Recent Preparations

I'll be brief. (There you go - setting myself up for a fall at the outset.) List-making is a great addiction of mine. I suspect that this has something to do with my deeply ingrained OCD complex. For example, I've managed to keep a list of every classic horror film I've ever seen, equipped with the unbearably sad and geeky addition of production information and personalised star ratings. It currently numbers 321... 322 actually, now that the sun has set on the seedy dreck of The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1.5 stars, if you're interested). Lists offer me a certain degree of aesthetic pleasure. They whip the fundamentally crazed and disordered (the fact that Murnau, Lang and Hitchcock sit happily next to Edward D. Wood Junior; the inclusion of titles like Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires; my undying belief that The Wizard of Oz* is a horror film, ecetera) into some sort of order. They instill a false sense of achievement by their very expansiveness - and, conversely, a false sense of responsibility and commitment when delineating tasks yet to be fulfilled. List-making also eradicates the slight irritation of structural planning that an extended bit of prose insists upon. I love the damned things.

For the past few weeks then, I've had a list (aha!) of tasks I desperately need to complete in aid of the Dickens show, staring fixedly up at me from my desk. With the Dungeon rolling to a close after a marathon eight weeks, the time seems opportune. I've managed to accomplish a fair few things over the summer season, but there's more to do yet. Perhaps if I submit my duties to public display, I'll feel that extra bit of impetus to get on and deliver:

1. Learn the lines thoroughly: This is the central task. I made a good start on this in the first round of rehearsals. I estimate that I had roughly eighty percent of the lines down by that stage, but these will have naturally slipped a little with my Dungeon distractions. The incessant, grinding boredom of merciless repetition, a harsh round of correction and instruction, is the only path forward (as I make my way through the childhood terrors of David Copperfield, the examples of Murdstone and Creakle are foremost in my mind). Discovering a chain of aural rhythms to carry me smoothly through the fifteen pages will be the best way. With all that completed to my satisfaction, the fun can really begin! And let's face it - there's no way that it's going to be more stressful now then in the middle of a Cambridge term.

2. Reinstate daily rehearsals of one hour: It's very hard getting the whole cast in one place at the same time, but with a schedule fixed in stone, this should be made considerably easier. To begin, it's probably going to be most sensible to stick to my pre-Dungeon regime of playing my way through parts one and two on alternating days. But since the play as a whole is projected to run for one hour, it would be ideal to start on some complete runs, no matter how patchily realised, by my final week in York. Come to think of it, that extra week in Cambridge in an all-but-deserted accommodation block... that should provide ample opportunity for a daily shout.

3. Design and make placards: I've purchased the card (surprisingly expensive for a mere five sheets). Now I need to work on ageing it (the ancient art of tea-staining is doing this admirably; although, being virgin to this method, I've already frittered away an unprecedented eight tea bags), as well as working out where the various bits of text need to go. I'm strongly reminded of The Relapse, and the eleventh hour fun of finger-painting what seemed an interminable number of scene locations, all the while threatening to despoil the Howard Theatre's unbearably smug red leather seating with our hopelessly blackened palms.

4. Record and edit the Vincent Crummles narration: I've been putting this off for quite some time now, waiting for the lining of my throat to rebuild after the rigorous revolutions of voice loss brought about by the Dungeon. As I mentioned in my vocalisation rant earlier this month, it's both a relief and a terror to have a performance in the can so long before the performance... What will it sound like? Will it be good? Disappointing? Hopelessly bad? I'm consoled by the fact that if I only get it right now, I can set my mind to rest about delivering the opening lines of the play in person. This is a stress that I've never yet had to face... and I don't intend to start now! In hand with this task is an opportunity to edit together the music for the show. After an extended period of internal debate, I've decided to go for Saint-Saens rather than Mussorgsky (too Russian, I feared), but settling on which pieces to use and how best to implement them is quite another challenge...

5. Finish the lighting plot: Nearly done with this one, happily enough! Simplicity is key, especially since I'm not anticipating the world's greatest technical capabilities to be sequestered away in the confines of the Larkum. I'm confident that a few innovative and eye-catching tricks with lighting can be devised (and have whipped out my old ultra violet lamp in readiness), but better is simplicity. I don't want to be accused of deviating too far from the inherent modesty that by all accounts was such an integral attraction of Dickens's readings, but at the same time, I do feel that it's important to capture some fleeting sense of the great Victorian appetite for magic and spectacle... A tricky balance, but I'm sure that with a diligent and sensitive lighting technician to put a swift end to my more impractical ideas, we will get there in the end!

6. Finalise the set design: I already have a fairly good idea of this (such was essential for rehearsal choreography), but it would be helpful to have a definitive or 'master' version in graphic form to refer to when needed. It will also be a lot kinder to our set designer to have a concrete plan to work from - and perhaps make it easier to locate the more ambitious chunks of set dressing (a table, a hat-stand, a raised level).

7. Locate a few vital props: I say 'vital', but in all honesty, I don't think we're missing anything without which the show couldn't run to my satisfaction. For what it's worth, the items I would most like to source are a quart-pot, a leather valise, a rag doll of the male persuasion, a warming-pan, an over-sized quill and a sherry bottle (which I'm sure can be located with relative ease among Cambridge's amiable community of upper-class drunkards).

8. Learn lines for The Alchemist to even out workload on return: I honestly did know these at one time! The aggression with which great swathes of text were deleted in rehearsal may have monkeyed about with my powers of recall though. Drugger's not the most loquacious of Jonson's grotesques (he certainly has nothing to rival a Face or a Subtle or a Mammon), so the task is eminently achievable. It will also be a lovely change of pace to enter a Cambridge rehearsal process off the book. The dissertation research I'd like to do in that first week will also go a lot more smoothly if I'm not hampered by constant reflections on the layout of my tobacco shop or how much I have the hots for Dame Pliant.

If I manage the above before October, the Dickens show will be in a fairly happy place. My productivity should pick up a fair bit with an end to the Dungeon on the nebulous horizon, as well as the nuisance of this low mood that's started to prevail of late. Then again, it might well slide as the workload increases. Such pressures will necessitate some vital changes to the composition and structure of these blog entries. No more can they be sharply-honed antique daggers, polished to perfection and honed for the kill. If I'm to go on keeping a production diary at all (and it would be absurd to stop completely once rehearsals are in full swing), I'll have to find some way to re-adapt. Possibly exploiting these blodgings as a more hazy and elliptical dumping ground for general thoughts on the rehearsal process will be most sensible. More in the vein of this entry then. I'll still be launching on a good old rant should the mood strike me... It's just that I haven't the time or energy during term to grind out more back-to-back essays on my very woolly conception of theatre, nor do I imagine that anyone else has the time to read them. Entries will be more of this flavour from October forth: straightforward; concise(ish); economical... but hopefully not impoverished. Of course, this will only be of value if people carry on reading the blog at all. I don't mean in depth, particularly; nobody has the time for that on the Internet. Just as much as they feel prepared to tackle - this production diary was always going to be self-therapy.

In other news, I've developed the sudden urge to start writing another play. I've made peace with my first play by now, certain that it has no future business appearing on any stage whatsoever. I look back on it now as a highly worked, beautifully polished and almost completely blind dramatic misfire. Unstageable as well. Sort of like Faust, only without the genius and artistry and all that claptrap. The only problem is that I have no time to write another play. However, it's set to deal with two of my favourite themes - misused language and aberrant sexuality - which should stir me to set pen to paper now and again when the mood strikes me... I'm not terribly fast with this sort of thing though, so I'm projecting completion of something vaguely presentable by this time next year. No need to rush...

Also exciting is the appearance of the website for The Alchemist, which is to be found just here. Admire our talented cast, the undeniable skill of our back-up team, and innumerable other delights (such as the programme picture that I deliberated over at such agonising length), all wrapped up in the beauty of Peter Cowan's web design. John Haidar's written a compelling blurb for the production that demands to be read. I particularly enjoyed this bit:

To my mind, all great art should evoke a reaction in us, and whether that's love or hate, sorrow or joy, it should grab us by the throat, wrestle us to the ground, and re-arrange our reality. Jonson does this, having spent most of his life moving between the shadows and the sun, and, for this reason, The Alchemist continues to have a hold over us, four hundred years' on.

Scintillating stuff. However, I shall never forgive him if the overpowering thrill of the education pack doesn't appear online sometime soon...

I'll leave you with a quotation. It's from All About Eve - one of the greatest of all films, certainly the best that I saw last year, and an elegant, zesty melodrama that I had the great pleasure of introducing to my good friends Callum and Davies some weeks back. (Davies retaliated by introducing me to the animated Animal Farm, which I thought was a bit below the belt, especially given that I've since been plagued with nightmares of dictatorial pigs and potato-nosed farmers.) Lofty critic Barry Norman lauds All About Eve as 'a film in which every line is worth listening to'. I'd go further than that. For my money, it's the single greatest script in Hollywood history. Joseph L. Mankiewicz (the man behind Vincent Price's Dragonwyck and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, both of which I highly recommend) crafted a script of such acid wit, cornball pathos, crowd-pleasing hilarity and overriding cynicism that the film develops into an object lesson in wholesome, nourishing script-writing. The moment that caught me most potently this time round comes early on - Gary Merrill's outburst at the unsuspecting but thoroughly twisted Anne Baxter when they meet in Bette Davis's dressing room. It expresses my views on the diversity of theatre very eloquently indeed. Thanks to my zig-zagging in 2010 between a silent pirate play, the classical goons of Shakespeare, Jonson and Vanbrugh, the Grand Guignol melodrama of the Dungeon and the one-man show format, I've been induced to accept a very wide definition of theatre. And it's approximate to this golden tirade:

The Theatuh, the Theatuh - what book of rules says the Theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris or Vienna? Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the Theater is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band - all Theater. Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience - there's Theater. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and The Lone Ranger, Sarah Bernhardt, Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex and Wild, and Eleanora Duse. You don't understand them all, you don't like them all, why should you? The Theater's for everybody - you included, but not exclusively - so don't approve or disapprove. It may not be your Theater, but it's Theater of somebody, somewhere.

So there you have it. Theatre doesn't exist solely with Sophocles and Shakespeare and the other immortals, no more than it does in the ADC Bar in Cambridge. It's no more than an effort to fill whatever hollows we care to find ourselves - the little or the large; for our entertainment or our salvation - resorting to make-believe to make the world that bit more bearable. A truly universal theatre may seem an idealistic model, but it's the reality, through and through. Dabbling in diversity gives you access to humanity in all its guises. Redoubled fascination and passion can be the only outcome.

