Trip-Hop in the Trees: Can Max Porter's Lanny Sing in a Mendip Wood?

Sound designers Elena Peña and Dave Price are burying a microphone in mossy ground in the Mendip Hills, hunting the sounds that will score a new stage adaptation of Max Porter's novel Lanny. Composer Dom Coyote listens on headphones nearby, testing rhythms first with his boot, then barefoot on dead conifer needles. "It's got to be socks off, Dom," Price tells him. "Do you wish you'd had a pedicure now?" Peña asks.

The venue is Bristol Old Vic, a short drive from the woodland where the team is working. Somerset-based playwright Bea Roberts has adapted Porter's 2019 novel — the spectral story of a lost boy and a mulch-guzzling creature — and has relocated it. The original sits commuting-distance-to-London; Roberts moves it to commuting-distance-to-Bristol.

That move has musical consequences. Director Nancy Medina wants the show's sound to live within Bristol's historical music scene. "A kind of trip-hop world," Coyote says — the city that produced Massive Attack and Portishead, though the composer names no acts. His solution is stricter than a pastiche: replace the genre's electronic beats with sounds made by the natural world. "So we need to go and play the forest," he says.

Every sun-dappled object becomes an instrument. Pine cones and rowan berries scatter at the entrance to the trees. Price, back on his feet, taps out a rhythm on a deep-timbred trunk and points at the wood. "Any notes for the snare drum department?"

What does trip-hop sound like without electricity?

The question the team is answering in practice is blunt: strip out the programmed beat, keep the feel. Coyote's method treats the forest as a drum machine — moss for bass, needles for texture, trunk for snare. Whether an audience will hear trip-hop rather than rustic percussion is the open question, and the source gives no rehearsal evidence yet either way.

What does this change for the novel?

Porter's Lanny already trades on place — the village, the wood, the creature known as Dead Papa Toothworth feeding on the chatter of daily life. Relocating it to Bristol's orbit shifts the reference points from Home Counties to the Mendips, and the soundscape from ambient menace to a genre the source city can claim as its own. The adaptation's wager is that locality, translated through sound rather than scenery, can carry a mythic story across county lines.

The evidence so far is a working session, not a finished score. The microphone goes into the ground; the shoes come off; the trunk gets tested. The show will tell whether a forest can hold a downbeat.