This development season of The King in Yellow, created by Simon Burgess and based on The King In Yellow by Robert W Chambers (published in 1895), is offered as part of Te Whare Ngangahau’s 6 Degrees Festival 2024 (part 2). A full production is planned for the NZ Fringe 2025. A review has been requested for this iteration so I will endeavour to focus on a constructive response for its further development while fairly indicating what audiences may expect this week.

I’ve gone to Wikipedia to get a handle on the starting point. It seems the first four stories in Chambers’ book of 10 short stories, collectively titled The King in Yellow, involve a “mysterious and malevolent supernatural and gothic entity known as the King in Yellow” and an “eerie symbol called the Yellow Sign”. The whole collection includes excerpts from a fictional play, The King in Yellow, which “has at least two acts and at least three characters: Cassilda, Camilla and ‘the Stranger’, who may or may not be the titular character.” It is described as “a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it.”

The lost city of Carcosa, “a mysterious, ancient, and possibly cursed place”, also features in many of the stories and in the apocryphal play. It was purloined by Chambers from a story by his contemporary, Ambrose Bierce. In his programme notes, writer/director Simon Burgess honours the tradition by listing the names of authors he stole for his version of the cursed play. Wiki classifies the 19^th century works as supernatural horror. Burgess calls his play “cosmic horror”. When I Google that I get (on Wiki) Lovecraftian horror, “also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror … a subgenre … that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible”.

Burgess’s premise is that director Thomas Wilde (Billy Healy-Melhuish) has become enamoured of and old play called The King in Yellow and has got a cast together to rehearse it: Amber who eventually plays Cassilda (Renee Heayns), Jon who plays The Stranger (Cameron Law) and Rebecca Allan who plays Camilla (Sarah Robinson). For this development season, all of it is presented as a play reading, which means actors are reading the lines of the actors who are conversing with each other as well as reading the lines of the characters they play.

In the full production there will be more opportunity to clearly differentiate what is immediate and spontaneous dialogue and interaction, as opposed to the play text being read by the actors, as intended, with varying degrees of fluency and comprehension. As Becca says, the language of the play-within-the-play is “flowery” and often poetic. Making the actors’ dialogue – when discussing the play and bickering about it, the casting and lack of directing – sound more every-day, less like well-constructed complex sentences, would doubtless improve the texture of the work. This applies mostly to Thomas the Director’s dialogue.

Perhaps the way Becca rushes her lines over the first 10 minutes or so, rendering them largely incomprehensible, is down to her trying to make them sound more natural.

The relationship between Becca and Thomas, is so dysfunctional I find it hard to believe they’ve worked together on plays for years and still want to do so. If Becca found Thomas’s behaviour strange and unusual (she does say “He wasn’t the person I knew anymore” very late in the play), and was more bemused than abusively confrontational in her efforts to work out why, we may feel more inclined to share her concerns and buy into the mystery. Also Thomas, as the only one not playing another role as well, needs to be much more grounded and authentic than we see on opening night (a ‘when in doubt shout’ performance just alienates the audience).

The credibility issues around Thomas’s way of directing – or rather his failing to direct in any constructive or supportive way – may be less problematic if we understood this was atypical and shocking to those who’ve worked with him before. As it stands, it’s very low-level dramatic conflict. And the script tells us he has a track record in driving actors away. Is that important? Does his being an abusive bastard from the start of this play serve the evolution of the supernatural horror elements?

Jon, who has worked with Thomas and Becca before, has brought a friend, Amber, along to replace the actor who has left. He is a peacemaker and she is intriguingly uncertain and vulnerable. This relationship draws me in, as does the one that develops between the two women. So Amber is the stranger in the drama group while Jon plays The Stranger in the apocryphal The King in Yellow (it may be a good idea to give the play about rehearsing The King in Yellow a different title).

As I skim the script (thank you course supervisor Kerryn Palmer for sending it to me), I see its potential for drawing us in at a human level, so that as the supernatural elements emerge, we’ll be hooked. But having willingly suspended our disbelief, what might we take away from the experience? What is it about that’s bigger than itself?

One of the recurring lines in the play-within-the-play is, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god.” I’m still trying to work out what that means. Is there a hubris thing happening here? Is Thomas aware of the play’s reputation as “a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it”? Is that’s why he’s attracted to it? What if, rather than being in “a critical and creative slump” as suggested in the publicity blurb, he is at the top of his game and arrogant enough to scoff at the whole idea of supernatural forces? That might give the Burgess version of The King in Yellow a real dramatic arc that resonates.

There is certainly lots to work on in the process of bringing it to next year’s Fringe.

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