Composing For A Medium Less Locked To Music

"Scene three," she begins. "The Way Of Others. Darkness. A door slams. Nora in a spotlight. Amplified breathing; possibly not hers. Too scared to move. She sees a body on the ground. She moves towards it. It comes to life. It is Hedda. A sonic and physical crashing mix of worlds. Intense, physical, acrobatic. Duet."

This is the kind of brief that composer Oonagh Sherrard got from Circa director Yaron Lifschitz when she was commissioned to create the sound world for the company's conceptually brilliant new work When One Door Closes.

"So obviously you can take that in a whole lot of directions," Sherrard adds. Indeed, composing for acrobats is not quite like making soundtracks for screen or music for dance or text-based drama. "Acrobats are slightly less locked to music. Like, music is feeding them and giving them a world to move in but they're not tied rhythmically to it."

"It's an amazing selection of three women who, unfortunately, found themselves in a time and place where it was hard to move forward."

Of course, this kind of latitude is not unusual in the non-literal world of physical theatre, where circus skills and thespian prowess combine. That said, When One Door Closes is not your usual nu-circ pastiche of burlesque athletics and slender narrative. With its nod to fin de siècle European realist drama it grounds itself in deeply psychological soil.

By exhuming a triumvirate of theatre's most fascinating female leads, (Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler and Miss Julie), throwing them together in a room and denying them the gift of speech, Circa have laid the ground for an extraordinary acrobatic experiment in brooding naturalism.

"The idea that these three women meet is the starting point," Sherrard explains. "There's all this background information which sorta gets referred to through little snippets of text and visuals, which suggest there's been some internal struggle that's lead to two of them committing suicide and one of them walking out on her husband."

Although the show is not a re-telling, some effort has been made to help us understand the Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Miss Julie references. But will those of us not up to speed with Ibsen and Strindberg really get it? Oonagh Sherrard laughs, "I don't know that you will. I mean, that was something we asked ourselves the whole way through. Does the audience know these pieces and to what extent do we need to explain things?"

In terms of action, the "Nora door slam" is a recurring motif and the three female acrobats are clearly playing characters. For a composer though the job is "to represent the unspoken" and given the dense emotional landscape of the three source plays this leaves plenty of scope. As Sherrard says, "The acrobats work kinda how I work. Y'know, with music you're working more from the feeling or the mood of what's happening and you go from there."

Back in the late 1800s Ibsen and Strindberg were also concerned with mood, but their real passion was to evoke a social realism that framed nascent social revolutions in personal terms. In their day they sharply divided audiences, perhaps not simply by asking awkward questions but by placing powerful but nonetheless constricted women at the centre of their works. "It's an amazing selection of three women who, unfortunately, found themselves in a time and place where it was hard to move forward," Sherrard observes.