Porter's Lanny Gets Trip-Hop Soundtrack in Mendips Woodland — SkimNews
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- Max Porter's novel "Lanny" — described in the piece as a 'mythic tale of a mulch-guzzler' — is being adapted as an immersive outdoor stage production set in the Mendips woodland
- Composer Dom Coyote is creating trip-hop-inspired rhythms for the adaptation, framing every woodland object as a musical instrument
- Sound designers Elena Peña and Dave Price were found burying microphones into the forest floor to capture the woodland environment directly into the production's audio
- The staging treats the Mendips itself as the venue and instrument — the source describes the woodland as 'stuck to our skin', signaling a fully site-specific immersive production
- The headline's central question — whether the mythic Lanny can truly be 'heard in this woodland' — turns on whether buried-mic field recording and trip-hop scoring can cut through the actual forest noise for an audience outdoors
Why it matters: By burying mics in the Mendips and scoring with trip-hop rhythms, the production bets that audiences will tolerate — and indeed seek out — theatre where sound design competes with wind, birds, and leaves rather than a tuned acoustic. The gamble is whether Porter's mythic, mulch-rich text can land when the 'stage' is literally a forest floor.
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