special songs for it – there’s a rats song in it – and he’ll be orchestrating all of the carols as well. So everything that you remember and associate with The Box of Delights musically we’ll be doing, but we’ll also be seeding the score with a whole load of quotes from carols and stuff like that. It’ll be the most Christmassy score you can imagine.

The Midnight Folk is the novel that precedes The Box of Delights in the series. It’s maybe not as well known as The Box of Delights but it does feature Abner Brown and Sylvia Daisy Pouncer. Mark and Louise, would you be keen to reprise your roles in a prequel of sorts.

Louise: Oh yes.

Mark: I’m always up for prequels, sequels!

Louise: Absolutely!

Mark: I’ve never read it, I’d be intrigued to know how it fits in. If this goes well, it’d be lovely to do it, then we could have a little set.

Barnaby: That is very much my hope. I have tweaked the script so that it is compatible with that existing so there are various little nods in it about Sylvia Daisy Pouncer being Kay’s governess and things like that, and sort of a little bit of past history possibly between Caroline Louisa and Abner and stuff like that. The possibility is open and hopefully this will go very well and if it’s a big success I would absolutely love to reassemble the cast.

Mark: Avengers! Re-assemble!

Have you yet got a favourite moment or a moment that summed up your characters?

Louise: I think the one that Mark quotes earlier where she threatens the little girl with grinding her up and making her dog biscuits.

Mark: It’s genius about dog biscuits isn’t it? Because it’s not just mince meat, it’s very plausible!

Louise: It’s dry, isn’t it, marrow and… So yes, I love that, particularly as she’s being sweet a nanosecond before, that wonderful ability to turn on a sixpence like that.

Mark: I did a scene this morning, it’s my first scene I think, when I meet the children. Maria is very feisty and she’s not fooled by me for a minute. I loved doing that, that was great. He turns in the French windows as he leaves and says ‘What a sweet little thing you are Miss Maria’ and he’s thinking ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to throttle you’. Very nice.

Barnaby: They’re all joyous scenes for me because I’m just hearing them lift off the page and live and breathe but I have a great weakness for the villains They are just so villainous and they’re sophisticated and sexy and horrible so anything featuring the villains is a treat for me. The heroes are doughty and worthy and Cole Hawlings is magical and fantastic but yes the dog’s meat is where I’m at!

 

Thanks to Steve Berry and Caitlin Plimmer for their assistance in arranging the interview

The Box of Delights is out now from Big Finish