Carl Davis’ scores for nine of Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual Comedies will appear across the 2025/26 season at Staatstheater Kassel. The first of three triple-bill programmes is set opens on 26 September, with screenings of One A.M., The Fireman, and The Pawn Shop. They are followed by a run of The Vagabond, The Count and The Rink on 3 December and Behind the Screen, Easy Street, and The Adventurer from 6 February. Across the season, Peter Schedding conducts the Staatsorchester Kassel – full details here.
One A.M. (1916) is a solo tour-de-force for Chaplin, and one of the few films where he does not play the iconic ‘Tramp’ character. Instead, a wealthy young man returns home late, rather the worse for wear, and grapples with tiger skin rugs, staircases, a pendulum clock and a collapsible wall-bed with a will of its own. The Fireman sees the titular hero caught in a love triangle with the brutish Chief and Edna, whose father wants to torch his house in an insurance scam, and concludes with a conflagration and daring rescue. The Pawn Shop sees Chaplin play a dapper assistant in the titular family-run store, foiling a scam and getting the girl.
Davis’ scores for the Mutuals are all composed for an identical line-up of 16 or 17 players, comprising single woodwinds and strings, trumpet, trombone, a pair of horns, and a percussionist. His music for the 12 Mutuals was created in collaboration with the BFI, who made them all available on DVD from 2003 onwards. In scoring the films, Davis drew on the early life experiences of Chaplin, whose parents performed regularly in the music halls and Variety theatres of London, and accordingly drawing a repertoire of Victorian parlour ballads, marches, polkas and waltzes, as well as popular operatic arias (such as Gounod and Gilbert & Sullivan) and even well-known themes from classical ballet. In The Pawn Shop, for instance, Davis draws on Haydn’s ‘Clock’ Symphony to accompany the clock-mending routine.
“During the course of composing these scores”, Davis wrote, “I began to discern an overall form, a defining shape to the material. Just as Charlie employed a small group of actors of contrasting size, shape and disposition across the whole cycle, I too could use a handful of themes which could jump from film to film.” He describes his approach to scoring the Mutuals in depth here. Selections from his scores were recorded with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra for the album Loitering Without Intent in 2015, with Davis himself conducting.