“It’s Carry On Beckett!” We've never thought of having to scare people. Inevitably for a story steeped in analogue recordings, there are echoes of Krapp’s Last Tape. “We’ve discussed Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, Yorgos Lanthimos and The Archers,” he says. Ask Scutt about its influences and it’s like turning on a tap full blast. The in-house DVD library may be heavy on Dario Argento (Suspiria, Tenebrae) but cast and crew can also borrow the documentary Notes on Blindness, or audio-centric thrillers including The Conversation and Blow Out, and the play itself will be accessible to even the greenest giallo-come-lately. Strickland always saw his movie not as horror but as a workplace drama about office politics, and Scutt and Horwood are equally keen to give the h-word a swerve. ![]() The poster for Peter Strickland’s 2012 film. “There are so many deviations from the film, it would be irrelevant,” explains the writer, Joel Horwood. Only one cast member, Strickland’s regular collaborator Eugenia Caruso, appears in both play and movie, though she hasn’t brought any reminiscences to the rehearsal room. Scutt is making his directing debut on this theatrical version of Peter Strickland’s chilling 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio, about a timid analogue recordist named Gilderoy ( Toby Jones on screen, Brooke in this version) who travels to Italy in the mid-1970s to record foley for a giallo – one of those florid, operatic chillers where the deaths are almost as painful as the dialogue. Picking his way through this scene in tracksuit bottoms, T-shirt and socks is Tom Scutt, an acclaimed stage designer who has also worked as creative director for Christine and the Queens. They are wearing caretaker coats and high heels. An engineer says, “Let’s put some reverb on that,” while two men relax in chairs nearby. Someone is looking for a misplaced electric toothbrush, though this turns out to be a matter of sound effects rather than dental hygiene. Props strewn around the room include an axe, a Tom and Jerry music box and a cabbage with a knife lodged in it. ![]() The actor Enzo Cilenti sits behind glass issuing orders impatiently in a thick Italian accent to three of his co-stars, who are squeezed around a microphone in a smaller booth opposite one of them, Tom Brooke, the soldier-turned-sniper from the BBC thriller Bodyguard, looks as amusingly bewildered as Beaker from The Muppet Show. The first thing you see when you walk into the Donmar rehearsal space is a control room taking up the whole of one wall.
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