*As for The Wizard of Oz... it's horror to the core. Let's face it - the Wicked Witch of the West was the least of Dorothy's problems. Between the cyclone, the Munchkins, the apple-hurling trees, the flying monkeys, the cataleptic poppy field, the death-dictating hourglass and the translucent, flame-spitting head of the great and powerful Oz (not to mention the surprisingly mean Auntie Em), it's a non-stop roller coaster ride in white-knuckle terror. Many people run into difficulty acknowledging it as such - either because of its 'vulgar' popularism, the garish embarrassment of its gay following or a simple/justifiable resistance to the Wicked franchise - but I still look upon it as one of the greatest films ever made. It was a wonderful moment at York College when Neil Smith - that fantastic tutor who delighted in subjecting us to The Burning and Cannibal Holocaust - insisted we watch it on the simple proclamation that it is 'fantastically good'. And it really is... every element comes together perfectly. (Plus, I've been looking to the innocent figures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Man as a possible inspiration in the ongoing Drugger debacle... so we'll see how that works out!)

The Plague

Perhaps the best way into this entry is to grant a much-aired picture of mine a new and more topical outing:


This happy little number continues to reign as my all-time favourite photo of... myself. Wowee. I'm the gentleman on the right; the fellow on the left is but paint and plaster. Bela Lugosi made sure that his household had a selection of grand, romantic portraits of himself on display at all times - even after moving into that pokey and thoroughly anti-Draculean apartment late in life to stave off the financial traumas of unemployment and morphine addiction. I'm yet to be painted in any context (barring face paint, liberally applied on a daily basis), but I'll shame-facedly admit that this one's hanging on my wall, surrounded by a smouldering garland of old-time horror posters and Brett Helquist illustrations. The image put in an appearance in an edition of York's local newspaper, The Press, last year, in order to publicise the little-known Feast of Saint Roch. Here's the blurb. I learned a good few things from it, not least how far removed our actual plague festivities were from the hype:

Park your sensitivities at the door and enter a world of pestilence, rats, gore and more as the York Dungeon celebrates Plague Day.

In honour of St Roch, the patron saint of plague victims whose saint's day falls on August 16, the York attraction will be celebrating all things plague-ridden with boils, buboes and pus infused fun over the weekend.

You will be able to meet the Plague Pit Digger, who digs the pits for the thousands of plague-riddled rotting corpses and hear his terrifying tales of plague prevention and treatments. Come face to face with the carriers of the most prolific serial killer in history as the London Dungeon's Rat Keeper displays her collection of live rats.

Basically, Rachel brought in her two pet rats - bags of fun, they were, playful and mischievous as anything - and sat with them in the Plague section. She ain't from The London Dungeon though, not by any stretch - and I have absolutely no idea who this 'Plague Pit Digger' was supposed to be. Oh, well. A nice idea, a very nice picture, and a charmingly gimmicky way to hook in the crowds.

Plague is one of the flagship Dungeon exhibits, and, until very recently indeed, some variation on it had existed in every Dungeon worldwide. London has recently exempted itself from this pattern with the decision to revamp their surgery as an old-fashioned operating theatre - a supremely icky and disturbing concept, as anyone who's visited the Thackeray Medical Museum will know - but their plague theming was so extensive when I last visited that to completely oust it would probably bankrupt the attraction. Well, as for The York Dungeon, the Plague show has been installed for nearly a decade; like Clifford's Tower, it was part of an extensive refurbishment in 2001 that put the building's upper reaches into use. And whilst there was most definitely a Plague show and actor in place from the feature's earliest days, the focus was at least as much on crafting a haunting and atmospheric walk-through experience. In my previous two seasons at the Dungeon, it was still possible to roam and explore the plague-ridden streets of sixteenth-century York unsupervised, and, at its best, the experience could be truly haunting. I credit Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year as the text that saved my English degree, and I'm sure that a large part of its hold on me was its awesome power to summon up memories of a simpler, more carefree time, when capering about in the dark to terrorise children and little old ladies was my only real concern. On a structural level though, Defoe's masterpiece of gritty, documentary realism stirred more than a few recollections of the real experience of the old Plague show: a series of scattered, horrific vignettes, linked only by the compulsively rotting body of a city in ruins. In the manner of a fairground peepshow, window after window would yield a fresh store of horrors... A man endlessly vomiting into a large wooden bowl, hair shrouding his face with wraith-like shadows... A woman protruding from a window in a last-ditch effort to escape the scourge, her intermittent sneezes onto the heedless public an even darker omen for the future... A hag in a mop cap, on the verge of being bricked up, screaming out with alarming, wanton abandon... Best of all was an exquisite tableau of two skeletons at a table, one sprawled across the spread of putrefied food, the other rocking rhythmically in a chair, the ominous buzz of flies adrift in the air... It was a truly magnificent effort, akin to a film set at its best, and a fantastic way to build the tension prior to entering the surgery. It also transported me back to one of my first childhood fascinations with a dark attraction - the long-defunct Haunted Hotel (later Trauma Towers) at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which featured a long chain of monsters pressed against the ground floor windows, alternately hidden and revealed by mysteriously mobile sets of lace curtains. These were no more than static mannequins dressed up in cheap rubber masks, but even a third-rate effort at the macabre was sufficient to fire my young imagination. The streets contained a few other features of note. The monk that I mentioned last time, dispensing proclamations of absolute doom via a neat projection effect; a door that visitors could tug at to provoke a vitriolic, blood-lusting 'GO AWAY!' from the beast within; and my personal favourite, the corpse-cart and country cemetery lurking beyond the confines of the surgery, the only discernible landmarks in the first of the Dungeon's near-impenetrable black voids. As I said, a mighty effort.

Sadly though, the plague-stricken streets are no more. Market forces is one sure reason for this. When the Dungeon first opened, way back in the wilds of 1986, it was an unrepentantly dark but dry-as-dust museum, with visitors expected to journey through at their own leisurely pace. There was no consideration of a millennium of actor-led shows or hyper-efficient batching systems. With the current 'fill 'n' spill' system securely in place (one minute to get the public in, five minutes to do a show, another minute to get 'em out), an open plan atmosphere piece had no real place in the Dungeon. This is regrettable, but certainly makes driving the requisite twenty-four victims into the surgery a great deal simpler for the actor - in the old show, repeated dashes around fog-bound streets, all the while wielding a three-pronged garden weeder and looking like the spawn of Satan, did not make for a happy few hours (particularly when customers would assert their perfectly reasonable right to 'just have a look' and cut severely into your show time). But perhaps just as influential is the tricky matter of space. Carving out a house of horrors in the centre of a Grade II listed building is a very tall order - moreso given the pressure to introduce a new scene each year to keep the experience fresh. 2010 was an especially radical time for the Dungeon. In addition to the creation of the new witch-burning extravaganza, three shows were given an overhaul, which demanded room swaps, new recordings, refittings, dustings off, dustings down, and a great deal of design-centered chaos. Guy Fawkes and Dick Turpin were two of these shows; Plague was the third, and the change was a bittersweet necessity - but one that should ensure the show's survival in the thrifty years ahead.

Let's settle into a discussion of the Plague show then. Guests are sitting in Clifford's Tower, ears quietly rent apart by the combined magnitude of our mad monk's acid-drenched tones and the Gregorian chant oozing in from the entrance area. (The Dungeon's musical choice is something I forgot to mention last time... When Halloween rolls around, we play nothing but 'This is Halloween' from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Again and again. And again and again and again and again. Oh, goodness. And again. Again-again-again. If Danny Elfman is someday assassinated by a Dungeon employee, I should think it perfectly justified. But for the other eleven months, it's Gregorian chant, through and through.) All at once, the timeless chant of 'Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! is heard, followed by some Python-esque ramblings as a severed head is dropped. Then the maniacal tolling of a bell, pitched just behind a pair of wooden doors. Smoke floods from beneath them with alarming suddenness. Silhouetted by a dim orange beam, the first actor is revealed. The twisted shadow shuffles forward, presses itself against the chain in eager inspection, and utters the legend:

Oh...! You lot don't look so dead. You smell like you're dead, but there are definitely still some signs of life around here... Still! I think the doctor might be able to help some of you, so you better follow me!

This delightful chap is William, the plague doctor's trusty assistant. The costume is as in the picture posted above: basic white shirt and breeches, tattered leather apron, and blood-stained surgeon's cap - which, in the right light, recreates the sleek, sub-human look of the vampire in Nosferatu. There's definitely an unsettling edge to the actor concealing their hair, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you exactly why. There's a great deal of free rein in creating your own character make-ups. There are a few essentials, mind. A white base to start. Then the hollows: black to shade your eyes and cheeks; dark enough to show up in the yet greater darkness of the Dungeon, yet light enough so as not to suggest a predatory panda dredged up from a Puerto Rican cannibal flick. I like to extend the black to my lips (perhaps a subconscious nod to Mary Shelley's Creature, whose 'straight black lips' rank among its more memorably creepy features) and also to my eyebrows, which keeps them pronounced and fully expressive. After seeing Simon Callow as Pozzo in Waiting for Godot (an actor's dream role), I started to extend my eyebrows into my hairline. I like to think that this lends the makeup the off-kilter, carnivalesque dementia of a deranged circus ringmaster, all the while keeping my eyebrow gyrations as over-the-top as possible. The fun bit comes next: blood and plenty of it. There are a few methods for making yourself look like a road accident. Knowing how massively I'd be exposed to the light, I decided to exercise a bit of restraint for the photo (a very rare thing in my dramatic endeavours), and merely make it look as though a cat had tried to get into my head. This year, the general habit has been to carve out a weeping gash in my forehead, complimented by another gushing sedately from the corner of my mouth. This is accomplished simply enough. I tend to apply a few blotches of black as a foundation layer, before moving on to a pot of 'scratch' (a gummy resin, dark red in colour, that dries hard but continues to look wet) and the truly glorious bottles of fake blood we have lying about (the proper theatrical potion; it leaves the most pleasing drip-lines imaginable on my nose, sporadically dripping as my face melts into place). It's nice to finish by flicking the blood over yourself to give the wounds a slightly raw and acrobatic finish; being careful of course to spare your eyes from the downpour. Stipple sponges were a mainstay last year, but these have mysteriously vanished (I have my suspicions that they're all tucked away in the forbidden recesses of the lady's changing room, as well as some of the older and mouldier makeup boxes). Stipple or not though, this entertaining process will make sure you're all set for a dazzling day in the dark.

