Guest Blog: Adaptor/Director Alexandra Spencer-Jones On THE LOST BOY PETER PAN

I've always been obsessed with music. Pretty much everybody I've ever met or any place I've ever visited comes with a soundtrack. I think, secretly (or perhaps not so secretly), that I would have liked to have been a composer.

When people start making theatre they often have a direct stimulus: an image, a sound, a place. Mine is the soundtrack - I can feel how that story sounds and the music of the world in which we are working. Across the body of my work, audiences and critics have given plaudits to the music chosen and I'm often asked for soundtracks of the collections I put together.

Prerecorded music became less interesting to me in 2012 when I started working on my third part of the Greek tragedy The Oresteia. Set in 1968, the piece is essentially what has become known as 'Gig Theatre', where, though no artists sing in character, live instrumentalists and singers within the company promote the action forward with music.

Creating a full rock band with members of the Greek Chorus taking turns to sing, these songs felt very authentic and fully harkened back to the original concept of Greek 'Stasimon' - narrative pushing the action forward.

When I came to write my adaptation of Dracula I wanted to create a soundscape based on a Stoker quote from the book: "Look at them, the children of the night, what music they make". Music became the language of 'vampirism' in the show. Magic, thrall, fight - they all came from the music created by the ensemble.

With The Lost Boy Peter Pan I've taken that even further. All members of the company are actor-musicians, most of whom are incredibly skilled multi-instrumentalists capable of working their way around a full rock band as well as singing, dancing and acting.

The theatre industry calls these strange lost boys (and girls) 'quadruple threat'. Olivia Warren, who plays Mrs Darling, formally trained at the world-famous actor-musician programme at Rose Bruford College, but the rest are from a myriad of training or rock backgrounds and have less conventional training.

The process of creating a new work for actor-musicians is absolutely thrilling and forces the artists into extreme creativity from the start. There's a lot of patience required as the actors have so much music to learn in a short period of time, alongside dance steps and lines, but they're honestly sort of creatively superhuman.

I have strong feelings about 'post-modernism' in theatre. As an audience member, if you hear a particular piece of music that you might know or recognise, you're bringing your emotional history into the mix. A master of this is Baz Luhrmann in his films - triggering an audience's own memories or emotional connections to further the emotional response required for the work.

Of course, when you're working with theatre for children, there will be many songs they haven't experienced yet. But just imagine them hearing something in your work and then watching something in 20 years and thinking, "Ah....that makes me think of Peter Pan".

The Lost Boy Peter Pan - presented by Action to the Word in association with Glynis Henderson Productions - runs at Pleasance Theatre from 29 November -7 January, 2018

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