I've at last finished Dombey and Son, and it was a most pleasing experience. It's one of the more overlooked and underrated Dickens works, probably due to the lack of a canonical film or television adaptation to keep its memory alive. Based on potted descriptions of the narrative and a somewhat misleading cover illustration, I was certain I was in for an extremely dull, Conrad-style wallow through innumerable insufferable descriptions of rigging, delineated in terms so arcane and pedantic that they demand constant recourse to footnotes (and, as Noel Coward once said, 'Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love'). However, it was an enormous success when first serialised (which can't be said for certain more famous Dickens works, such as the low-selling, riot-inducing enigma of Martin Chuzzlewit), and was at least a work that Dickens believed worthy enough to outlive him. For my money, it's more than deserving of the time it takes to wade through its thousand-odd pages - and every bit the equal of Bleak House, which it seems to foreshadow in structure, character and the pervasive sense of some overwhelmingly deep and terrible mystery at the centre of it all. And despite my perennial failure to 'get' the appeal of Conrad, some of Dombey's most memorable passages are those focused on clutter and complication; the depressing, junk-laden wasteland of industrialised modern life. This sort of thing held a dark fascination for me long before I encountered Dickens, but there's no denying that it's pasted all over the master's work. The horrors of the Jellyby residence in Bleak House might be the finest example - a place where you're as likely to trip on a bawling infant as some vestment of bric-a-brac - but Dombey's sprawling shop of disused nautical heirlooms is nearly as effective. Oliver Twist, which I'm halfway through by now, is one of those select few novels that everyone feels they've read without reading it, but what every adaptation to date has skimped on are the remarkable, horrifying scenes of the London poor wading knee-deep through the poisonous mud spewing from their own decaying houses. Quite unexpected and almost Lovecraftian... One of Dickens's greatest strengths as a novelist is the uncanny impression of buried complexity he conveys. But this doesn't emanate from a razor-sharp affinity with the geographical particulars of the metropolis, as it so often does in Peter Ackroyd - more often it falls to precisely these jagged, disorded images suggestive of an ultimate chaos. There is a strange appeal in all this. Perhaps the sense that Dickens is just as lost as we are? The hopelessness of man's condition redeemed by the dark fascination it exerts? Whatever it is, it's something I intend to pry into further.
The main reason I've been so unproductive lately has been my acting commitment with The York Dungeon. I've been installed in there for three weeks now, and it's lived up to every inspiriting adjective in my slightly camp lexicon. Energising - life-affirming - transcendent - revelatory! As usual, I babble, but the unadulterated pleasure in returning to my macabre and hammy Yorkshire roots has been very special. There is indeed a feeling of having returned to my roots - something at once segregated from the suffocating hierarchies of the Cambridge drama scene and yet so much more important than it. For one thing, it's a professional acting job, and, by that token, a hell of a lot more representative of the real world of acting than the puffed-up imaginative bubble of university play-making. It's back-breaking physical labour, ferociously taxing at times, and if you're not enjoying it, you quickly find that you're utterly lost. There's not an ounce of pretension about it either, another vital life lesson that should be made more accessible in the merry old land of Cambridge. Great friendliness too; that all-too-rare sense of camaraderie. It really is like a family. It is this confused bundle of emotion that has convinced me to fire up and maintain an exhaustive record of the attraction as it currently stands. This will absorb ten entries in total. I'll still be talking Dickens and whatever other nonsense should occur to me, but my first duty will be to describe every Dungeon show in immersive detail. It's a more special and surprising place than it first appears, and deserves to be memorialised properly. So expect something on Clifford's Tower next time - and the truly horrible massacre of the Jews it stands for.
On a lighter note, it now seems that the details for Pickwick & Nickleby have materialised on the ADC Theatre website! And what's more, there's now an opportunity to book tickets! I didn't much fancy messaging people straight away about it - unlike the panto, it's hardly the sort of show that the world at large are going to be clamouring and scrabbling to get tickets for - but the option is now there if you're feeling particularly (unhealthily?) eager. It's another of those slightly heart-in-the-mouth steps, where the knowledge that the show is really happening and that people might drop by to stare at you starts to operate with genuinely skin-crawling terror... However, in the lively spirit of self-promotion, I'll toss you a handful of links. This one opens up the cheery little window shown below, through which you can directly order tickets. Also worth checking out are the ADC Diary and Drama listing, which offer up a selection of tantalising productions you might well be interested in.
