Egad! A few closely associated visions swim into my mind... Leisurely punts a-puttering past, serenaded by floating string quartets and the compulsory quaffing of elderberries and caviar... Doffing my mortar board and addressing professors by their first names (oh, lor!)... The usual run of unfailingly polite and lovely people... Argh - truly I am back in the land of the loonies! No chance of being egged by Northern louts over here!* No, sir!
There have been a few developments, of course. I've swapped accomodation from the impeccably brown, silverfish-ridden horizons of Selwyn College's distinguished Cripps Court. I've gravitated just across the road to Ann's Court this year, which is light (relatively), airy (sort of) and spacious (when I'm not in the room). It's also connected to the building that served as the backdrop in Love's Labour's Lost, so I'm entertaining the deluded concept of somehow living in a theatre. Oh, Swanton. You sad, troubled fool. I'm in Room O2 (the arena, as it shall henceforth be called - which means I'll soon be staging a Les Miserables concert featuring the immortal Jenny Galloway!)... This information will be of definite interest should you wish to leave a brown paper bag of flaming literature outside my door. Or set about egging it into submission. Or something like that.*
I'm back early for a purpose, of course. Rehearsals for The Alchemist are already well underway, and the production looks set to be a very exciting one indeed. There was also a real buzz about the last effort (and one not to be confused with the adrenaline rush of piecing Jonson's comic masterpiece together in only a week), and this is only multiplying in the resurrection. One of the most pleasant things about Alchemist 1.0 was precisely this early start; the opportunity to work, relax, rehearse and simply function in the Disney-esque surroundings of Cambridge without any of the organised stress that normally crowds in on you in the form of supervisions, classes, lectures, meetings, and insistent, harrowing deadlines. I felt captain of my soul and master of my destiny. Academically speaking - and only until term got properly underway.
There have been a few other marginal developments as of late. I've managed to secure a low commitment gig with Varsity, who have bafflingly granted me permission to rant about a different classic horror film on a weekly basis. This is sure to distract me even further from the upkeep of the ol' blodgings, as well as see me prostrate with grief and howling in agony at three o'clock in the morning on a weekly basis, unable to construe another synonym for 'terror', 'fright', 'Lon Chaney Jr.', ecetera. (I kid - it really shouldn't be too much extra work, once I adjust to the technique of saturated, sensationalist writing!) I've also rediscovered my old hatred for sin. This is a weird little habit of mine, strictly non-religious, and more based on an intrinsically personal compass of morality. Maybe that's in response to the great, tottering heap of work I've set myself this term. The degree is taxing enough, but add to that two plays (both intense in their own ways) and an expansive amount of writing, and life goes spinning into a crazed sort of orbit. It's exciting though. I may never again be so stressed or so busy - or so alive. Keeping busy is the best of all things. I wouldn't have it any other way, and I'm fortunate indeed to have been gifted with an environment that fosters - nay! - encourages it. And on that note, I will quote Charles Dickens's defence of just the same, as found in a letter to his devoted correspondent John Forster:
Too late to say, put the curb on, and don't rush at hills - the wrong man to say it to. I am incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.
Just as expected from the man who vowed to 'tear myself to pieces' in his final enactment of the 'Sikes and Nancy' murder from Oliver Twist. The pledge was a hollow one - he tore himself to pieces with it every time, and most certainly hastened his death in the process. I have no such fatalism in mind, but I am steeling myself for what's likely to be the most action-packed few months of my existence to date. I shall not go down with egg on my face!* No, sir - no, no! Bring on the work!
*I was egged on my way home in York! Shocking - utterly! It was all so perfectly civilised at first! I'd just completed my last day at the Dungeon, rounding off what was by far the happiest acting experience I've ever had; the sun was shining gaily; I walked past the Theatre Royal, the art gallery, the ancient city walls - the birthplace of Auden, for goodness' sakes! Then, quite unexpectedly, a heavy object came sailing out of a car window and struck me rather hard... For some reason, I instantly assumed it to be an apple core, to which it had at least been approximate in size and weight... But a study of the ground revealed a less pleasant sight still: sticky, foetid, poisonous yolk. Ah ha-ha! Interesting indeed. I'll admit that I have a somewhat severe face when I'm roaming freely and consider myself off-duty, but I didn't for one moment think my homely mug warranted a drive-by fit of eggery. Fortunately, the egg brushed my sleeve only - which was still unpleasantly yellow - which just goes to show that certain pillocks can't even get draining the life-blood of society completely right. I live as usual!
Saturday, 25 September 2010
Friday, 10 September 2010
Love and Acting
Blimey. That sounds a bit weighty. I'm not one to experience strong emotions in this life. For better or for worse, moderation remains my governing code, and no matter how often I try to dredge up an honest scrap of emotion, I find myself timelessly pent in by dull, grinding stolidity. That's not to say that I'm at all unhappy - far from it, by and large. Through the course of this holiday in particular, I've been basking in the glow of a benevolent - and, occasionally, happily, even overwhelming - contentedness. But I did stumble on a quotation from Mary Shelley earlier in the year that has since become a firm favourite. It expresses this murky condition perfectly: 'Some have a passion for reforming the world. Others do not cling to particular opinions... Besides, I feel the counter-arguments too strongly.' What a thing that must be - to have opinions! Not on things that matter to you. No, no, no - I'm quite prodigiously and dysfunctionally eloquent on all of that claptrap. To have opinions on lots of different things. Things that don't matter, things you're not even necessarily informed about... Politics, for instance. The environment. Activism, charities. Music. A feeling, beyond anything, of being well-adjusted, expertly attuned, to the minute intricacies of life. That subtle social code that dictates someone reads The Guardian instead of The Observer; that they that they purchase a blazer with four buttons on the sleeve instead of three. I regard this sort of thing as a nightmare. Perhaps these are views that will come only with age... Age - and experience. (Or arid, baseless bigotry, conditioned by convenience and cynicism!) That would do quite nicely. On a less fanciful, more pressing note, the formation of opinions would be consolation indeed in getting on with this bloody degree. If you can't opine, then you can't argue, and argument is so often the core of these tricksy arts subjects. At the very least, it would make supervisions a less clammy and oppressive experience.
I suppose this is all my way of saying that I'm not one to experience strong emotions in acting either. Love is the strongest of all emotions - positive ones, at any rate - so it's interesting to speculate on the influence it might hold over a performance. This isn't entirely off-topic; trying to thrash out the Smike and Nickleby relationship (my constant theme) has been helped on a little by thinking on the subject of loved ones, those both lost and found. The perhaps inevitable backlash to this real-life inertia has been my unusually aggressive presence on-stage. Just as Mary Shelley, a shy, retiring nineteen year old, gave full license to her dark side in the creation of Frankenstein, so too have I, sharing every one of her nineteen years and a considerably diminished propensity for genius, found a bizarre creative outlet and intermittent life substitute in the business of acting. My own perception of my characterisations is distorted at best. As strange as it may seem, I've never gone out of my way to be bad, but it does dawn on me from time to time that I really do far too much - flashy cartoon performances replete with bellowing, flailing, shrieking, wailing; in short, a plethora of infantile showings-off, and above all, that persistent, hovering M-word: manic, manic, manic, manic. It's only in the last year that I've undergone the unsettling experience of my entire theatrical persona being distilled to one word. I now spend the majority of my dabblings in acting succumbing to divided loyalties: torn between trying to escape the manic, before giving in to play up to it with renewed aggression. But can such wild, deluded abandon be conducive to the cultivation of love? I use the word in the broadest possible sense, and I'll be unpacking a few of its applications as I rattle on with this entry.
First then: have I ever had a proper love scene? Not quite. Unless by love scene, you mean hate scene. They all seem to have been stonkingly bitter affairs. I've had an astounding amount of dead wives, for instance... Scarlet Petals Underfoot was a long, melancholic paen to one, painted in the fashion of those interminable, interchangeable vignettes of Vincent Price contemplating a portrait of his dead wife in the Roger Corman Poe films... Dear, religious Roy of Neville's Island had a field day recounting the blackness attendant on his beloved's death, all the while convincing a fellow lad that his own wife was making passionate love on the bread shelf at Safeway's. Return to the Forbidden Planet had my wife rise from the dead in the act break, only to sing me into the clutches of a carnivorous green beastie and kill me off to restore the balance. Possibly in a spirit of unconscious revenge, the majority of Funeral Games was spent in pretending to kill my wife off, and furthermore convince the world at large of the reality of the crime. In A Christmas Carol, any love was confined to the limbo of Christmas Past, with Scrooge's affections principally focused on the coins thrown to the ground by saintly, virginal Belle, her disgust at his grasping, scraping, clutching covetousness convincing her to leave for good. Pericles was another sorry, manipulative tryst, with poor, gullible Cleon persuaded to hide wifey's assassination-based treachery prior to the gods dispatching lynch-mobs and infernoes and conveniently collapsing palaces to do the pair of us away... There's a very simple message here: marry me and you're for it, girls. Keep your distance.
One of my big regrets in The Elephant Man was the deleton of the tender, beautiful love shared by John Merrick and Mrs Kendal. I can see why it went. Nudity is a big dilemma for a youthful cast. A number of clever compromises were tossed about - to have Mrs Kendal undress behind a screen set in one corner of the stage, to have her disrobe only as far as her slip - but none that really preserved the integrity of the scene. The odds were stacked against us, and the scene was at last removed in full. I regard it as one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever read in a play - and couldn't help but feel that a substantial bit of soul went out of The Elephant Man in its passing. So if anyone wants to shoe-horn me into a revival at some point (not that I'm holding my breath or anything, blue-faced depressant that I am), I'll be only too happy to oblige! Merrick is a character I still have a great rapport with... Gah, I won't hold my breath. It's a fascinating piece of writing. Sparely written. Bernard Pomerance's duologues usually are, and in many ways, the play is no more than an extended procession of them. There's not an exclamation mark to be found here - even in places where a particular emotional register would seem to call for such - and parenthetical stage directions are rendered almost non-existent. Pomerance foists no responsibility onto the actor to make up for deficiencies in his language; invests no faith in the elusive performance gifts of inspiration and inventiveness reserved to the limited few. The text is all, and he trusts to it utterly. This, of course, is the joy in having a subject matter so pure and fruitful that it plays itself out to its own happy conclusion. No need for embellishment or colour. That will come quite naturally with the idiosyncrasy-prone translation to the living, breathing, shuffling actor. This kind of minimalism has always eluded me (not for lack of trying), so it exudes a much-envied fascination. It's a while since I've read the extract, so I'll provide it here unabridged - for my own benefit as much as yours:
Rain in Merrick's room. MERRICK working. MRS. KENDAL.
MERRICK. The prince has a mistress. (Silence.) The Irishman had one. Everyone seems to. Or a wife. Some have both. I have concluded I need a mistress. It is bad enough not to sleep like others.
MRS. KENDAL. Sitting up, you mean. Couldn't be very restful.
MERRICK. I have to. Too heavy to lay down. My head. But to sleep alone; that is worst of all.
MRS. KENDAL. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilisation.
MERRICK. Are you shocked?
MRS. KENDAL. Why should I be?
MERRICK. Others would be.
MRS. KENDAL. I am not others.
MERRICK. I suppose it is hopeless.
MRS. KENDAL. Nothing is hopeless. However it is unlikely.
MERRICK. I thought you might have a few ideas.
MRS: KENDAL. I can guess who has the ideas here.
MERRICK. You don't know something. I have never even seen a naked woman.
MRS. KENDAL. Surely in all the fairs you worked.
MERRICK. I mean a real woman.
MRS. KENDAL. Is one more real than another?
MERRICK. I mean like the ones in the theatre. The opera.
MRS. KENDAL. Surely you can't mean they are more real?
MERRICK. In the audience. A woman not worn out early. Not deformed by awful life. A lady. Someone kept up. Respectful of herself. You don't know what fairgrounds are like, Mrs. Kendal.
MRS. KENDAL. You mean someone like Princess Alexandra?
MERRICK: Not so old.
MRS. KENDAL. Ah. Like Dorothy.
MERRICK. She does not look happy. No.
MRS. KENDAL. Lady Ellen?
MERRICK. Too thin.
MRS. KENDAL. Then who?
MERRICK. Certain women. They have a kind of ripeness. They seem to stop at a perfect point.
MRS. KENDAL. My dear she doesn't exist.
MERRICK. That is probably why I never saw her.
MRS. KENDAL. What would your friend Bishop How say of all this I wonder?
MERRICK. He says I should put these things out of my mind.
MRS. KENDAL. Is that the best he can suggest?
MERRICK: I put them out of my mind. They reappeared, snap.
MRS. KENDAL: What about Frederick?
MERRICK. He would be appalled if I told him.
MRS. KENDAL. I am flattered. Too little trust has maimed my life. But that is another story.
MERRICK. What a rain. Are we going to read this afternoon?
MRS. KENDAL. Yes. Some women are lucky to look well, that is all. It is a rather arbitrary gift; it has no really good use, though it has uses, I will say that. Anyway it does not signify very much.
MERRICK. To me it does.
MRS. KENDAL. Well. You are mistaken.
MERRICK. What are we going to read?
MRS. KENDAL. Trust is very important you know. I trust you.
MERRICK. Thank you very much. I have a book of Thomas Hardy's here. He is a friend of Frederick's. Shall we read that?
MRS. KENDAL. Turn around a moment. Don't look.
MERRICK. Is this a game?
MRS. KENDAL. I would not call it a game. A surprise. (She begins undressing.)
MERRICK. What kind of a surprise?
MRS. KENDAL. I saw photographs of you. Before I met you. You didn't know that, did you?
MERRICK. The ones from the first time, in '84? No, I didn't.
MRS. KENDAL. I felt it was – unjust. I don't know why. I cannot say my sense of justice is my most highly developed characteristic. You may turn around again. Well. A little funny, isn't it?
MERRICK. It is the most beautiful sight I have seen. Ever.
MRS. KENDAL. If you tell anyone, I shall not see you again, we shall not read, we shall not talk, we shall do nothing. Wait. (Undoes her hair.) There. No illusions. Now. What is there to say? 'I am extremely pleased to have made your acquaintance?'
Enter TREVES.
TREVES. For God's sakes. What is going on here? What is going on?
MRS. KENDAL. For a moment, Paradise, Freddie. (She begins dressing.)
TREVES. But - have you no sense of decency? Woman, dress yourself quickly.
(Silence. MERRICK goes to put another piece on St. Phillip's.)
Are you not ashamed? Do you know what you are? Don't you know what is forbidden?
Fadeout.
Richard III was probably the love scene I got the most pleasure from: planting a lascivious, lingering kiss on the cheek of Queen Elizabeth after cajoling her into giving her daughter over to my fitful marital bed. Originally, we'd rallied for a mouth-to-mouth kiss between mother and future son-in-law, which would have been quite astoundingly creepy. I'd decided to smear my face in Vaseline throughout the play, and had also slicked my hair back, in a bid to transform myself into an overgrown, hunchbacked sewer rat (Professor Ratigan had nuthin' on me). On the lip-kissing front, we relented in the end - at least partly because Elizabeth's real-life boyfriend would be in the audience, and might not take kindly to such perverted overtures - but I still think we managed to crank up the perversity to the point where the scene was considerably more unsettling and erotic than Richard's much-lauded wooing of Anne. It was a profoundly satisfying scene to play, replete with assorted strokings and rubbings. Never before have I felt such palpable waves of hate come streaming in from an audience. The Relapse was of a similar order, I suppose, with those dreadful, perverted scenes of old Coupler necking and vampirising Young Fashion for the gratification of his distended, pedaristic lusts - although with that production, the default response was resounding indifference. Until George Potts appeared to dispense seminal ad-libs on cornflakes or marmalade, or Will Seaward to declare his affections as solid and true as Adam Ant... And everything with Andy Brock. Come to think of it, there were a lot of bright spots in the Vanbrugh firmament!
For as much as I encounter love stories on stage (perverted and otherwise), I've noticed that it's my tendency to turn them into hate stories. I've never been daunted by the prospect of parading my perversion in theatre. As time goes on, I'm finding that I relish it. There is no greater release than inviting an audience to bask in your ugliness, hideousness, monstrosity. Gone is the obscenity of theatre as an obscene girl's finishing school, as 'dressing up for mummy and daddy' - you are encouraged, nay, applauded for behaving as beastly as ever you like for people who've paid for the privelige. It almost feels a con - too good to be true. After Funeral Games, a crew member told me that her friend said that she'd had nightmares about me. Wonderful! Allow me to quote a Pringle monologue, if only as a counter to the sentiment of The Elephant Man... I love it. Within the subversive, suggestive nightmare realm of Funeral Games, it came closer than any other section to extricating the Ortonian aesthetic: deviant, sexually playful beasties, flapping about in deep waters. In imagery and tone, it coincides astonishingly closely with Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne', which I proceeded to listen to obsessively throughout the rehearsal process. Here we are then:
PRINGLE. I had a remarkable experience last night. (He puts the letters into a folder.) The Lord came to me. I made a Covenant under the memorial arbour in the garden of the Lady of the Wand.
CAULFIELD. One of the Sisterhood?
PRINGLE. A woman of great humility and private fortune.
CAULFIELD. She's wealthy?
PRINGLE. She's a lost sheep with a golden fleece. We speak of her riches in hushed whispers. It means nothing to us.
CAULFIELD. Is she a philanthropist?
PRINGLE. She's a diamond. Lately she demonstrated her belief in Christian charity by building a synagogue on the banks of the Nile.
CAULFIELD. Is she Jewish?
