Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone is reopening… in London’s West End. The original Almeida production (see our reviews here) has transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre for a season, and shortly before opening, producer Ron Fogelman chatted with Paul Simpson. In the first part of this interview, he discusses the genesis of the project…

If you really want to blame anyone for this, blame my kids! Not to say there’s not amazing material being developed and realised today, but in our house, we take the view, because we are in an age that there are so many ways to be distracted, it’s harder for a new generation to get the opportunity to see some of the great works of film and TV unless they’re given a little bit of a helping hand.

My wife and I have three children and we’re a little bit like curators. It doesn’t have to be the Great Works of Cinema, but everything – we’ve covered Hitchcock, Powell & Pressburger, David Lean, Carry On films – just to give them the opportunity to see old material and appreciate it, and make allowances that it wasn’t made yesterday with the latest CGI techniques.

We’ve done these regular movie nights, and on my shelf I saw The Twilight Zone and I wondered what they’d think of this. It’s been a while since I’d watched it, and I steered them to the episodes that I thought they’d appreciate. What amazed me was how powerful that storytelling remained. It didn’t matter that it was 60 years old, it didn’t matter it was black and white. All of that fell away – what fascinated them was the storytelling which is at the core of it.

I was amazed at how well the episodes stood up, the range of the storytelling, the pedigree of the writers behind them, and I started looking into the history of the show and how important it is. The fascinating thing here is, especially in the UK, that we all know the theme tune – even kids, who use it as a shorthand reference because they’ve absorbed it as pop culture from America in The Simpsons, Family Guy or mainstream shows. The term turns up in the major papers – in the national news. What struck me was we’re known to be a genre-loving country, yet one of the most interesting TV shows in history that inspired a generation today has largely gone unnoticed. It never played here in the early 60s because we only had 2 channels; it made an appearance in the early 80s on late night TV, relegated to the wee small hours.

That led me to a deep dive into reading the scripts and the original stories that were adapted for the show and I was overwhelmed by the quality.

A good friend of mine, Mark Bentley, is the producer of The Play That Goes Wrong and we would sit and talk about film, TV and the stage. The more I looked at the London stage, I realised it’s now on a par with Broadway but because it’s not so expensive to put a show on here, you can be a little bit more daring and inventive. I thought people were genuinely trying to do something new for theatre.

I also thought that genre is so well loved here but not so well represented on stage. If you get it right you get The Woman in Black, which has been running for 30 years, but outside of that, there are only periodic pop ups of things. That made me think The Twilight Zone could work on stage. What followed was a three year journey of approaching CBS and trying to convince them that we were worth working with and had an approach that would honour the original series but also create something that would have genuine purpose on stage.

I was dealing originally with Liz Kalodner and Veronica Hart, who now runs CBS Consumer Products. We’ve got an amazing relationship with that team there. They’ve been so supportive, so helpful and continue to be. We really wouldn’t have got to this stage without their assistance and support.

So how did it get from there creatively into what we see on stage? The Twilight Zone could have been done as straight stage plays – how did it become this conglomeration of different ideas?

It was genuinely an evolutionary process. The first thing we knew was that we didn’t want to do a DVD box set. That might have been the obvious approach to doing something – the writing stacks up by itself – but we didn’t feel that that was necessarily the right approach for the play and drawing out something that was genuinely had purpose for the stage. We didn’t necessarily have the answers early on but we were thinking, “How do we take this and honour it, and at the same time adapt it with intelligence and care?”

We were very keen to make sure we weren’t perceived as trying to do a cash-in on the brand. That wasn’t the intent. That was one of the reasons we approached the Almeida Theatre. It’s such an amazing venue and does so much great work. We thought we’d see what they thought, and we spoke originally to Rob Icke, who’s a leading director there – he’s done amazing work himself and works very closely with the artistic director, Rupert Goold – and a woman called Jennie Walters. It was clear that straightaway they got what we were trying to do and why; it started with a lunch with them and they were fired up about it.

So who would be good to bring on board as creatives to realise the show and do something that was different but at the same time respectful? Rob had recently worked with Anne Washburn on [her play] Mr Burns, that was shown at the Almeida, and really enjoyed not just the outcome but the working process. In discussion, we also thought of Richard Jones, a world class opera director, three times Olivier Award winning director, who has not just a great understanding of text and versatility, but also an amazing visual imagination and a different understanding of what theatre can do. Richard and Anne had never met or worked together before but we wondered what that combination would do.

I sent Richard over to New York to sit in CBS’ offices, with Anne who’s based in New York, and watch telly! They worked their way through a lot of episodes, to get immersed in that whole world, to get a sense of what spoke to them, what episodes might work. That was a great way for them to bond and see how they would work together and what would come out of it, what interested them specifically about the Twilight Zone and what they thought would work.

What came out of that was a choice of episodes that made a lot of sense to us straightaway and to this day what stands out is that they covered pretty much everything that the Twilight Zone is known for – the thought-provoking, the comedic and occasionally the downright scary. We had done a sampler of episodes that could represent what might be suited on stage and one that made it through was The Shelter, which is very powerful on stage.

What followed was a two-year process of readings, workshops, which took place in London. We would cast together to experiment with textures and different ways of presenting it and from that the show was really built up.

 

Photos by Marc Brenner. The Twilight Zone is on now at the Ambassadors Theatre.

Thanks to Natasha Haddad at Emma Holland PR for help in arranging this interview