How Hail Regina Captured the Art of Staged Word Theatre

Nine minutes of street poetry for one voice, made from the words of a satire

4 min read2 days ago

Not every part of Hail Regina is meant to be read.

Synaesthesia is a piece of Word Theatre from the world of Hail Regina. It runs for nine minutes and fifty seconds. It is performed by a single voice, the voice-artist PJ Williams, and it is built entirely from words and phrases lifted out of the Hail Regina novels.

What is Word Theatre?

Word Theatre takes the vocabulary of a story world and lets it loose. Names, places, institutions and odd phrases are pulled from their sentences and set side by side, so that they collide. The result reads like a dream of the novel, or a radio left on in the Capital after the smog sirens have sounded.

The title is a clue. Synaesthesia is the crossing of the senses: hearing a colour, tasting a word. The piece asks the listener to do something similar, and to take in the Capital through its sounds rather than its plot.

How the traditions of theatre came to Hail Regina

It began in the early manuscripts. Long before there was a settled plot, there were words. The first drafts were peppered with single words and phrases in italics, marked to be kept: not for the reader’s sake, but for how they sounded. Hail Regina has always loved the sound of language, in the line of Evelyn Waugh.

Those manuscripts were built as audio-visual novels, with paintings and music set beside the text. When the novels were readied for publication, the music, the image plates and the italicised words were taken out, as a matter of routine editing. But the words had been collected, and they did not go away.

The sound had been just as deliberate. The early manuscripts came with two albums’ worth of music, cued to particular passages, with directions to the reader such as ‘Play Audio Tracks 1–3 (10.12m): on Low Volume’. The aim was to give readers “a seat in the writer’s studio”, with the story, its pictures and its music as one exhibit. Karmalade, as author, knew this broke an old rule, that a novel ought to be read in silence, and accepted the risk. The early test readers split three ways: some pressed shuffle, some followed every cue exactly, and some read in silence and listened afterwards. The sound was “merely an offer; not a compulsion.

The Capital was always loud in the writer’s ear: smog sirens, chanting, a cello and viola, the hornsmen’s horns, bells and cuckoo clocks. In 2014–15 that soundscape led to an experimental pilot audio drama, recorded and produced to hear, for the first time, what the work might sound like. It can still be heard on Bandcamp. Word Theatre took the idea one step further. If the sounds of the Capital could be heard, why not its words?

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Word Theatre was the result. Set end to end and given a voice, the kept words became Synaesthesia.

How it sounds

It opens with a sentence that almost makes sense:

“If we Ignore Justice and Liberation, then Futility, Contempt, Control and Fear — and the Tabernacle Martyr — will see the Melting Saint — watching the Peephole Priest, ‘eat’ — the Atomic pigs.”

From there it runs on, in a steady, earnest voice, through the Dominus Regis, the State Ranking Register, the debt-internment camps and the Humiliation Inquiry into Smog Death. Characters drift in and out: Mandy Fagan, Perceval Lamb in the hammerhead crane, State-leader Bustwick, and Governor Graves “in an Embittered Coma”. Now and then a line comes through clearly:

“Eat Up Jack. You are excused. Hurry Back. Don’t miss the meeting.”

And then the laughter, from the Outer Circle:

“Hah! Hah Hah! Hah! Hah Hah!”

Why make something so strange?

Satire usually works by keeping a straight face. Synaesthesia keeps the straight face and takes away the sense. What is left is the tone of officialdom (inquiries, registers, submissions, plans) wrapped around images that make no sense at all.

Heard this way, the language of the State sounds as absurd as it is.

It is melancholic on purpose, and odd on purpose. There is probably an unconscious debt to Monty Python, and to the long line of English nonsense behind it.

One voice

The piece is written for a single performer, so there is nothing to lean on but the voice and the rhythm of the words. PJ Williams reads it the way a newsreader might read a bulletin from a country that has quietly lost its mind: calmly, clearly and without a flicker. Beneath the voice runs a soundscape of odd, steady beats that might have come from the flagellation chambers under St Dandy’s Cathedral.

It belongs to the audio side of Hail Regina, alongside the soundscapes and the pilot audio drama, and it sits beside the novels and the screenplays as another way into the same world.