PRINGLE. She's welcome anywhere. In Camden Town they call her Macushla. A very real honour. They accept that woman as a mother without question. In the garden of her detached ranch-type dwelling the vision of the Lord came upon me. I was swept up and the springs of my heart were opened. I made a vow. Taking my cue from Holy Writ. 'My wife must be punished.' The words I spoke weren't rejected or pooh-poohed. I was hoisted high on the shoulders of two priestly personalities. (Tears roll down his cheeks.) The Lady of the Wand shook forth the glorious strands of her golden hair. There were loud hosannas. Palm branches. I was girt in white. The grounds of that Surrey mansion were ablaze with the ecumenical spirit until the small hours. My commandment was repeated like a catechism: 'Thou shalt not suffer an adultress to live.'
I almost long for someone to ask me to do a nude scene - an idea that probably originated with my recognition of how badly Daniel Radcliffe fouled this simple task up in Equus... Remember Dysart's closing speech about his barely functional rubber genitals? Spread that delightfully puerile image to Radcliffe's entire person, clothed or unclothed, and you have my assessment of his acting... I don't care how much he's improving, O Mighty Brothers Warner... If he's spent that proportion of his development glued to a film set, he should be up to the standard of Olivier by now... Nude scenes are an absolute gift. This is quite tangible from the sensation of watching them. You at once feel a change of energy in the auditorium. There's that phrase in Macbeth - 'light thickens' - and there's a comparable atmospheric density that builds about the naked actor, as though the collective prudishness of the audience is attempting to superimpose some article of dress onto their frame. It's but a high-octane version of what normally goes on in an auditorium, each individual audience member acutely aware of how everyone else is behaving. It's the point at which theatre becomes a fascinating social experiment. Comedies are the boldest illustration of this, entertainments that cry out for an aural response and tend to succeed in eliciting one. But next time you're watching a comedy, take note of when people laugh, how people laugh - whether of their own volition or in tandem with others; whether in isolation or out of a community spirit, in mirth or pressure. This is a simple dual example. There are more strains of laughter attendant at a comedy than even Uncle Albert and his flying tea party retinue would care to delineate, and I often find myself getting more enjoyment from thinking about these knotty social expressions than the comedy. Much the same could be said for scenes that provoke weeping. How many hands will go to how many eyes - whose hand will go first; whose tears will roll on unchecked? Nudity is more extreme still, for flying in the face of social propriety and roundly slapping it about the chops, leaving its captives quite uncertain as to what to do next.(It's long been the tradition in Britain to pretend we're that bit more progressive than we are - anything that comes even vaguely close to breaking the mould has us quaking in our boots and covering up table-legs again.) Unless you're the sort that can seriously contemplate masturbating at the back of an XXX Movie Theater (the arrest figures confirm that there are such people), you'll find that you moderate your behavior quite rigidly (apologies for innuendo). Theatre demands a sort of muted masturbation in calling up an audience response in the normal way of things - some outward manifestation of inward pleasure, some outpouring in exchange of the stimuli ahead of you. Confront an audience head-on with the steamy, sexual core of theatre and it can have a quite potent effect. What to do, in this deadly hush - what to do to prevent being thought conspicuous? It's the primal terror of being singled out. What to do then? The token noises? Polite cough? Nervous laughter? How about absolute stillness? A difficult one, that. The smallest move made bolder in the contrast. It goes without saying that you're in far greater trouble if you happen to be of the male persuasion, and - God help you - you find yourself aroused by what's taking place. It's a well-worn truism that being forced to bare all in public is akin to a bucket of cold water, but the same needn't apply to the spectator, encased in the deceptive protective bubble of a darkened auditorium. The fact that nudity so often precedes an act break is not only inconvenient here, but downright dangerous.
Maybe nudity's a dirty trick (in more than the puerile sense), a cheap manipulative tool, no different to the NSPCC clogging their adverts with innumerable infants bound up in an eternally despairing black-and-white netherworld. Yet tearing off your clothes won't win you the love of an audience, no more than making them laugh or cry will. What these manipulative tactics do achieve is the projection of some scope of power over an audience. To me and probably many others, power is a problematic concept in theatre, a violation of the unwritten code of equality between actor and audience, but it is undeniable that it can and does exist - and that some actors absolutely revel in it. Whilst this is desirable in certain sorts of part, the general trend in these overreaching few is to abuse such power, reducing their art to a series of self-confident effects that treat the audience with a marked degree of egotistical contempt. It's no longer about the character. We're back to the girl's finishing school, the actor whining 'look at me!' as they complete task after meaningless task and invite the assembled company to bask in their aura. All at once, they become theatre - and not just in the pretentious, arse-licking, shuddery sense, although that is often the unavoidable side-effect - they become the auditorium, they usurp the role of the audience, so far as the transfer of energy is switched over to them and generosity internalised. Sometimes these people need a good, stern kicking and a stout reminder to open themselves up to more of the same from an audience. Actors watching themselves on-stage - appalling travesty, selfish action. How does it go...? 'Great power demands great responsibility'? Nudity is a creative tool. It shouldn't be used as a shock tactic or an explosive, attention-seeking special effect. In this sense, it's very fortunate that no-one's offered me a nude scene. (Even more fortunate for audiences, I hasten to add.) I worry that I know what I'd be tempted to do with it.
(I needn't add that at Equus, the reception was purely academic. This was a drama class outing, after all. A mass squeaking of chairs as my fellow class-mates in the gallery, male and female united as one, leaned forward to take in the ever-so-magical wand of the boy who lived. At the performance's close, a certain beloved art teacher arose with a haughty air and exclaimed 'Well! That wasn't very impressive.' Ambiguity - fleeting only. We all knew she wasn't talking about the play. My friend Davies and I have since delighted in imagining her whipping out a pair of nineteenth-century opera glasses, interspersing her elegant focusings and refocusings with reedy, indignant cries of 'Can't see it! Still can't see it!' Ah. What larks. One can only imagine how much Gielgud, the little-known jobbing actor for which the theatre is named, would have appreciated this daily naughtiness.)
There's quite a bit of play-acting in my 'Vitriolic Valentine' - a spurious observation that I believe justifies its inclusion here. In retrospect, I'm bloody relieved that no-one read my old blog, because it makes me look like the most sexually warped individual in all creation. It was written in response to my steady realisation that I was doomed to be forever ignored by the person I thought most wonderful in all the world. One of the most upsetting things about being gay are the vastly increased odds that you'll fall in love with someone with whom there isn't the faintest hope of reciprocation. This can spring from a basic incompatibility of preferences, or the sickly, sweaty prospect of coming clean about a passion that will most likely see you spurned, rejected and decried as an aberration, or an uneasy compromise between the two. In one sense, this can be marvellously freeing; in another, more real sense, it's corrosive, wretched, damaging and brutally unjust. That's not to suggest that the uneasy weight of possibility in heterosexual liasions is any easier to cope with, because let's face it - all unrequited loves are painful, and to pretend that one sexual order has the monopoly on such a pang (or that such a pang is worth having a monopoly on) is, quite frankly, absurd. A love can fester most deliciously in time - when not permitted to get out - and this one wound up dissolved into bitterness. It was probably the most painless close-down of emotion I could find, though I don't think that it was the most gracious or respectful way to quash it (to myself, least of all, but also to the other party). It's one of those regrets I'll lay to rest for the present. Anyway. I looked it over and it made me chortle. I'll set about posting it in full, unexpurgated from the original - but not until I've included a few apologies.
APOLOGIES: yes, this is the origin of the bassoon simile - just call me an inspired self-plagiarist; I don't actually have body dismorphia - looking back, I think I get a perverse kick out of painting myself as horrendously as possible - this probably links into the revelling-in-perversity angle that's come to dominate my acting; 'low culture'... oh, I detest myself for such pretension - especially given how much I do enjoy watching/jeering at Hollyoaks; the 'astronomically talented' bit is a low blow, and any suggestion that I use this as an index of value in another human being is not only upsetting, but just plain wrong; big apologies that it gets so sanctimonial, preachy, and saccharine at the end... eurgh.
Here it is then... Deep breath:
Ah. Another corporate global relationships festival is upon is. Rise up, countrymen! Impale cherubim on their scarlet arrows! Infuse heart-shaped chocolates with arsenic! Alight in Clinton Cards and vomit across the displays! I have anyway conceived myself incapable of any sort of successful relationship by now. As a person, I am incompatible with the faintest suggestion of this sickly dilution of self. Empathy I am lacking, closeness I despise. Compassion I have none. Love chills me to the bone. I am somehow deformed this way, abhorrent by birth. This is not so bad. Deformity is an inherently poetic matter, after all. It is responsible for all my childhood heroes, from the Phantom of the Opera to the Frankenstein Monster to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Acknowledging one's own unattractiveness is a valuable stepping stone in life. A bone protrudes from my chest in the most disconcerting way. My voice is a bassoon recorded at half speed, a lugubrious spatter of muddy syllables and dropped letters countered by that loathsome, uncontrollable smugness. I have a sizeable hunch and misshapen spine, a veritable coup de grace of premature kyphosis. My neck juts out and curves in such a way that it resembles a worm emerging from its burrow. My movements are awkward, my walk that of a stork collecting its pension. We become what we joke about in time. I am far too old. Were I ever to engage with someone, it would be the ultimate feat of mind over matter. And the mind is an impenetrable thicket in its right. I don't think either of us would be willing to take the job on. One or both of us would lose interest, blows and partings would be dealt and we'd both wonder what the bloody point had been. This view does not stem from bitterness, but rather a hopeful pessimism. Life is invariably delightful when viewed through a tragic glass. Despite any number of personal brickbats, I am content with my lot.
For you see, this is preferable to the alternative. The pale, preening pose and posture of it all, the unhealthy squelch and slap of physical intimacy, that messy human nonsense. The relationship transfigured to flesh. It's enough to make you retch. It's enough to make you sweat the cold dew of fear. It's enough to curdle blood and bones to red-and-white jelly. It's enough to make you cry out to God. My God! It has all the profundity of an adolescent masturbatory fantasy, that pale, spotty concoction that informs all aspects of low culture. The wet dream of Hollyoaks. Page Three of The Sun. The twin tomatoes of a teenager's buttocks ricocheting against their exposed white underwear. Relationships are at one with this pallid, soulless trash, the force that stands for everything repugnant in modern society. Alas. 'Tis not for the likes of us.
That there's a day reserved for this ridiculous rite is even worse. Saint Valentine's Day, like Easter and Christmas, is rightly celebrated by Christians alone. Valentine warrants the faintest footnote in the Christian calendar - we know only two things of him. First, his name. It's Valentine, you know? Second, his burial place. That is of even less consequence. There's more love in a digestive biscuit. Since there's a selection of eleven Valentine's Days to choose from, there's no reason a Christian should celebrate it any more fervidly than, say, Saint Swithun's Day. Or Hannukah, for that matter. As ever though, in jumps Joe Public for the chocolate eggs and stocking fillers. Blame Geoffrey Chaucer for this sorry state of affairs. Stonking good writing in The Canterbury Tales aside, he's got a lot to answer for after creating the Valentine's Day myth. The idea that love and a commercial holiday are compatible is frankly laughable. It's like Santa Claus usurping Jesus Christ as the figurehead of Christmas. Beyond their natty dress sense and fathomless age, the two have strikingly little in common.
Fair enough. I am a cold sort of fish. But supposing you can live on in this puerile dreamworld, I beg of you, please ask yourself: just what the hell has it all been about? What, indeed, is the driving force behind these pathetic relationships?
It's certainly not love - not real love, true love, pure and untainted and unrequited love. A love worth having, in short. For it is not enough to love - you must love to love. You must be moved to shout your love from the rooftops to the heavenly serenade of birdsong and cathedral bells. Petrarch's love for Laura, now that is love. Peach Geldof's love for the no-name drummer she married, now that is something else entirely. That is madness, idiocy, egotism and near-unbearable crassness curled up into one insufferable succubus purring incessantly on the living room rug. A relationship cannot be excused as friendship either. By that definition, I'm more than married to Callum and Davies. In fact, I'm laid up in bed rubbing Vic on my chest after disgorging their seventeen children in a night of heated labour. If love is but friendship in acceleration, friendship with neon lights and and glow sticks and sparkles attached, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. Friendship has contained for me the same highs and lows, the same strife and stress, the same exquisite, sainted silliness and the same unmitigated joy. If that is all love amounts to, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. People have been too good to me. Far better than they have any business being, given my appalling heartlessness and generally surly demeanour. I am beyond grateful for them. I am quite satisfied - I need no more.
We must look to other areas to unravel the relationships enigma. A conformity ritual? Personal weakness more like. Practise! Practise for what? Life is no dress rehearsal in wait of polished performance. Life is a messy and thoroughly embarrassing improvisation with the odd moment of accidental genius. Best of the excuses is 'harmless fun.' Harmless fun! Oh, FUCK. OFF. We must have a little confidence, a little respect for ourselves. A little of the life-enhancing egotism we profess to suppress with these tawdry relationships! Relationships remain, as ever, the supremely selfish act: low, unconscientious, course and vile, disqualifying all others from your life. Relationships equate to a definite addiction, a selfish leave take of the senses! As much as it is claimed that friends will not be dismissed and rejected, they are - oh, yes they are, with breathtaking speed. The two are, in final analysis, incompatible. Think of it! Years of devotion cast aside for larger breasts, perkier buttocks, a particularly large dropsical-shaped sausage - whatever! A devout betrayal of all that is good and right in friendship. It is utterly shameful. There is no excuse. It is said that all we look for in a mate is a reflection of ourselves. I can believe it. Lovers come to mimic and mirror each other, gorging themselves on their own personality. So relationships are an ego trip, maybe. Self-justification. Two exquisitely narcissistic bubbles simply falling into each other. Perhaps that's all that's needed. Yet I find egotism is best performed within the safety of our own heads. Take this diatribe as an example. I have found the intellectual satisfaction of writing it ten times more arousing than a romp through the garden of consensual sex. The click and whirr of this exquisite marriage between keyboard and brain is worth a wilderness of licking, panting, heavy breathing and hot flushes. I am self-sufficient. I have discovered the joy of life without relationships.
And yet... and yet... and yet...
I believe in the reality of love. With painful, pitiless acuteness. I do not completely trust the love I feel myself - not yet, at any rate. I'll take some convincing. Far too self-referentially bitter and twisted am I to acknowledge personal truths at speed. I have had one so unbearably kind, well-intentioned, good-natured and, might I add, astronomically talented profess their love to me. It was a pleasant thing to know, a warm thing to know. It reawakened some jewel of faith in humanity. But it meant nothing. I felt nothing. What could I give back? What could I do in deference to that love? How could I possibly serve it? I felt nothing of the same. Simon Callow was right - 'equality of love is absolutely uncommon.' Equality of indifference, however, is not, and this is the code we tend to live by as human beings. You must look for satisfaction elsewhere. Otherwise you'll find yourself sacrificing sanity and reason for something you had already had. Contained within you. For love lies dormant within us at all times, should we only seek it. Love originates in the human beast and that is where it must remain. It is only natural.
The love I place my faith in is to be shared. This love is not selfish or furtive or attention-seeking or pig-headed or wrong. Here is love in its purest distillation, a unified state of compassion. The love with which we treat not just ourselves, not just one special other, but everyone. All the time. I am no saint (not even a Saint Valentine). I fall frightfully short of this standard every day of my life. I must get my satisfaction from trying. It is my eternal wish to do a bit of good in this world and, God help me, someday I'll succeed. For it is in this elevated plateaux of love that our salvation lies. Our final deliverance from the narrow-minded squalor of relationships.
Oof. I have issues.
Now, to finally drag myself back on-topic, this idea of a communal love-sharing (not too different to these woolly post-modern humanist notions fizzing about, which are themselves derived from Christian ethics) - this is astoundingly close to my model for theatre. Love between actor and audience is something I'd like to think I've got altogether more close to than the 'real' experience of it, and I know that I've at least had the chance to bask in the love that a few very gifted performers have cultivated. Funnily enough, it doesn't have to be a particularly pleasant character to inspire devotion. One time I'd like to think I have honed it is with the Torturer at The York Dungeon - as unlovely a soul as you're likely to encounter, the embodiment of evil, in fact, but still possessed of a certain something. Charisma, maybe? Devilish magnetism? Hard to say. For one reason and another, the concept of stage charisma is something I've been thinking about a fair bit recently, and it's not all that far removed from this discussion of love. I veer from one camp to the other - torn between the thought that charisma may actually be a burgeoning strain of the horrendous, self-extolling egotism that I've ranted about above, or a more vibrant and dynamic manifestation of this elusive love that I continue to rabbit on about. Perhaps there's no distinction. Or perhaps only the most marginal one - a razor-sharp divide, with audience responses as changeable as the wind. A dangerous thing. But again, I do think that power plays a substantial part - bending the audience to an overriding will, forcing them into a default channel and making sure their reaction is as uniform as possible. An effort to impose control on the audience - the force that, in effect, should really be controlling you. A tricky business. How do you keep charisma charming, like an Antonio Salieri? How do you make it threatening, like a Stanley Kowalski? Are you aiming for some mixture of the two? You're playing with fire. It's exciting, it's scary. It'll light your way to bed or burn the staircase from under your feet. You're only as good as your audience, and perhaps the vulnerability, the essential vulnerability that will be discussed a little later on, is restored by this simple recourse to trust.
