From Page to Stage: Goat

The Wonderful World of Dissocia was a really exciting play to work on. Creating the world inside of Lisa’s head was a really interesting experience. From discussions with the directors, Molly Rose Curran and Gabriel Fogarty Graveson they wanted the world to have a disturbing mixture of fun, whimsical bright colour and a slightly altered, unnerving link to childhood.

Mr Tumnus - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005)

The character of the Goat is part of this disturbing and unnerving world, he tricks Lisa into thinking he is helpless and then rapes her. To add to the disturbing nature of the character I decided to link the look of the character to that of childhood character Mr Tumnus from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, a faun character. To give the sense of this character I chose to draw inspiration from the 2005 film, designed by Isis Mussenden, where Mr Tumnus is depicted with a red scarf. So I took this into my own design and depicted the goat as a faun rather than just a goat.

The Faun - Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

On top of the inspiration from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, I looked at a film that brings out the underlying darkness in childhood fairy tales: Guillermo Del Torro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. The faun in the film has magnificent horns and definitely toes the lines between creepy and whimsical. I wanted to bring the sense of magic that the Faun has in the film into the character through the horns which we were able to borrow from one of the crew.

Construction of the fur trousers

To create the look the first thing I focused on was creating a pair of fur trousers to develop the faun look. Saskia, also working on the costume for this project, and I bought a great faux fur and I got a vintage pattern for trousers and constructed the trousers. It was my first time working with faux fur and creating a pair of trousers and I was really happy with how they turned out. From there I was able to get a red scarf from the UEA costume store. Unfortunately we didn’t have the time to make hooves to cover Lewis’ feet.

Director Molly-Rose Curran wearing the horns

The horns we found worked great but weren’t able to get them in the photographs with Lewis, as the dress rehearsal was the first chance everyone had to practice the plethora of costume changes that they had in the show so some parts of the costume ended up being missed for the photographs, but I was really happy with how the show came out and they all worked on the night. I think the Goat costume worked really well at giving the sense of childhood and linking it to the Goat character gave it the disturbing twist that the directors wanted.

Lewis Wilding as Goat and Rosa Caines as Lisa (Photo: Sydney Burges)