From Page to Stage: Sweeps, Sal and Fray
In this week’s post we’re back to another From Page to Stage returning to Gemma Aked-Priestly’s dark comedy, The Cupboard. This time we’re looking at the final three characters that I have not explored yet, Sweeps, Sal and Fray played by the wonderful Alex Edge, Sydney Burges (in Edinburgh), Ellie Whittaker (at the LET Showcase) and Adrian Moore respectively. These three characters were the other inanimate objects, besides Righty the Boot, who Rat 333 stumbles upon in the cupboard of Jack the Ripper. It was so interesting and challenging to create costumes that maintained the sinister, dark undertones of the script whilst making it obvious which object they were and be in keeping with the time period.
I was, again, lucky to have artwork from Tess Castella to begin working from. She had created initial artwork in association with the first drafts of the script which I used as a base for the costume designs. I’ll begin by exploring the character of Sweeps, the chimney brush, played by the brilliant Alex Edge. His was probably the most challenging of all the costumes to realise. His overall look came from the look of chimney sweeps in the Victorian era, a la Bert from Mary Poppins. A short black waistcoat, period trousers and a white grandad collar shirt. It was obviously essential that these items be dusty and covered in black to create a look as if he were covered in soot, as a chimney brush would be. The really challenging part of this costume was his headpiece. We wanted to literally create the look of Alex having a brush on his head. I began this process by buying an actual chimney brush. There were a number of steps to working out what to do then do with the bristles on the brush. It began with seeing if we could perhaps attach the whole brush head to some sort of cap or hat, but this proved difficult with how the brush was made. It then developed into arranging the individual bristles within Alex’s hair, but we found this was time consuming and ineffective as the bristles often fell out. The final solution I was able to come up with was attaching the bristles to a piece of elastic that could slide around Alex’s head, we would then use coloured hairspray to turn his naturally blonde hair, black to match the bristles and help them blend in. Although a few bristles still had the tendency to loosen here and there, the overall look worked and the loss of bristles was only minor. If I were to get the opportunity to re-make any of the costumes of The Cupboard, I’d be interested to explore other solutions to the chimney brush and see what other ways we could make it work.
Moving on from Sweeps the Brush, we come to Sweeps’ partner in crime in the cupboard, Sal the Sack, seemingly the kind hearted nurturing member of the group before things turn sinister. This was probably the simplest of the costumes to develop but did not come without its difficulties. When first developing the costume for the LET Showcase, Sal was played by Ellie Whittaker and the role then transferred to Sydney Burges when the show developed for the Edinburgh Fringe. The costume did not change much between the two as it was at its core a hessian sack that I had cut holes in to make wearable. However, Gemma and I did not simply want just a plain sack. To bring across a slightly more motherly or homely image to the character we wanted Sal to have an apron. For the LET Showcase this was just a simple white apron. However, as we developed it for Edinburgh it made more sense for this apron to also be made of hessian. The addition of the apron not only added this suggestion of a more homely and nurturing character but it also helped to shape the sack into more of a dress look rather than simply looking like a sack. We continued to add little details of hessian, such as Sydney’s hair tie as well just to bring it throughout the rest of the costume. We ran into one issue when on the mile in Edinburgh with the costume being extremely irritating on Sydney’s skin and also it not providing any warmth so she wore a black tops and leggings for when we were flyering on the mile to maintain warmth and comfort.
After this we come to troubled Fray the Rope, played by Adrian Moore. This was an interesting character to explore, probably the most broken in the cupboard as he was the one that Jack really used to commit the murders. I started with a simple base costume similar to Sweeps, with a shirt and trousers, however, I wanted Fray’s shirt collar to engulf his neck and be extremely tight to give a sense of choking and as if he may burst at any moment. From here we simply got some rope and wrapped it tightly around his entire body, constricting his movement as well as really giving the audience a sense of the tension within Fray that he held throughout the play which was wonderfully acted by Adrian.
For all three of these characters similar approached were made to the make-up. Gemma had been particularly influenced by the aesthetics of Tim Burton so we wanted them to all have intense bags under their eyes and make them all look quite pale and sallow. For Sal we used a brown under the eyes and on the cheeks to soften the look a little more, in comparison to Fray, where we used black to make the look more intense. For the LET Showcase I was inspired by Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in particular for Sal’s make-up look, looking at the Bogeyman and Sally with the idea of her having stitches around her mouth to continue the look of the sack onto her skin, I moved away from this idea of stitches on Sal’s face as the script had become slightly darker and less whimsical when the show developed in preparation for Edinburgh. While the general aesthetic, and particularly Fray’s look, came from Sweeny Todd, Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride. Sweeps on the other hand had very little under his eyes, this gave him the softest look of the characters in the cupboard, as his character was more naïve and childlike. Instead, his make-up was more him being covered in soot. All three were bare foot; this meant that there was then a lot of focus on Righty as the only inanimate object with a shoe, almost a marker of authority, while adding an element of oddness to each of them as well.
Overall I think the costumes for these three characters, although simple, were effective and I was happy with results of how they looked onstage. I think it was interesting to play around with the dark undertones of the play while still maintaining a slight sense of whimsy with them all playing inanimate objects.
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