Looking balefully up at that questionable title, I wonder whether it would be improved with the word 'actor' locked squarely in inverted commas. For there is nothing in my person as likely to bar me from future dabblings in drama as the tricky little matter of my voice. I didn't choose character acting - character acting chose me. For who doesn't initially set out in theatre to be one of those charmed, elfin creatures, strutting about being so pretty and admirable, courting such massive acclaim for the lightest possible touch? It is only natural that drama's initial draw should be its superficial side: if I stand on a stage and do things... people will like me. In spite of my impassioned vitriol for naturalism, and in spite of my tirelessly well-hewn arguments to its detriment, I have a sneaking suspicion that it amounts to little more than an insecure hate campaign against a fragment of my being that I'm unable to change. As with various other aspects of my person - my obsessive tendencies, my sexuality, my extremely antisocial character - I've come to accept that my blasted voice is as much a blessing as a curse. For instance, it happens to coincide with my very narrow body of interests - numerous adventures in the macabre, the brazenly theatrical, the grotesquely comedic and the therapeutic catharsis of a jolly good shout. Did my voice shape itself in response to these interests? Or perhaps go some way towards creating them? It's difficult to say. Let me instead burden you with an achingly comprehensive history of my voice - and how my distorted vocalisations have provided me with pleasure and pain in roughly equal measure.
I have no distinct memory of it first striking me that my voice was odd. It must have come from listening to myself in some recording or other. This is universally accepted as an uncomfortable experience, and, in one way, it confronts a cornerstone challenge in the acting trade: bridging the gulf between thought and action to make sure that as little as possible is lost in translation. It's for this very reason that the fruity, full-blooded and oh-so-very theatrical voices of the recent past are not to be dismissed as tasteless or contrived. As sustained acts of exaggeration - and hence projection - such vocal stylings provide a commendably simple solution to the problem by tackling it from the inside out: if the tongue cannot be sufficiently quickened to synchronise with the brain, then it is the tongue that must slow and richen in tone and be moulded by will into a more expressive instrument. The alternative is the tedious path to purity pursued by drama schools, where skill is progressively beaten into the student by successive turns of chastisement and penitence. This would seem to be the more effective and lasting option, but it demands a real commitment to change that can only be realistically facilitated in those forced conditions of sustained high pressure. For the rest of us then, the mere mortals, we're pretty much stuck with the voices we acquire by daily habit. I can't have been older than ten when I had vocal epiphany, and was most probably quite a bit younger.
And, oh - how I hated my voice. Wetness, principally - a sort of damp quality, horrible and sloppy, as though a deal too much saliva was sloshing about up there. Yet this quiddity seemed to wrap itself loosely about my tongue, as though absorbed into some burdensome phantom flannel, squashing flat my vowels and blurring my consonants into a single syrupy spatter. This blow was cushioned by other embarrassments. Infuriatingly deep even at that stage, long before the fabled voice breaking of pimply, pockmarked puberty. I often wonder whether my famed coughing fits as a baby - enormously loud and alarming whoopings, to the extent that concerned relatives feared I was choking to death - might have blown out my upper register for good, because the prevailing tonelessness of my voice was set in stone from infancy. I've certainly suffered with other diseases of the head holes, particularly those of the nasal strain. Now I accept that I will sound permanently as though my nose is blocked, regardless of the emptiness of my nasal passageways. And born of this thick linguistic soup was the most terrible scourge yet - a tone of world-weary smugness and orotund complacency that made me want to retch. It had crept into my speech while I was all unawares, and now resisted every effort at removal. The lugubrious voice of James Swanton was taking form - the bassoon recorded at half-speed. I couldn't have been less happy with it.
Thus was the start of my slow and steady descent into vocal paranoia. In one sense, it would make sense to say that my childhood died on the day that I first became aware of my voice. Crippling self-consciousness set in, and never again could I feel quite so liberated and carefree. Then again, in another, quite different sense, that would be talking a load of self-pitying bollocks, and although my voice did become a perennial hang-up, life remained very good indeed for the most part. Vocal stress seemed localised to brief incidents, which would all of a sudden flare up and just as quickly burn out again. I can't claim that I've ever been bullied in any serious way, but certain incidents have stayed with me. For instance, I once remember being asked 'what's wrong with your voice?'. Not an ounce of irony in it. Cold, brutal - head-on. Ouch. My retort was a short stunned silence, followed by a reflexive 'what's wrong with yours?' Far too cerebral for two children to appreciate, particularly when one is really rather hurt and the other is lacking in emotional intelligence and/or a braincell. There were other moments of this nature, always an abject humiliation, and in no small part responsible for my becoming so quiet. Gone were the days of playing the clever dick by raising my arm at school. Too terribly aware of being shot down with laughter to risk it. More ambiguous was my time at York Youth Theatre, where for a brief period I became infamous for saying 'oatmeal loaves' and 'jacket potatoes' in a tone of forced Yorkshire merriment. This was the curse of a play I appeared in called Allotments, which, among other things, afforded me the first really good review I'd ever had. The writer was Charles Hutchinson (legendary figure), the outlet was The Evening Press (now rechristened The Press):
The Allotments, a chance for children to play perky pensioners, unearths a comic talent of the future in James Swanton. Watch him blossom. It's all in the voice.
