Garrick Hagon

Garrick Hagon has appeared in many films including Batman, Cry Freedom, Star Wars, Anthony and Cleopatra and Fatherland. His TV credits include A Perfect Spy, Henry V, The Chief and Love Hurts. In London’s West End he played Chris Keller in All My Sons and he reads frequently for the BBC.

‘A book must be dramatic to be multi-voiced. It has to have a dramatic structure that can be broken up into ‘scenes’. There must be strong characters and a sense of drama.’

Garrick Hagon, who directed Naxos AudioBooks’s unabridged recording of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (released in September 2006) took the brave decision to use many voices to depict Lewis Carroll’s colourful array of characters. Here, Hagon shares his thoughts on the challenging but stimulating recording process that is the multi-voice recording...

‘The appeal of the multi-voice approach came to me after hearing Philip Pullman (a great friend) discuss his work on the radio. We had already worked together on his Dark Materials trilogy (also multi-voiced). I’d already done a lot of unabridged recordings which are always ambitious…but twenty actors is a lot to use in a single unabridged book! That is where meticulous planning comes in.

‘In a multi-voice recording you can’t bring everyone in at once... so we scheduled the book as we would a film by dividing it up into individual scenes. It was a case of deciding who could spend the shortest amount of time in the studio and record the most amount of material appropriate to them as possible. Liza Ross and myself spent a great deal of time discussing the story circle and the technical planning. Overall, it only took four and half days to record both books [Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass] which was quite an achievement!

‘Many of the actors I had worked with before... we all knew each other – that was important. When Nigel Lambert came in with David Shaw-Parker to play Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, they were like real brothers! All the actors brought the love of the book with them – (they had all known and loved the book as children.) The main thing about this production was the fun!

‘I wanted to remain absolutely true to the text – that’s what unabridged texts have to be. We used as much of the text as possible, including the poems. I could picture Charles Lutwidge Dodgson [Carroll’s real name] on a boat, bobbing along the river, sharing stories with the girls for whom he wrote. I love the contrast between the gentleness of that and the mayhem when the stories begin!

‘It was important to put across what the stories meant to Carroll himself... that meant a fair amount of research. There are a lot of songs in the recording... we tried to use songs Carroll would have known. Fortunately we had the very talented David Timson and David Shaw-Parker on board who sung so brilliantly.

‘While a stream of consciousness novel will continue to require a solo reader and certain actors prefer to read all the parts themselves, there is something special about a multi-voiced recording – the coming together of a number of great minds, bringing tension and conflict. It is this energy and zest, not to mention the pace, that makes making a multi-voice recording such a wonderful experience.’