WRITER EXCLUSIVE
Playwright Stewart Pringle on bringing folk horror to the stage with The Bounds
FOLK HORROR has been undergoing something of a renaissance in recent years, but mostly on the big and small screens. Now it’s theatre’s turn to get in on the act with the arrival of a new play that brings those themes of isolation and superstition to the stage.
“I’d say that everything is more frightening when it’s right in front of you,” says writer Stewart Pringle of his new play The Bounds, which begins a four-week run at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 13 June. “The great thing about theatre, particularly when you’re doing stuff that’s in the genre world, is that you’re in a shared space – you’re breathing the same air as other people and going through it together.”
Pringle’s play is set in Northumbria in 1553 against the backdrop of the English Reformation. But while it includes many tropes of the folk horror genre (“Our props list contains quite a lot of sheep skulls!” laughs Stewart), it’s also as much about football – or at least what passed as football in the 16th century. “I liked the idea of doing something about tribalism and sport,” says Pringle, who first came across Shrovetide football, as it’s called, after visiting a Tudor house in Margate. “It felt like taking this strange, wild, slightly unknown game as its centrepoint could be a good place to start.”
Pringle says that many big-screen horrors fed into the writing of The Bounds. There’s a bit of Blood On Satan’s Claw and Midsommar in its DNA, as well as Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England and also Berberian Sound Studio. “That idea of the monstrous bleeding its way into the everyday felt really important,” he says of Peter Strickland’s 2012 psychological horror. “There’s also a bit of [1971 s