Just as I was dusting off this entry for completion, I stumbled on the most unexpected echo of these sentiments, so much so that I thought I might as well share it. Behold! Yet another appearance from Kenneth Williams, on Parkinson in 1979. You can find it here, if you're interested in watching the whole thing. This I would recommend - Williams deserves to be enshrined with the likes of Clive James and Stephen Fry as one of the great, flowery, aesthete raconteurs of British television. Here is an acted character worlds removed from the private man, who felt himself to be irredeemably hideous, suffered terribly from depression, lived alone with his mother for his entire life and eventually died a suicide. Making others laugh, but never himself. In this elegant, witty and entirely charming persona, Williams has no time for such melancholia. In fact, one of the highlights of the interview is Kenneth's reapprasial of Joe Orton as simply a fun person to be around instead of a fountain gushing out darkness day, night and noon (the exploits of his letter-writing persona 'Edna Wellthorpe' - and her various attempts to stage a production of compassionate gay drama Nelson is a Nance at the local church hall - should put paid to this notion for good). Anyway. Generally as affected as you'd imagine it's possible for an actor to get, the lost heritage of Williams's stage work might well have offered a different perspective on his talents. This is an astonishingly frank and pure spillage of philosophy - particularly for coming from the angularity and contortion of this so-called 'wasp with adenoids'. Whether Williams put it into practise or not is a mystery. But his words have endured (quite unexpected fun, transcribing his lightning-fast diction, but I've done my best):
I think what they're coming for is to be beguiled... To be - I think, what Shaw says about theatre is the most significant, 'to illuminate the dark places of the mind', and I think if you engage them in that process, then they will accept it, they'll accept it totally, whatever the picture you're creating, because you're engaging them. I think the moment you're failing, whether it's comedy or tragedy - and really, they're only two sides of the same coin - the moment you're failing is when they are not engaged by you. And that means you're not being vulnerable anymore. Vulnerability is what acting's about. You go onto a stage and you say, 'Well, this is it. If you don't - 'this is my baby, I'm doing this for you'. If they don't like it, and you're not prepared to be vulnerable, then it doesn't work at all - it doesn't work and it never will work. But if you are prepared to be vulnerable, I'd love them to come with you. And there is that reciprocity established, they'll come with you halfway, and they'll say 'Is it any good?' and go with you. If it's not, and you're not prepared to be engaging, then it's death. And I know actors that have been vulnerable, that feel afterwards - having put a hand out, it's been spat on - they think 'oh!' for the rest of their life, they're not going to do it. You know what I mean? They're going to hold themselves like that. And it doesn't work: you've got to go on putting it out. And it's a terrible risk that you take. But you take it, you take it nightly.
As I said, it does seem odd to think of Kenneth Williams as at all vulnerable. But he is, through and through. He thrusts himself into a position of supreme vulnerability here. Listen to the crowd laugh at his voice, hardly before he's got a word out. In a spirit of affection, I'm sure, but there's little that's more distressing than provoking a laugh by acting in the way that seems most natural to you. The man was trashed too much in his own day and is trashed too much in this one... not that he isn't beyond all that by now. He has nothing but respect from me.
I fear that unless I can hone a bit of reflexive love between actor and audience for Pickwick & Nickleby, I will fail very badly indeed. Such an ambitious undertaking is always going to be a bit of a failure - but hopefully not excessively so! I can rehearse the play to death in isolation, but a vital piece of the its soul is missing. Things will probably start to change the instant I get it back before my director and a team of committed acquaintances and well-wishers... For the moment though, I am performing only to myself (and to you, the reader, in a far more limited capacity), and the self-absorbtion is stifling. Bring back Cambridge. Bring back people.
I suppose this is all my way of saying that I'm not one to experience strong emotions in acting either. Love is the strongest of all emotions - positive ones, at any rate - so it's interesting to speculate on the influence it might hold over a performance. This isn't entirely off-topic; trying to thrash out the Smike and Nickleby relationship (my constant theme) has been helped on a little by thinking on the subject of loved ones, those both lost and found. The perhaps inevitable backlash to this real-life inertia has been my unusually aggressive presence on-stage. Just as Mary Shelley, a shy, retiring nineteen year old, gave full license to her dark side in the creation of Frankenstein, so too have I, sharing every one of her nineteen years and a considerably diminished propensity for genius, found a bizarre creative outlet and intermittent life substitute in the business of acting. My own perception of my characterisations is distorted at best. As strange as it may seem, I've never gone out of my way to be bad, but it does dawn on me from time to time that I really do far too much - flashy cartoon performances replete with bellowing, flailing, shrieking, wailing; in short, a plethora of infantile showings-off, and above all, that persistent, hovering M-word: manic, manic, manic, manic. It's only in the last year that I've undergone the unsettling experience of my entire theatrical persona being distilled to one word. I now spend the majority of my dabblings in acting succumbing to divided loyalties: torn between trying to escape the manic, before giving in to play up to it with renewed aggression. But can such wild, deluded abandon be conducive to the cultivation of love? I use the word in the broadest possible sense, and I'll be unpacking a few of its applications as I rattle on with this entry.
First then: have I ever had a proper love scene? Not quite. Unless by love scene, you mean hate scene. They all seem to have been stonkingly bitter affairs. I've had an astounding amount of dead wives, for instance... Scarlet Petals Underfoot was a long, melancholic paen to one, painted in the fashion of those interminable, interchangeable vignettes of Vincent Price contemplating a portrait of his dead wife in the Roger Corman Poe films... Dear, religious Roy of Neville's Island had a field day recounting the blackness attendant on his beloved's death, all the while convincing a fellow lad that his own wife was making passionate love on the bread shelf at Safeway's. Return to the Forbidden Planet had my wife rise from the dead in the act break, only to sing me into the clutches of a carnivorous green beastie and kill me off to restore the balance. Possibly in a spirit of unconscious revenge, the majority of Funeral Games was spent in pretending to kill my wife off, and furthermore convince the world at large of the reality of the crime. In A Christmas Carol, any love was confined to the limbo of Christmas Past, with Scrooge's affections principally focused on the coins thrown to the ground by saintly, virginal Belle, her disgust at his grasping, scraping, clutching covetousness convincing her to leave for good. Pericles was another sorry, manipulative tryst, with poor, gullible Cleon persuaded to hide wifey's assassination-based treachery prior to the gods dispatching lynch-mobs and infernoes and conveniently collapsing palaces to do the pair of us away... There's a very simple message here: marry me and you're for it, girls. Keep your distance.
One of my big regrets in The Elephant Man was the deleton of the tender, beautiful love shared by John Merrick and Mrs Kendal. I can see why it went. Nudity is a big dilemma for a youthful cast. A number of clever compromises were tossed about - to have Mrs Kendal undress behind a screen set in one corner of the stage, to have her disrobe only as far as her slip - but none that really preserved the integrity of the scene. The odds were stacked against us, and the scene was at last removed in full. I regard it as one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever read in a play - and couldn't help but feel that a substantial bit of soul went out of The Elephant Man in its passing. So if anyone wants to shoe-horn me into a revival at some point (not that I'm holding my breath or anything, blue-faced depressant that I am), I'll be only too happy to oblige! Merrick is a character I still have a great rapport with... Gah, I won't hold my breath. It's a fascinating piece of writing. Sparely written. Bernard Pomerance's duologues usually are, and in many ways, the play is no more than an extended procession of them. There's not an exclamation mark to be found here - even in places where a particular emotional register would seem to call for such - and parenthetical stage directions are rendered almost non-existent. Pomerance foists no responsibility onto the actor to make up for deficiencies in his language; invests no faith in the elusive performance gifts of inspiration and inventiveness reserved to the limited few. The text is all, and he trusts to it utterly. This, of course, is the joy in having a subject matter so pure and fruitful that it plays itself out to its own happy conclusion. No need for embellishment or colour. That will come quite naturally with the idiosyncrasy-prone translation to the living, breathing, shuffling actor. This kind of minimalism has always eluded me (not for lack of trying), so it exudes a much-envied fascination. It's a while since I've read the extract, so I'll provide it here unabridged - for my own benefit as much as yours:
Rain in Merrick's room. MERRICK working. MRS. KENDAL.
MERRICK. The prince has a mistress. (Silence.) The Irishman had one. Everyone seems to. Or a wife. Some have both. I have concluded I need a mistress. It is bad enough not to sleep like others.
MRS. KENDAL. Sitting up, you mean. Couldn't be very restful.
MERRICK. I have to. Too heavy to lay down. My head. But to sleep alone; that is worst of all.
MRS. KENDAL. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilisation.
MERRICK. Are you shocked?
MRS. KENDAL. Why should I be?
MERRICK. Others would be.
MRS. KENDAL. I am not others.
MERRICK. I suppose it is hopeless.
MRS. KENDAL. Nothing is hopeless. However it is unlikely.
MERRICK. I thought you might have a few ideas.
MRS: KENDAL. I can guess who has the ideas here.
MERRICK. You don't know something. I have never even seen a naked woman.
MRS. KENDAL. Surely in all the fairs you worked.
MERRICK. I mean a real woman.
MRS. KENDAL. Is one more real than another?
MERRICK. I mean like the ones in the theatre. The opera.
MRS. KENDAL. Surely you can't mean they are more real?
MERRICK. In the audience. A woman not worn out early. Not deformed by awful life. A lady. Someone kept up. Respectful of herself. You don't know what fairgrounds are like, Mrs. Kendal.
MRS. KENDAL. You mean someone like Princess Alexandra?
MERRICK: Not so old.
MRS. KENDAL. Ah. Like Dorothy.
MERRICK. She does not look happy. No.
MRS. KENDAL. Lady Ellen?
MERRICK. Too thin.
MRS. KENDAL. Then who?
MERRICK. Certain women. They have a kind of ripeness. They seem to stop at a perfect point.
MRS. KENDAL. My dear she doesn't exist.
MERRICK. That is probably why I never saw her.
MRS. KENDAL. What would your friend Bishop How say of all this I wonder?
MERRICK. He says I should put these things out of my mind.
MRS. KENDAL. Is that the best he can suggest?
MERRICK: I put them out of my mind. They reappeared, snap.
MRS. KENDAL: What about Frederick?
MERRICK. He would be appalled if I told him.
MRS. KENDAL. I am flattered. Too little trust has maimed my life. But that is another story.
MERRICK. What a rain. Are we going to read this afternoon?
MRS. KENDAL. Yes. Some women are lucky to look well, that is all. It is a rather arbitrary gift; it has no really good use, though it has uses, I will say that. Anyway it does not signify very much.
MERRICK. To me it does.
MRS. KENDAL. Well. You are mistaken.
MERRICK. What are we going to read?
MRS. KENDAL. Trust is very important you know. I trust you.
MERRICK. Thank you very much. I have a book of Thomas Hardy's here. He is a friend of Frederick's. Shall we read that?
MRS. KENDAL. Turn around a moment. Don't look.
MERRICK. Is this a game?
MRS. KENDAL. I would not call it a game. A surprise. (She begins undressing.)
MERRICK. What kind of a surprise?
MRS. KENDAL. I saw photographs of you. Before I met you. You didn't know that, did you?
MERRICK. The ones from the first time, in '84? No, I didn't.
MRS. KENDAL. I felt it was – unjust. I don't know why. I cannot say my sense of justice is my most highly developed characteristic. You may turn around again. Well. A little funny, isn't it?
MERRICK. It is the most beautiful sight I have seen. Ever.
MRS. KENDAL. If you tell anyone, I shall not see you again, we shall not read, we shall not talk, we shall do nothing. Wait. (Undoes her hair.) There. No illusions. Now. What is there to say? 'I am extremely pleased to have made your acquaintance?'
Enter TREVES.
TREVES. For God's sakes. What is going on here? What is going on?
MRS. KENDAL. For a moment, Paradise, Freddie. (She begins dressing.)
TREVES. But - have you no sense of decency? Woman, dress yourself quickly.
(Silence. MERRICK goes to put another piece on St. Phillip's.)
Are you not ashamed? Do you know what you are? Don't you know what is forbidden?
Fadeout.
Richard III was probably the love scene I got the most pleasure from: planting a lascivious, lingering kiss on the cheek of Queen Elizabeth after cajoling her into giving her daughter over to my fitful marital bed. Originally, we'd rallied for a mouth-to-mouth kiss between mother and future son-in-law, which would have been quite astoundingly creepy. I'd decided to smear my face in Vaseline throughout the play, and had also slicked my hair back, in a bid to transform myself into an overgrown, hunchbacked sewer rat (Professor Ratigan had nuthin' on me). On the lip-kissing front, we relented in the end - at least partly because Elizabeth's real-life boyfriend would be in the audience, and might not take kindly to such perverted overtures - but I still think we managed to crank up the perversity to the point where the scene was considerably more unsettling and erotic than Richard's much-lauded wooing of Anne. It was a profoundly satisfying scene to play, replete with assorted strokings and rubbings. Never before have I felt such palpable waves of hate come streaming in from an audience. The Relapse was of a similar order, I suppose, with those dreadful, perverted scenes of old Coupler necking and vampirising Young Fashion for the gratification of his distended, pedaristic lusts - although with that production, the default response was resounding indifference. Until George Potts appeared to dispense seminal ad-libs on cornflakes or marmalade, or Will Seaward to declare his affections as solid and true as Adam Ant... And everything with Andy Brock. Come to think of it, there were a lot of bright spots in the Vanbrugh firmament!
For as much as I encounter love stories on stage (perverted and otherwise), I've noticed that it's my tendency to turn them into hate stories. I've never been daunted by the prospect of parading my perversion in theatre. As time goes on, I'm finding that I relish it. There is no greater release than inviting an audience to bask in your ugliness, hideousness, monstrosity. Gone is the obscenity of theatre as an obscene girl's finishing school, as 'dressing up for mummy and daddy' - you are encouraged, nay, applauded for behaving as beastly as ever you like for people who've paid for the privelige. It almost feels a con - too good to be true. After Funeral Games, a crew member told me that her friend said that she'd had nightmares about me. Wonderful! Allow me to quote a Pringle monologue, if only as a counter to the sentiment of The Elephant Man... I love it. Within the subversive, suggestive nightmare realm of Funeral Games, it came closer than any other section to extricating the Ortonian aesthetic: deviant, sexually playful beasties, flapping about in deep waters. In imagery and tone, it coincides astonishingly closely with Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne', which I proceeded to listen to obsessively throughout the rehearsal process. Here we are then:
PRINGLE. I had a remarkable experience last night. (He puts the letters into a folder.) The Lord came to me. I made a Covenant under the memorial arbour in the garden of the Lady of the Wand.
CAULFIELD. One of the Sisterhood?
PRINGLE. A woman of great humility and private fortune.
CAULFIELD. She's wealthy?
PRINGLE. She's a lost sheep with a golden fleece. We speak of her riches in hushed whispers. It means nothing to us.
CAULFIELD. Is she a philanthropist?
PRINGLE. She's a diamond. Lately she demonstrated her belief in Christian charity by building a synagogue on the banks of the Nile.
CAULFIELD. Is she Jewish?
PRINGLE. She's welcome anywhere. In Camden Town they call her Macushla. A very real honour. They accept that woman as a mother without question. In the garden of her detached ranch-type dwelling the vision of the Lord came upon me. I was swept up and the springs of my heart were opened. I made a vow. Taking my cue from Holy Writ. 'My wife must be punished.' The words I spoke weren't rejected or pooh-poohed. I was hoisted high on the shoulders of two priestly personalities. (Tears roll down his cheeks.) The Lady of the Wand shook forth the glorious strands of her golden hair. There were loud hosannas. Palm branches. I was girt in white. The grounds of that Surrey mansion were ablaze with the ecumenical spirit until the small hours. My commandment was repeated like a catechism: 'Thou shalt not suffer an adultress to live.'
I almost long for someone to ask me to do a nude scene - an idea that probably originated with my recognition of how badly Daniel Radcliffe fouled this simple task up in Equus... Remember Dysart's closing speech about his barely functional rubber genitals? Spread that delightfully puerile image to Radcliffe's entire person, clothed or unclothed, and you have my assessment of his acting... I don't care how much he's improving, O Mighty Brothers Warner... If he's spent that proportion of his development glued to a film set, he should be up to the standard of Olivier by now... Nude scenes are an absolute gift. This is quite tangible from the sensation of watching them. You at once feel a change of energy in the auditorium. There's that phrase in Macbeth - 'light thickens' - and there's a comparable atmospheric density that builds about the naked actor, as though the collective prudishness of the audience is attempting to superimpose some article of dress onto their frame. It's but a high-octane version of what normally goes on in an auditorium, each individual audience member acutely aware of how everyone else is behaving. It's the point at which theatre becomes a fascinating social experiment. Comedies are the boldest illustration of this, entertainments that cry out for an aural response and tend to succeed in eliciting one. But next time you're watching a comedy, take note of when people laugh, how people laugh - whether of their own volition or in tandem with others; whether in isolation or out of a community spirit, in mirth or pressure. This is a simple dual example. There are more strains of laughter attendant at a comedy than even Uncle Albert and his flying tea party retinue would care to delineate, and I often find myself getting more enjoyment from thinking about these knotty social expressions than the comedy. Much the same could be said for scenes that provoke weeping. How many hands will go to how many eyes - whose hand will go first; whose tears will roll on unchecked? Nudity is more extreme still, for flying in the face of social propriety and roundly slapping it about the chops, leaving its captives quite uncertain as to what to do next.(It's long been the tradition in Britain to pretend we're that bit more progressive than we are - anything that comes even vaguely close to breaking the mould has us quaking in our boots and covering up table-legs again.) Unless you're the sort that can seriously contemplate masturbating at the back of an XXX Movie Theater (the arrest figures confirm that there are such people), you'll find that you moderate your behavior quite rigidly (apologies for innuendo). Theatre demands a sort of muted masturbation in calling up an audience response in the normal way of things - some outward manifestation of inward pleasure, some outpouring in exchange of the stimuli ahead of you. Confront an audience head-on with the steamy, sexual core of theatre and it can have a quite potent effect. What to do, in this deadly hush - what to do to prevent being thought conspicuous? It's the primal terror of being singled out. What to do then? The token noises? Polite cough? Nervous laughter? How about absolute stillness? A difficult one, that. The smallest move made bolder in the contrast. It goes without saying that you're in far greater trouble if you happen to be of the male persuasion, and - God help you - you find yourself aroused by what's taking place. It's a well-worn truism that being forced to bare all in public is akin to a bucket of cold water, but the same needn't apply to the spectator, encased in the deceptive protective bubble of a darkened auditorium. The fact that nudity so often precedes an act break is not only inconvenient here, but downright dangerous.
