SFX: Nicholas Nickleby's sickening beating
DISCLAIMER AND SPOILER WARNING:
This post contains major SPOILERS for Nicholas Nickleby, both in terms of a shocking scene and how a stage effect is achieved.
Caveat lector.
In the story of Nicholas Nickleby, the character of Smike, a crippled and mentally-handicapped orphan, is tied to a whipping frame and beat with a riding crop by the sadistic Yorkshire schoolmaster Wackford Squeers. This happens onstage, in full view of the audience, and in our production it is clear that the actor playing Squeers, Scott Ripley, is literally beating Jason Powers, the performer playing Smike, with an actual riding crop. The scene is harrowing, and rarely is there a dry eye in the house by the time it's through.
Clearly, even were Mr. Powers the most dedicated of method actors, most people could not sustain being actually savagely beaten with a riding crop every night but Monday and twice on Sunday, so to speak. Of course there's a trick to it.
This story begins with a rehearsal note, asking whether we could provide some type of protector for Mr. Powers' back, so he could actually be beaten.
Normally, this would have meant the addition of what is essentially a piece of stealth-armor, constructed from scratch to custom fit the performer. Lucky for me, though, Jason Powers played the role of the Fox in last season's The Little Prince ( depicted and discussed in this prior post). The Fox was a mask-faced puppet-character, the entire steel rig of which was mounted on a boiled leather backplate, shaped to fit Mr. Powers' torso. Since time was of the essence, i decided that the Fox backplate would have a second life as Smike's protective whipping-armor.
front view of the back protector on a form
back view of the form, after i removed the Fox puppet support connectors,
but before i drilled all the rivets out
This quilted lining velcroes into the piece, so it may be removed by Wardrobe and laundered throughout the run of the show.
On a show of such immense scale--65 hats alone, with just myself and a single assistant--i was pleased to have come up with such a quick solution to the back-protector request. (If we hadn't already made the boiled leather vest-back for Mr. Powers the prior season, such a piece would have taken my assistant and i at least three days to make, since vegetable-tanned leather must be fully saturated and then fully dry in order to harden into a protective custom-shape of this sort.) We sent the vest into rehearsal and went back to our millinery workload.
However, i patted my own back on the quick-fix too soon.
The request came after the first half of the show had been teching for several days: could something be done to make the protective vest sound less like hard leather armor and more like meaty back-flesh when struck?
Let me go on record and say that I completely LOVE it when something like that comes up in this job. I could spend a week writing posts on crafts solutions to special-effects problems i have dealt with over the course of my career and every one was something like this: some last-minute request that makes you initially go, "WTF?!?!?! OMG LOL FREAL?????" and then, it's a race against the clock for brainstorming your solution. (The bar-none pinnacle of this: during tech of Janos Szazs's production of Marat/Sade at the American Repertory Theatre, i was asked for "some type of appliance" by which a performer could sew his lips shut onstage with grotesque bloody realism from as close as 10', and that could be applied onstage in full view of the audience in a split second with his back turned without him exiting the stage. After i picked myself up off the floor and powwowed with my boss, i did it. That's a future post, i guess.)
At 9am the morning the note came in, I began by considering what would have a similar force-dispersion to back-flesh, that i had readily available and could use to pad the backplate in time for a 4pm beating rehearsal. I think that, in an ideal universe, i would have had time to create a custom-shaped silicone piece that covered the entire back area and slipped into a protective pocket, kind of like a back-shaped version of a post-mastectomy breast-form. Silicone takes more time to cure than i had, though, so that wasn't my solution.
If i'd HAD some handy post-mastectomy breast forms, i might have tried slicing them thin and tiling them across the back of the vest. We don't have any in our stock, here, though ironically, when i worked there someone did donate a pair of them to the ART...
What i had readily available was rubber-mesh shelf liner, so I put the vest on the form and began laying shelf liner layers onto the back of it, putting a shirt over top, and, well, beating it with a stick. I found an MP3 online for comparison, a sound effect file purporting to be a riding crop flogging a human back, so i would play the file, beat the form, adjust the padding and the shirt, and repeat, until i had a pretty good "meaty smack" approximation.
Here are some photos:
two layers of shelf liner...
third one's a charm...
Can you spy the meaty smack-pad under this shirt?
This is the finished pad, which also velcroed to the back of the vest.
All layers are pad-stitched together inside the canvas cover, using heavy carpet thread, to keep them functioning as one integrated unit no matter how much of a literal beating they take (ideally). I made the pad detachable in case i needed to remove it, replace it, or reuse the base vest again at some point in the future for some other freaky project similar to this one!
