Recent Preparations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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