Maybe nudity's a dirty trick (in more than the puerile sense), a cheap manipulative tool, no different to the NSPCC clogging their adverts with innumerable infants bound up in an eternally despairing black-and-white netherworld. Yet tearing off your clothes won't win you the love of an audience, no more than making them laugh or cry will. What these manipulative tactics do achieve is the projection of some scope of power over an audience. To me and probably many others, power is a problematic concept in theatre, a violation of the unwritten code of equality between actor and audience, but it is undeniable that it can and does exist - and that some actors absolutely revel in it. Whilst this is desirable in certain sorts of part, the general trend in these overreaching few is to abuse such power, reducing their art to a series of self-confident effects that treat the audience with a marked degree of egotistical contempt. It's no longer about the character. We're back to the girl's finishing school, the actor whining 'look at me!' as they complete task after meaningless task and invite the assembled company to bask in their aura. All at once, they become theatre - and not just in the pretentious, arse-licking, shuddery sense, although that is often the unavoidable side-effect - they become the auditorium, they usurp the role of the audience, so far as the transfer of energy is switched over to them and generosity internalised. Sometimes these people need a good, stern kicking and a stout reminder to open themselves up to more of the same from an audience. Actors watching themselves on-stage - appalling travesty, selfish action. How does it go...? 'Great power demands great responsibility'? Nudity is a creative tool. It shouldn't be used as a shock tactic or an explosive, attention-seeking special effect. In this sense, it's very fortunate that no-one's offered me a nude scene. (Even more fortunate for audiences, I hasten to add.) I worry that I know what I'd be tempted to do with it.
(I needn't add that at Equus, the reception was purely academic. This was a drama class outing, after all. A mass squeaking of chairs as my fellow class-mates in the gallery, male and female united as one, leaned forward to take in the ever-so-magical wand of the boy who lived. At the performance's close, a certain beloved art teacher arose with a haughty air and exclaimed 'Well! That wasn't very impressive.' Ambiguity - fleeting only. We all knew she wasn't talking about the play. My friend Davies and I have since delighted in imagining her whipping out a pair of nineteenth-century opera glasses, interspersing her elegant focusings and refocusings with reedy, indignant cries of 'Can't see it! Still can't see it!' Ah. What larks. One can only imagine how much Gielgud, the little-known jobbing actor for which the theatre is named, would have appreciated this daily naughtiness.)
There's quite a bit of play-acting in my 'Vitriolic Valentine' - a spurious observation that I believe justifies its inclusion here. In retrospect, I'm bloody relieved that no-one read my old blog, because it makes me look like the most sexually warped individual in all creation. It was written in response to my steady realisation that I was doomed to be forever ignored by the person I thought most wonderful in all the world. One of the most upsetting things about being gay are the vastly increased odds that you'll fall in love with someone with whom there isn't the faintest hope of reciprocation. This can spring from a basic incompatibility of preferences, or the sickly, sweaty prospect of coming clean about a passion that will most likely see you spurned, rejected and decried as an aberration, or an uneasy compromise between the two. In one sense, this can be marvellously freeing; in another, more real sense, it's corrosive, wretched, damaging and brutally unjust. That's not to suggest that the uneasy weight of possibility in heterosexual liasions is any easier to cope with, because let's face it - all unrequited loves are painful, and to pretend that one sexual order has the monopoly on such a pang (or that such a pang is worth having a monopoly on) is, quite frankly, absurd. A love can fester most deliciously in time - when not permitted to get out - and this one wound up dissolved into bitterness. It was probably the most painless close-down of emotion I could find, though I don't think that it was the most gracious or respectful way to quash it (to myself, least of all, but also to the other party). It's one of those regrets I'll lay to rest for the present. Anyway. I looked it over and it made me chortle. I'll set about posting it in full, unexpurgated from the original - but not until I've included a few apologies.
APOLOGIES: yes, this is the origin of the bassoon simile - just call me an inspired self-plagiarist; I don't actually have body dismorphia - looking back, I think I get a perverse kick out of painting myself as horrendously as possible - this probably links into the revelling-in-perversity angle that's come to dominate my acting; 'low culture'... oh, I detest myself for such pretension - especially given how much I do enjoy watching/jeering at Hollyoaks; the 'astronomically talented' bit is a low blow, and any suggestion that I use this as an index of value in another human being is not only upsetting, but just plain wrong; big apologies that it gets so sanctimonial, preachy, and saccharine at the end... eurgh.
Here it is then... Deep breath:
Ah. Another corporate global relationships festival is upon is. Rise up, countrymen! Impale cherubim on their scarlet arrows! Infuse heart-shaped chocolates with arsenic! Alight in Clinton Cards and vomit across the displays! I have anyway conceived myself incapable of any sort of successful relationship by now. As a person, I am incompatible with the faintest suggestion of this sickly dilution of self. Empathy I am lacking, closeness I despise. Compassion I have none. Love chills me to the bone. I am somehow deformed this way, abhorrent by birth. This is not so bad. Deformity is an inherently poetic matter, after all. It is responsible for all my childhood heroes, from the Phantom of the Opera to the Frankenstein Monster to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Acknowledging one's own unattractiveness is a valuable stepping stone in life. A bone protrudes from my chest in the most disconcerting way. My voice is a bassoon recorded at half speed, a lugubrious spatter of muddy syllables and dropped letters countered by that loathsome, uncontrollable smugness. I have a sizeable hunch and misshapen spine, a veritable coup de grace of premature kyphosis. My neck juts out and curves in such a way that it resembles a worm emerging from its burrow. My movements are awkward, my walk that of a stork collecting its pension. We become what we joke about in time. I am far too old. Were I ever to engage with someone, it would be the ultimate feat of mind over matter. And the mind is an impenetrable thicket in its right. I don't think either of us would be willing to take the job on. One or both of us would lose interest, blows and partings would be dealt and we'd both wonder what the bloody point had been. This view does not stem from bitterness, but rather a hopeful pessimism. Life is invariably delightful when viewed through a tragic glass. Despite any number of personal brickbats, I am content with my lot.
For you see, this is preferable to the alternative. The pale, preening pose and posture of it all, the unhealthy squelch and slap of physical intimacy, that messy human nonsense. The relationship transfigured to flesh. It's enough to make you retch. It's enough to make you sweat the cold dew of fear. It's enough to curdle blood and bones to red-and-white jelly. It's enough to make you cry out to God. My God! It has all the profundity of an adolescent masturbatory fantasy, that pale, spotty concoction that informs all aspects of low culture. The wet dream of Hollyoaks. Page Three of The Sun. The twin tomatoes of a teenager's buttocks ricocheting against their exposed white underwear. Relationships are at one with this pallid, soulless trash, the force that stands for everything repugnant in modern society. Alas. 'Tis not for the likes of us.
That there's a day reserved for this ridiculous rite is even worse. Saint Valentine's Day, like Easter and Christmas, is rightly celebrated by Christians alone. Valentine warrants the faintest footnote in the Christian calendar - we know only two things of him. First, his name. It's Valentine, you know? Second, his burial place. That is of even less consequence. There's more love in a digestive biscuit. Since there's a selection of eleven Valentine's Days to choose from, there's no reason a Christian should celebrate it any more fervidly than, say, Saint Swithun's Day. Or Hannukah, for that matter. As ever though, in jumps Joe Public for the chocolate eggs and stocking fillers. Blame Geoffrey Chaucer for this sorry state of affairs. Stonking good writing in The Canterbury Tales aside, he's got a lot to answer for after creating the Valentine's Day myth. The idea that love and a commercial holiday are compatible is frankly laughable. It's like Santa Claus usurping Jesus Christ as the figurehead of Christmas. Beyond their natty dress sense and fathomless age, the two have strikingly little in common.
Fair enough. I am a cold sort of fish. But supposing you can live on in this puerile dreamworld, I beg of you, please ask yourself: just what the hell has it all been about? What, indeed, is the driving force behind these pathetic relationships?
It's certainly not love - not real love, true love, pure and untainted and unrequited love. A love worth having, in short. For it is not enough to love - you must love to love. You must be moved to shout your love from the rooftops to the heavenly serenade of birdsong and cathedral bells. Petrarch's love for Laura, now that is love. Peach Geldof's love for the no-name drummer she married, now that is something else entirely. That is madness, idiocy, egotism and near-unbearable crassness curled up into one insufferable succubus purring incessantly on the living room rug. A relationship cannot be excused as friendship either. By that definition, I'm more than married to Callum and Davies. In fact, I'm laid up in bed rubbing Vic on my chest after disgorging their seventeen children in a night of heated labour. If love is but friendship in acceleration, friendship with neon lights and and glow sticks and sparkles attached, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. Friendship has contained for me the same highs and lows, the same strife and stress, the same exquisite, sainted silliness and the same unmitigated joy. If that is all love amounts to, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. People have been too good to me. Far better than they have any business being, given my appalling heartlessness and generally surly demeanour. I am beyond grateful for them. I am quite satisfied - I need no more.
We must look to other areas to unravel the relationships enigma. A conformity ritual? Personal weakness more like. Practise! Practise for what? Life is no dress rehearsal in wait of polished performance. Life is a messy and thoroughly embarrassing improvisation with the odd moment of accidental genius. Best of the excuses is 'harmless fun.' Harmless fun! Oh, FUCK. OFF. We must have a little confidence, a little respect for ourselves. A little of the life-enhancing egotism we profess to suppress with these tawdry relationships! Relationships remain, as ever, the supremely selfish act: low, unconscientious, course and vile, disqualifying all others from your life. Relationships equate to a definite addiction, a selfish leave take of the senses! As much as it is claimed that friends will not be dismissed and rejected, they are - oh, yes they are, with breathtaking speed. The two are, in final analysis, incompatible. Think of it! Years of devotion cast aside for larger breasts, perkier buttocks, a particularly large dropsical-shaped sausage - whatever! A devout betrayal of all that is good and right in friendship. It is utterly shameful. There is no excuse. It is said that all we look for in a mate is a reflection of ourselves. I can believe it. Lovers come to mimic and mirror each other, gorging themselves on their own personality. So relationships are an ego trip, maybe. Self-justification. Two exquisitely narcissistic bubbles simply falling into each other. Perhaps that's all that's needed. Yet I find egotism is best performed within the safety of our own heads. Take this diatribe as an example. I have found the intellectual satisfaction of writing it ten times more arousing than a romp through the garden of consensual sex. The click and whirr of this exquisite marriage between keyboard and brain is worth a wilderness of licking, panting, heavy breathing and hot flushes. I am self-sufficient. I have discovered the joy of life without relationships.
And yet... and yet... and yet...
I believe in the reality of love. With painful, pitiless acuteness. I do not completely trust the love I feel myself - not yet, at any rate. I'll take some convincing. Far too self-referentially bitter and twisted am I to acknowledge personal truths at speed. I have had one so unbearably kind, well-intentioned, good-natured and, might I add, astronomically talented profess their love to me. It was a pleasant thing to know, a warm thing to know. It reawakened some jewel of faith in humanity. But it meant nothing. I felt nothing. What could I give back? What could I do in deference to that love? How could I possibly serve it? I felt nothing of the same. Simon Callow was right - 'equality of love is absolutely uncommon.' Equality of indifference, however, is not, and this is the code we tend to live by as human beings. You must look for satisfaction elsewhere. Otherwise you'll find yourself sacrificing sanity and reason for something you had already had. Contained within you. For love lies dormant within us at all times, should we only seek it. Love originates in the human beast and that is where it must remain. It is only natural.
The love I place my faith in is to be shared. This love is not selfish or furtive or attention-seeking or pig-headed or wrong. Here is love in its purest distillation, a unified state of compassion. The love with which we treat not just ourselves, not just one special other, but everyone. All the time. I am no saint (not even a Saint Valentine). I fall frightfully short of this standard every day of my life. I must get my satisfaction from trying. It is my eternal wish to do a bit of good in this world and, God help me, someday I'll succeed. For it is in this elevated plateaux of love that our salvation lies. Our final deliverance from the narrow-minded squalor of relationships.
Oof. I have issues.
Now, to finally drag myself back on-topic, this idea of a communal love-sharing (not too different to these woolly post-modern humanist notions fizzing about, which are themselves derived from Christian ethics) - this is astoundingly close to my model for theatre. Love between actor and audience is something I'd like to think I've got altogether more close to than the 'real' experience of it, and I know that I've at least had the chance to bask in the love that a few very gifted performers have cultivated. Funnily enough, it doesn't have to be a particularly pleasant character to inspire devotion. One time I'd like to think I have honed it is with the Torturer at The York Dungeon - as unlovely a soul as you're likely to encounter, the embodiment of evil, in fact, but still possessed of a certain something. Charisma, maybe? Devilish magnetism? Hard to say. For one reason and another, the concept of stage charisma is something I've been thinking about a fair bit recently, and it's not all that far removed from this discussion of love. I veer from one camp to the other - torn between the thought that charisma may actually be a burgeoning strain of the horrendous, self-extolling egotism that I've ranted about above, or a more vibrant and dynamic manifestation of this elusive love that I continue to rabbit on about. Perhaps there's no distinction. Or perhaps only the most marginal one - a razor-sharp divide, with audience responses as changeable as the wind. A dangerous thing. But again, I do think that power plays a substantial part - bending the audience to an overriding will, forcing them into a default channel and making sure their reaction is as uniform as possible. An effort to impose control on the audience - the force that, in effect, should really be controlling you. A tricky business. How do you keep charisma charming, like an Antonio Salieri? How do you make it threatening, like a Stanley Kowalski? Are you aiming for some mixture of the two? You're playing with fire. It's exciting, it's scary. It'll light your way to bed or burn the staircase from under your feet. You're only as good as your audience, and perhaps the vulnerability, the essential vulnerability that will be discussed a little later on, is restored by this simple recourse to trust.
Just as I was dusting off this entry for completion, I stumbled on the most unexpected echo of these sentiments, so much so that I thought I might as well share it. Behold! Yet another appearance from Kenneth Williams, on Parkinson in 1979. You can find it here, if you're interested in watching the whole thing. This I would recommend - Williams deserves to be enshrined with the likes of Clive James and Stephen Fry as one of the great, flowery, aesthete raconteurs of British television. Here is an acted character worlds removed from the private man, who felt himself to be irredeemably hideous, suffered terribly from depression, lived alone with his mother for his entire life and eventually died a suicide. Making others laugh, but never himself. In this elegant, witty and entirely charming persona, Williams has no time for such melancholia. In fact, one of the highlights of the interview is Kenneth's reapprasial of Joe Orton as simply a fun person to be around instead of a fountain gushing out darkness day, night and noon (the exploits of his letter-writing persona 'Edna Wellthorpe' - and her various attempts to stage a production of compassionate gay drama Nelson is a Nance at the local church hall - should put paid to this notion for good). Anyway. Generally as affected as you'd imagine it's possible for an actor to get, the lost heritage of Williams's stage work might well have offered a different perspective on his talents. This is an astonishingly frank and pure spillage of philosophy - particularly for coming from the angularity and contortion of this so-called 'wasp with adenoids'. Whether Williams put it into practise or not is a mystery. But his words have endured (quite unexpected fun, transcribing his lightning-fast diction, but I've done my best):
I think what they're coming for is to be beguiled... To be - I think, what Shaw says about theatre is the most significant, 'to illuminate the dark places of the mind', and I think if you engage them in that process, then they will accept it, they'll accept it totally, whatever the picture you're creating, because you're engaging them. I think the moment you're failing, whether it's comedy or tragedy - and really, they're only two sides of the same coin - the moment you're failing is when they are not engaged by you. And that means you're not being vulnerable anymore. Vulnerability is what acting's about. You go onto a stage and you say, 'Well, this is it. If you don't - 'this is my baby, I'm doing this for you'. If they don't like it, and you're not prepared to be vulnerable, then it doesn't work at all - it doesn't work and it never will work. But if you are prepared to be vulnerable, I'd love them to come with you. And there is that reciprocity established, they'll come with you halfway, and they'll say 'Is it any good?' and go with you. If it's not, and you're not prepared to be engaging, then it's death. And I know actors that have been vulnerable, that feel afterwards - having put a hand out, it's been spat on - they think 'oh!' for the rest of their life, they're not going to do it. You know what I mean? They're going to hold themselves like that. And it doesn't work: you've got to go on putting it out. And it's a terrible risk that you take. But you take it, you take it nightly.
As I said, it does seem odd to think of Kenneth Williams as at all vulnerable. But he is, through and through. He thrusts himself into a position of supreme vulnerability here. Listen to the crowd laugh at his voice, hardly before he's got a word out. In a spirit of affection, I'm sure, but there's little that's more distressing than provoking a laugh by acting in the way that seems most natural to you. The man was trashed too much in his own day and is trashed too much in this one... not that he isn't beyond all that by now. He has nothing but respect from me.
