‘We want to put audiences on edge’: the team bringing A24 horror film Saint Maud to the stage

“We’re telling a story of loneliness – how it can manifest in an extreme way,” says Jack McNamara, artistic director of Newcastle upon Tyne’s Live theatre, which is about to stage an adaptation of the indie horror film Saint Maud. “It can be euphoric. It can be violent.”

Writer-director Rose Glass’s debut feature quickly garnered a cult following on its 2020 release. Set against Scarborough’s seafront, the film centres on Maud, an isolated Catholic nurse living with and caring for terminally ill Amanda, an older dancer whose cancer has deprived her of her beloved art form. As Amanda’s health deteriorates and another woman, Carol, starts spending nights with her, Maud sinks deeper into her religious rituals, losing her grip on reality as she becomes obsessed with saving Amanda’s soul.

The play will focus on the three women – “almost like the holy trinity,” says writer Jessica Andrews – setting the drama in Amanda’s bedroom, with glimpses of post-industrial shorelines and Maud’s sparse bedsit. Catholicism manifests in candles, small rituals and repetitions. The stage adaptation draws on Live’s location, situating the three women in a north-east coastal town haunted by its industrial past. McNamara, who lives on the northern coast himself, is taking a creative risk with a production that’s looking beyond traditional theatre, combining the skills of three women who “go really deep with what they do” – novelist Andrews, choreographer Roberta Jean and musician Elizabeth Bernholz, who performs as the electronic artist Gazelle Twin.

McNamara first met Andrews while exploring the possibility of adapting Saltwater, her first novel, about a young woman from Sunderland navigating her identity. “I was struck by how deep and frightening the language could be,” he says. “Very material and tangible.”

When he started imagining what Saint Maud could look like on stage, images appeared in his mind. The first was Bernholz performing her “beautiful and frightening” album Black Dog, sitting in an armchair “like a seance”, with a single lampshade and elongated shadows. Then there was an “absolutely unreal” dance performance created by Jean: Brocade, a piece about craft and physical work, with “strange, minimal, repetitive, scratchy kind of movements”. He felt the trio had “an innate understanding of the darkness of Maud”.

“I could immediately see how it could be adapted for stage, because it’s such a tight film; every second matters,” says Andrews. This will be her first play, but her prior work has many parallels with Saint Maud. “Lots of the themes – Catholicism, ideas of the body in states of extreme transformation, social class, the northern setting – felt very kindred.”

Bernholz has created five albums as Gazelle Twin, composed scores for film and TV, and worked on installation and theatre pieces. “What drove me to make Gazelle Twin in the first place was getting a little tired of the live music format and how I felt expected to present myself,” she says. “So I’m always interested in any creative approach that’s looking to shake things up.”

Jean, from Newcastle but now based in Scotland, makes “interdisciplinary … immersive” work, including her recent, personal piece, Ways of Being, “a love letter to those who’ve experienced depression and suicidal thoughts,” she says. “I like to make work which gives the audience time to reflect.”

When we speak, rehearsals have just begun and the play is still evolving, but the vision is clear. The film of Saint Maud is visceral, the presence of a higher power and Maud’s psychological struggles expressed in intensely physical ways. The play follows suit: in Live’s rehearsal room, I watch Jean working with the actors Brogan Gilbert (Maud), Dani Arlington (Amanda) and Neshla Caplan (Carol) to get deeper into the characters. They workshop the physical changes that come over Maud when she believes she’s feeling the presence of God, her meek and uncertain movements opening up into relaxed bliss, or what Amanda looks like to Maud when she believes the devil is within her, transforming from a woman confined to her bed and struggling to breathe to something unsettling, as animalistic, gleeful movement is restored to her body. “That’s creepy as fuck,” says Gilbert, as Arlington trials the scene.

The story blends reality and delusion, as we’re privy to Maud’s religious ecstasies. In rehearsal, the team test an intriguing way to portray a miracle on stage, repurposing a classic magic trick to create an illusion that, if all goes to plan, will see Maud levitating from Amanda’s bed by the power of God.

Before Live, McNamara ran a touring company in Nottingham, where he pushed to stage “diverse and unexpected” shows. Live sits on Newcastle’s quayside and last year celebrated its 50th anniversary. As we look over the Tyne, McNamara explains that Live is known locally for productions that dig into social issues, but often through “geordieramas”, which he terms as “meaty, rather male narratives” that lean on nostalgia in their exploration of regional identity. It feels risky to push the theatre in a new direction, he says, away from its reliable style and audiences, but necessary. He wants to make space for female narratives, younger voices too, that tell new stories about the area.

That resonates with Andrews. “A lot of my work is centred in the north-east. It’s an intrinsic part of who I am,” she says. “For such a long time it has been about the mines, shipyards, football, this kind of disenfranchised white masculine story, which is real and true, but it’s not representative of where we are now. There’s a multiplicity of ways to be from the region.”

Drawing out local details grounds the horror of Saint Maud. On film, there are gruesome shots and closeups of Maud’s face, Andrews says: “On stage, it felt like the haunting had to come from somewhere else.” She thought about the steelworks in Teesside, the beach at Redcar where coal would wash up on shore, and communities where religion once cemented a sense of identity but now, like traditional industries, has dissipated. “What if Maud’s haunting was also the haunting of a place, and this absence within it that leads to a sense of isolation?”

McNamara says: “There’s a pervasive loss that has defined a community, and even a young girl who had nothing to do with that industry is raised inheriting that.”

The artists hope to get inside Maud’s mind. Bernholz is playing with Maud’s religious obsession, experimenting with hymn structures, live vocals and organ sounds. “She goes from moments of absolute euphoria and ecstasy to rage and malice. I’ll be trying to mirror that,” she says. Jean and the actors discuss how Maud’s mindset and physical demeanour change in moments of worship.

The creative team thought carefully about Maud’s mental state. “In a lot of performance, it’s a woman making a presentation of breakdown,” says Jean. “It felt important that there’s nuance and complexity woven into the fabric of this.”

Andrews says: “We thought a lot about the ethics of a story that can be interpreted as someone struggling with a mental health crisis.” She’s dealt with that by delving into Maud’s backstory, “bringing in more of her past, her relationship to this place and to religion”. We’ll see how a lack of opportunity, a parent obsessed with cleaning rituals, a home town with few clear paths for young women lead Maud to breaking point.

“There’s an increasingly intense quest for purpose and meaning – when it’s not offered, she latches on to religious devotion to have a place in the world,” McNamara says. “The play will dig into that with her,” helped by the casting of Gilbert, who’s “very warm … there’s a kindness to her appearance”.

While the play draws out relatable themes, it’s still a horror story. Not a “schlocky, jump-scare” horror, says McNamara, but something that builds slowly. “I want to put audiences on edge. But it’s a drip. A steady drip that does reach a very frightening, climactic end.”

When the writing, music, movement, sparse set and carefully staged illusions all come together, Andrews hopes audiences in Newcastle “will feel what Maud is going through in their own bodies. I hope they’ll get a sense of the haunting and toxicity of the landscape and think about what it means to be watching that in the north-east,” she says.

McNamara agrees: “I want them to feel the intensity of it. The uncertainty. A subtler, deeper, existential horror. But I want them to also feel the beauty of it. The beauty of darkness.”

Saint Maud is at Live theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 10 October to 2 November.