This post contains major SPOILERS for Nicholas Nickleby, both in terms of a shocking scene and how a stage effect is achieved.
Caveat lector.
In the story of Nicholas Nickleby, the character of Smike, a crippled and mentally-handicapped orphan, is tied to a whipping frame and beat with a riding crop by the sadistic Yorkshire schoolmaster Wackford Squeers. This happens onstage, in full view of the audience, and in our production it is clear that the actor playing Squeers, Scott Ripley, is literally beating Jason Powers, the performer playing Smike, with an actual riding crop. The scene is harrowing, and rarely is there a dry eye in the house by the time it's through.
Clearly, even were Mr. Powers the most dedicated of method actors, most people could not sustain being actually savagely beaten with a riding crop every night but Monday and twice on Sunday, so to speak. Of course there's a trick to it.
This story begins with a rehearsal note, asking whether we could provide some type of protector for Mr. Powers' back, so he could actually be beaten.
Normally, this would have meant the addition of what is essentially a piece of stealth-armor, constructed from scratch to custom fit the performer. Lucky for me, though, Jason Powers played the role of the Fox in last season's The Little Prince ( depicted and discussed in this prior post). The Fox was a mask-faced puppet-character, the entire steel rig of which was mounted on a boiled leather backplate, shaped to fit Mr. Powers' torso. Since time was of the essence, i decided that the Fox backplate would have a second life as Smike's protective whipping-armor.
front view of the back protector on a form
back view of the form, after i removed the Fox puppet support connectors,
but before i drilled all the rivets out
This quilted lining velcroes into the piece, so it may be removed by Wardrobe and laundered throughout the run of the show.
On a show of such immense scale--65 hats alone, with just myself and a single assistant--i was pleased to have come up with such a quick solution to the back-protector request. (If we hadn't already made the boiled leather vest-back for Mr. Powers the prior season, such a piece would have taken my assistant and i at least three days to make, since vegetable-tanned leather must be fully saturated and then fully dry in order to harden into a protective custom-shape of this sort.) We sent the vest into rehearsal and went back to our millinery workload.
However, i patted my own back on the quick-fix too soon.
The request came after the first half of the show had been teching for several days: could something be done to make the protective vest sound less like hard leather armor and more like meaty back-flesh when struck?
Let me go on record and say that I completely LOVE it when something like that comes up in this job. I could spend a week writing posts on crafts solutions to special-effects problems i have dealt with over the course of my career and every one was something like this: some last-minute request that makes you initially go, "WTF?!?!?! OMG LOL FREAL?????" and then, it's a race against the clock for brainstorming your solution. (The bar-none pinnacle of this: during tech of Janos Szazs's production of Marat/Sade at the American Repertory Theatre, i was asked for "some type of appliance" by which a performer could sew his lips shut onstage with grotesque bloody realism from as close as 10', and that could be applied onstage in full view of the audience in a split second with his back turned without him exiting the stage. After i picked myself up off the floor and powwowed with my boss, i did it. That's a future post, i guess.)
At 9am the morning the note came in, I began by considering what would have a similar force-dispersion to back-flesh, that i had readily available and could use to pad the backplate in time for a 4pm beating rehearsal. I think that, in an ideal universe, i would have had time to create a custom-shaped silicone piece that covered the entire back area and slipped into a protective pocket, kind of like a back-shaped version of a post-mastectomy breast-form. Silicone takes more time to cure than i had, though, so that wasn't my solution.
If i'd HAD some handy post-mastectomy breast forms, i might have tried slicing them thin and tiling them across the back of the vest. We don't have any in our stock, here, though ironically, when i worked there someone did donate a pair of them to the ART...
What i had readily available was rubber-mesh shelf liner, so I put the vest on the form and began laying shelf liner layers onto the back of it, putting a shirt over top, and, well, beating it with a stick. I found an MP3 online for comparison, a sound effect file purporting to be a riding crop flogging a human back, so i would play the file, beat the form, adjust the padding and the shirt, and repeat, until i had a pretty good "meaty smack" approximation.
Here are some photos:
two layers of shelf liner...
third one's a charm...
Can you spy the meaty smack-pad under this shirt?
This is the finished pad, which also velcroed to the back of the vest.
All layers are pad-stitched together inside the canvas cover, using heavy carpet thread, to keep them functioning as one integrated unit no matter how much of a literal beating they take (ideally). I made the pad detachable in case i needed to remove it, replace it, or reuse the base vest again at some point in the future for some other freaky project similar to this one!