I fear that unless I can hone a bit of reflexive love between actor and audience for Pickwick & Nickleby, I will fail very badly indeed. Such an ambitious undertaking is always going to be a bit of a failure - but hopefully not excessively so! I can rehearse the play to death in isolation, but a vital piece of the its soul is missing. Things will probably start to change the instant I get it back before my director and a team of committed acquaintances and well-wishers... For the moment though, I am performing only to myself (and to you, the reader, in a far more limited capacity), and the self-absorbtion is stifling. Bring back Cambridge. Bring back people.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Rotten Corpse
I can't quite get my head round it, but that's the Dungeon over for another year. Incredible. Seems only a few days since I was perched at the secret entrance, clutching hold of my battered black dress shoes and swallowing great, satisfying puffs of Dungeon air - that exquisite concoction of chemical fog, pungent smell-pots and the dust of centuries - all the while steeling myself for swift conversion to period breeches, blood-stained shirt, indelibly moist horror make-up and confrontation after confrontation with the sprawling, untamed mass of the general public.
Eight weeks - hundreds upon hundreds of shows - tens of thousands of audience members. Our plans for the offensive have been followed to the letter - merciless, unrelenting and born into darkness. There have been faintings. There have been vomitings. There have been pullings of bits and carvings of groins for plague-ridden wretches; hangings and drawings and quarterings for parliamentary conspirators; there have been hauntings galore for beligerent landlords; watchings and waitings and marchings on and on and on and on and on and on and on for long-dead Roman Centurions; burnings and pillagings and lootings and blood-eaglings for the Viking hoardes; there have been stool-duckings and nudey-dancings and inappropriate crotch-thrustings and finger-choppings and kipper-skewed replacings and tongue-to-toilet cleanings for deranged high court judges; there have been hookings of posteriors, rippings of breasts and choppings of chappies for torturers; threatenings and whisperings and corrosive heavy-breathings for Dick Turpin's hangman; there have been prickings and burnings for wild and wicked witches; the jumpiest of jump scares on written record... I can't deny it's been exhausting. But then, it's never been less than rewarding either.
Our clientele have been many and varied. We've enjoyed the old standards: the tourists, the families, the legions of traumatised children. There have been the usual run of surprisingly adventurous, surprisingly desperate women, who've insisted on gifting my characters with (gulp) 'the eye'. There have been gypsy invasions, in which our precious severed heads have very nearly been spirited away at the behest of an overzealous travelling culture. There have been disordered drunkards, who somehow sneaked in without paying, that I delighted in hurling through a fire escape. Particularly alarming were a pair of well-meaning drunkards, who, upon being admitted to the torture chamber, persisted in asking me for fish and chips long after the joke had worn thin... The dust has cleared, the public have parted, and with the end-of-season party over and done with, the Dungeon's mighty plaster walls can settle down to rest.
The experiences of this summer have only confirmed my respect for the Dungeon's unique merits. If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: it's the most intense acting experience imaginable. Where else will you find it? To reap the benefits of an unending practical rehearsal process; to explore a monologue at your leisure for over a month; to revel in the shadowy, atmospheric glory of cinema-class lights, costumes, props and sets; to learn the intimate particulars of the multiple revelations of voice loss; to hone an instinctive, near-psychic grasp for the requirements of each audience? Where else will you get the chance? The satisfaction? And I'm so grateful that I've had the chance to return to it. A place where you can learn your instrument back to front, improve on it with a bit of luck, and have a hell of a lot of fun into the bargain. In some happy ways, the Dungeon is one of the last gasps of the repertory system, with a group of people - amiable, kind, funny, and all of them fanatical actors - united, occasionally for years on end, to make the best theatre that they possibly can. The camaraderie is everything at the Dungeon. Without the people behind the actors behind the makeup behind the ghouls, the establishment would have no soul. The York Dungeon opened in 1986. As a museum. Now, a near quarter-century later, it is theatre in the purest sense. The actors are the life-blood of the business. They've created this one, and now they're keeping it alive... Wonderful.
I'm severely lacking in a camera of any sort, so I'm indebted to the deft hands and nimble shutters of Natalie, Katie and Sammy for making this retrospective possible. Rotten Corpse is the cheerful title lavished on the Dungeon's end-of-season party - and as my farewell to this year's experience, I felt that it deserved a little good-natured memorialisation. Apologies for any impending slushiness. With any luck, it'll be kept in check by my usual cynicism and polite outrage at the downfall of mankind. Ho-hum. On with the show!
Perhaps the most exciting thing about Rotten Corpse is the transformation that the Dungeon undergoes. And that can mean only one thing: a disco in the torture chamber. Lights! Music! Tasteful array of red and black balloons! Fellow tied to the giant wheel, who spins right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round, round, round! Our DJ for the last two years has been Ryan Stocks, a former Dungeon actor and the first person I talked to about the possibility of working there myself, nearly three years ago now - so it's always nice to catch up! Whether or not I was coerced into partaking of that compulsive rhythmic swaying hereafter known as dance... that, my friends, is a mystery that these images will solve... Also submitted to changes this year were the judge's chamber, which became an all-purpose drinks repository; the entrance to the debtor's prison, given over to an expansive buffet of rare and exotic meats; and the condemned cell of highwayman Dick Turpin, adequately represented in the picture below...
Charming arrangement, isn't it? The cage is normally the show element faced by visitors as they sit clustered in the pitchy darkness, listening to the preposterously deep voice of the psychotic, roving murderer before his execution (the joys of strategically placed speakers). You can just make out the shape of the animatronic Turpin, located behind the gauze at centre, who twitches with remarkable vigour and enthusiasm when subjected to a hanging at the climax. The festive banner and fairy lights do much to brighten up what is probably the darkest chamber in the entire Dungeon, bordering at times on an impenetrable black void, an overwhelming limbo of decay... Thoughts of a merrier strain reigned at Rotten Corpse - as with last year's event, the voluminous benches of the Dick Turpin chamber meant that it became the living, beating heart of revels: a general area for communal chit-chat and the dishing out of the annual Rotten Awards. In a fortunate footnote, the pneumatic system that causes the benches to plunge at the end of the show was disabled. This did mean sitting at a slight downward slant for extended periods, but this was by far preferential to the sort of drink-spewing, glass-smashing mayhem that might otherwise have triumphed. It was here that we assembled at the start of the evening.
I had the honour of sitting next to Mr Bryan Heeley for the awards ceremony this year. The man is a legend in the truest sense. He can be a little intimidating at first - height and hairiness are his defining characteristics - but he's a lovely chap once you get to know him a bit... His shows are simply magnificent. It seems that he's studied every Dungeon script to the letter before summarily throwing them away; devising his own mad, idiosyncratic patter for each position, always filtered through that inimitably droll, quirky, half-dead croak, which never fails to reduce an audience to laughter. You can guarantee that when Bryan's in the building, at least half a dozen of the tour's most memorable moments can be ascribed to him. The lightning-fast alternation between screams and whispers, a technical feat I've never seen pulled off better... His anguished cries of 'SAXONS!', 'GO AWAY!' and (best of the lot) 'SPAWN OF SATAN!', reverberating through the Dungeon and so often interrupting other people's shows (you must shout very loudly if you're placed in Bryan's orbit)... The fact that his witch-burning show metamorphoses, suddenly and without warning, into a Queen concert... There's something of the grizzled rock star about Bryan. It reaches its epitome in his undisguised enthusiasm for the 'once... twice... THREE TIMES A LADY!!' line when elaborating on the compromising bluntness of the chappy chopper in the torture chamber. He's also won more acting awards at the Dungeon than anyone can remember (even Bryan, I'd wager), and this is a fitting tribute to his genius. The wonderful colouring in this picture is down to Natalie. A dress code of red and black was in place at last year's Rotten Corpse, so I'd taken the opportunity of airing out my costume from Richard III a few months earlier: black shirt, black trousers, and flamboyant red bow-tie. It seems that my dress has since become infamous, so I was left with no choice but to whip out the red for an encore! In this joyful spirit, the awards got underway...
Oh, goodness. This was deeply exciting! And surprising! And very, very touching. Turns out that I won the 2010 Rotten Award for Scariest Actor! Personally, I felt I was robbing Bryan of his rightful spoils... but given his prodigious pile of past trophies, I didn't let myself feel too bad about it. On the left are Dan and Mark, respectively Performance Supervisor and Assistant Performance Supervisor, and very nice chaps to work with. I got to know Dan last summer, when he too was a debased and lowly actor 'on the floor' (with the most splendidly bloody eye-makeup in all creation, might I add), but following his promotion, he's now more likely to be found in an office in the upper reaches. Mark was the man who auditioned me for the Dungeon in the first place - I read Richard III, Bottom and (more classical yet) the innkeeper of the haunted pub show - and he's been a constant friend through all of my time there. This was a happy moment, so it's unfortunate that I look so unbearably smug in the picture, a fault that can only be blamed on my lack of a Rathbone-esque Roman profile. The awards themselves are another talking point. Our props mistress, Anna, has hand-made the lot of them, so they're all unique. Every year the awards assume a different shape. I've had the chance to look at some of 'em - particularly good have been the skulls (with hair and flesh in varying states of decay) and a line of mock-Oscar statuettes given a macabre overhaul. Last year, the awards were exquisitely naughty - small wooden plaques festooned with severed fingers, each one jutting forth in an unmistakably obscene configuration. I'm thrilled with the plaster gravestones that Anna whipped up for this year's festivities. . Best of all, they smell like the Dungeon. Priceless. Like most of the prizes given out at Rotten Corpse, the Scariest Actor is elected by a majority vote from the staff, so I got painfully contrite and blustering in my very short acceptance speech, and sat down as quick as I was able. I would not be sat for too long though...
Now this was a genuine shock. Ego of the Year. Me. Eeek. I'd won Ego of the Week before - heck, I'd even won Ego of the Month... But the Year? My goodness... I should explain. Unlike most of the other awards, this one was decided by the public, who have the opportunity to vote for their favourite actor before they leave. In the course of my short contract, I'd netted more votes than anybody in the entire year. As I said, eeek. (Though readily explicable - aside from Easter and Halloween, which together add up to a scant three weeks, Summer is by far the Dungeon's busiest period. And the time when most of the votes are cast, I'm sure.) This was of course lovely, fortifying knowledge, but quite awesomely embarrassing too. No acceptance speech this time. I beat a hasty retreat before they all stopped applauding. Embarrassment aside, I fully intend on taking my awards back to Cambridge with me. If nothing else, they'll deliver on Bryan's suggestion of a pair of jolly good book-ends. Incidentally, my face looks curiously misshapen in this picture. Partially withered jack-o'-lantern maybe. On the cusp of a collapse. There's a reason I don't smile very often in public. (For those needing further persuasion, feel free to corroborate my testimony with the widely circulated 'my nose is naught but an aubergine' portrait, dredged up from the publicity-hungry archives of York College.)
Well, with the awards out of the way, we could move on to the celebratory munchings, crunchings, waterings and talkerings that, for me at least, are the life-blood of Rotten Corpse. Here I am, looking mysteriously like Stephen Hawking, in the happy company of Carol, Flozz and Adam. Flozz's fetching crown (another of Anna's masterpieces; a coronet sculpted entirely from skeleton hands) is representative of her having bagged the Employee of the Season gong. A substantial cash prize, the adulation of your co-workers, a substantial cash prize and a hat that typifies insurmountable evil glamour. And a substantial cash prize. I don't know about you, but I'm jealous! Jealous... and a substantial cash prize.
This is me and Carl! Me and Carl go way back! Back to last summer actually, when Carl was new and I was the old hand, the voice of partial, fumbled experience after my single, scanty season in Halloween. Now the tables have turned: Carl has acted in the Dungeon for the last year, and I am but a fly-by-night guest. He has the most wonderful, playful approach to his characters, and remains a constant competitor in the Ego stakes. My favourite moment this year came when I was on Torture, and Carl barnstormed his way in to collect my victims for a hanging, challenging me to a marathon laugh-off that rattled on for a good forty seconds of senseless white noise. Then a look at the children: 'awwww, they didn't tell me they'd have MONKEYS!'... Majestic, truly, truly. I enjoy this photo immensely. Eyes and bow-tie are in unison, colour-wise. Phenomenally good job we can see where Carl's hand is though. (Dark, dark memories of Brian Blessed bellowing 'I'VE BEEN GOOSED!' on Have I Got News For You...)
Here are another two of the Dungeon's old reliables: Matt and Ali. This was Matt's farewell season at the Dungeon, as it happens, after spending well over a year with the attraction. He left on a high though, courting the unparalleled distinction conferred on him by the Most Fanciable Male trophy. Last summer, Matt was a trail-blazing member of the Dungeon's street theatre team, and, in the guise of a tatty, renegade Bill Sikes, became lucky enough to accomplish that rarest of feats - spending the sunniest months of the year outside. Most enviable. There's nothing you miss so much as the sun in this line of work. Ali has been with the Dungeon for quite a few years now. She's a lovely, helpful member of the team, and the only one of us who's up to defeating the merciless seven-minute batching system on Plague (an almighty thwack to this truly unruly bit of administrational madness). She also has the most fantastic manner of dealing with the occasional disorderly nutters who ooze in amongst our generally well-behaved public. A real asset to the place. And usually a good deal less puckered than this. I'll miss 'em both, I tells yer!
Another angle of the torture-cum-disco chamber. By this point in the proceedings, celebrations were in full swing, with guests free to roam through the Dungeon at large and take part in its novelties. Highlights of this snap include my impossibly attractive head; Bryan quaffing some manner of liquid-based sustenance; attraction manager Helen peering in through the curtains; best of all, the glittering array of ghost orbs at the top of the frame! Also take heed of the cage at the far right. Its use tends to be restricted to the confinement of some unlucky visitor in the Torture show, who you can taunt with the dreadful possibility that something conclusive might happen (such lines 'feel any sharp pain at the base of your neck?' and 'watch out for the rats... they nibble things' have been found to work well), or (much funnier, I reckon) ignore them completely and leave them in suspense long after the rest of the group has departed. For one night only, it was given over to quasi-erotic dance routines, courtesy of assorted Dungeon employees. Horror of a different sort. I do hope that it was scrubbed in the aftermath.
Yet another vantage point on the amiable, well-intentioned chaos! As you may have guessed by now, I prefer to stand apart and let everybody else get on with flexing, swivelling and writhing their frames to musical accompaniment. My dancing is on a par with dancersizing, tragically enough. A life-changing moment loomed on the horizon...
Argh! Curses! Flibberty-gibbet! They got me onto the dance floor! The exposure! The humiliation! The superfluity of communal enjoyment! Shuddery stuff. I blame Emma (just on my right; the abundantly deserving Funniest Actor of 2010!) for this heinous crime. But fair is fair considering that I just about blinded her with the door in Ghosts earlier on in the season. My justification is that the music to which I synchronised my macabre gyrations had enough of the Dungeon flavour to craft my participation into a bonus show. 'The Time Warp' for example. Can't find a greater horror hit than that. I believe that picture was taken during the high-pitched agony-throes of Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights'... It may fall short of 'Hammer Horror' for thematic appropriation - but it's still a song about a ghost, so my principles stand! (Just.)
What better way to climax the evening than by mounting to the judge's plinth and striking a disjointed series of dramatic poses? I very nearly put the wig on, but relented with the fear that this might clash with the bow-tie. Very fond of that bow-tie... You'll notice that the gavel is on a chain. This was specifically installed to prevent my homiciding all over the guests by pelting it at them mid-show. Horrific would be a show in which it came flying off. It's surprisingly heavy - and deadly.
A closer look at the judge's plinth; a yet deeper immersion in horror! Now, this image is rather satanic, enhanced immeasurably by the motion blur and gleaming red eyes. Reminds me of certain obscure Mexican photographs purporting to show ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedly aliens and other assorted nasties a-rising from their graves. For that reason, I refer to this picture by the title 'JUDGEO EL CHUPACABRA'. Think of it what you will!
I didn't think it was possible, but I've departed the Dungeon in an even greater state of elation than last year. Above all, I feel grateful. Grateful to the management, for giving me another opportunity to return. Grateful to the public, for stomaching all the nonsense I put them through on a daily basis. Grateful to the seemingly unquenchable kindness of my fellow Dungeonites, who made my latest exit so much more sweet than bitter... In the back of my head, sequestered in the darkened, mercenary department poised between my perpetually deflating ego and my all-purpose jealousy centre, I had the notion that I would cast the Dungeon off after this summer, and devote the next one to something more (shudder) 'ambitious'. There is much to be said for new experiences. Edinburgh bids temptingly in this respect, and my goodness, I really would like to give it a crack someday, if only to see what all the fuss is about. But after all the warmth, benevolence and family atmosphere of the Dungeon... I'm not sure if I could make the break. Hell, why does drama appeal to me in the first place? I suppose it's here that I'm expected to play the great theatrical romantic, tossing back my Byronic locks and adjusting my Olivierian nasal appendage as I expound pretentious truths on the enduring pertinence of dramatic art, its illimitable dominion over human existence, its power to touch the mind, rend the heart and purify the soul... Ultimately though, I think I go by a more stoical rationale. Such grand spiritual overtures are undeniably a part of theatre, and it's a cause for real happiness when you accidentally stumble on one of them all over again. They're not to be strived for however - not to be consciously chased. I don't believe that really works. Too much room for pretension, frustration and exasperation at the sheer, thundering banality of the enterprise...
I'm far happier to cling to a doctrine of simplicity. Let's enjoy our theatre, take it seriously - but not too seriously. It's make-believe, fairy stories... A bit of magic and imagination, replete with terror and wonder and enchantment. The pure satisfaction in doing a job and doing it well - and knowing that you're improving all the time. My time at The York Dungeon has given me that satisfaction in abundance. And for that, I bless it. It's my acting ideal.
