The Laboratory of Hallucinations
Words from the Attic
(Programme Notes)
It was Oct 1993 and my dear father Hector had passed earlier in the year. Since moving to the USA, I had happily adopted their custom of Halloween. Joining in and celebrating with gusto this spectral holiday of the departed. Now, with my Father’s death, the marking of All Hallows’ Eve held a special meaning. For my father was the one who introduced and infused in me a love of Sci-fi and horror. So, I wanted to pay tribute to this man who’d thrown star dust in my eyes and let loose the supernatural into my imagination. It was at his knee that I watched sixties fantasy TV like ‘Doctor Who’ and the ‘Twilight Zone’. I took his hand when we went to the cinema to see such classics like Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand leagues or ‘The Planet of the Apes’ with Charlton Heston. We ate popcorn and explored the universe with the mind expanding art of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then watching Akira Kurosawa’s now mythical ‘The Seven Samurai’. He was intellectually curious and when something came out, he went to see it. And, as a result, those visions and ideas splashed into my mind’s eye. Same with his passion for reading when he took me to join the local library. Where I stowed aboard the books of Ray Bradbury’s ‘R is for Rocket’ and ‘S is for Space’. Or when, after church on Sundays, we’d pop around to the ‘Newsagents’ and Dad would pick up a packet of smokes and the Sunday papers full of celebrity gossip and dirt. And I would rush over to the pile of American comics in the corner. He’d always buy me a couple of them. Which was a mixed bag, some were reprints from much earlier 1950s sci/horror pulp mags, some DC and eventually Marvel..came along. He told Mom they were for me, but he always had a pile of them by his bedside as well. So, what do you do for someone like that? I put on some Grand Guignol.
I had come across this type of theatre when I read Anne Rice’s famous novel ‘Interview with the Vampire’. I fell in love with her fictional troupe called ‘The Theatre of Vampires’. A brilliantly morbid idea of a theater company who literally kills humans on stage in front of a paying audience. The crowd assuming wrongly that it must be fake. Our Madame Rice had based them on the French ‘Grand Guignol’. Which thrived for decades in Paris. Its founder was Max Maurey who in 1898 turned the ‘Theatre Du Grand-Guignol’ into a house of horror. Max was a bloody business man who measured the success of a play by the number of people who fainted during its performance. He hired a house doctor to treat the more fainthearted spectators. He also found the infamous horror playwright Andre Lorde who was to pen so many of his productions.
This 1916 script, ‘The Laboratory of Hallucinations’ is a good example of the Grand Guignol’s repertoire. The brilliant surgeon, Dr. Gorlitz, is so obsessed with his research on the brain that he’s indifferent to pain or suffering he causes in others. Not surprisingly, his lovely, gentle wife, Sonia, prefers the company of the cheerful and handsome archaeologist John De Mora. Dr. Gorlitz learns of his wife’s infidelity at the same moment that an automobile accident delivers his rival into his hands with a severe head injury requiring immediate surgery. Whereupon the Doctor performs torturous experiments on the victim’s brain invoking pain and terrible hallucinations. Before he himself is dispatched by his wife’s lover, who attacks the Doctor during the surgery. All this done with plenty of supernatural set up and terrifyingly realistic, bloody special effects.
