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Darren Hayes Folds Time
Time, an elastic concept created by man so that he might boil a better egg. It’s a dimension that caught the attention of Darren Hayes when he came to pen his latest album ‘This delicate thing we’ve made’, and that in turn led to the harnessing of Willie Williams to the yoke of presentational concept. How to realise the substance of time from an idea; the sort of challenge Williams relishes.
Williams has been quietly absent from these shores this last year: “I deliberately took time off for myself following the last U2 tour.” Time off for Williams is a misnomer; he took the chance to exercise the grey muscle between his ears in other ways, collaborations with the Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson have taken his mind into new unexplored territory, “Anderson recommended I consider mental images”, as opposed to the prevailing literal imagery of the overbearing LED screen. Thus he comes to Hayes tour revitalised. “Not that I’m wanting for ideas with a man like Darren; he has talents in many directions.”
Williams’ stage set for the tour, built by Total Solutions Group (TSG), comes in two main parts, a curved vaulting bridge apparently of iron and brass; and a 7 metre tall origami bird, a delicate framework clad in RP screen. “I drew on Darren’s own stimuli for the album. He chose the bird as a metaphor for relationships; the only way to see how it works is to take it apart and once you’ve done that, even if you put it back together again, it’s never quite the same.” It’s a potent image, one Williams needed to have recreated on stage in plausible fashion.
“I went to Charlie Kail; he’s incredibly useful in taking something like this and managing it through every stage to fruition.” Williams saw the set pieces in terms of HG Wells Victorian technology. “I sent Mervyn (Thomas) at TSG some images, pictures of an old brass microscope for example, and they took it from there. They’ve done incredibly well with a modest budget. The finish to the bridge is highly evocative of the era.”
The show is conducted in four acts, and the bridge features in three of them, being repositioned several times, providing a very physical change to the stage, finally projecting Hayes out over the stalls seating for an intimate exchange with his audience.
The bird remains concealed, set side-on and flat to the audience, an integral part of the rear cyc, before finally being turned outward and opened to the crowd. “Both pieces are incredibly substantial yet both move really well,” said Williams. “Mervyn made it so that Darren himself can turn the bird once it’s opened.”
Typical of Williams, he manages to extract maximum variety from what are essentially two simple objects; the bridge dramatically evokes transition from place and time. The bird is frankly jaw dropping. It startles and amazes by it’s unexpected emergence, then unsettles us as Hayes and band tear the screen cladding from it’s delicate aluminium skeleton in the second song of act four, revealing its stark beauty and inner light.
“There’s a real arc to this show,” concluded Williams. “The set, the songs, and Bruce Ramus’ lighting really carry that. I’m very pleased with TSG’s work; this is the first time in years I’ve made a cardboard model of a stage set, but CAD just didn’t quite show what I wanted. They’ve taken that 3D model and made it into a touring, practical reality, and it looks beautiful.”
http://www.totalsolutions-group.co.uk
17th October 2007
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