Eight weeks - hundreds upon hundreds of shows - tens of thousands of audience members. Our plans for the offensive have been followed to the letter - merciless, unrelenting and born into darkness. There have been faintings. There have been vomitings. There have been pullings of bits and carvings of groins for plague-ridden wretches; hangings and drawings and quarterings for parliamentary conspirators; there have been hauntings galore for beligerent landlords; watchings and waitings and marchings on and on and on and on and on and on and on for long-dead Roman Centurions; burnings and pillagings and lootings and blood-eaglings for the Viking hoardes; there have been stool-duckings and nudey-dancings and inappropriate crotch-thrustings and finger-choppings and kipper-skewed replacings and tongue-to-toilet cleanings for deranged high court judges; there have been hookings of posteriors, rippings of breasts and choppings of chappies for torturers; threatenings and whisperings and corrosive heavy-breathings for Dick Turpin's hangman; there have been prickings and burnings for wild and wicked witches; the jumpiest of jump scares on written record... I can't deny it's been exhausting. But then, it's never been less than rewarding either.
Our clientele have been many and varied. We've enjoyed the old standards: the tourists, the families, the legions of traumatised children. There have been the usual run of surprisingly adventurous, surprisingly desperate women, who've insisted on gifting my characters with (gulp) 'the eye'. There have been gypsy invasions, in which our precious severed heads have very nearly been spirited away at the behest of an overzealous travelling culture. There have been disordered drunkards, who somehow sneaked in without paying, that I delighted in hurling through a fire escape. Particularly alarming were a pair of well-meaning drunkards, who, upon being admitted to the torture chamber, persisted in asking me for fish and chips long after the joke had worn thin... The dust has cleared, the public have parted, and with the end-of-season party over and done with, the Dungeon's mighty plaster walls can settle down to rest.
The experiences of this summer have only confirmed my respect for the Dungeon's unique merits. If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: it's the most intense acting experience imaginable. Where else will you find it? To reap the benefits of an unending practical rehearsal process; to explore a monologue at your leisure for over a month; to revel in the shadowy, atmospheric glory of cinema-class lights, costumes, props and sets; to learn the intimate particulars of the multiple revelations of voice loss; to hone an instinctive, near-psychic grasp for the requirements of each audience? Where else will you get the chance? The satisfaction? And I'm so grateful that I've had the chance to return to it. A place where you can learn your instrument back to front, improve on it with a bit of luck, and have a hell of a lot of fun into the bargain. In some happy ways, the Dungeon is one of the last gasps of the repertory system, with a group of people - amiable, kind, funny, and all of them fanatical actors - united, occasionally for years on end, to make the best theatre that they possibly can. The camaraderie is everything at the Dungeon. Without the people behind the actors behind the makeup behind the ghouls, the establishment would have no soul. The York Dungeon opened in 1986. As a museum. Now, a near quarter-century later, it is theatre in the purest sense. The actors are the life-blood of the business. They've created this one, and now they're keeping it alive... Wonderful.
I'm severely lacking in a camera of any sort, so I'm indebted to the deft hands and nimble shutters of Natalie, Katie and Sammy for making this retrospective possible. Rotten Corpse is the cheerful title lavished on the Dungeon's end-of-season party - and as my farewell to this year's experience, I felt that it deserved a little good-natured memorialisation. Apologies for any impending slushiness. With any luck, it'll be kept in check by my usual cynicism and polite outrage at the downfall of mankind. Ho-hum. On with the show!
Perhaps the most exciting thing about Rotten Corpse is the transformation that the Dungeon undergoes. And that can mean only one thing: a disco in the torture chamber. Lights! Music! Tasteful array of red and black balloons! Fellow tied to the giant wheel, who spins right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round, round, round! Our DJ for the last two years has been Ryan Stocks, a former Dungeon actor and the first person I talked to about the possibility of working there myself, nearly three years ago now - so it's always nice to catch up! Whether or not I was coerced into partaking of that compulsive rhythmic swaying hereafter known as dance... that, my friends, is a mystery that these images will solve... Also submitted to changes this year were the judge's chamber, which became an all-purpose drinks repository; the entrance to the debtor's prison, given over to an expansive buffet of rare and exotic meats; and the condemned cell of highwayman Dick Turpin, adequately represented in the picture below...
Charming arrangement, isn't it? The cage is normally the show element faced by visitors as they sit clustered in the pitchy darkness, listening to the preposterously deep voice of the psychotic, roving murderer before his execution (the joys of strategically placed speakers). You can just make out the shape of the animatronic Turpin, located behind the gauze at centre, who twitches with remarkable vigour and enthusiasm when subjected to a hanging at the climax. The festive banner and fairy lights do much to brighten up what is probably the darkest chamber in the entire Dungeon, bordering at times on an impenetrable black void, an overwhelming limbo of decay... Thoughts of a merrier strain reigned at Rotten Corpse - as with last year's event, the voluminous benches of the Dick Turpin chamber meant that it became the living, beating heart of revels: a general area for communal chit-chat and the dishing out of the annual Rotten Awards. In a fortunate footnote, the pneumatic system that causes the benches to plunge at the end of the show was disabled. This did mean sitting at a slight downward slant for extended periods, but this was by far preferential to the sort of drink-spewing, glass-smashing mayhem that might otherwise have triumphed. It was here that we assembled at the start of the evening.
I had the honour of sitting next to Mr Bryan Heeley for the awards ceremony this year. The man is a legend in the truest sense. He can be a little intimidating at first - height and hairiness are his defining characteristics - but he's a lovely chap once you get to know him a bit... His shows are simply magnificent. It seems that he's studied every Dungeon script to the letter before summarily throwing them away; devising his own mad, idiosyncratic patter for each position, always filtered through that inimitably droll, quirky, half-dead croak, which never fails to reduce an audience to laughter. You can guarantee that when Bryan's in the building, at least half a dozen of the tour's most memorable moments can be ascribed to him. The lightning-fast alternation between screams and whispers, a technical feat I've never seen pulled off better... His anguished cries of 'SAXONS!', 'GO AWAY!' and (best of the lot) 'SPAWN OF SATAN!', reverberating through the Dungeon and so often interrupting other people's shows (you must shout very loudly if you're placed in Bryan's orbit)... The fact that his witch-burning show metamorphoses, suddenly and without warning, into a Queen concert... There's something of the grizzled rock star about Bryan. It reaches its epitome in his undisguised enthusiasm for the 'once... twice... THREE TIMES A LADY!!' line when elaborating on the compromising bluntness of the chappy chopper in the torture chamber. He's also won more acting awards at the Dungeon than anyone can remember (even Bryan, I'd wager), and this is a fitting tribute to his genius. The wonderful colouring in this picture is down to Natalie. A dress code of red and black was in place at last year's Rotten Corpse, so I'd taken the opportunity of airing out my costume from Richard III a few months earlier: black shirt, black trousers, and flamboyant red bow-tie. It seems that my dress has since become infamous, so I was left with no choice but to whip out the red for an encore! In this joyful spirit, the awards got underway...
Oh, goodness. This was deeply exciting! And surprising! And very, very touching. Turns out that I won the 2010 Rotten Award for Scariest Actor! Personally, I felt I was robbing Bryan of his rightful spoils... but given his prodigious pile of past trophies, I didn't let myself feel too bad about it. On the left are Dan and Mark, respectively Performance Supervisor and Assistant Performance Supervisor, and very nice chaps to work with. I got to know Dan last summer, when he too was a debased and lowly actor 'on the floor' (with the most splendidly bloody eye-makeup in all creation, might I add), but following his promotion, he's now more likely to be found in an office in the upper reaches. Mark was the man who auditioned me for the Dungeon in the first place - I read Richard III, Bottom and (more classical yet) the innkeeper of the haunted pub show - and he's been a constant friend through all of my time there. This was a happy moment, so it's unfortunate that I look so unbearably smug in the picture, a fault that can only be blamed on my lack of a Rathbone-esque Roman profile. The awards themselves are another talking point. Our props mistress, Anna, has hand-made the lot of them, so they're all unique. Every year the awards assume a different shape. I've had the chance to look at some of 'em - particularly good have been the skulls (with hair and flesh in varying states of decay) and a line of mock-Oscar statuettes given a macabre overhaul. Last year, the awards were exquisitely naughty - small wooden plaques festooned with severed fingers, each one jutting forth in an unmistakably obscene configuration. I'm thrilled with the plaster gravestones that Anna whipped up for this year's festivities. . Best of all, they smell like the Dungeon. Priceless. Like most of the prizes given out at Rotten Corpse, the Scariest Actor is elected by a majority vote from the staff, so I got painfully contrite and blustering in my very short acceptance speech, and sat down as quick as I was able. I would not be sat for too long though...
Now this was a genuine shock. Ego of the Year. Me. Eeek. I'd won Ego of the Week before - heck, I'd even won Ego of the Month... But the Year? My goodness... I should explain. Unlike most of the other awards, this one was decided by the public, who have the opportunity to vote for their favourite actor before they leave. In the course of my short contract, I'd netted more votes than anybody in the entire year. As I said, eeek. (Though readily explicable - aside from Easter and Halloween, which together add up to a scant three weeks, Summer is by far the Dungeon's busiest period. And the time when most of the votes are cast, I'm sure.) This was of course lovely, fortifying knowledge, but quite awesomely embarrassing too. No acceptance speech this time. I beat a hasty retreat before they all stopped applauding. Embarrassment aside, I fully intend on taking my awards back to Cambridge with me. If nothing else, they'll deliver on Bryan's suggestion of a pair of jolly good book-ends. Incidentally, my face looks curiously misshapen in this picture. Partially withered jack-o'-lantern maybe. On the cusp of a collapse. There's a reason I don't smile very often in public. (For those needing further persuasion, feel free to corroborate my testimony with the widely circulated 'my nose is naught but an aubergine' portrait, dredged up from the publicity-hungry archives of York College.)
Well, with the awards out of the way, we could move on to the celebratory munchings, crunchings, waterings and talkerings that, for me at least, are the life-blood of Rotten Corpse. Here I am, looking mysteriously like Stephen Hawking, in the happy company of Carol, Flozz and Adam. Flozz's fetching crown (another of Anna's masterpieces; a coronet sculpted entirely from skeleton hands) is representative of her having bagged the Employee of the Season gong. A substantial cash prize, the adulation of your co-workers, a substantial cash prize and a hat that typifies insurmountable evil glamour. And a substantial cash prize. I don't know about you, but I'm jealous! Jealous... and a substantial cash prize.
This is me and Carl! Me and Carl go way back! Back to last summer actually, when Carl was new and I was the old hand, the voice of partial, fumbled experience after my single, scanty season in Halloween. Now the tables have turned: Carl has acted in the Dungeon for the last year, and I am but a fly-by-night guest. He has the most wonderful, playful approach to his characters, and remains a constant competitor in the Ego stakes. My favourite moment this year came when I was on Torture, and Carl barnstormed his way in to collect my victims for a hanging, challenging me to a marathon laugh-off that rattled on for a good forty seconds of senseless white noise. Then a look at the children: 'awwww, they didn't tell me they'd have MONKEYS!'... Majestic, truly, truly. I enjoy this photo immensely. Eyes and bow-tie are in unison, colour-wise. Phenomenally good job we can see where Carl's hand is though. (Dark, dark memories of Brian Blessed bellowing 'I'VE BEEN GOOSED!' on Have I Got News For You...)
Here are another two of the Dungeon's old reliables: Matt and Ali. This was Matt's farewell season at the Dungeon, as it happens, after spending well over a year with the attraction. He left on a high though, courting the unparalleled distinction conferred on him by the Most Fanciable Male trophy. Last summer, Matt was a trail-blazing member of the Dungeon's street theatre team, and, in the guise of a tatty, renegade Bill Sikes, became lucky enough to accomplish that rarest of feats - spending the sunniest months of the year outside. Most enviable. There's nothing you miss so much as the sun in this line of work. Ali has been with the Dungeon for quite a few years now. She's a lovely, helpful member of the team, and the only one of us who's up to defeating the merciless seven-minute batching system on Plague (an almighty thwack to this truly unruly bit of administrational madness). She also has the most fantastic manner of dealing with the occasional disorderly nutters who ooze in amongst our generally well-behaved public. A real asset to the place. And usually a good deal less puckered than this. I'll miss 'em both, I tells yer!
Another angle of the torture-cum-disco chamber. By this point in the proceedings, celebrations were in full swing, with guests free to roam through the Dungeon at large and take part in its novelties. Highlights of this snap include my impossibly attractive head; Bryan quaffing some manner of liquid-based sustenance; attraction manager Helen peering in through the curtains; best of all, the glittering array of ghost orbs at the top of the frame! Also take heed of the cage at the far right. Its use tends to be restricted to the confinement of some unlucky visitor in the Torture show, who you can taunt with the dreadful possibility that something conclusive might happen (such lines 'feel any sharp pain at the base of your neck?' and 'watch out for the rats... they nibble things' have been found to work well), or (much funnier, I reckon) ignore them completely and leave them in suspense long after the rest of the group has departed. For one night only, it was given over to quasi-erotic dance routines, courtesy of assorted Dungeon employees. Horror of a different sort. I do hope that it was scrubbed in the aftermath.
Yet another vantage point on the amiable, well-intentioned chaos! As you may have guessed by now, I prefer to stand apart and let everybody else get on with flexing, swivelling and writhing their frames to musical accompaniment. My dancing is on a par with dancersizing, tragically enough. A life-changing moment loomed on the horizon...
Argh! Curses! Flibberty-gibbet! They got me onto the dance floor! The exposure! The humiliation! The superfluity of communal enjoyment! Shuddery stuff. I blame Emma (just on my right; the abundantly deserving Funniest Actor of 2010!) for this heinous crime. But fair is fair considering that I just about blinded her with the door in Ghosts earlier on in the season. My justification is that the music to which I synchronised my macabre gyrations had enough of the Dungeon flavour to craft my participation into a bonus show. 'The Time Warp' for example. Can't find a greater horror hit than that. I believe that picture was taken during the high-pitched agony-throes of Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights'... It may fall short of 'Hammer Horror' for thematic appropriation - but it's still a song about a ghost, so my principles stand! (Just.)
What better way to climax the evening than by mounting to the judge's plinth and striking a disjointed series of dramatic poses? I very nearly put the wig on, but relented with the fear that this might clash with the bow-tie. Very fond of that bow-tie... You'll notice that the gavel is on a chain. This was specifically installed to prevent my homiciding all over the guests by pelting it at them mid-show. Horrific would be a show in which it came flying off. It's surprisingly heavy - and deadly.
A closer look at the judge's plinth; a yet deeper immersion in horror! Now, this image is rather satanic, enhanced immeasurably by the motion blur and gleaming red eyes. Reminds me of certain obscure Mexican photographs purporting to show ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedly aliens and other assorted nasties a-rising from their graves. For that reason, I refer to this picture by the title 'JUDGEO EL CHUPACABRA'. Think of it what you will!
I didn't think it was possible, but I've departed the Dungeon in an even greater state of elation than last year. Above all, I feel grateful. Grateful to the management, for giving me another opportunity to return. Grateful to the public, for stomaching all the nonsense I put them through on a daily basis. Grateful to the seemingly unquenchable kindness of my fellow Dungeonites, who made my latest exit so much more sweet than bitter... In the back of my head, sequestered in the darkened, mercenary department poised between my perpetually deflating ego and my all-purpose jealousy centre, I had the notion that I would cast the Dungeon off after this summer, and devote the next one to something more (shudder) 'ambitious'. There is much to be said for new experiences. Edinburgh bids temptingly in this respect, and my goodness, I really would like to give it a crack someday, if only to see what all the fuss is about. But after all the warmth, benevolence and family atmosphere of the Dungeon... I'm not sure if I could make the break. Hell, why does drama appeal to me in the first place? I suppose it's here that I'm expected to play the great theatrical romantic, tossing back my Byronic locks and adjusting my Olivierian nasal appendage as I expound pretentious truths on the enduring pertinence of dramatic art, its illimitable dominion over human existence, its power to touch the mind, rend the heart and purify the soul... Ultimately though, I think I go by a more stoical rationale. Such grand spiritual overtures are undeniably a part of theatre, and it's a cause for real happiness when you accidentally stumble on one of them all over again. They're not to be strived for however - not to be consciously chased. I don't believe that really works. Too much room for pretension, frustration and exasperation at the sheer, thundering banality of the enterprise...
I'm far happier to cling to a doctrine of simplicity. Let's enjoy our theatre, take it seriously - but not too seriously. It's make-believe, fairy stories... A bit of magic and imagination, replete with terror and wonder and enchantment. The pure satisfaction in doing a job and doing it well - and knowing that you're improving all the time. My time at The York Dungeon has given me that satisfaction in abundance. And for that, I bless it. It's my acting ideal.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
The Many Deaths of James Swanton: Part One
Amongst my friends in York at any rate, it's become a joke that I've been killed off in every play I've ever performed. More than that, it's become a joke that I've always been killed off-stage. As with most spoofing, half-witty observations, there's a certain element of truth to these claims, nestled snugly in against the intricately woven nest of lies. Andrew Crisp - inspirational GCSE English teacher and all-round theatrical ally - certainly agreed. The last time I spoke to him was just after he'd come to see a performance of Nineteen Eighty-Four at York Theatre Royal. Two remarks stick in my head. First: 'When are you going to place a nice character, James? You know - Hamlet or something?' Second: 'Are you ever going to make it to the end of a play? Even in A Christmas Carol you sort of died, in the graveyard...'