A double-edged sword then. Even though I knew I was crucifying myself to be court jester for a good while longer, it was truly heartening to ease an honest bit of laughter from an audience - in a fairly unforced way as well, something I've rarely managed since. For this is the inexplicable and maddening paradox at the centre of my bipolar vocal relationship. As much as it's held me back in drama, it's been a significant part of what little success I've had. Quite possibly the most significant part.
This is the redemptive side to my voice. As I hinted a little earlier, my style is more to carve the words in the air by force than permit them to form with an effortless grace. So correctly tamed - and suitably loud - I can imitate locutions vaguely suggestive of elegance, and at the very least, I can crush it into an overriding tone of pseudo-classical superiority and fusty English gentility. Cleon in Pericles belonged to this school, as did Pringle in Funeral Games and (in high camp form) Coupler in The Relapse. One of Orson Welles's outstanding truisms on the art of acting was of character as a basic subtraction. If you're playing a merry old soul, you drop your angst. If you're playing a drunk, you drop your inhibitions. If you're playing a rent-boy, you drop your trousers. And so forth. This makes sense to me, but I've always found it to be incompatible with my voice's idiosyncratic grasp of character. As far as I can gather, there's always some consistent and unchanging vocal characteristic a-lurking in the background, some base aspect of 'James Swanton' that refuses to go away, but it is to this canvas that I add my characterisation layer by layer. It's like painting at times - only more airy, more psychic - more loaded with pretentious adjectives! I sense the presence of different channels, often two or three overlapping simultaneously, through which I can project my voice to affect the necessary distortions. More rasp, I find myself thinking, and a touch sharper - now a purring and a key change on that word. The bassoon occasionally aspires to the post of satanic pipe organ. It's a sort of warping process, dictated by sensation, and one that has tested the strength of my voice to my satisfaction. It takes a hell of a lot for me to lose it, and thanks to the large amount of ghouls I've wound up playing (characters hardly renowned for the beauty of their speech), even this needn't be a problem. I'm also pleased to be loud. This seems a trivial point, but I've seen too many perfectly decent performances trashed by inadequate projection over the years to not feel grateful for my naturally active diaphragm. There are also the freak-show accomplishments (an astonishingly underrated form of theatre, as anyone appreciative of Tod Browning's Freaks will know). I don't know of anyone who can drive their voice as preposterously deep as mine; when challenged, I can drop it to the point of unlistenable, harrowing, throat-scalping creepiness. I do a good line in screeching, and have finally located the pocket in my throat that permits me to do this with minimal shredding of flesh. Little things afford me an inordinate amount of amusement. After years of imitating Basil Rathbone's immortal delivery of the line, in reference to the Monster's resurrection in 1939's Son of Frankenstein, 'Or am I supposed to have wh-ipped one up? As a housewife - wh-ips up an omelette?' - yes, I too have managed to hasten my wh-s to breaking point... I babble.
To begin with though, self-consciousness prevailed. I would affect voices by instinct, and in my really, really early efforts at plays, these became organic presences: essentially shapeless, and shifting from line to line as the fancy took me. I dimly recall playing a king in a nativity play, and being absolutely adamant that a line beginning 'we have followed the stars...' (I think) had to be delivered in an elevated, vague and stereotypically mystical fashion, where my voice would rise in pitch and then drift off into silence. Weird to remember that. Sort of pathetic too. And evidently cornerstone to my well-being for a little while that I did indeed manage to get the line out in that way. I was particularly pleased with my Ogre in Puss in Boots, who ranted and raved in the style of Fredric March in 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I even stumbled over words and let sibilance go to blazes as though I was fitted with a set of March's toothsome Hyde dentures (I was wearing a brace at that point in time, which impacted not a fig on my pronunciation, but did lend my grin a pleasingly metallic sheen). My Duncan in Macbeth was, shamefully enough, an extended impression of Boris Karloff in the 1963 version of The Raven, in which his glorified sing-song acting voice is in high gear and summoned up an air of artificial cheer that I thought suited to the war-weary, soon-to-be-murdered Scottish royal. There's a sort of magpie mentality at work here - cherry-picking from a hoard of scanty, fragmented memories instead of aiming at a sobering and objective assessment of character. Of course, this isn't always desirable (aim for a nuanced and compassionate panto villain and you'll be laughed off the stage), and, in some ways, this is perhaps a commentary on the sort of scripts I was dealing with at this time. They were likable enough, and perfectly serviceable, but never the stuff of great writing and didn't involve an ounce of sincere emotion. When I finally was confronted with great writing in Macbeth, I hadn't the foggiest idea how to deal with it, and was quickly resorting to my magpie tendencies again.
