The next interview in our stagey chat series is with Mark Underwood. Along with Tobias Künzel, Mark created the Avenue Q-esque new show, Death On the Throne, which is currently playing Upstairs at the Gatehouse in London.

Get yourself comfy and join us for the next segment of Stagey Chat!

Hi Mark, how are you doing today? Thanks so much for chatting to Stage to Page! Would you mind introducing yourself and telling us how you first got into the theatre industry?

I always acted as a child and I always wrote stories. I assumed there was no future in acting, but when I didn’t get accepted into any university writing courses after A-Levels, I applied to drama schools. I won a scholarship to attend Mountview Conservatoire for the Performing Arts, or Les Mountview as it was known at the time, due to the amount of alumni who were in Les Mis. In the second year, a group of peers decided they wanted to go to the Edinburgh Festival and they asked me to join them because I’d written some stuff for Students Own (such as the classic song Mountview is **cking *shite) and they needed a writer. I wrote a musical comedy with songs where God goes on holiday and all creation quite literally turns to hell. The average audience was supposedly 3 back then, but we managed to sell out an 80 seat venue for a week. I think my young brain then assumed the universities were wrong and that I was good at writing, so I started concentrating on that again. Then after college, my good friend started a theatre company and I wrote a bunch of shows for them which, coincidentally, were often staged at the Gatehouse.

Your show, Death on the Throne, is coming to Upstairs at the Gatehouse this month. Can you tell us about the story?

Death on the Throne is a fusion of puppetry and pop music written by Tobias Künzel and I. A mischievous child, determined to stay up past her bedtime, spins a tale of four naughty humans who all die on the toilet. In purgatory - a great big shiny unisex public loo in the sky - St. Peter is in a bind, as he was only expecting three. This is a huge clerical error to happen on his first day, so one of them needs to go home and live again. Uncertain who to choose, Peter summons the King of Rock and (toilet) Roll, Elvis Presley. Elvis presides over a kangaroo court, pairing the humans off with historical figures as their counsel, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Queen Elizabeth II, and Margaret Thatcher.

The show is pitched as an eccentric comedy with hints of Avenue Q. What were the inspirations behind writing the story?

Although I’ve personally never seen Avenue Q and Tobias isn’t sure if he has, which is impressive, our show has puppets which is the obvious connection. But Death on the Throne isn’t a typical puppet show; Margaret Thatcher is a talking portrait and two important roles are performed by puppeteers lip-syncing. The puppeteers themselves do not talk; the entire thing is voiced by two actors who play a father and daughter making up a bedtime story. Also, this is a family show, so there’s no swearing. And to me ‘eccentric comedy’ makes it sound like someone couldn’t be bothered to come up with a punchline. Hey, if you find puppets dying on the toilet and ascending to a great big toilet in the sky and meeting Erich Honecker weird, then I suppose the show can be classed as weird, but the comedy is just comedy. But in answer to your question, the inspirations were Camden Hells or, when in Germany, Warsteiner.

What came first for you, the music or the lyrics for Death on the Throne? How do you balance the two when creating a song?

There is no real separation, they happen at the same time. The words are the melody. We knew the story we needed to tell, so one of us would start singing or playing an instrument and it would happen organically. ...Unless it’s a reprise, in which case the music came first.

My blog is called Stage to Page. But if you could turn any book, from page to stage, what would it be and why?

I fear we’re revealing my aliteracy here. I’ve probably read about one book a year for the past ten years. I just don’t have the attention span or eyesight anymore. The internet broke me. That said, I have co-written eleven books during the same time which you’re welcome to listen to. 

They mostly reside behind a paywall, but Grett Binchleaf and the Adventure of the Women Getting Abducted by Crabs is available for free on my podcast The Worst Writer in the World, available on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, I’d probably pick Grett Binchleaf for a stage adaptation. It’s not like there’s much choice otherwise. They’ve done everything else: Charlotte’s Web, Gatsby, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all done. If I could claw the rights from Salinger’s dead hands I guess I could do Catcher in the Rye, but then I don’t want to risk anyone shooting Ringo.

And finally, why should people book tickets to Death on the Throne?

Because if you don’t book tickets they don’t let you into the theatre. Duh doy.