In answer to the first query, I can only confess to being unrepentantly happy to be typecast as the evil, blood-letting old man, and lacking the sufficient drive, talent and prettiness to go a-Hamleting. The answer to the second adds up to the deeper meditative pool of this blog entry. It's undeniable. I've died a ridiculous amount of times on stages up and down these mighty British Isles. Part of this comes from playing so many character parts, which almost by default occupy a peripheral or (to be polite) 'featured' role in the action. You simply can't kill off the lead (at least until the end) - unless your director's Alfred Hitchcock and your corpse is Janet Leigh, the drama will implode. My repeated dabblings in villainy and the macabre have doubtless also played a part. I rarely think of it this way, but every character pent up in The York Dungeon must have died at some point. Nothing else would explain the ghastly paleness and startling proliferation of weeping head wounds. So whip out your favourite Chopin death march, and allow Mercadé, messenger of doom and part-time slobbering policeman of Love's Labour's Lost, to induct you into the many, many deaths of James Swanton...
(Note: I'm not planning on dying in any serious way in Pickwick & Nickleby. However, I will be caning myself into a bloody pulp towards the end of the night. Come for that reason alone!)
BAHM-BAHM-BA-BAHM, BA-BA-BAHM-BA-BA-BA-BAAAAAAHMMM!
1. Puss in Boots (2005)
Crime Scene: Methodist Church Hall, Poppleton
Victim: The Ogre
Method: Self-transfiguration to a mouse and subsequent braining against castle wall.
Details: The one that started it all. After being raised on David Leonard's stentorian baddies in Berwick Kaler's annual line-up of compassionate rubbish, it was a true thrill to become the ludicrous rotting core of pantomime villainy. My Ogre was a monstrosity, and quite deserving of all he got. My height was enhanced to truly loony extremes, not only by the Karloff-style boots that Richard kindly provided for my feet, but my insistence on the anachronistic addition of a top hat, which ensured that I projected at least a foot out of vision at all times. Add in a dollop of green make-up, a straggly black wig, a Son of Frankenstein sheep-skin and the mangled vocalisations of Fredric March's Mr Hyde... and we have a creature crying out for a killing, ladies and gentlemen. The death was the inevitable denouement to Puss's ever-so-clever scheme to escape being made into cat pie. A petty, small-minded contest was established, with the Ogre compelled to transfigure himself into steadily less compromising entities (though no water goblets, sadly enough). Our state-of-the-art church hall special effects unit meant that I would step into the wings during a series of short blackouts, allowing a substitute actor to take my place; an illusion that never quite worked, mostly due to the impossibility of moving anywhere in haste when you're pushing eight foot and in danger of demolishing the very flimsy set. A bear came first, I think - the supremely unintimidating cuteness of a child in mask and costume. I'm not sure whether anything followed that, but I do recall that the dubious finale was the Incredible Hulk vaulting in to wreak some tame, family-oriented mayhem. I was finally cajoled into transmogrifying into an unconvincing rubber mouse. (Don't ask me why an Ogre would so blindly deliver on the whims of an obnoxious talking cat... probably the tall person's version of short man syndrome.) To top it all off, that darned cat doesn't even eat me. Oh, no. That would be too easy. Instead, I'm hurled into the wings, an action so brutal that it provokes a high-pitched scream. This is probably a burst of agony from my future self, appalled at the first of my many off-stage deaths. Devastatingly ironic given that I'd got my panto break, aged nine, playing a mouse in the same church's Cinderella. Oh, how the wheel spins round!
Rating: 7/10
2. Macbeth (2005)
Crime Scene: Georgian Theatre, Richmond
Victim: King Duncan
Method: Stabbed to death by shady supposed ally with dagger fixation.
Details: The plot-based ramifications of the Scottish Play are so well-worn that to repeat them would be patronising. I'm firmly of the opinion that Duncan had it coming. Or at least, my version of Duncan. He was pretty frail (easier to knock over), pretty irritating (forced merriment through and through) and drummed into hyper-redundancy by the cuts (severely edited version, this one). This destruction disappointed me on a few counts. To start with, it was my long-time theatrical arch-rival, Sir Christopher Guard, who'd be doing the killing. Chris and I have a fraught theatrical legacy. In the years that followed, I was Scrooge to his Bob Cratchit, Merrick to his Treves, and finally - triumphantly - Richard III to his... Richard III (a weird production, better not to ask). Stoked by a viewing of the seminal bloodshed of Roman Polanski's Macbeth (which does show the Duncan murder, and coheres a little too neatly with the Sharon Tate tragedy for comfort), I had every hope that there'd be a picturesque orgy of blood-packs and steaming rubber entrails to contrast with the sleek finery of our old-fashioned theatre. This didn't seem so very irrational at the time. After all, our Banquo was favoured with a truly sensational Tarantino rip-off for his dispatch, in which the full company swayed, grinned and clapped to the peppy accompaniment of 'Stuck in the Middle with You' - a collective glorification in the S&M-tinged ecstasy of a seductive Murderer knife-dance. Surely Duncan deserved a send-off that was at least decipherable from the text, despite not being shown. Such was not to be, and I had to content myself with returning as a Caligari-style ghost at some point in Lady Macbeth's midnight wanderings. Come to think of it, I remember rehearsing an opening to the play that would have been at least equally satisfying. I was originally to suffer a protracted, expressionist crucifixion at the hands of the Weird Sisters, only then settling into prayer for my first appearance. This image would have resurfaced at the conclusion, with the Christ-like agonies of kingship now transferred to Malcolm. A neat idea, adventurously dark given the average age of the cast, and a real pity that it didn't make it into the final play. So, yes... Off-stage again. Begrudgingly. But since this production lay in the enduringly capable hands of Mr Crisp, it did lead rather pleasingly into mortality number three...
Rating: 3/10
3. A Christmas Carol (2005)
Crime Scene: Manor CE School
Victim: Ebenezer Scrooge
Method: Moralistic inter-dimensional vision of possible future grave-site.
Details: Now this was a fun one. That I never felt I got it right is almost beside the point. Crisp balanced the elements so thrillingly that it was a true privilege to be obliterated. Everyone knows the scene: Scrooge's nightmare vision of the winter cemetery in the company of Christmas Yet to Come. We had a black gravestone at centre stage, on which 'Ebenezer Scrooge' was slowly, agonisingly engraved with a stick of chalk. At this massive distance from the production, I have a feeling that we got the same person who played Belle (Scrooge's spurred lover of Christmas Past) to write the name upon the stone, and this would certainly have added a certain darkness to the proceedings that I consider inseparable from the Crispian theatrical aesthetic. In order to keep as much of Dickens's flavourful narration as possible, our production had a substantial chorus. (One of my central gripes with Dickens adaptations in general is the curious resistance to using Dickens's language, which is uniformly excellent - even if it risks being a little too 'complete' and having all the characterisation done before the actor gets a look-in.) Done out in top hats and flock coats, they looked like the ghosts of the Sweeney Todd ensemble gone wrong. They proceeded to shout me into the dust of the earth with a vigorous round of chanting: 'Ebenezer, Ebenezer, Ebenezer Scrooge! Nobody, nobody, nobody likes you!' This would admittedly be slightly lame coming completely out of the blue - the chant had earlier featured as the playground bullying in Scrooge's tormented vision of his school days. It was like being caught in the middle of a cyclone - comparable to the cathartic thrill of doing a musical, in which your energy undergoes a massive boost from the analagous support of the orchestra - before I at last collapsed with an anguished (ie: overacted) cry of 'Oh, tell me I may sponge the writing from this stone!' In the best tradition of Noel Coward, I couldn't have liked it more! In general with the Carol, I was about as on-stage as you could possibly get. But whether a hypothetical future demise (for which the living representation of the character was present) really counts as a death at all remains a point for fierce debate. And I suppose that if you follow that train of logic, Scrooge's death occurred some time before he was buried, in an imaginary vignette that can only be situated... off-stage. Ah. Damn.
Rating: 9/10
4. Hickory Dickory Dock (2006)
Crime Scene: Methodist Church Hall, Poppleton
Victim: The Black Imp
Method: Suckered into enchanted grandfather clock by supernatural forces.
Details: That's the Black Imp in the picture above. Fearsome little devil. Sort of stylish in his silken trousers, impeccably pointed winkle-pickers and oversized gorilla mitts (a totally incongruous feature that I nonetheless insisted be imported from the Ogre of Puss in Boots fame). Not remotely interested in children, as the image would have you believe - although the character did lead to my all-time guiltiest backstage moment, when some poor, blithe, innocent infant tottered into my path, took one look at me, burst into hysterical tears and ran as fast as their wee little legs could carry them. King Ogre II, basically. And desperately in need of a killing. Panto plots are strained and tenuous enough when they spring from the wholesome medium of fairytales - once you start cobbling them together from fragmentary old nursery rhymes, you can guarantee that nothing will make sense. Hickory Dickory Dock is one of the select few plays for which I still have the script, but as I flick through it now, it's all a senseless, incoherent mess, brimming with daft wizards, greedy squires, resolutely heterosexual dames and villager after villager after villager... In other words, yet another opportunity for the immortal citizens of the Poppleton Methodist Players to play naught but themselves for a good two and a half hours of community-based tedium! I think the basic concept underpinning the Black Imp was that he originated in an ultra-evil hidden dimension accessible only by antique, pastel-painted grandfather clock. But naturally, a demented sorcerer must venture into this kingdom of shadows to bag himself a very shiny jewel (sounding pretty similar to Aladdin, this), which will give him all the diabolical derring-do needed to take over the world. Standard panto fare, in short. But in a moral universe more black-and-white than the kabuki-style design imprinted on my face, the panto baddie must be foiled. This can swing in one of two directions. I believe the sorcerer received the lower order of punishment: a character reformation at the eleventh hour, probably in response to being forced to marry the ugliest cast member. More to my taste is the full-on pulverisation ritual, deployed to lastingly obliterate a seed of unquenchable evil. I forget exactly how or why, but the Black Imp was drawn back into the clock as though dragged by a retinue of wild and conveniently invisible horses, howling in agony as the door was closed on him for all time. Who can tell what happened afterwards? Having no money whatsoever to fritter on a lavish array of wind machines and motorised wire effects, I got to go a grand old bit of physical comedy, contorting my body into wild arcs and dips as I tried to wedge myself into the surprisingly tiny chink at the front of the clock. I'm certain that I all but knocked the prop over on one night, but it was fun enough. Above all, don't ask me where the mouse of running-up-the-clock fame entered into the proceedings. Shameful... Utterly shameful. Almost as shameful as this adding up to another off-stage death - or at least, only partially on-stage. Curses!
Rating: 6/10
5. Murder Me Always (2006)
Crime Scene: Manor CE School
Victim: Fritz Fontaine
Method: Hammy enactment of self-written, self-indulgent hack work.
Details: Despite the title, I didn't get murdered in this. This is probably just as well, seeing as the unlucky person who did (the fictional 'director' of a play-within-a-play) was out for the count in ten minutes flat. Truly the Duncan of Murder Me Always... My secondary school used to hold a murder mystery event every October. These were always well-intentioned affairs, but farcically shoddy. It was accepted that everyone would be glued to their script, no set would exist beyond a selection of black drapes and whatever mouldering sticks of furniture could be dredged up from beneath the stage, and any acting that went on was ropey, generalised and thoroughly underwhelming. I'm still undecided as to whether Lee Mueller's writing is deliberately bad or not. (The age-old question: when does deliberately bad writing become just, well - bad? I suppose as soon as it becomes boring... which is an accusation you can levy at almost any of these paint-by-numbers murder mystery shenanigans.) I'll let you decide for yourself by quoting the relevant chunk. My character was an outrageously large ham (I told you there was minimal acting), sporting a pipe and white scarf at all times, who, with the pompous bombast typically restricted to Christopher Lee, insists on recreating the highpoint of the evening's cancelled drama: 'The play we were doing this evening was indeed a delight. I actually had quite a dramatic death scene. As you may know, Mr. Swanwallow, whom I was portraying, ingests poison and dies. It was a brilliant scene. Here, allow me to demonstrate before everyone else arrives. (acts this out) I come stumbling in through this doorway. I am clutching my throat and gasping for precious oxygen. I turn a few times and struggle to utter some prophetic final words. "Do not go gentle into that good night! Rage! Rage! Against the... Uhhh! Aggg!" ... Then I pitch myself and fall to center. (lies down) My hand reaches up, as if to welcome the oncoming image of death. I reach for the light. And alas, darkness. I die.' It's one of the rare occasions on which I've received a spontaneous round of applause for being insufferable and outlandish - the other that springs to mind was covering up Coupler's 'enthusiasm' for Young Fashion on the last night of The Relapse (an unforgivably dirty sight gag - and a complete accident) - so the play's prominent in my memory for that reason alone. Now! This was quite the on-stage death - but as with A Christmas Carol, it's one that's debatable through and through. After all, the character was alive and well and stumbling across the stage as normal only seconds later... Curse and double-curse it!
Rating: 5/10
6. The Elephant Man (2007)
Crime Scene: Manor CE School
Victim: John Merrick
Method: Bombastic religious breakdown followed by impromptu self-asphyxiation ritual.
Details: Typical, isn't it? When I finally get to an unquestionable, certified, one-hundred-per-cent genuine on-stage death, it requires a more sensitive treatment. This is about the closest I've got to method acting, so far as I really did end up struggling to breathe and became very red in the face in the process - unless it's the lighting, I think that's what's showing up above. It's not even worth making fun of this one, to be honest. The real Merrick had a truly horrible life, and the version we played was quite a bit more gratuitous than the scene that features in the Bernard Pomerance original (which won the Tony Award for Best Play way back in 1979). The action that directly preceded the death was that horribly awkward, dragged-out conversation between Merrick and Treves, in which Merrick attacks his master's skewed moral code with regards to sex and medicine ('Is it okay to see them naked if you cut them up afterwards?'), before the good doctor's patience is sufficiently frayed that he turns against the deformed, unhappy man he'd originally sworn to protect ('For God's sakes. If you are angry, just say it. I won't turn you out. Say it: I am angry. Go on. I am angry! I am angry! I am angry!). This exposes a last stubborn shred of belief in Merrick ('I believe in heaven...') and leaves the heartache of his beloved Mrs Kendal's banishment from the hospital unresolved. What followed was pretty nasty, oddly exhilarating, but black and bleak to the very core. Merrick first had to enter in tears, building his way towards an impassioned, frustrated crescendo as he repeats the words of his supposed benefactor: 'I am angry... I am angry... Go on, say it, you freak! I am angry! I am angry! I am angry! I am angry!' Being an actor with a greater than usual reputation for going over-the-top, it was certainly refreshing to have a scene in which this was positively demanded by the script. This can be very dangerous. When a character's entire emotional integrity hangs in the balance, these scenes can swing either way, and I've little doubt that the success of the final performance falls to individual perception. Certainly, when I recorded Erik's two monologues from Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, both of which are as teary and anguish-laden as they come, they provoked a sharply divided reaction. The second has garnered 82 responses to date, and the range and dynamism of response is comical to say the least: 'That was the scariest thing I have ever seen. And I'm not exaggerating here'; 'It reduced me to shaking limbs and tears, and for that I give you my thanks'; 'I don't have words to express my gratitude and the emotions you provoked in me! That was the thing that made me tremble in fear and cry in sympathy for Erik! Just great and beautiful in a strange way. Because even in a man as ugly as Erik, there is beauty...; 'It's not that your voice is bad, I just can't imagine that voice singing in a way that would trick a person to fall of a boat or something'; 'You make Erik sound like a drunk Stewie Griffin, it's just overacting'; 'You WAAAAAY overdid the voice over and the sob of your vocalization sounds silly and ridiculous'. They go on like this, streaky bacon style, alternating flashes of light and dark... Whether the performance is a good one or a bad one (I'll admit that I'm not its biggest fan/Phan) is almost irrelevant, and, judging from these remarks, nearly impossible to determine... Sometimes it's just a case of trying to be fearless, dropping those troublesome inhibitions as much as you're able and really letting rip. When the situation demands it, it is your most solemn duty. In my humble view, the trials of the Elephant Man merit considerably more than a watered-down trickle of pathetic sentiment. It's a little like opera, these epic scenarios when you're expected to step up to the plate and deliver. Pavarotti frequently used to mention the sublime terror of hitting the high notes - Will he make it? Will he not? - and I suppose that there's a cross-over here. The modern vogue for understatement, whilst it certainly has its place, is too often rooted in embarrassment and narcissism... But enough ranting. Merrick goes on to read from Psalm 23, the perennially touching 'The Lord is my shepherd...', which turns up in innumerable film scenes as the condemned man walks to the electric chair (senseless Lugosi potboiler Invisible Ghost springs to mind). A bit of a cliche maybe, but no bigger than David Lynch's decision to wallpaper Merrick's death in his film of The Elephant Man with the strains of Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' (we opted for John Barry in our version, and made eager use of 'The Day the Earth Fell Silent' from 'The Beyondness of Things'). Then comes the suicide. The real-life Merrick could never lie down to sleep like normal people - he had to remain in a strained, half-croucing position on an evening, supported by an impenetrable fortress of cushions and bedding. It's never been verified that Merrick intended to take his life (for what it's worth, he was zealously Christian - or at least seemed to be), but it's bleak to speculate on how far his deformities might have progressed had his life been allowed to continue. And so, delivering on his wistful proclamation of earlier that 'sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams', Merrick leans back and suffocates on the weight of his own physicality. There was a lot going on in this death. It's fortunate that I consider it one of the few times I've (almost) got something right.
Rating: 9/10
Next time I'll be picking up with the eight (that's right, eight) remaining deaths I've had the pleasure to experience. Often twice in the course of the same play. Clearly there's public appetite to see me done in. Pleasures to come include a burning, a firing squad, a vaporisation and consumption by a giant green monster. What larks!