An email from John Haidar has also reminded me that The Alchemist is still very much up and running. A programme-style blurb and image are required for the production's website, and eventually the programme itself. A simple enough task perhaps, but it did get me thinking. What, for example, is the best way of formatting a programme blurb? I know that for the programme of Alchemist 1.0 (a beautiful relic if you can find one... which you won't), I regurgitated a simple list of plays with their attendant societies. This seems to be the standard for jobbing actors in the outside world, and even with a host of credits as undistinguished as mine, it does ooze out a heartening gloss of professionalism. But at the amateur level, is it really worth going through the motions? For one thing, it's a bit, well, boring. I like to see what parts an actor has played, even if it does tend towards spear-carriers and individually numbered plebeians rather than Hamlets and Lears. Although that I suppose is one of the benefits of the more prosaic and functional programme model - the aura of heightened prestige it cultivates might be precisely what's needed to give a deflated ego a much-needed boost. However, honesty is more interesting to me, so I've drafted up a new programme that lists roles in conjunction with plays. This is pleasing, if only because it gives me the opportunity to include the attention-seeking lunacy of 'Mad Old Pirate' and 'Schuppanzigh' among my credits. One thing that annoys me in this approach is the steady stream of monosyllables it winds up provoking, with each role aggressively pinned to its dramatic context by an endlessly repeated 'in'. A in B, B in C, C in D, D in E... Taken the wrong way, it all sounds curiously perverted, and, more to the point, comes across as a bit clumsy and fumbling when more than four or five plays are listed. A counter-approach is to list the production before the role - so, E as D, D as C, C as B and B as A... But this of course only reverses the problem. I do like the way that it suggests the production to be bigger than the individual actor, but it's still not perfect.
After lengthy deliberation, I settled on good-naturedly plagiarising Simon Haines's blurb formatting (at least as it appears in Alchemist 1.0), which vetoes the prepositional downpour for a Conrad-esque frenzy of punctuation: so commas, semicolons and brackets galore. (I dislike Conrad's fiction only; his punctuation is to be admired.) I like this approach a great deal - I suppose it could be seen as mechanical, but to me it gets the job done smoothly and elegantly without all the messy frills. The only downside to this procedure is that my blurb feels rather paltry in comparison. So many of Simon's characters are monumental beings, encompassing an indecent quantity of Shakespearean gentility, alongside other wonderful stuff, like Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, while I'm stuck with things like Dull and Coupler, which not even classical pedants are likely to remember. Maybe a spate of canned descriptions is more in line for my sort of character. A Friends-style attack perhaps - 'the one who fouled up some perfectly good iambic pentameter by adding extra syllables onto words' and 'the one with the extreme back pain who groped everything in sight' could work nicely. But this whimsy returns us to the undying problem of length. I've also decided to scrap societies unless they really do have a strong reputation. Now this has solved the problem of length - and much to my liking.
John's email also necessitated taking a new programme picture. I've never had a professional mug-shot taken, so I've no fixed standard to go by with these things. I don't own a camera, so I was forced to resort to my webcam. I have no knowledge of photography, so a desk lamp and abundant darkness were forced to stand in for any creditable talent for things of this nature. It was diverting enough though, and I think I finally managed to settle on one that I was happy with. However, this process exhumed its own set of problems. What precisely is the gurning quotient when it comes to a programme image? It's staggeringly hard to catch anyone off-guard with a photograph. And such an aim may not in fact be desirable here. My brother often ripostes me for my 'acting face', which, with perilously good observation, is actually no more than me tipping my head forward a bit and allowing my upper brow to cut out the better part of my vision. I wonder whether this is more than an idiosyncrasy or mannerism though. There seems to be a vogue for precisely this shade of gurning nowadays - innumerable dark and exotic creatures, far more dangerous and sexy than I could ever hope to be, glaring at the camera lens with rapacious, wolfish intent. Oh, yes. The 'intense' look. It's never wise to argue with fashion, but in this case, it does seem a bit of a sad put-on. These beautiful marble creatures with their sculpted, unyielding facial pavilions only perpetuate the nasty ideology that underpins the current vogue for naturalism in theatre: yes, we'll go through the motions of behaving like real people, but don't you ever forget that it's just to showcase how transcendently wonderful we are - without recourse to character, we'll bloody well hold you spellbound. I'd much rather see someone smiling or behaving outrageously or simply looking a little flawed. In this context, the photo's unlikely to be getting me any jobs, so the mission is to distil some personal quality that I believe deserving of wider broadcast. I went for mildly inquisitive/bemused/befuddled in the end, but I'll probably go off it again as soon as the wind changes.
Shooting the programme image also gave me the opportunity to review my gurning for July 2010 (a vital skill at the Dungeon once your voice packs in). The full gallery of nasties can be found on Facebook, but the image beneath is my current 'favourite'. It was some time before I realised why I liked it so much. But then it hit me. It resembles nothing so much as the infamous Hatbox Ghost (Walt Disney Imagineering, circa August 1969). It seems I am becoming the ghouls that inspired me. All the more reason to write on the Dungeon.
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