Above and beyond this, however, is the character himself. William. Or, if a girl's playing the part, Mary. (Probably a nod to the Roald Dahl short story of the same name. Or the non-talking, non-magical mice in The Witches... Or maybe these monikers were plucked from the dusty dumping ground of appellations for their generic and timeless quality.) William is a happy enough fit for my take on the character though, who emerges as a bit of a Kenneth Williams type. I ranted a little about this in an earlier post, but Williams's voice has been a perennial source of fascination to me. Like the splitting of some grand atom of comedy, his vocalisations sound out along two distinct channels, each one so exquisite as to surpass the reach of mere mortals. Default for Mr Williams were the rhapsodically posh and elastic enunciations that typecast him into an early grave. His apocalyptically scandalised 'Oooh! Matron! Take them away!' in Carry On Camping may be the supreme example; the blustering, stentorian authority figure functioning at its highest level. But then, it's also the voice with which he so erratically intoned Betjeman on an old episode of Parkinson (aided by a young Maggie Smith) that it transcended mere affectation to encroach on the sublime... However, there's that other side to Kenneth Williams, crystallised in those frenzied and unpredictable concessions to a cockney dialect. His infamous 'Stop messin' about!' is played in this voice, and his madcap Rambling Syd Rumpo seems to at least be working on the same continuum. Anyway, enough digressing. My character favours the cockney, which makes precious little sense in a Yorkshire attraction, but does much to graft out the proper strain of seediness and perversion. In many ways, William is a pantomime version of the Syme character that I played in Nineteen Eighty-Four... I always thought of Syme as a bit of a repressed homosexual, so William is (perhaps inevitably) really rather camp in his demeanour. He's coquettish, he's fawning and mincing, he's altogether too excited about 'pulling out the bits!' and male customers are the prime candidates when it comes to inspecting groins for buboes (interesting thought-experiment, incidentally, to see how different men react to this sort of unforgivably stereotyped behaviour). There's not a bit of subtlety or restraint to be found in it. As the first of the actors that visitors encounter, it's your duty to cover all the Dungeon bases in the course of one five-minute show. So it's got to be a little funny, a little scary, warped as anything and dark to the very core. You've got to grab your public by the throats, drag them in kicking and screaming if necessary. There's no reason that this call to ham should spell an end to good acting. Quite the opposite. This free license can be exactly that: freeing. And the surgery into which you usher your guests - pointing them down a night-time street boasting a rat-infested harbour and corpse-cart, the sole remnants of the highly impressive street scene - the surgery is, fortunately enough, more than adequately furnished to boost the histrionics.

The surgery is a busy room, cluttered with figures and set-pieces, each of which come into play in their own good time, but make positioning the public something close to a cattle drive. The actor can slip by the twenty-four strong crush of the unwashed masses by breaking into the surgery through the rat-run (a secret passage, painted in black, that provides a quick, uncomplicated route between street and surgery). Provided you vault in speedily enough, simultaneously belting some baffling non-sequitar to the effect of 'Right then!' or 'Let's be 'aving yer, you ugly, maligant bunch!', you can ease quite the jump scare from your audience. Done right, this gets the show off to a jolly good start: your confidence receives an immediate boost (the child-like thrill of catching someone all unawares) and sets a tone of uneasy expectation for the show to come (the gauntlet has been thrown; now the stage is set for all hell to break loose, with the most inconsequential fragments of set dressing threatening to pop out and explode in people's nervous faces). Ferrying people into position can be a bit of a chore (particular when the five-minute time limit is remembered), and, as with flyering, I've found that the most effective approach is to bother people as little as possible. Oh, yes, you try to whack in some quasi-humorous ad-libs ('Stay away from that cupboard! That's where I stash the hooch!'), but these are only occasionally amusing, more often irritating, absorb a quantity of time disproportionate to their theatrical value, and, worst of all, dilute the show's impact before it's even properly started ('Is this the show?' your audience wonders, bemused, 'Isn't this a bit... y'know, weak?'). This doesn't reflect very well on anyone. A blunt and threatening 'Right! I want you all stood where you can see that, that and THAT!', complimented by a round of patronising synchronised pointing, tends to work its magic. Some might view such a regime as a weighty and soul-crushing affair, in which individuality and creative flair are quashed by the slumbering demon of business commandments. Not so. It's more tight, more sensible and considerably less embarassing to be efficient in skimming through the formalities. Make no mistake. This is contained ham. Ham with a pocket watch and a schedule to keep. Shouting and bravado aplenty, but with the onus on precision. Quite a thrill.

The show gets underway with a short physical inspection. The plague is running rampant and symptoms must be rooted out posthaste. You ask your audience 'Has anyone here been coughing up blood recently? Vomiting blood?' I like to add on a particularly gratuitous and medically unsound 'How about leaking blood from every orifice of your body at the same time?' Your path can diverge here based on what people shout back at you. If they shout back at all; very often, you'll be faced with a quiet and utterly lovely group who laugh politely and speak nary a word. But then, it's just as typical to get some plucky youngster insisting that they have the symptoms - or the incandescently hilarious and original men who push forth their singularly reluctant partners. (A less frequent, but no less special response, is that of an innocent child begging 'Mummy, what's orifices?' - guaranteed roof-raiser.) To be honest, it's fairly useful to have a chance to pick on people at this early stage. As with so much in Plague, it's about setting a number of precedents, not only for the show to come, but the rather more taxing level of audience participation demanded by the Dungeon at large. And the way I see it, there's no better course of instruction than a bit of good-natured ritual humiliation before a group of total strangers. Next comes the hunt for buboes: 'big, abnormal swellings of pus and blood'. These are to be found on the neck, beneath the arms and around the groin, which gives plenty of leeway for some profoundly tasteless physical comedy (if fluttering your hands about your genitals like the wings of a rabid dove can be termed 'comedy' by any objective standard... horror-comedy is the Dungeon's stock-in-trade). Springing and ducking about the group in a dedicated fit to check their necks are clear is a fun enough routine. Obviously it's going to be one of those things that changes organically with the size and composition of the group, with the chance to terrorise children particularly fun. Checking the armpits offers the chance for a blindingly obvious but still rather comely gag on just how badly the armpits of the audience reek. 'This may be 1551,' you screech, 'but we 'ave 'eard of such a thing as a BATH, y'know!' This is all the more twisted given the proliferation of smell-pots littering this part of the Dungeon. Unlike the Jorvik Centre just across the road - whose dedicated recreation of Viking faecal matter has since passed into legend - the Dungeon goes in for a more ambiguous line of mustiness... leading guests to rather predictably utter, with each new chamber they encounter, 'It stinks in here' (an exemplary feed for a reflexive ad-lib if ever there was one). 'As for the groins...' you continue, honing in on a customer with a dreadful pause. I always make sure that this is a bloke. Not only does this compliment my grander design for William's cartoon sexuality, but homosexuality remains a far more comfortable tool in comedy than heterosexuality. This holds particularly true when the homosexuality is bumbling, ineffectual and about as cardboard as the scenery (the scenery in a lesser horror attraction, that is), whereas heterosexuality has the potential to seem voracious and predatory. But that's still not getting to the nub of the problem. Heterosexuality only becomes threatening and icky when it comes from men and is aimed at women; have a woman target a man and it's suddenly hilarious all over again. Maybe it's as simple as the old adage that violence towards women isn't funny. It's not for any partularly valiant or heroic motives that I try to refrain from making the fairer sex (sorry, girls) feel uncomfortable, but the very integrity of my shows. In the same way, there's nothing less humorous in the torture chamber than the sharp iron implement known as the breast ripper. Vaginal humour is similarly off the radar. Yet penis jokes are considered as perennially amusing, as exemplified by the show-stopping sharp iron implement decreed the chappy chopper. Despite the complicated reasoning underpinning this gender selection, it usually works as a comic moment. You leave off quickly enough (this is a family attraction), deciding of the groins that 'you can check that for yourselves'. 'Last time I tried to check people, there was...' here I favour a protracted, rattling snort and overzealous eyeroll, usually with perverted leg-rubbings to assist, '... trouble'. Very funny, very twisted, I'm sure.

Next you move on to the corpse. This lies rather ominously on a table for the first part of the show, which gives you a few nice opportunies to racket up the tension that little bit more. Crucially, the body is shrouded in a sheet (wonderfully frayed and unhygenic... and blood-stained in all the right places) that you reset before the start of every show. I can't tell you how many times I've arranged and rearranged the sheet to resemble the one covering Boris Karloff and/or his big-foot stunt double at the start of Frankenstein. Another thing interesting as a thought experiment too; seeing which exposed body bits will leave an audience most repulsed. Two feet? One foot? Shoulder? Arm? Hand? Just a finger? Last year, I liked to perch nonchalantly on the covered corpse to provoke a reaction of general nausea, but the dear old boy's only made of foam rubber, so it's crucial that we go easy on him. The unveiling is very special, seeing as it does nothing whatsoever to quash the group's anxieties over whether the figure is a real person or not. In the dim orange light of the surgery, the head appears very convincing indeed. It's even furnished with a good mop of hair, which gets ever so tiresome when it refuses to lie flat... the sort of prissy observation that transports me right back to my work experience in the funeral parlour. You announce your intention to 'pull out the bits' to arrive at the cause of death, although this is no more than a facile excuse for some low-level gross-out humour. One by one, you extract the intestines, the liver and (crowning achievement, this) the bladder, flinging them into a bucket with frenzied abandon or else shoving them in the audience's faces. You describe the organs, but only in the most banal and generic of terms. It's really not clear how this relates to the plague, except as a campy reappraisal of the ignorance of the period's medical practitioners. The 'ick' factor is amped up considerably here - unsurprisingly, it's the moment when quite a few children and a surprising number of adults decide that the Dungeon is not for them. As with the Torture show, your character's relationship with the human body is something intense. Omnisexual, I suppose, so far as he derives a positive erotic charge from the inside as well as the outside of these rotten, plague-ridden barges. Accordingly, you get up to every little thing to make the spectators feel sick to the stomach. You carelessly allow the intestines to fall apart in your hands. You give the liver a good hearty lick and grunt 'I'll save that for later'. Showering your captives with plague-juice (water, suggestively described) as you root about in search of the insidious bad blood. Letting the body swallow up your arm and head in the midst of your travels is a cheery tactic. The grand finale is raising the bladder with great solemnity, opining that it 'sounds like it's full too'. The audience, already damp with plague-juice, steel themselves for an even more uncompromising water prank. You can do much in your movements to suggest the weight and configuration of a water-shooter. Eventually, of course, you lunge forward - men scream, women fall over, children explode into fits - and there's not a single bleeding drop to be found. 'Not really! Not really!' you shriek to cover up the almighty cheat, quietly pressing the button for the plague doctor as you do so.

