The New Zealand Fringe Festival prides itself on being bold, brave and innovative. It also encourages punters to get out of their comfort zone. This makes it the perfect vehicle for The King in Yellow (TKY), an exploration of dark supernatural themes in the setting of rehearsals for a troubled theatrical production.

TKY is definitely innovative, being a recent work on a largely original theme. It’s also bold and brave, with the capacity to take punters out of their comfort zone – the long list of trigger warnings in the Fringe website is proof of that. However, it’s how the play is presented that I find most challenging. When I come out of the theatre at the end, I feel as if I’ve watched a promising dramatic concept struggling to be born.

TKY borrows its title and premise from a 19^th century American writer, Robert W. Chambers. The King in Yellow is the title of both a book of short stories by Chambers and of a play which comes up in some of his stories. It’s described as “a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it.” This sounds exactly like, and in fact is, the sort of thing you would find in late 19^th century decadent literature (think The Picture of Dorian Gray).

Coming back to the 21^st century version, we are in contemporary Wellington, where aspiring director Thomas Wilde (Billy Healy-Melhuish) is desperate to produce TKY. After some initial “will they, won’t they?” jockeying, he assembles a cast of troubled souls, and rehearsals get under way. However, the play has a mind of its own, and distinctly malevolent intentions. It also has the power to possess those who let themselves be trapped by it.

Simon Burgess’ script does a craftily suspenseful job of unravelling the intricacies of possession by a literary work. There’s a well-paced buildup over TKY’s 60-minute length as we discover the play’s mysterious powers, who has succumbed to them already, who is struggling, and who (or what) will prevail.

Burgess has an educated sense of the range of tools available in the horror genre’s box of tricks, and mixes them up well. As the trigger warnings indicate, he isn’t stingy with his use of onstage violence, but he doesn’t rely on it for effect. He also makes good use of the contrast that arises when ordinary contemporary people interact with a 19^th century text with supernatural powers.

The writer has also taken pains to allow his characters to develop from opening to finish. This observation applies particularly to Amber (Renee Heayns), for me the most sympathetic and well-developed of the characters. Between them, the script and the actor manage to create a sense of her facing and struggling with conflict, inner and outer.

Where the production pulls its punches a bit, or so it seems to me, is in the mechanics of horror. To quote those trigger warnings, the play delivers emotional abuse, depictions of violence, use of replica weapons, death, psychosis and simulated blood. This sounds like very heavy territory indeed, but if the production hoped to shock or frighten me, it fell well short of its goal. If forced to say why, I would probably mumble something about “staging” or “design,” but also possibly something about first night nerves.

TKY is in its development season as a staged play. Burgess says in his programme notes that he is keen to let TKY rest for a while after this. I hope that he persists; somewhere inside that chrysalis there is surely a beautiful scary butterfly yearning to be free.  

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This development season of The King in Yellow, created by Simon Burgess and based on The King In Yellow by Robert W Chambers (published in 1895), is offered as part of Te Whare Ngangahau’s 6 Degrees Festival 2024 (part 2). A full production is planned for the NZ Fringe 2025. A review has been requested for this iteration so I will endeavour to focus on a constructive response for its further development while fairly indicating what audiences may expect this week.

I’ve gone to Wikipedia to get a handle on the starting point. It seems the first four stories in Chambers’ book of 10 short stories, collectively titled The King in Yellow, involve a “mysterious and malevolent supernatural and gothic entity known as the King in Yellow” and an “eerie symbol called the Yellow Sign”. The whole collection includes excerpts from a fictional play, The King in Yellow, which “has at least two acts and at least three characters: Cassilda, Camilla and ‘the Stranger’, who may or may not be the titular character.” It is described as “a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it.”

The lost city of Carcosa, “a mysterious, ancient, and possibly cursed place”, also features in many of the stories and in the apocryphal play. It was purloined by Chambers from a story by his contemporary, Ambrose Bierce. In his programme notes, writer/director Simon Burgess honours the tradition by listing the names of authors he ‘stole from’ for his version of the cursed play. Wiki classifies the 19^th century works as supernatural horror. Burgess calls his play “cosmic horror”. When I Google that I get (on Wiki) Lovecraftian horror, “also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror … a subgenre … that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible”.

Burgess’s premise is that director Thomas Wilde (Billy Healy-Melhuish) has become enamoured of an old play called The King in Yellow and has got a cast together to rehearse it: Amber who eventually plays Cassilda (Renee Heayns), Jon who plays The Stranger (Cameron Law) and Rebecca Allan who plays Camilla (Sarah Robinson). For this development season, all of it is presented as a play reading, which means actors are reading the lines of the actors who are conversing with each other as well as reading the lines of the characters they play.

In the full production there will be more opportunity to clearly differentiate what is immediate and spontaneous dialogue and interaction, as opposed to the play text being read by the actors, as intended, with varying degrees of fluency and comprehension. As Becca says, the language of the play-within-the-play is “flowery” and often poetic. Making the actors’ dialogue – when discussing the play and bickering about it, the casting and lack of directing – sound more every-day, less like well-constructed complex sentences, would doubtless improve the texture of the work. This applies mostly to Thomas the Director’s dialogue.

Perhaps the way Becca rushes her lines over the first 10 minutes or so, rendering them largely incomprehensible, is down to her trying to make them sound more natural.

The relationship between Becca and Thomas, is so dysfunctional I find it hard to believe they’ve worked together on plays for years and still want to do so. If Becca found Thomas’s behaviour strange and unusual (she does say “He wasn’t the person I knew anymore” very late in the play), and was more bemused than abusively confrontational in her efforts to work out why, we may feel more inclined to share her concerns and buy into the mystery. Also Thomas, as the only one not playing another role as well, needs to be much more grounded and authentic than we see on opening night (a ‘when in doubt shout’ performance just alienates the audience).

The credibility issues around Thomas’s way of directing – or rather his failing to direct in any constructive or supportive way – may be less problematic if we understood this was atypical and shocking to those who’ve worked with him before. As it stands, it’s very low-level dramatic conflict. And the script tells us he has a track record in driving actors away. Is that important? Does his being an abusive bastard from the start of this play serve the evolution of the supernatural horror elements?

Jon, who has worked with Thomas and Becca before, has brought a friend, Amber, along to replace the actor who has left. He is a peacemaker and she is intriguingly uncertain and vulnerable. This relationship draws me in, as does the one that develops between the two women. So Amber is the stranger in the drama group while Jon plays The Stranger in the apocryphal The King in Yellow (it may be a good idea to give the play about rehearsing The King in Yellow a different title).

As I skim the script (thank you course supervisor Kerryn Palmer for sending it to me), I see its potential for drawing us in at a human level, so that as the supernatural elements emerge, we’ll be hooked. But having willingly suspended our disbelief, what might we take away from the experience? What is it about that’s bigger than itself?

One of the recurring lines in the play-within-the-play is, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god.” I’m still trying to work out what that means. Is there a hubris thing happening here? Is Thomas aware of the play’s reputation as “a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it”? Is that’s why he’s attracted to it? What if, rather than being in “a critical and creative slump” as suggested in the publicity blurb, he is at the top of his game and arrogant enough to scoff at the whole idea of supernatural forces? That might give the Burgess version of The King in Yellow a real dramatic arc that resonates.

There is certainly lots to work on in the process of bringing it to next year’s Fringe.

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