“Do you believe in ghosts?”. It’s a question we pose in each interview during the research processes for our productions. We’ve found that this line of enquiry can be incredibly fruitful, no matter who we are speaking to, leading us down strange and fascinating pathways. Sometimes, interviewees launch into a tall tale they’ve heard, or a personal encounter, or the very definition of what they believe a ghost to be. Over the last couple of years we’ve been surprised to find that the answer is rarely a simple: “no”. Then again, what is a ghost if not a story of our past?
We created our first audio project together in the spring of 2021. The piece was a short digital theatre commission which told the story of a groundskeeper encountering malevolent celtic faeries on the edge of her master’s land, inspired by a piece of real local folklore. We instructed our listeners, who were at home (pandemic), to tune in while seated in front of a window, with the light off, gazing into the dark. This was our first foray into harnessing the listener’s live environment as a storytelling tool, and a nifty method of continuing to create live art during lockdowns.
What seemed like a temporary way of reaching audiences during plague times steadily evolved into an exciting hybrid art form that we couldn’t get enough of, combining two of our great loves: theatre and wanders out into nature. Each soundlandscape piece in its current form is experienced through headphones, allowing for the intimacy of an audio play, against the backdrop of the great outdoors, a live space with all the dynamic transience of a theatre that a natural environment readily has. No walk while listening could ever truly be the same experience as another. The inherent mutability of each landscape, their distinctive feels and characteristics, lie at the heart of each of our pieces. We even record the actors in the very spots our audiences will be listening from to add to the verisimilitude. We want our listeners to be fully immersed in the live landscape, through their eyes, ears, minds, and boots.
The opportunity to work on this latest piece in collaboration with The Brontë Parsonage Museum has been inspiring. We had each read a couple of the sisters’ novels before and The Wild Hauntings…’s director, Beth Knight, a fierce advocate for female historical figures and a Yorkshireperson herself, felt an existing strong connection to the authors. However, for all of us to rediscover them together in the context of this process and spend extended periods of time in the house and on the moorlands they walked, has imbued us with a fresh and potent connection from which to draw our inspiration. Early on in our research process, we decided the story should move away from the sisters themselves to focus on the era and environment they grew up in: 1823, the eccentric stone village below the Parsonage, and the wild and rugged hinterland above.
A large part of our creative process in making these pieces is a research period based in the area the walk and the story are set, focusing largely on interviews with local people: journalists, walking groups, storytellers, librarians, bloggers, community leaders, academics and authors. Interviews have taken us to all sorts of places over the past three years. We’ve had meetings in cafés down cobbled streets, with rain lashing down outside. We’ve been to stranger’s houses for tea and been shown much-loved photographs from decades ago. We’ve hiked up moors and down fells, rendez-voused with friends of friends of friends and tiptoed past graveyards at dusk.
Through books, articles, interviews and two very informative meetings, one with the Parsonage’s Principal Curator Ann Dinsdale and one with local storyteller Adam Sargant, we began to unlock life surrounding the Parsonage in the early 19th Century. We delved into the gruesome histories of Haworth; high mortality rates, the tide of spiritualism, dismal life expectancies, rife superstition and piteous poverty. We heard of earthly visits and unearthly visitations, local folklore like the tale of the Guytrash and the harrowing tradition of silent vigil on St. Mark’s Eve. We woke to footsteps on the cobbles below and examined etchings on gravestones (a cheerful favourite: “How ?hort is life, how ?oon comes death”). We climbed the moors at midday, the February air prickling our cheeks, and we slowly pieced together our story in a quiet corner of the Old White Lion - avoiding the haunted Room 7, of course; you will have to ask Adam Sargant about that…
The Brontë sisters are so inextricable from the environment that shaped them, and it was a privilege to spend time in Haworth walking in their footsteps and discovering it for ourselves. Our research was far-reaching, and Patch adapted it into a script about an Offcumden - a character new to the village, who after a troubled sleep seeks solace in the moors, but finds herself venturing through the veil into a dream of death. Through her eyes and our ears we will explore her Haworth, and her Moors, and discover spectral figures lurking in the distant heather. For listeners who are Brontë fans, you will pick up on symbolism reminiscent of Jane Eyre, a proximity to death akin to Shirley and Emily’s poetry, the sense of longing felt in Wuthering Heights and Villette-esque weather-lore.
At Obscura, we believe in ghosts, but not the kind you might see on TV. We think that ghosts lie at the intersection between land and people. The land shapes the people who live on it, and likewise the people shape the land. Ghosts in Haworth manifest in paving slabs laid clumsily hundreds of years ago, Branwell’s shadowed figure in the portrait he has painted himself out of and endless desire paths stretching out across the Moors. In experiencing soundlandscape: The Wild Hauntings on the Moor, you will become a ghost on the moors yourself. Beth articulated it perfectly when we first met her when we asked her if she believed in ghosts. She talked about the coexistence of the past and present in a place, and the undeniable feeling that landscapes, no matter how vast, have been informed by the people who have once been there.
The past is so very present in Haworth, but so too is the future. People from all over the world will continue to be drawn here, to visit the Parsonage and walk the Moors, bootprint on top of bootprint, memory on top of memory, when all that’s left of us is our ghosts.
Emily Oulton & Patch Middleton
Obscura Theatre
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soundlandscape: The Wild Hauntings on the Moor is created by Obscura Theatre, co-comissioned by Ilkley Literature Festival and the
Brontë Parsonage Museum. Available from Saturday 19th July.
To celebrate the launch of soundlandscape: The Wild Hauntings on the Moor, join Obscura Theatre for stories 'By Candlelight' on Saturday 19th July.
Find out more here.