You can make out a sliver of the doctor's head protruding from behind my own in the picture above. It's the classic nightmare image of the behatted bird mask, a fresh-exhumed dinosaur with impenetrable black eyes. The doctor doesn't do much moving about - he's an artefact of the old Plague show, sadly enough, and is represented primarily by a surly voice recording. This is perfectly alright though - it's an awful lot of fun to interact with a fixed dramatic element, with pauses discreetly left for your own goonish interjections. Endeavouring to infuse such a tired old thing with life is never a waste of time. The doctor demands that you treat his customers to the plague cures, which sees recourse to a fantastically detailed cupboard that seems spewed from some mad wizard's laboratory. Books, beakers, boxes, bottles, and any number of other thematically appropriate items beginning with 'B'. Bleeding comes first, as represented by a very gnarled-looking knife and a jar filled to the brim with more of the fabled bad blood. Second are the leeches - real leeches, it must be said. Leeches in a glass jar, which has been known to smash on occasion, an event that I can only imagine to be a career highlight. I feel like Ernest Thesiger, mincingly parading his own demonic collection of bottles in Bride of Frankenstein: 'I have to be very careful with the leeches...' Favourite tactic at the moment is to hone in on an audience member with a garbled stream of 'here-are-the-leeches, do-you-like-the-leeches, say-hello-to-the-leeches, this-leech-is-called-Bob, for-Bob-is-a-good-name-for-a-leech, say-hello-to-Bob-now, hello-Bob-hello-leeches, I-like-leeches-me, I'm-just-a-leech-person-I-am'. Before long, the doctor has brayed out an order to give the patient in the chair a good bleeding. This has to be timed exactly right. Up to the chair you scramble, transported with delight at the thought of rending yet more flesh, and eagerly press the knife in upon his wrist. In synchronisation with this (and the pleasingly loud scream that picks up on the soundtrack), you must press a button concealed on the back of the chair. Thus, through the miracle of pneumatic air compression, the man is seen - with astounding violence - to - you shan't believe this! - jump. And that is why we call him... the jumping man. It's clever if you think about it. A very cheap effect, but it tends to get a disproportionately good reaction - particularly when, as so often happens in these busy summer months, you have a few foolhardy people all but touching the figure in what they considered a safe place.

The jumping man was originally the finale of the Plague show. That was certainly my experience of it last year, and it proved a wee bit anticlimactic. This was all well and good ten years ago, when the rubes weren't quite as jaded as they are now, but time and innovation now calls for more from a dark attraction. Happily, a setpiece first tested out in Halloween 2008 is now firmly in place as the coda to Plague. The doctor insists that an especially diseased body in the crowd be operated on posthaste. Once you've selected your helpless victim (for the reasons specified above, it's again most sensible to pick out a man). You lead them behind a curtain, sit them down in a chair and manipulate a switch by foot to switch on a light. The miracle of rear projection allows the rest of the scene to play out in menacing shadow. You take a mallet from the table, explain that 'I just need to use a little anaesthetic', and proceed to bonk the fellow on the head with it. There's no mercy to be had here; it's pitiless comic cruelty all the way, played out in the best tradition of the Three Stooges. It's a criminally simple deception. There's a block of wood positioned just behind the participant's head that allows you to decimate their skull in safety - thanks to the persuasive guile of the shadows, in which planes of depth are irreparably mottled and confused, the illusion is near-perfect. To keep matters interesting though, you stamp down on a foot pedal to play a litany of high-pitched shrieks, all the while shrieking out your own brand of special encouragements, such as 'Oooh! Such a screamer!', 'It's really, really off-putting, you know!', 'Make it so much harder than it needs to be...', 'Whoops, didn't quite get you that time!' and so on. After three sound bonks, you proclaim that the victim is as knocked out as he's ever going to be and you need to pull out the bits. You grab your knife, loom over the victim, Nosferatu-like, with your blade at the ready - give a count of three - and then swoop down. Off with the light and on with the air cannon: a sharp blast and a hideous scream. It's a pretty good jump scare - and, what's more, the end of the Plague show. You come out with some absolutely foul and inexcusable quip to cover up the senseless madness of the air cannon - something in the way of 'Amazing what a minor incision to the groin can do...' - before ushering the group into the next chamber.

I have a lot of affection for Plague. It has a bit of everything. It's by no means the strongest of the Dungeon shows, but it does a fine job of preparing the audience for the experience to come. Next on the agenda is Guy Fawkes, a son of York from the days when botched acts of terrorism were granted celebratory holidays... See you next time for more interminable ramblings!

The Kindness of Strangers

Sorry for the title. I loathe Blanche, really I do, as all stout and hearty Yorkshireman must loathe these youth-seducing, paper-lantern-proffering, rhinestone-next-door-to-glass-wearing hussies. (This tirade is probably congealed with my memories of Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, whose Little Miss Innocent act got old about the time she started gunning down looters and watching amputations... not to mention dallying with the affections of the Tarleton twins! I ask you! Who would dare?) Harrowing semantic webs aside though, it's a fairly accurate description of the experience I had at work today. As much as labouring at The York Dungeon is a wonderful and rollicking investment of time - one that I certainly wouldn't swap for anything else - it can also be a demented and pitiless grind. To stick with the Dickens analogies, it's as though the torture wheel occasionally rotates a little too far in one direction. All at once, the actor ceases to be the stentorian, hulking authority figure - a Buzfuz or a Bumble or a Dombey or a Tulkinghorn - and is reduced to the post of parish orphan, prostrate on the work-house altar and crumbling into ash. It's that very fine distinction between an energising, invigorating task that makes you feel alive... and a crushing ordeal that accomplishes the exact opposite.

Make no mistake. This is very hard work, and, in summer particularly, the actors are placed under an enormous strain. Examples are endless. Numerous actors have been slapped and punched by over-excited members of the public. Travelling folk have ravaged our catacombs with their dogged determination to intimidate our female staff and run off with the severed heads. There have been mass exoduses to the toilets and constant families requesting to be led outside again. Recently, one actress actually coughed up blood in a show. It wasn't serious, which is a blessing; it did occur on Plague, which is deeply amusing, so far as the line 'has anyone here been coughing up blood recently?' is the virtual opener to the script.

Just last night, I was ranting to George Potts about my recent nightmare stint on the Judges show. Picture it! Me: wigged-up, velvet gown (ermine trim!), raised quite high. Peak time of day: crowds coming in fast. Indecently so. Just about... tolerable. But then: ah. Complication. Flaw in system: no margin for human error. The offshoot of this sorry state of affairs was poor, pitiful me being forced to smirk, sneer, screech and (worst of the alliterative barrage) SHOUT for three hours. Three hours! Now, it's not unprecedented to struggle through a shift of that length. But when it's without the shortest break due to crises in the Dungeon batching system... My goodness. The horror - the horror! A group in the courtroom - a group waiting to come in from the Vikings section - and a group in the torture chamber preventing you from sending the current lot forward. And the only way out... is more shouting. It can be uncomfortable, to put it mildly. My pain threshold is relatively high, but you certainly feel the after-effects come eventide. It's for this reason that my blog output has been so underwhelming this month, and this offers yet another reason for resentment. I suppose that it's possible to give a little less energy in shows, if only to preserve yourself for the world beyond. However, my diffuse set of ethical values simply will not permit this! Everyone who enters pays the same amount, our charges are extortionate enough as it is, and it's inexcusable that a customer who just happens to catch you at the end of your shift should receive a diminished show.

So, you can imagine my delight when I read this email in the staff room:

Following our telephone conversation regarding our visit was on Friday 23rd July at about 4pm - and the Judge deserves everything you can give him!!
A stellar performance. Tell him not to change it one jot! Sneak in, Helen, and video him!! He's outstanding!
He may recall the day. He offers 3 punishments to the "convicted" in the dock - and one guy in our crowd (found guilty of theft I think) opted for his fingers to be chopped off - as opposed to the obvious most lenient punishment offered. We, the audience thought - what a prat - but your Judge didn't belittle him, but cleverly got him out of his embarrassment with his honour almost intact, whilst we all sniggered. What a pro!!

Ahhhh... Great happiness. And I mean great. I don't think there's much more to say, other than it's the nicest review I've ever had! I'm still of the opinion that most of my best acting has gone on in the Dungeon, so it's heartening that someone went to the effort to mention their appreciation of it. It's a tiresome old cliche, but it really does make it all worthwhile. Sad prat that I am, I've been walking on air all day.

I've come across a video of one interpretation of the Judges show online. The actor is Michael Collin, who I believe had moved on as early as my first stint at the Dungeon, way back in October 2008. It's very different to my characterisation, which is probably best described as an unrepentantly manic (aha!) fusion of Ebenezer Scrooge, the Child Catcher and the Wicked Witch of the West. Collin is considerably more droll, and has a very nice turn of phrase where the elusive majesty of improvisation is concerned ('you massively mutated mounds of monkey mucus' - premeditated or not, it's a golden line). A great deal of the humour is lost in this version - as are a few of the punchlines, including the sensational naked dancing pay-off for the witches crime, in which contumely anachronisms such as 'work it baby, work it baby!' are mingled with ritual humiliation - with distinctly delicious results. This doubtlessly has much to do with the lack of audience hysteria - at least two of the audience members are Dungeon actors (and still in makeup, by the looks of it). It strikes me that this material was intended for a show-reel, and has since gravitated mysteriously to YouTube. Where the video triumphs is in communicating the show's pervasively creepy atmosphere. The set dressing is outstanding: blazing torches, heavy red drapes, dark wood panelling, portraits of Tudor monarchs... The blinding white light that emerges from 'the big book of crime' - the shadowy jury of cloaked monks and friars... Best of all is the background noise, with assorted grunts, yelps and screams, all filtered through a blazing furnace, rolling gracefully in from the torture chamber... Odd quibbles aside, I really do love this job:



This might well be the shortest blog entry I've yet produced. Scary (welcome?) stuff, and a sure sign that this journal is in dire straits until such time as the Dungeon turns me out and I can get back to normal life. Should I ever finish my exhaustive guide to the Dungeon experience, I'll be providing a more comprehensive overview of the Judges show (officially titled 'Judgement of Sinners' - see, yer learnin' already!) and toss in a few of my stories about it. Given the pivotal role played by Justice Stareleigh in the 'Bardell and Pickwick' section of Pickwick & Nickleby, all of this legal rumination is very useful to me - and, provided I'm lucky, a sure sign that I'm on the right track with at least one character!

An Actor's Voice

Looking balefully up at that questionable title, I wonder whether it would be improved with the word 'actor' locked squarely in inverted commas. For there is nothing in my person as likely to bar me from future dabblings in drama as the tricky little matter of my voice. I didn't choose character acting - character acting chose me. For who doesn't initially set out in theatre to be one of those charmed, elfin creatures, strutting about being so pretty and admirable, courting such massive acclaim for the lightest possible touch? It is only natural that drama's initial draw should be its superficial side: if I stand on a stage and do things... people will like me. In spite of my impassioned vitriol for naturalism, and in spite of my tirelessly well-hewn arguments to its detriment, I have a sneaking suspicion that it amounts to little more than an insecure hate campaign against a fragment of my being that I'm unable to change. As with various other aspects of my person - my obsessive tendencies, my sexuality, my extremely antisocial character - I've come to accept that my blasted voice is as much a blessing as a curse. For instance, it happens to coincide with my very narrow body of interests - numerous adventures in the macabre, the brazenly theatrical, the grotesquely comedic and the therapeutic catharsis of a jolly good shout. Did my voice shape itself in response to these interests? Or perhaps go some way towards creating them? It's difficult to say. Let me instead burden you with an achingly comprehensive history of my voice - and how my distorted vocalisations have provided me with pleasure and pain in roughly equal measure.

