The Plague

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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