Lungs by Duncan Macmillan

The LUNGS Sound Designer, Stef Van Alsenoy, gives us a taste of what to expect from the sonic world of the play.

The soundscape represents - in a nutshell - climate change. It is completely indifferent to the lives and decisions of the characters in the play – just as nature in general is completely indifferent to our human destructive interactions with it.

There is a tonal drone layer which gradually descends in pitch, as a witness to the gradual destruction of our surroundings. Most of the other sounds in the soundscape are distorted and transformed field recordings of the sounds of climate change, such as melting glaciers, ice calving and ice sheet collapsing, hurricanes, wildfires. While some of these sounds may have a beautiful sonic texture, they all bear an equally ominous origin.

Our Designer, Charlotte Cooke, gives us an insight into the process of creating the look of the production.

I wanted to honour the current state and industrial decay of the building by using materials in the design that already appeared there, creating a seamless transition from the entrance to the auditorium. No part of the stage design was intended to stand out and yet a lot has been done to change the playing space such as new flooring, drapes, carpeting and graffiti all designed to tie the playing space and main building together.

Incorporating plants into Reset and within the auditorium was designed to create the illusion of nature claiming back the world and hope flowering through the cracks. Not only the cracks in earth made by heat and water, but those we have created, both in our relationships with each other and the world. Reflecting the themes of the play, the stage is stripped back with nowhere to hide.

It was important that the characters seemed, as couples often do when they’ve been together a long time, to blend into one. My costume design works to reflect this whilst also embodying colours and shades found in nature. To achieve this feel, I've kept the materials natural using greens, browns and greys in the colour palette but also, in contrast, synthetic brighter greens. This suggests a nod to nature but with a sense of dissonance too.

Article originally written for the Studio Theatre 2011 production of Lungs. 

A few things happened last year. I turned 30, I got engaged, I got a mortgage, and I got a proper job. The baby conversation was next, and this is something that I was very conscious of at the time of writing. We have a cat now, who we occasionally refer to as either ‘baby practice’ or ‘baby substitute’. Time will tell which she’ll ultimately be. She is asleep on my lap as I write this.

I’d been struggling for a long time to find a way to write about some of the bigger issues facing our species, unable to distil my research, concerns, and questions into a pinpoint, compelling dramatic metaphor. I’d also been working on a large-scale play for The Old Vic for about three years, a six-act epic called Transatlantic which begins in a wheat field in Norfolk on the eve of the US joining the Allied war effort and ends in the present day with the estranged family returning to the farm for a funeral. It’s an enormous project with lots of huge themes and a cast of about two hundred characters. I wanted to take a break from that and write a play that was direct, clear, fast, fun, and most importantly, stylistically more pared-back. I wanted to write something for two really good actors where they could tell a story unmediated by props, scene changes, costume changes, mime, lighting or sound queues, just two bodies in space, letting the audience fill in the gaps. It seems appropriate somehow that the play is as ‘carbon-neutral’ as possible. I also felt that the playfulness of the form would help to make some of the more troubling issues more palatable. I wanted the audience to feel as if they were eavesdropping on a very private conversation between two thoughtful, educated, middle-class people who are struggling to do the right thing. I wanted to write a play which was dramatically active but where the narrative isn’t compelled by unravelling a lie or a secret. For me, drama is about live decision making. There are no secrets, everything pours out of them, uncensored, impulsive, raw.

Although it’s not a true story, I’m sure writing Lungs was a way for me to articulate a number of anxieties I was subconsciously having about turning 30, considering parenthood and the state of the world. I wrote the first draft very quickly, I started first thing in the morning and by midnight I’d got to the end. I read it out with my wife-to-be then we spent the rest of the night (and much of the time since) having a very intense conversation. The play was written very quickly and without any planning. The play felt bigger than I’d intended it to, going beyond just the central question of whether or not to become parents. Only when I heard it read back did I realise all the research I’d been doing, particularly to do with climate change, had made its way into the play.

—Duncan Macmillan