I have no distinct memory of it first striking me that my voice was odd. It must have come from listening to myself in some recording or other. This is universally accepted as an uncomfortable experience, and, in one way, it confronts a cornerstone challenge in the acting trade: bridging the gulf between thought and action to make sure that as little as possible is lost in translation. It's for this very reason that the fruity, full-blooded and oh-so-very theatrical voices of the recent past are not to be dismissed as tasteless or contrived. As sustained acts of exaggeration - and hence projection - such vocal stylings provide a commendably simple solution to the problem by tackling it from the inside out: if the tongue cannot be sufficiently quickened to synchronise with the brain, then it is the tongue that must slow and richen in tone and be moulded by will into a more expressive instrument. The alternative is the tedious path to purity pursued by drama schools, where skill is progressively beaten into the student by successive turns of chastisement and penitence. This would seem to be the more effective and lasting option, but it demands a real commitment to change that can only be realistically facilitated in those forced conditions of sustained high pressure. For the rest of us then, the mere mortals, we're pretty much stuck with the voices we acquire by daily habit. I can't have been older than ten when I had vocal epiphany, and was most probably quite a bit younger.

And, oh - how I hated my voice. Wetness, principally - a sort of damp quality, horrible and sloppy, as though a deal too much saliva was sloshing about up there. Yet this quiddity seemed to wrap itself loosely about my tongue, as though absorbed into some burdensome phantom flannel, squashing flat my vowels and blurring my consonants into a single syrupy spatter. This blow was cushioned by other embarrassments. Infuriatingly deep even at that stage, long before the fabled voice breaking of pimply, pockmarked puberty. I often wonder whether my famed coughing fits as a baby - enormously loud and alarming whoopings, to the extent that concerned relatives feared I was choking to death - might have blown out my upper register for good, because the prevailing tonelessness of my voice was set in stone from infancy. I've certainly suffered with other diseases of the head holes, particularly those of the nasal strain. Now I accept that I will sound permanently as though my nose is blocked, regardless of the emptiness of my nasal passageways. And born of this thick linguistic soup was the most terrible scourge yet - a tone of world-weary smugness and orotund complacency that made me want to retch. It had crept into my speech while I was all unawares, and now resisted every effort at removal. The lugubrious voice of James Swanton was taking form - the bassoon recorded at half-speed. I couldn't have been less happy with it.

Thus was the start of my slow and steady descent into vocal paranoia. In one sense, it would make sense to say that my childhood died on the day that I first became aware of my voice. Crippling self-consciousness set in, and never again could I feel quite so liberated and carefree. Then again, in another, quite different sense, that would be talking a load of self-pitying bollocks, and although my voice did become a perennial hang-up, life remained very good indeed for the most part. Vocal stress seemed localised to brief incidents, which would all of a sudden flare up and just as quickly burn out again. I can't claim that I've ever been bullied in any serious way, but certain incidents have stayed with me. For instance, I once remember being asked 'what's wrong with your voice?'. Not an ounce of irony in it. Cold, brutal - head-on. Ouch. My retort was a short stunned silence, followed by a reflexive 'what's wrong with yours?' Far too cerebral for two children to appreciate, particularly when one is really rather hurt and the other is lacking in emotional intelligence and/or a braincell. There were other moments of this nature, always an abject humiliation, and in no small part responsible for my becoming so quiet. Gone were the days of playing the clever dick by raising my arm at school. Too terribly aware of being shot down with laughter to risk it. More ambiguous was my time at York Youth Theatre, where for a brief period I became infamous for saying 'oatmeal loaves' and 'jacket potatoes' in a tone of forced Yorkshire merriment. This was the curse of a play I appeared in called Allotments, which, among other things, afforded me the first really good review I'd ever had. The writer was Charles Hutchinson (legendary figure), the outlet was The Evening Press (now rechristened The Press):

The Allotments, a chance for children to play perky pensioners, unearths a comic talent of the future in James Swanton. Watch him blossom. It's all in the voice.

A double-edged sword then. Even though I knew I was crucifying myself to be court jester for a good while longer, it was truly heartening to ease an honest bit of laughter from an audience - in a fairly unforced way as well, something I've rarely managed since. For this is the inexplicable and maddening paradox at the centre of my bipolar vocal relationship. As much as it's held me back in drama, it's been a significant part of what little success I've had. Quite possibly the most significant part.

This is the redemptive side to my voice. As I hinted a little earlier, my style is more to carve the words in the air by force than permit them to form with an effortless grace. So correctly tamed - and suitably loud - I can imitate locutions vaguely suggestive of elegance, and at the very least, I can crush it into an overriding tone of pseudo-classical superiority and fusty English gentility. Cleon in Pericles belonged to this school, as did Pringle in Funeral Games and (in high camp form) Coupler in The Relapse. One of Orson Welles's outstanding truisms on the art of acting was of character as a basic subtraction. If you're playing a merry old soul, you drop your angst. If you're playing a drunk, you drop your inhibitions. If you're playing a rent-boy, you drop your trousers. And so forth. This makes sense to me, but I've always found it to be incompatible with my voice's idiosyncratic grasp of character. As far as I can gather, there's always some consistent and unchanging vocal characteristic a-lurking in the background, some base aspect of 'James Swanton' that refuses to go away, but it is to this canvas that I add my characterisation layer by layer. It's like painting at times - only more airy, more psychic - more loaded with pretentious adjectives! I sense the presence of different channels, often two or three overlapping simultaneously, through which I can project my voice to affect the necessary distortions. More rasp, I find myself thinking, and a touch sharper - now a purring and a key change on that word. The bassoon occasionally aspires to the post of satanic pipe organ. It's a sort of warping process, dictated by sensation, and one that has tested the strength of my voice to my satisfaction. It takes a hell of a lot for me to lose it, and thanks to the large amount of ghouls I've wound up playing (characters hardly renowned for the beauty of their speech), even this needn't be a problem. I'm also pleased to be loud. This seems a trivial point, but I've seen too many perfectly decent performances trashed by inadequate projection over the years to not feel grateful for my naturally active diaphragm. There are also the freak-show accomplishments (an astonishingly underrated form of theatre, as anyone appreciative of Tod Browning's Freaks will know). I don't know of anyone who can drive their voice as preposterously deep as mine; when challenged, I can drop it to the point of unlistenable, harrowing, throat-scalping creepiness. I do a good line in screeching, and have finally located the pocket in my throat that permits me to do this with minimal shredding of flesh. Little things afford me an inordinate amount of amusement. After years of imitating Basil Rathbone's immortal delivery of the line, in reference to the Monster's resurrection in 1939's Son of Frankenstein, 'Or am I supposed to have wh-ipped one up? As a housewife - wh-ips up an omelette?' - yes, I too have managed to hasten my wh-s to breaking point... I babble.

To begin with though, self-consciousness prevailed. I would affect voices by instinct, and in my really, really early efforts at plays, these became organic presences: essentially shapeless, and shifting from line to line as the fancy took me. I dimly recall playing a king in a nativity play, and being absolutely adamant that a line beginning 'we have followed the stars...' (I think) had to be delivered in an elevated, vague and stereotypically mystical fashion, where my voice would rise in pitch and then drift off into silence. Weird to remember that. Sort of pathetic too. And evidently cornerstone to my well-being for a little while that I did indeed manage to get the line out in that way. I was particularly pleased with my Ogre in Puss in Boots, who ranted and raved in the style of Fredric March in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I even stumbled over words and let sibilance go to blazes as though I was fitted with a set of March's toothsome Hyde dentures (I was wearing a brace at that point in time, which impacted not a fig on my pronunciation, but did lend my grin a pleasingly metallic sheen). My Duncan in Macbeth was, shamefully enough, an extended impression of Boris Karloff in the 1963 version of The Raven, in which his glorified sing-song acting voice is in high gear and summoned up an air of artificial cheer that I thought suited to the war-weary, soon-to-be-murdered Scottish royal. There's a sort of magpie mentality at work here - cherry-picking from a hoard of scanty, fragmented memories instead of aiming at a sobering and objective assessment of character. Of course, this isn't always desirable (aim for a nuanced and compassionate panto villain and you'll be laughed off the stage), and, in some ways, this is perhaps a commentary on the sort of scripts I was dealing with at this time. They were likable enough, and perfectly serviceable, but never the stuff of great writing and didn't involve an ounce of sincere emotion. When I finally was confronted with great writing in Macbeth, I hadn't the foggiest idea how to deal with it, and was quickly resorting to my magpie tendencies again.

As I've discussed elsewhere, the opportunity to play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol was a wee bit of an epoch. On a vocal plane, it was an object lesson in creating character. I had the entirety of the summer to brood on how I might construct the voice. It was an uphill struggle to escape from my recent past in the land of the magpies, but one that was eminently useful. I still looked to the actors of the past as a first inspiration, but in an altogether more committed and comprehensive fashion. No point in going at this thievery business half-cock, after all. I did my research and I did it thoroughly. I discovered that Basil Rathbone had played Scrooge on radio, and tested his locutions to see if they would fit. They didn't. Likewise, I discovered that Laurence Olivier had played the part for an audio book. I had a listen, instantly realised how dreadful he was at it, and started looking elsewhere. I had been greatly inspired by David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, and looked to both Mr Sowerberry and the Fagin of Alec Guinness as possible Dickensian source material. No go. Karloff reared his head again, as did Vincent Price, Ernest Thesiger (so witty and memorable in The Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein) and Tony Jay, undisputed king of the villainous voice-over. I even checked the performances of Alistair Sim, Albert Finney and Michael Caine in their own variant versions of A Christmas Carol to make certain that I wouldn't copy anything by accident. Originality seems to have been the crux of my battle, so it seems odd that I saw a solution in cluttering my life with old-time actors. I guess that it wasn't so important that what I produced was original - no such thing as originality, after all, what with everything having been done at least once - merely that it was original to me, and some sort of positive development in my limited powers as an actor. I don't remember whether this epic search bore fruit or not, for all of a sudden, the voice sprung from my lips and I instantly knew that it was right for Ebenezer. With rehearsal, it matured into everything I'd been looking for: thin, reedy, begrudging, venomous, fawning and even nasal (by my standards). It's a voice that survives today in my endeavours at The York Dungeon, where Lord Chief Justice Judge Venables Vernon Harcourt the Fifth spews out his proclamations of absolute doom in the same idiolect that once berated Bob Cratchit, fizzled in fear in the graveyard and broke out in ecstatic bellows on Christmas morning. I still believe Scrooge to be the best thing I've ever done. A lot of this is likely down to the time that it came into my life, which invested it with an aura of untold responsibility and personally-felt magnificence. But even allowing for this optimistic gloss, I can't ignore the fact that the production set me on a path of vocal adventuring that has stood me in good stead ever since.