As I've discussed elsewhere, the opportunity to play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol was a wee bit of an epoch. On a vocal plane, it was an object lesson in creating character. I had the entirety of the summer to brood on how I might construct the voice. It was an uphill struggle to escape from my recent past in the land of the magpies, but one that was eminently useful. I still looked to the actors of the past as a first inspiration, but in an altogether more committed and comprehensive fashion. No point in going at this thievery business half-cock, after all. I did my research and I did it thoroughly. I discovered that Basil Rathbone had played Scrooge on radio, and tested his locutions to see if they would fit. They didn't. Likewise, I discovered that Laurence Olivier had played the part for an audio book. I had a listen, instantly realised how dreadful he was at it, and started looking elsewhere. I had been greatly inspired by David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist, and looked to both Mr Sowerberry and the Fagin of Alec Guinness as possible Dickensian source material. No go. Karloff reared his head again, as did Vincent Price, Ernest Thesiger (so witty and memorable in The Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein) and Tony Jay, undisputed king of the villainous voice-over. I even checked the performances of Alistair Sim, Albert Finney and Michael Caine in their own variant versions of A Christmas Carol to make certain that I wouldn't copy anything by accident. Originality seems to have been the crux of my battle, so it seems odd that I saw a solution in cluttering my life with old-time actors. I guess that it wasn't so important that what I produced was original - no such thing as originality, after all, what with everything having been done at least once - merely that it was original to me, and some sort of positive development in my limited powers as an actor. I don't remember whether this epic search bore fruit or not, for all of a sudden, the voice sprung from my lips and I instantly knew that it was right for Ebenezer. With rehearsal, it matured into everything I'd been looking for: thin, reedy, begrudging, venomous, fawning and even nasal (by my standards). It's a voice that survives today in my endeavours at The York Dungeon, where Lord Chief Justice Judge Venables Vernon Harcourt the Fifth spews out his proclamations of absolute doom in the same idiolect that once berated Bob Cratchit, fizzled in fear in the graveyard and broke out in ecstatic bellows on Christmas morning. I still believe Scrooge to be the best thing I've ever done. A lot of this is likely down to the time that it came into my life, which invested it with an aura of untold responsibility and personally-felt magnificence. But even allowing for this optimistic gloss, I can't ignore the fact that the production set me on a path of vocal adventuring that has stood me in good stead ever since.
From that time on, I started to delve deeper and deeper into vocal 'creations' - new voices that required practice to hone, but were all the more satisfying for the effort. Just after A Christmas Carol, clearly buoyed up with hubris after my virgin vocal success, I completely ruined the character of Roy in Neville's Island with a heavy lisp and thoroughly goonish delivery, partly based on a reverend I had quietly admired and mocked. More satisfying was The Elephant Man, which was unnaturally high (for me; probably slightly over the normal level for everyone else), querulous; prying and priggish on occasion, and fragile from start to finish. Return to the Forbidden Planet gave me the chance to tip my hat to every horror actor in the book, and I at last settled on a complimentary zig-zag between Tod Slaughter, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, with a little Kesley Grammar and David Leonard (my all-time theatrical hero) hurled in for good measure. Whether or not this was evident in the performance is almost irrelevant. We never sound precisely as we imagine when we speak in life (though to bridge this gap between conception and result as elegantly as possible should be every actor's goal), but some variation of this happy creation will at least get out there.