In answer to the first query, I can only confess to being unrepentantly happy to be typecast as the evil, blood-letting old man, and lacking the sufficient drive, talent and prettiness to go a-Hamleting. The answer to the second adds up to the deeper meditative pool of this blog entry. It's undeniable. I've died a ridiculous amount of times on stages up and down these mighty British Isles. Part of this comes from playing so many character parts, which almost by default occupy a peripheral or (to be polite) 'featured' role in the action. You simply can't kill off the lead (at least until the end) - unless your director's Alfred Hitchcock and your corpse is Janet Leigh, the drama will implode. My repeated dabblings in villainy and the macabre have doubtless also played a part. I rarely think of it this way, but every character pent up in The York Dungeon must have died at some point. Nothing else would explain the ghastly paleness and startling proliferation of weeping head wounds. So whip out your favourite Chopin death march, and allow Mercadé, messenger of doom and part-time slobbering policeman of Love's Labour's Lost, to induct you into the many, many deaths of James Swanton...
(Note: I'm not planning on dying in any serious way in Pickwick & Nickleby. However, I will be caning myself into a bloody pulp towards the end of the night. Come for that reason alone!)
BAHM-BAHM-BA-BAHM, BA-BA-BAHM-BA-BA-BA-BAAAAAAHMMM!
1. Puss in Boots (2005)
Crime Scene: Methodist Church Hall, Poppleton
Victim: The Ogre
Method: Self-transfiguration to a mouse and subsequent braining against castle wall.
Details: The one that started it all. After being raised on David Leonard's stentorian baddies in Berwick Kaler's annual line-up of compassionate rubbish, it was a true thrill to become the ludicrous rotting core of pantomime villainy. My Ogre was a monstrosity, and quite deserving of all he got. My height was enhanced to truly loony extremes, not only by the Karloff-style boots that Richard kindly provided for my feet, but my insistence on the anachronistic addition of a top hat, which ensured that I projected at least a foot out of vision at all times. Add in a dollop of green make-up, a straggly black wig, a Son of Frankenstein sheep-skin and the mangled vocalisations of Fredric March's Mr Hyde... and we have a creature crying out for a killing, ladies and gentlemen. The death was the inevitable denouement to Puss's ever-so-clever scheme to escape being made into cat pie. A petty, small-minded contest was established, with the Ogre compelled to transfigure himself into steadily less compromising entities (though no water goblets, sadly enough). Our state-of-the-art church hall special effects unit meant that I would step into the wings during a series of short blackouts, allowing a substitute actor to take my place; an illusion that never quite worked, mostly due to the impossibility of moving anywhere in haste when you're pushing eight foot and in danger of demolishing the very flimsy set. A bear came first, I think - the supremely unintimidating cuteness of a child in mask and costume. I'm not sure whether anything followed that, but I do recall that the dubious finale was the Incredible Hulk vaulting in to wreak some tame, family-oriented mayhem. I was finally cajoled into transmogrifying into an unconvincing rubber mouse. (Don't ask me why an Ogre would so blindly deliver on the whims of an obnoxious talking cat... probably the tall person's version of short man syndrome.) To top it all off, that darned cat doesn't even eat me. Oh, no. That would be too easy. Instead, I'm hurled into the wings, an action so brutal that it provokes a high-pitched scream. This is probably a burst of agony from my future self, appalled at the first of my many off-stage deaths. Devastatingly ironic given that I'd got my panto break, aged nine, playing a mouse in the same church's Cinderella. Oh, how the wheel spins round!
Rating: 7/10
2. Macbeth (2005)
Crime Scene: Georgian Theatre, Richmond
Victim: King Duncan
Method: Stabbed to death by shady supposed ally with dagger fixation.
Details: The plot-based ramifications of the Scottish Play are so well-worn that to repeat them would be patronising. I'm firmly of the opinion that Duncan had it coming. Or at least, my version of Duncan. He was pretty frail (easier to knock over), pretty irritating (forced merriment through and through) and drummed into hyper-redundancy by the cuts (severely edited version, this one). This destruction disappointed me on a few counts. To start with, it was my long-time theatrical arch-rival, Sir Christopher Guard, who'd be doing the killing. Chris and I have a fraught theatrical legacy. In the years that followed, I was Scrooge to his Bob Cratchit, Merrick to his Treves, and finally - triumphantly - Richard III to his... Richard III (a weird production, better not to ask). Stoked by a viewing of the seminal bloodshed of Roman Polanski's Macbeth (which does show the Duncan murder, and coheres a little too neatly with the Sharon Tate tragedy for comfort), I had every hope that there'd be a picturesque orgy of blood-packs and steaming rubber entrails to contrast with the sleek finery of our old-fashioned theatre. This didn't seem so very irrational at the time. After all, our Banquo was favoured with a truly sensational Tarantino rip-off for his dispatch, in which the full company swayed, grinned and clapped to the peppy accompaniment of 'Stuck in the Middle with You' - a collective glorification in the S&M-tinged ecstasy of a seductive Murderer knife-dance. Surely Duncan deserved a send-off that was at least decipherable from the text, despite not being shown. Such was not to be, and I had to content myself with returning as a Caligari-style ghost at some point in Lady Macbeth's midnight wanderings. Come to think of it, I remember rehearsing an opening to the play that would have been at least equally satisfying. I was originally to suffer a protracted, expressionist crucifixion at the hands of the Weird Sisters, only then settling into prayer for my first appearance. This image would have resurfaced at the conclusion, with the Christ-like agonies of kingship now transferred to Malcolm. A neat idea, adventurously dark given the average age of the cast, and a real pity that it didn't make it into the final play. So, yes... Off-stage again. Begrudgingly. But since this production lay in the enduringly capable hands of Mr Crisp, it did lead rather pleasingly into mortality number three...
Rating: 3/10
3. A Christmas Carol (2005)
Crime Scene: Manor CE School
Victim: Ebenezer Scrooge
Method: Moralistic inter-dimensional vision of possible future grave-site.
Details: Now this was a fun one. That I never felt I got it right is almost beside the point. Crisp balanced the elements so thrillingly that it was a true privilege to be obliterated. Everyone knows the scene: Scrooge's nightmare vision of the winter cemetery in the company of Christmas Yet to Come. We had a black gravestone at centre stage, on which 'Ebenezer Scrooge' was slowly, agonisingly engraved with a stick of chalk. At this massive distance from the production, I have a feeling that we got the same person who played Belle (Scrooge's spurred lover of Christmas Past) to write the name upon the stone, and this would certainly have added a certain darkness to the proceedings that I consider inseparable from the Crispian theatrical aesthetic. In order to keep as much of Dickens's flavourful narration as possible, our production had a substantial chorus. (One of my central gripes with Dickens adaptations in general is the curious resistance to using Dickens's language, which is uniformly excellent - even if it risks being a little too 'complete' and having all the characterisation done before the actor gets a look-in.) Done out in top hats and flock coats, they looked like the ghosts of the Sweeney Todd ensemble gone wrong. They proceeded to shout me into the dust of the earth with a vigorous round of chanting: 'Ebenezer, Ebenezer, Ebenezer Scrooge! Nobody, nobody, nobody likes you!' This would admittedly be slightly lame coming completely out of the blue - the chant had earlier featured as the playground bullying in Scrooge's tormented vision of his school days. It was like being caught in the middle of a cyclone - comparable to the cathartic thrill of doing a musical, in which your energy undergoes a massive boost from the analagous support of the orchestra - before I at last collapsed with an anguished (ie: overacted) cry of 'Oh, tell me I may sponge the writing from this stone!' In the best tradition of Noel Coward, I couldn't have liked it more! In general with the Carol, I was about as on-stage as you could possibly get. But whether a hypothetical future demise (for which the living representation of the character was present) really counts as a death at all remains a point for fierce debate. And I suppose that if you follow that train of logic, Scrooge's death occurred some time before he was buried, in an imaginary vignette that can only be situated... off-stage. Ah. Damn.
Rating: 9/10
4. Hickory Dickory Dock (2006)
Crime Scene: Methodist Church Hall, Poppleton
Victim: The Black Imp
Method: Suckered into enchanted grandfather clock by supernatural forces.
Details: That's the Black Imp in the picture above. Fearsome little devil. Sort of stylish in his silken trousers, impeccably pointed winkle-pickers and oversized gorilla mitts (a totally incongruous feature that I nonetheless insisted be imported from the Ogre of Puss in Boots fame). Not remotely interested in children, as the image would have you believe - although the character did lead to my all-time guiltiest backstage moment, when some poor, blithe, innocent infant tottered into my path, took one look at me, burst into hysterical tears and ran as fast as their wee little legs could carry them. King Ogre II, basically. And desperately in need of a killing. Panto plots are strained and tenuous enough when they spring from the wholesome medium of fairytales - once you start cobbling them together from fragmentary old nursery rhymes, you can guarantee that nothing will make sense. Hickory Dickory Dock is one of the select few plays for which I still have the script, but as I flick through it now, it's all a senseless, incoherent mess, brimming with daft wizards, greedy squires, resolutely heterosexual dames and villager after villager after villager... In other words, yet another opportunity for the immortal citizens of the Poppleton Methodist Players to play naught but themselves for a good two and a half hours of community-based tedium! I think the basic concept underpinning the Black Imp was that he originated in an ultra-evil hidden dimension accessible only by antique, pastel-painted grandfather clock. But naturally, a demented sorcerer must venture into this kingdom of shadows to bag himself a very shiny jewel (sounding pretty similar to Aladdin, this), which will give him all the diabolical derring-do needed to take over the world. Standard panto fare, in short. But in a moral universe more black-and-white than the kabuki-style design imprinted on my face, the panto baddie must be foiled. This can swing in one of two directions. I believe the sorcerer received the lower order of punishment: a character reformation at the eleventh hour, probably in response to being forced to marry the ugliest cast member. More to my taste is the full-on pulverisation ritual, deployed to lastingly obliterate a seed of unquenchable evil. I forget exactly how or why, but the Black Imp was drawn back into the clock as though dragged by a retinue of wild and conveniently invisible horses, howling in agony as the door was closed on him for all time. Who can tell what happened afterwards? Having no money whatsoever to fritter on a lavish array of wind machines and motorised wire effects, I got to go a grand old bit of physical comedy, contorting my body into wild arcs and dips as I tried to wedge myself into the surprisingly tiny chink at the front of the clock. I'm certain that I all but knocked the prop over on one night, but it was fun enough. Above all, don't ask me where the mouse of running-up-the-clock fame entered into the proceedings. Shameful... Utterly shameful. Almost as shameful as this adding up to another off-stage death - or at least, only partially on-stage. Curses!
Rating: 6/10
5. Murder Me Always (2006)
Crime Scene: Manor CE School
Victim: Fritz Fontaine
Method: Hammy enactment of self-written, self-indulgent hack work.
Details: Despite the title, I didn't get murdered in this. This is probably just as well, seeing as the unlucky person who did (the fictional 'director' of a play-within-a-play) was out for the count in ten minutes flat. Truly the Duncan of Murder Me Always... My secondary school used to hold a murder mystery event every October. These were always well-intentioned affairs, but farcically shoddy. It was accepted that everyone would be glued to their script, no set would exist beyond a selection of black drapes and whatever mouldering sticks of furniture could be dredged up from beneath the stage, and any acting that went on was ropey, generalised and thoroughly underwhelming. I'm still undecided as to whether Lee Mueller's writing is deliberately bad or not. (The age-old question: when does deliberately bad writing become just, well - bad? I suppose as soon as it becomes boring... which is an accusation you can levy at almost any of these paint-by-numbers murder mystery shenanigans.) I'll let you decide for yourself by quoting the relevant chunk. My character was an outrageously large ham (I told you there was minimal acting), sporting a pipe and white scarf at all times, who, with the pompous bombast typically restricted to Christopher Lee, insists on recreating the highpoint of the evening's cancelled drama: 'The play we were doing this evening was indeed a delight. I actually had quite a dramatic death scene. As you may know, Mr. Swanwallow, whom I was portraying, ingests poison and dies. It was a brilliant scene. Here, allow me to demonstrate before everyone else arrives. (acts this out) I come stumbling in through this doorway. I am clutching my throat and gasping for precious oxygen. I turn a few times and struggle to utter some prophetic final words. "Do not go gentle into that good night! Rage! Rage! Against the... Uhhh! Aggg!" ... Then I pitch myself and fall to center. (lies down) My hand reaches up, as if to welcome the oncoming image of death. I reach for the light. And alas, darkness. I die.' It's one of the rare occasions on which I've received a spontaneous round of applause for being insufferable and outlandish - the other that springs to mind was covering up Coupler's 'enthusiasm' for Young Fashion on the last night of The Relapse (an unforgivably dirty sight gag - and a complete accident) - so the play's prominent in my memory for that reason alone. Now! This was quite the on-stage death - but as with A Christmas Carol, it's one that's debatable through and through. After all, the character was alive and well and stumbling across the stage as normal only seconds later... Curse and double-curse it!
Rating: 5/10
6. The Elephant Man (2007)
Crime Scene: Manor CE School
Victim: John Merrick
Method: Bombastic religious breakdown followed by impromptu self-asphyxiation ritual.
Details: Typical, isn't it? When I finally get to an unquestionable, certified, one-hundred-per-cent genuine on-stage death, it requires a more sensitive treatment. This is about the closest I've got to method acting, so far as I really did end up struggling to breathe and became very red in the face in the process - unless it's the lighting, I think that's what's showing up above. It's not even worth making fun of this one, to be honest. The real Merrick had a truly horrible life, and the version we played was quite a bit more gratuitous than the scene that features in the Bernard Pomerance original (which won the Tony Award for Best Play way back in 1979). The action that directly preceded the death was that horribly awkward, dragged-out conversation between Merrick and Treves, in which Merrick attacks his master's skewed moral code with regards to sex and medicine ('Is it okay to see them naked if you cut them up afterwards?'), before the good doctor's patience is sufficiently frayed that he turns against the deformed, unhappy man he'd originally sworn to protect ('For God's sakes. If you are angry, just say it. I won't turn you out. Say it: I am angry. Go on. I am angry! I am angry! I am angry!). This exposes a last stubborn shred of belief in Merrick ('I believe in heaven...') and leaves the heartache of his beloved Mrs Kendal's banishment from the hospital unresolved. What followed was pretty nasty, oddly exhilarating, but black and bleak to the very core. Merrick first had to enter in tears, building his way towards an impassioned, frustrated crescendo as he repeats the words of his supposed benefactor: 'I am angry... I am angry... Go on, say it, you freak! I am angry! I am angry! I am angry! I am angry!' Being an actor with a greater than usual reputation for going over-the-top, it was certainly refreshing to have a scene in which this was positively demanded by the script. This can be very dangerous. When a character's entire emotional integrity hangs in the balance, these scenes can swing either way, and I've little doubt that the success of the final performance falls to individual perception. Certainly, when I recorded Erik's two monologues from Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, both of which are as teary and anguish-laden as they come, they provoked a sharply divided reaction. The second has garnered 82 responses to date, and the range and dynamism of response is comical to say the least: 'That was the scariest thing I have ever seen. And I'm not exaggerating here'; 'It reduced me to shaking limbs and tears, and for that I give you my thanks'; 'I don't have words to express my gratitude and the emotions you provoked in me! That was the thing that made me tremble in fear and cry in sympathy for Erik! Just great and beautiful in a strange way. Because even in a man as ugly as Erik, there is beauty...; 'It's not that your voice is bad, I just can't imagine that voice singing in a way that would trick a person to fall of a boat or something'; 'You make Erik sound like a drunk Stewie Griffin, it's just overacting'; 'You WAAAAAY overdid the voice over and the sob of your vocalization sounds silly and ridiculous'. They go on like this, streaky bacon style, alternating flashes of light and dark... Whether the performance is a good one or a bad one (I'll admit that I'm not its biggest fan/Phan) is almost irrelevant, and, judging from these remarks, nearly impossible to determine... Sometimes it's just a case of trying to be fearless, dropping those troublesome inhibitions as much as you're able and really letting rip. When the situation demands it, it is your most solemn duty. In my humble view, the trials of the Elephant Man merit considerably more than a watered-down trickle of pathetic sentiment. It's a little like opera, these epic scenarios when you're expected to step up to the plate and deliver. Pavarotti frequently used to mention the sublime terror of hitting the high notes - Will he make it? Will he not? - and I suppose that there's a cross-over here. The modern vogue for understatement, whilst it certainly has its place, is too often rooted in embarrassment and narcissism... But enough ranting. Merrick goes on to read from Psalm 23, the perennially touching 'The Lord is my shepherd...', which turns up in innumerable film scenes as the condemned man walks to the electric chair (senseless Lugosi potboiler Invisible Ghost springs to mind). A bit of a cliche maybe, but no bigger than David Lynch's decision to wallpaper Merrick's death in his film of The Elephant Man with the strains of Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' (we opted for John Barry in our version, and made eager use of 'The Day the Earth Fell Silent' from 'The Beyondness of Things'). Then comes the suicide. The real-life Merrick could never lie down to sleep like normal people - he had to remain in a strained, half-croucing position on an evening, supported by an impenetrable fortress of cushions and bedding. It's never been verified that Merrick intended to take his life (for what it's worth, he was zealously Christian - or at least seemed to be), but it's bleak to speculate on how far his deformities might have progressed had his life been allowed to continue. And so, delivering on his wistful proclamation of earlier that 'sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams', Merrick leans back and suffocates on the weight of his own physicality. There was a lot going on in this death. It's fortunate that I consider it one of the few times I've (almost) got something right.
Rating: 9/10
Next time I'll be picking up with the eight (that's right, eight) remaining deaths I've had the pleasure to experience. Often twice in the course of the same play. Clearly there's public appetite to see me done in. Pleasures to come include a burning, a firing squad, a vaporisation and consumption by a giant green monster. What larks!
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