From that time on, I started to delve deeper and deeper into vocal 'creations' - new voices that required practice to hone, but were all the more satisfying for the effort. Just after A Christmas Carol, clearly buoyed up with hubris after my virgin vocal success, I completely ruined the character of Roy in Neville's Island with a heavy lisp and thoroughly goonish delivery, partly based on a reverend I had quietly admired and mocked. More satisfying was The Elephant Man, which was unnaturally high (for me; probably slightly over the normal level for everyone else), querulous; prying and priggish on occasion, and fragile from start to finish. Return to the Forbidden Planet gave me the chance to tip my hat to every horror actor in the book, and I at last settled on a complimentary zig-zag between Tod Slaughter, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, with a little Kesley Grammar and David Leonard (my all-time theatrical hero) hurled in for good measure. Whether or not this was evident in the performance is almost irrelevant. We never sound precisely as we imagine when we speak in life (though to bridge this gap between conception and result as elegantly as possible should be every actor's goal), but some variation of this happy creation will at least get out there.

I think that the zenith of all this was Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was an important project to me for many reasons. I was playing three characters: Goldstein (shadowy, possibly non-existent leader of the rebel movement), Syme (obsessive creator of Newspeak and general nasty) and a Eurasian Prisoner (who dies by firing squad... and says nothing whatsoever). It was to be performed in the main house auditorium of York Theatre Royal, a beautiful venue normally restricted solely to the professional classes. It has also been some eight months since I'd done a proper play, so I was hungry for a return. Goldstein and Syme were both a joy to devise voices for though. The fun in Goldstein was that the voice would be pre-recorded. Although it's a dreadful stress and panic knowing that you have only really one shot at getting a character 'right', this matures into a wonderful relief when the performances finally roll around. This was a lesson that I'd learned on Return to the Forbidden Planet, where my initial vomitings at my projected intonation of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' quickly prospered into delight that I wouldn't have to reproduce it live. It precursed my first entrance, and thus had the effect of filling my head with the right voice and quality of mania in a fashion devoid of the pitfalls of method acting. It wasn't a perfect performance (far from it; you can quite clearly see me reading the script in sections I was told would be edited out!), but at least it was in the can, and the relief was considerable:



Although the adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four from which the company worked was questionable in some respects (having originally been written for a cast of four), the Orwell novel is a masterpiece of sprawling, dystopian detail, and I could refer back to it whenever I wished for character pointers. The revelation for Goldstein was his likeness to a sheep. Instant character voice! Play him like a demented barnyard fluff-ball! Alright, it was a little more nuanced than that. The reasoning that Goldstein was likely a propaganda creation of Big Brother, deployed to whip the workers into a frenzy in the daily hate rallies, justified what could have easily descended into politically incorrect Jewish caricature. There were also two distinct sides to Goldstein on display in the production. First came the vitriolic screams processed through the telescreens. For this I watched a good few reels of Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies. It was a menacing thrill to hear my voice echoing through the great auditorium and know that it was out of my hands; in the spirit of multi-roling, I was among the workers shouting myself down with unrestrained vitriol. The second was a more subdued narration of a few pages of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (cor, big words). For this I listened to a range of audio books to perfect a calm, quiet indifference of tone. Even through a glaringly ostentatious character voice then, a modicum of subtlety and nuance is achievable. Syme was an ungainly mix of Alan Bennett (which meant a lot of 'A Chip in the Sugar') and Kenneth Williams (his intermittent slides into Cockney in the Carry On films rather than his more composed upper-class idiolect). It's another voice that lives on in Dungeon form, slightly modified for the character of William, the plague doctor's grovelling and waspish assistant. I had my doubts about Syme, and felt for sure after our short run that it had been an awkward failure. But then, quite by chance, I stumbled on two reviews online. I reckon that my being singled out is due to my perennial inability to seem young, and hence protruding like a sore thumb in the context of a youth theatre. The first came from York University's student publication, The Yorker:

The most notable performance however was from James Swanton playing Syme. This character was brought to life with a well-portrayed devotion alongside subtle eccentricities that sufficiently developed a broader picture of life in Oceania.

And, in a less celebratory vein, the BBC's backhanded compliment:

With some notable exceptions – James Swanton does a brilliant turn as Winston’s co-worker, Syme – the acting is, in general, unconvincing.

Very nice. But that's not to say that there haven't been some flat-out disasters. My efforts to impersonate Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire were horrendous, excruciating - among the worst things I've done in my life, a cardboard affair due to my inability to master a proper regional accent. I felt like doing as Robin Williams did in Mrs Doubtfire - intoning 'vell, I do voices' with unbridled intensity before launching into a marathon quick-cut montage of Walter Huston, Sean Connery and Ronald Reagan. A newly written play called Ghost's Reflection constitutes the absolute nadir of my theatrical endeavours - not because there was anything wrong with the play, which was a quirky, humorous and fast-paced account of a postman's darkly comic dissatisfaction with life, but my skin-crawling failure to simply SPEAK the words in my own voice. Everything was tremendously excruciating and strained. Oh, it was a train-wreck - and that's not self-deprecation either. The character was meant to be pitiful; not the performance, and not by extension the actor.

York Youth Theatre also afforded me the chance to dabble in another medium that's fascinated me for a good long time: radio. Quite out of the blue, I remember getting forwarded for the job with a bunch of other uncomprehending members. I wound up auditioning by phone, a new but surprisingly comfortable experience, for our very pleasant director Toby Swift. By some blessed stroke of luck, I got the part. I was going to be on BBC Radio 4. For a five-day week then (schooling be damned!), I was back-and-forth on the train to Manchester. The play was The Present, the writer was Jackie Pavlenko, and my character was Carl: the cynical and argumentative son of a put-upon woman cycling through mid-life crisis, bereavement and a crumbling love affair. Even when I do naturalism, it seems I'm cast as the bastard.

I regarded the BBC headquarters with the utmost fascination. I ate every day at the (in)famous BBC canteen, and discovered to my delight that they did a superlative line in cooked breakfasts. I got a tour of the magician's cabinet of the recording studio as well, including the echo chamber used to recereate the distinctive aural quality of an outdoors setting and a flight of stairs coated with contrasting layers of carpet to suit any number of dwellings. On one particularly surreal afternoon, I walked unsupervised down a corridor and happened to see the London Chamber Orchestra crushed into a studio and playing away with vigour. I also got to act alongside Jim Millea, a name that will mean little to most people, but is thrown into sharp, instant relief when it is remembered that joined the immortals as Neville: the endlessly incompetent pub landlord of Hollyoaks fame. For the uninitiated, Hollyoaks positively demands to be watched. It's by far the funniest thing on television in this day and age, sometimes intentionally, more often unintentionally, a sort of postmodern version of The Alchemist - a dark urban landscape populated with squalid, degrading and sinful characters who drum themselves into yet deeper cesspools of criminality, violence and sexual depravity. Anyway, Millea was great. Did the most convincing impression of a parrot I've heard in my life. Yes, that's right. A pet shop is the perfect venue for a mid-life crisis. All in all, a lovely experience. But when I listened to the broadcast, I found myself wincing a fair bit and leaving the room whenever I came back on. Make no mistake, it was 'JAMES SWANTON' (capitalised this time). It's a disquieting thought that the performance of mine that reached the largest number of people was rife with the natural tics and mannerisms that I despise so much - the same tics and mannerisms that stand in such firm opposition to my beliefs in the acting business. I have my suspicions that they're the reason I was cast in the first place. I regret nothing. I've listened to the CD since, and it's a tolerable effort - there are good points and there are bad points. The folks at the BBC never indicated that they were anything other than satisfied with my contribution, so full credit must go to them for their humbling professionalism.

One broadcast I didn't listen to was Jonathan Martin: The York Minster Incendiary. This was recorded at BBC Radio York for a production company known as Soundstage North. I had a number of small parts, amongst them one where I just coughed repeatedly, as though trapped in a burning cathedral. More importantly, the play offered a run-in with Berwick Kaler. This name will mean nothing to those not based in York. But to those bearing even a tangential connection to this Mecca of the Northern World, he bestrides the theatrical landscape as the almighty arch-dame: the undisputed king of British pantomime. Contrary to expectations, he was not wearing a frock when I strolled past him at the front doors. Rather, he was puffing on a fag and derisively claiming himself to be the doorman. A bit of a surly chap in person, but a true legend, so I didn't mind. He gave me a good deal of help with an accent I was doing, advice that was both pertinent and greatly appreciated. No other radio offers have been forthcoming, but these were both fascinating and rewarding experiences (paid too; I received no more and no less than two pounds for my Soundstage contribution!) and I look back on them fondly. Truly, this was a golden time - a time when solely my voice was required and seemed adequate for the task's demands.

Less prestigious than these professional engagements, but infinitely closer to my heart, is the long-running (getting on for five years now) Harry Potter spoof. This was the brainchild of my dear friend James Davies, who dashed out what was - to us at least - a mind-bogglingly witty few scenes that recklessly derided and pilloried the wonderful world of K. J. Railing. It's too laden with obscure in-jokes to make much sense to anyone other than us - an unholy, primordial soup of the alumni of Manor CE School, the productions that flourished there and (improbably in the first installment) The Sword in the Stone and A Christmas Carol. 'Chapter One: Hut on the Rock' is probably the finest insight into the kind of impenetrable weirdness that can only prosper with best friends. Watch out for Davies's flair for (kinda) understated metatheatrical flourishes in this first outing:



The series matured (regressed?) from that point on. James Davies took the roles of Harry, Hermione and McGonagall, whilst I played Hagrid, Ron (as a ginger sock puppet... no reason for this), Dumbledore (patterned on the senseless, nigh-incomprehensible wheezings of Richard Harris), Voldemort, Pince, Uncle Vernon, Snape and various others. Another idea that was knocking about from the early stages was to provide a narration in the style of the Harry Potter audio books. Happily enough, this gave me the chance to sling my feeble impression of Stephen Fry into the brew (in the video posted above, it doesn't even sound like his balls have dropped). Great fun, all in all, a little tiresome to edit together at times, but it gave me a restricted opportunity to practice the art of silly voices in the comfort of my own home. I think my favourite of the lot remains 'Chapter Five: The Dursley's House'. The writing was a team collaboration by this point, Mr Fry's voice had deepened to my satisfaction, and the twisted humour was stoked by our shared mockery of the fate of Bertha in Jane Eyre, the hilarious notion that Gordon Brown might soon be Prime Minister, and, most importantly of all, the Radcliffe-Griffiths team-up in Equus - a play that I'd just seen in the West End and been absolutely horrified by (for all the wrong reasons). Idiosyncrasy abounds:



We finally wrapped the series up last year with the recording of the epic song 'Dumbledore'. I have a lot of love for Les Miserables, and the idea that we might blow a respectful raspberry at its most powerful number, 'One Day More!', in the persona of various demented wizard caricatures, seemed too much fun for words. I had a whale of a time in thrusting together the obscene and pernicious lyrics, and even more fun lay in wait in our afternoon of recording, in which my bedroom gave way to a sea-change of caterwauling and diabolical screeches. There's not a correct note to found in the final recording (if you run across one, let me know, and I'll edit it out), and I've never failed to be deeply moved by the sheer quantity of blood that gushes from my ears in the final counterpoint:



