A ghost walks the halls of his old manor house, accompanied by that of the serving girl he pushed down the well. Can they move on from their past? And is there a place from the here in the present?
Jane – Stephanie Campion
Nathanial – Roger Surridge
Successful author and all round bloody good chap Toby Frost is well known for his Space Captain Smith series of comedy sci-fi novels (I always say, the rule is four jokes a page, Stephen Moffat does five, and Toby does fifty – we’re talking Terry Pratchet levels here.) He has also written a rather brilliant pair of dark fantasy novels and has a new Sci-Fi spy story set in the Space Captain Smith universe but with a rather different take that I can’t wait to read.
I got in touch with Toby to ask if he was interested in writing for radio, and as he’d never tried it before and is one of those delightful people whose humility is as great is their talent, he agreed. Great! Except now I really had to get it right. No more fucking up the recordings.
I was very lucky that I had Stephanie Campion and Roger Surridge to play the two leads. The central concept – two ghosts musing about the purpose of their existence, on of whom pushed another down the well – was both interesting and risky. It would rely on the quality of the dialogue: after all, for almost all of the play they are walking and talking. And, of course, having a cast that could bring that to life.
The recording went really well. Steph and Roger are pros and make things terribly easy for a director. Then came the editing (I did this one), and, well, for the first (and I expect the last) time in my life I found myself cursing Toby’s name. Why? Because there is so… much… walking. Walking on different surfaces. Walking with a bustle dress. Walking to be integrated in a way that you understood what the characters were doing without the sound interfering with the dialogue.
I’m not going to tell you just how much time it took me to record a satisfactory sound to represent a woman walking in a bustle dress. You can imagine. The lesson: it improves with an experience, but you never know for sure which sounds are going to cause you the greatest difficult. Oh, and if you’re going to get into producing audio drama, you are going to spend a lot of time recording bloody footstep.
Thankfully, I didn’t manage to ruin the play with the editing and the combination of the dialogue and the quality acting really brought this through. I think Toby would agree that the final script was a little imbalanced – the ending sort of jumps at you in a way that makes it feel not fully integrated with the text. But these are the things that happen when you take risks to tell interesting, original stories, and I was thrilled that Toby took those risks and shared this delightful tale. Another moment of what I hope will be seen as high-praise for Toby: some time later he came back and wrote another script for us, and, as a truly good writer will, he had learned from what did and didn’t work in Walking the Halls and produced and absolutely bloody fantastic script with “Play the Game.”
Another author I think of when I read Toby’s work is Douglas Adams. Now, Toby understands structure and if there is a flaw in Walking the Halls it’s a relatively minor one that comes from the ambition of the script. But Douglas Adams couldn’t structure a story to save his life. He basically drank whiskey, took baths, and wrote whatever crazy shit came out of his brain. Adams was, of course, a genius, so the structural problems are barely noticeable because of the sheer invention. Walking the Halls is replete with similar invention. I feel privileged to have had Toby volunteer to be our first original script not-written-by-Keith, and I guarantee that the twelve minutes you spend with Jane and Nathaniel in this play are worth every second. Not a lot of authors can do that.
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