This private war against my voice has been waging for so long now that you'd assume I'd have gotten over it. Not so. The latest vocally induced trauma came a mere six months ago, when I went merrily skipping through Cambridge to contribute to a society looking to record selected scenes from Shakespeare. It was a very small part - First Priest in Hamlet - and rehearsals for The Relapse had prevented me doing any meaningful sort of line preparation - not that there were that many of 'em to begin with. In retrospect though, these reminders of my task's humble nature were only to add to the humiliation of the ordeal to come. I should have seen it coming. I was soon pinned in a small room with assorted theatrical luminaries (by Cambridge standards, at any rate). I'd never seen actually seen any of them perform before, but knew two of them by reputation and would soon see a third act and develop a great respect for their ability. I was but a floundering fish, but in my stern dedication to my philosophy of constant utilisation, I was determined to do the best job I could. Well, we did a read-through. I got a note. Fair enough. Show me the path to improvement and I'll gladly follow, every time. But this was no simple note: 'Oh, James - could you make it less "Mr Voiceover Man" please?' Ah. Ah. Kneejerk reaction. 'OH, GOOD GOD...' I screamed internally, 'NOT THIS SITUATION AGAIN.' I tried to laugh it off. Feebly. It was no use. No way out. From that point on, I was dead inside. So it went on. On and on. Recording after recording after recording. And every time I provoked some snarky, biting, quite unintentionally soul-destroying response. The nightmare climaxed in my actually being led aside, as the others, to their credit, all retreated very politely to their own separate corners, making small talk to disguise their impression of quite how unforgivably bad I was. 'I'm sorry it's so terrible,' I remember saying. 'It's not terrible,' came the reply, which seemed to me near-certain evidence to the contrary, 'You have a great voice, it's just that...' Sometimes there are no words. The eventual conclusion was that I lengthened vowels unnecessarily, so I stumbled back into the recording process, throwing enunciation to the winds and garbling like a petulant steam-hammer to repent for my sins, finally escaping into the cooling nectar of the evening rain, feeling more dejected and miserable than I had for quite some time.

A number of elements conjoined here so precisely as to place me in a state bordering on torment. Having my pronunciation corrected by another actor (but then, that actor always corrects my pronunciation), which made me feel ignorant of how to speak or even read Shakespeare all over again. Projecting such a monstrously bad impression for people I'd only just met and still regarded as somewhat superhuman. The delivery of a promise that had been hovering over me since the audition, in which I'd been sternly instructed to be 'less villain-y' in my reading (whatever the hell that means). Perhaps most rattling was a throwaway comment from the director, which I suppose was meant as consolation: 'Don't let these ADC actors throw you off...' In other words, these people can act. And you can't. I must have been thought the soul of inexperience, and given my unforgivably shoddy performance, I can't blame anyone for getting that idea. Above and beyond it all was that atrocious and execrable voice of James Swanton - damp, unresponsive and ponderous - which was not only embarrassing me to an unprecedented degree, but inconveniencing, irritating and likely also embarrassing a group of people who I wished only to please. Oh, everything against me. Sweat trickling from every pore. Heart lodged in gullet. Shaking nervously. My God. I thought it would go on and on. Fortunately, it didn't, but the scars remained, and I opted to retreat behind my usual rut of protective masks for the remainder of the term. There's no way of proving it, but I believe this experience had a direct knock-on effect on my giving an unprecedentedly hammy performance as Coupler in The Relapse (even by my standards; but given this agenda, I feel no shame), before cutting out that loathsome voicebox entirely by appearing Silent Canonfire, in which my character's tongue being cut out rendered me a mute within a mute play.

I told a friend about the incident. They didn't say much except 'directors are idiots' - and as a prolific director themselves, I'm guessing that that's a general note and in no way a specific attack. It can't be denied that I was unforgivably, impossibly bad... but then I shouldn't have been cast at all on the basis of my equally mannered and uncontrolled audition. It's not the director's task to expunge inferiority from their midst by brute force. They should spot it at the outset and politely decline to get involved. Or else really take the time and effort to get the best from something that has a glimmer of potential, but remains in need of gentle provocation before anything worthy can be done with it. To cast someone and then beat them over the head with their own incompetence is, quite simply, unforgivable. Possibly the tension became a bit too much. The terrifying distinction with radio as opposed to theatre is that the ephemeral quality is gone. There's no lengthy time for development or gestation. One rehearsal, two at most - curtain up, light the lights - and into the can it goes. From this perspective, I can well understand the panic from the director's standpoint. But this carries us to wider problems surrounding the radio performer in general. How far can an actor go knowing they need never learn the lines? Or even scan them before the five minute mark? It's certainly an enviable skill to be able to get things 'right' at a stroke with a sight-reading. I'm a little more suspicious as to whether any of us were getting the best of the text within these stifling parameters. The name of the game was Shakespearean naturalism - which I assume relies on a protean familiarity with the particular texts, which I also assume none of us really possessed - and I failed outright. I'm just glad that I didn't get this same uncomfortable reception at the BBC. Now that would have been truly devastating.

By way of a happier postscript, I recorded the Porter's speech for a production of Macbeth located in the dingy, serpentine basements of the Cambridge English Faculty. This was nothing if not a positive experience. I'd done Macbeth once before, in that severely truncated, expressionistic version at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and had been disappointed to find the immortal Porter cut entirely. Quite by chance then, this play delivered on a dream that had lasted for a fair few years. The positivity was abundant. Yes! You can do it in an arbitrary character voice. Yes! We like that it's over-the-top - that'll be an interesting contrast with the prevalent naturalistic emphasis. Yes! Our recording equipment is only so-so, but our hearts are large and our appetite for play-making contagious! Actors are simple folk. Just pat them on the head and make them feel useful and they'll be pliable to your every whim. Happy performances tend, on the whole, to be good performances, so such an atmosphere is to be encouraged. Even if the sinewy grace and elevation of the Shakespearean nobleman will be forever beyond me, I can at least have a bit of hearty fun with trashing my way through the prose idiots. It gives me license to create my own rhythms in the text - and not fritter away the potential enjoyment of a performance by worrying about someone else's opinion on them.

It's undeniable that there's too much pretension surrounding Shakespeare nowadays -and interesting that Dickens, top candidate for England's second greatest writer in terms of volume and quality of output, has fostered little to none of it. Dickens has retained his connection with the common man. Shakespeare has too, but not to so great an extent. The swift and brutal termination of all that god-awful, wallowy romantic criticism of Shakespeare (usually any text in which that unwieldy term 'genius' is repeatedly abused) was a needed step, but the mind-boggling technical pedantry that was to follow, whilst a considerable boon to scholarship, has proved positively disastrous for severing the Bard from his audiences. In preparation for Richard III, we enjoyed the brief but overbearingly energetic services of a fellow who'd once worked for the National Theatre. An absolutely lovely man, but he did have a way of crushing the life out of me and the rest of the cast by forcing us to repeat a line over and over for five minute stretches, until such time as he felt we were grasping it properly. Only then had we accomplished... what? Self-loathing? Awareness of our own mediocrity? A belief that Shakespeare is forever impenetrable? There was a knock-on effect too. I was left in a state of mild panic ahead of Pericles, my second go-around on the Theatre Royal's main stage, where I'd been asked, in a rare, rare change of pace, to play a basically normal human being. Speaking Shakespeare in my natural voice? Inconceivable! These good-natured bully-boy tactics are all very well in a drama school. But ineffective and counter-productive as a one-off. And certainly a large part of my lack of confidence in approaching Shakespeare. I can like Shakespeare. I can admire him, wonder at him, delight in him, laugh with him, all the frenzied, appreciative gestures. Oh, you bet I can like him - with such focused, driven fixation. But love him? No. There'll always be that fine veneer of academically-charged suspicion. Funnily enough, I get on with Marlowe just fine. Probably because, Doctor Faustus aside, there's not such a devastating cult of searing, white-hot pretension hissing round about him. Dickens remains my idol among writers. Not to mention a more helpful route into learning the ins and outs of acting... But the marathon wrestling match between Shakespeare and Dickens must wait for another blog entry. And another writer who dares feel qualified to write on Shakespeare at all...

Many thanks for trawling through my copious and unrequested ramblings. The topic is at the forefront of my mind due to the sheer virtuoso range of character voices demanded by The York Dungeon. Eight characters, and each in need of a different form of bonkers vocalisation. The fact that some five weeks of constant shouting have caused my vocal facilities to realign means that such things have required a daily reimaging. More than this however, looms the upcoming challenge of Pickwick & Nickleby. All those voices, all clamouring to get out... It's enough to drive anyone crazy.

Clifford's Tower

So it's come to this. Full frontal immersion in all things Dungeonesque. No escape now - not from this point in! Clifford's Tower is the very first section of The York Dungeon that visitors properly experience. First and foremost however is a quite elaborate entrance and queue area. A little digging through old newspaper archives reveals that this section of the Dungeon was the progeny of an extensive refurbishment in 2001 - something that surprised me when I first read it, since I'm so used to the current set-up that I can't imagine the entrance being anywhere else. Here it is:


As this helpful illustration shows, the current entrance is situated dead ahead, within the double doors. It seems the old entrance was just past the bus shelter, through the imposing stone archway on the left. If you pay close attention when hanging about around there (it's now a fire exit - and as a result, a common route for actors leading out the easily terrified once they reach the Ghosts of York section), you can make out the remnants of decorations indicative of the old entrance. There's a hidden sign bearing the legend 'Enter at Your Peril' in bloody red letters, as well as an extremely impressive grim reaper, pitched at an enormous size and bearing down from the ceiling with Draculean fangs and bared talons.

This curiosity aside, the current entrance is a wondrous creation. Once through the doors, visitors are ushered up an imposing wooden staircase flanked by decaying castle architecture. It's every cliched Hollywood Dungeon distilled into one glorious whole; evenly pitched between the monolithic majesty of Universal's Tower of London, the depressive squalor of The Black Sleep and the colourful pulp sensationalism of The Terror by Roger Corman. Just within the doors is the caged figure of an axe-wielding executioner, accompanied by a headless victim kneeling at the block. In one of the Dungeon's many attractive water features, blood gushes from the victim's neck with insatiable gusto for the entire eight hours of the attraction's opening. A hidden smoke machine means that the vignette is usually wreathed in cost-effective atmosphere; a nice little effect when picked up by the wind outside. There's also the bonus of a hidden censor that causes the display to intermittently shoot water at the guests. This can be a little infuriating for even the staff - no matter how many times I pass the damn thing, and no matter how many objects I hurl past it in a vain effort to trigger it before I pass, I still can't figure out a formula for avoiding its severe drenching effects. Just opposite is the carefully themed door that affords safe passage to our underground staff room, from which ghouls in varying states of disrepair emerge at all hours. Seeing as there's no connecting passage between the staff room and the attraction's interior, actors have no option but to walk around the building to access their positions - which at least offers an all-too-rare exposure to the undyingly precious commodity of sunlight - in full view of the queuing guests. This can be fun at times, irritating at others. It very much depends on the crowd and your particular mood. In peak times (and summer is certainly one of 'em), there's usually one actor (bedecked in monk-like raiments and sporting a skull on a stick) stationed at the entrance to entertain the crowd and supply vital information - guidance for anxious parents and children, historical background, our extortionate ticket prices, and so forth. However, that doesn't exempt poor, innocent, undeserving you from public interaction when trying to walk past the crowd as inconspicuously as possible - no mean feat when you're dripping every which way in your flouncy, blood-spattered shirt and period breeches. I can't improvise for toffee, so I tend to growl in some guttural, baleful tone if confronted, and then bolt as quickly as possible. Just this week, fellow Dungeonites took it upon themselves to bellow 'ALL HAIL THE LEGEND!' at me as I crossed to the secret entrance, forcing me to break into an embarrassed dash as they cheered, hollered and broke into Munchkin-style song. Humiliating each other within controlled boundaries is a daily custom at the Dungeon - a constant trial and sometime amusement...

Once up the staircase, there was until very recently a lovely vignette of a man being branded, resplendent in blazing orange, with chains and shackles throwing shadows on the walls behind. It's vanished recently, so it's probably being repaired - it's simply too good an image to be disposed of completely. There's also an elaborate figure of Queen Elizabeth I, wrapped in one of her signature dresses and staring at guests from a raised platform. This was originally part of a special exhibit on wicked women through the ages, which, among others, featured the warrior queen Boadicea (still there last summer, spear aloft and face a horror) and Anne Robinson (a figure loaned out from The London Dungeon - and apparently kept here by popular demand). Elizabeth alone remains. She used to have a sinister black raven perched on her shoulder, a probable nod to the Tower of London's lasting fixation on them, so it's a shame that this too has disappeared. Guests next reach the cash desk, stacked with the inevitable souvenir booklets and glow sticks (one of the most frustrating items in all creation... for a number of reasons I'll go into later), as well as a photo spot featuring an axe and severed head for guests to hold, the stocks for further adventuring, and, in the background, a wonderful skeleton wreathed with cobwebs. Certainly high on my list of Dungeon props I would most like to own. Another skeleton hovers above the cash desk, at once tangled up in and wielding a threatening hangman's noose. Skeletons are my earliest memory of my fascination with horror. Slight creepiness aside, there's something so aesthetically pleasing about them. None of the messy human nonsense - sleek emblems of high design; automatons even, near-robotic in appearance. By this criteria, it was probably equally likely at one time that I'd want to be a doctor, but it seems that less profitable dabblings in English lay ahead.

The atmosphere intensifies tenfold with the entrance into the first show: Clifford's Tower. It's probably the tamest and least ambitious of the current Dungeon shows, but that may just be me speaking as a jaded old cynic, forever annoyed that there's no real place for an actor in there. Visitors enter into an extremely dark wooden corridor - the deepest recesses of a heavily fortified Yorkshire castle. It can get very claustrophobic in there. The sole illumination is provided by flame. It can be seen licking away at the walls, peeping in at every chink and corner, the wood quite black by contrast. There are five or six different means by which the illusion of a blazing inferno is created. There are your standard spotlights mingling red, orange and yellow, a number of burning torches hanging from the walls, and an especially eye-catching device that produces a violent, strobe-like flickering. Most impressive of all is a turret window that provides a view of a sheet of flame. This is a very simple effect - quite literally a sheet, albeit one appropriately fanned and lit - but surprisingly effective. The earliest use of this particular effect in a dark attraction was Pirates of the Caribbean (not the film - the far superior theme park ride... now forever besmirched by the addition of an animatronic Johnny Depp). The story goes that Uncle Walt invited a select colloquy of guests to tour the attraction ahead of the grand opening. As Karl Bacon recalls:

I remember the head of the fire department coming through the lower doors way down there, and he looked up there and saw it and said 'You can't have fire in here!' As he got closer he saw that it was done with colored plastic. He was going to shut them down!

If you'll forgive the pun, this is surefire testament to the effect's powers of persuasion. Many of the Dungeon's special effects are deeply indebted to the wonderful world of Imagineering, so I imagine I'll be referring to Disney attractions quite a bit more as I roll on with my pontifications.

One detail that I used to adore about this window view was subtle enough to be easily missed. If you looked out far enough, you could make out a charred, skeletal corpse, lying prostrate in agony at the base of the fire. Very reminiscent of those interminable scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean of skeletons in various Holbeinesque poses - playing cards, drinking wine, lying in four-poster beds and other sainted nonsense. The corpse has shifted location - now it lies in the corner, pinned beneath the feet of a monk, who hisses prophecies of relentless doom at his captives and does much to increase the tension. In my opinion, this is one of the Dungeon's most effective (not to mention economical) new features. I've been told that The Edinburgh Dungeon opens with the infamous court-room scene, the script slightly rewritten to include references to the multitude of horrors that visitors are yet to experience. It's a truth rarely acknowledged in tourist attractions, but their primary mission is to be good theatre. With this low-key generation of suspense, Edinburgh has the beginnings of an overarching dramatic structure to tie together what risks dissolving into a series of fairly impressive but unrelated vignettes. With the introduction of the monk, The York Dungeon has gone some way towards duplicating this, as well as providing a genuine show to elegantly wallpaper over the Tower's function as a glorified waiting room prior to the first actor-led show. So we hear about The Great Plague (cheery accusations from the monk that one among the audience will soon infect the others), Guy Fawkes (the classic Dungeon description of being hung, drawn and quartered, conveyed in graphic, mouth-watering detail), the Viking invaders (Erik Bloodaxe gets so many grand introductions in the Dungeon that it's disappointing when you meet him, but the name more than warrants it) and witch-burning (clearly a sign that the Dungeon plans on keeping its newest horror for years to come... despite the slight technological dilemmas). Most importantly, we get an intelligible explanation of the history of Clifford's Tower for probably the first time since the feature's 2001 introduction. It is the plaque situated at the foot of the Tower itself - a mere two minute walk from the Dungeon premises - that puts it most succinctly:

On the night of Friday 16 March 1190 some 150 Jews and Jewesses of York, having sought protection in the Royal Castle on this site from a mob incited by Richard Malebisse and others, chose to die at each other's hands rather than renounce their faith.

A considerable amount of Jewish citizens were killed by the fire that the crowd started as siege degenerated into blood-lust, but the greater number died as suicides. Despite the plaque's cheerily low estimate, some have placed the death total as high as five hundred. The Tower was later rebuilt with stones taken from a Tadcaster quarry. These were soon observed to release a suspicious red liquid - an incident that got far too many locals hissing inane superstition about the ghostly blood of restless Jews. In reality, the liquid was produced by the release of small deposits of iron oxide in the stone. Rather than commemorate this idiotic footnote, unworthy of even The Amityville Horror, the Dungeon replicates the inferno. Unlike almost every other event the Dungeon covers, there's not a shred of exploitative fun or self-knowing, cynical irony to be found in it. Frankly, I'm amazed that they went ahead and built it. Maybe my hope that the Dungeon will someday house an exhibit based on Bedern (the York school in which the mad headmaster murdered his pupils and stashed the bodies in a cupboard) isn't quite so improbable. Or maybe the Clifford's Tower section is a product of its time: nine years is a virtual life-age in the realm of the politically correct. In fact, the feature can be argued as an emblem of a time when the Dungeon really did aim to be thought-provoking in exposing the atrocities of the past. Then again, you could also argue that it's just in very bad taste. Yet we receive no complaints about it. Clearly it's a little upstaged by the bad taste yet to come...

The special effects wizardry by which the monk tirelessly delivers and redelivers his fifteen minutes of doom is worthy of comment. As I said a bit earlier, this is one of the Dungeon's few sections not to feature an actor, not that you'd guess this from certain remarks that you hear from the public. Some insist the monk is a real person (usually followed with a comment to the effect of 'the eyes - THEY BE FOLLOWIN' ME!'); others that the head is a hologram, which is vague to say the least and assumes too much of our capabilities; best of the bunch (and always from young children) is 'the head is real - but the body is fake!' Yes. Come to The York Dungeon. Home of the world's first fully functioning disembodied head. Catch him next season with the RSC in Hamlet, alternating as Yorick in Hamlet and post-execution Buckingham in Richard III. The effect is actually no more than a blank, featureless bust onto which the footage of an actor is projected. This is another deception that originated with those tricksy Imagineering folk, who first set it to use in The Haunted Mansion in 1969. The illusion was apparently discovered almost by accident - the happy result of some unstructured play with a statue of an American President and a film reel of actor Hans Conreid impersonating the Magic Mirror. The near-mythic legacy of The Haunted Mansion has led to some memorable pop folklore in America. Among them is Madame Leota, a medium trapped in her own crystal ball, and the unlikely fusion of the remarkable face of Leota Toombs and the chilling voice of Eleanor Audley (harbinger of childhood nightmares the world over with her roles as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty):



Even better are the Mansion's crowd-pleasing Singing Busts. In the lead is the almighty Thurl Ravenscroft, who not only sung the show-stopping 'You're a Mean One, Mr Grinch' for the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Boris Karloff narrated, as well as voicing the immortal green nasty), but gained eternal glory as the never less than grrr-rrr-rrreat voice of Tony the Tiger in innumerable Frosties adverts. Far better than the kid who replaced him, I'm sure you'll agree:



The only downside to this effect is that it precludes the lashings and lashings of smoke that originally made Clifford's Tower that bit more frightening as the first of the Dungeon experiences. So despite the blazing fire, despite the power of all that sound and fury, Clifford's Tower is surprisingly bereft of, well, smoke. Swamp the chamber in a foggy soup and the projector's location is instantly revealed by the telltale streaks of light gushing from the ceiling. I suppose that internal projection is the solution, but apart from being ludicrously expensive, relying on fiber-optics and whatnot, it does tend to make characters look as though their faces are inside out. However, this limitation certainly didn't stop the management piping in gallons of smoke when the figure was in its original location - standing at the docks of a plague-ridden city, dispensing choice witticisms such as 'ALL OF YOU WILL DIE!' (always a popular line in the staff room, where it was quite audible at all times) in the person of a different actor entirely. That always seemed a softer projection than the crisp, digital image that we now have, but that might well have been the smoke working its reductive magic. It's fitting that I end this installment on the topic of The Great Plague, because that's precisely where I'll be picking up next time. And since there'll be a non-projected, flesh-and-blood actor about, I might even get round to discussing some dramatic articles. So: less indulgence of my insane fetish for ghost trains and more nearly on-topic blodgery! Hurrah!