I think that the zenith of all this was Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was an important project to me for many reasons. I was playing three characters: Goldstein (shadowy, possibly non-existent leader of the rebel movement), Syme (obsessive creator of Newspeak and general nasty) and a Eurasian Prisoner (who dies by firing squad... and says nothing whatsoever). It was to be performed in the main house auditorium of York Theatre Royal, a beautiful venue normally restricted solely to the professional classes. It has also been some eight months since I'd done a proper play, so I was hungry for a return. Goldstein and Syme were both a joy to devise voices for though. The fun in Goldstein was that the voice would be pre-recorded. Although it's a dreadful stress and panic knowing that you have only really one shot at getting a character 'right', this matures into a wonderful relief when the performances finally roll around. This was a lesson that I'd learned on Return to the Forbidden Planet, where my initial vomitings at my projected intonation of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' quickly prospered into delight that I wouldn't have to reproduce it live. It precursed my first entrance, and thus had the effect of filling my head with the right voice and quality of mania in a fashion devoid of the pitfalls of method acting. It wasn't a perfect performance (far from it; you can quite clearly see me reading the script in sections I was told would be edited out!), but at least it was in the can, and the relief was considerable:
Although the adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four from which the company worked was questionable in some respects (having originally been written for a cast of four), the Orwell novel is a masterpiece of sprawling, dystopian detail, and I could refer back to it whenever I wished for character pointers. The revelation for Goldstein was his likeness to a sheep. Instant character voice! Play him like a demented barnyard fluff-ball! Alright, it was a little more nuanced than that. The reasoning that Goldstein was likely a propaganda creation of Big Brother, deployed to whip the workers into a frenzy in the daily hate rallies, justified what could have easily descended into politically incorrect Jewish caricature. There were also two distinct sides to Goldstein on display in the production. First came the vitriolic screams processed through the telescreens. For this I watched a good few reels of Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies. It was a menacing thrill to hear my voice echoing through the great auditorium and know that it was out of my hands; in the spirit of multi-roling, I was among the workers shouting myself down with unrestrained vitriol. The second was a more subdued narration of a few pages of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (cor, big words). For this I listened to a range of audio books to perfect a calm, quiet indifference of tone. Even through a glaringly ostentatious character voice then, a modicum of subtlety and nuance is achievable. Syme was an ungainly mix of Alan Bennett (which meant a lot of 'A Chip in the Sugar') and Kenneth Williams (his intermittent slides into Cockney in the Carry On films rather than his more composed upper-class idiolect). It's another voice that lives on in Dungeon form, slightly modified for the character of William, the plague doctor's grovelling and waspish assistant. I had my doubts about Syme, and felt for sure after our short run that it had been an awkward failure. But then, quite by chance, I stumbled on two reviews online. I reckon that my being singled out is due to my perennial inability to seem young, and hence protruding like a sore thumb in the context of a youth theatre. The first came from York University's student publication, The Yorker:
The most notable performance however was from James Swanton playing Syme. This character was brought to life with a well-portrayed devotion alongside subtle eccentricities that sufficiently developed a broader picture of life in Oceania.
And, in a less celebratory vein, the BBC's backhanded compliment:
With some notable exceptions – James Swanton does a brilliant turn as Winston’s co-worker, Syme – the acting is, in general, unconvincing.
Very nice. But that's not to say that there haven't been some flat-out disasters. My efforts to impersonate Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire were horrendous, excruciating - among the worst things I've done in my life, a cardboard affair due to my inability to master a proper regional accent. I felt like doing as Robin Williams did in Mrs Doubtfire - intoning 'vell, I do voices' with unbridled intensity before launching into a marathon quick-cut montage of Walter Huston, Sean Connery and Ronald Reagan. A newly written play called Ghost's Reflection constitutes the absolute nadir of my theatrical endeavours - not because there was anything wrong with the play, which was a quirky, humorous and fast-paced account of a postman's darkly comic dissatisfaction with life, but my skin-crawling failure to simply SPEAK the words in my own voice. Everything was tremendously excruciating and strained. Oh, it was a train-wreck - and that's not self-deprecation either. The character was meant to be pitiful; not the performance, and not by extension the actor.
York Youth Theatre also afforded me the chance to dabble in another medium that's fascinated me for a good long time: radio. Quite out of the blue, I remember getting forwarded for the job with a bunch of other uncomprehending members. I wound up auditioning by phone, a new but surprisingly comfortable experience, for our very pleasant director Toby Swift. By some blessed stroke of luck, I got the part. I was going to be on BBC Radio 4. For a five-day week then (schooling be damned!), I was back-and-forth on the train to Manchester. The play was The Present, the writer was Jackie Pavlenko, and my character was Carl: the cynical and argumentative son of a put-upon woman cycling through mid-life crisis, bereavement and a crumbling love affair. Even when I do naturalism, it seems I'm cast as the bastard.
I regarded the BBC headquarters with the utmost fascination. I ate every day at the (in)famous BBC canteen, and discovered to my delight that they did a superlative line in cooked breakfasts. I got a tour of the magician's cabinet of the recording studio as well, including the echo chamber used to recereate the distinctive aural quality of an outdoors setting and a flight of stairs coated with contrasting layers of carpet to suit any number of dwellings. On one particularly surreal afternoon, I walked unsupervised down a corridor and happened to see the London Chamber Orchestra crushed into a studio and playing away with vigour. I also got to act alongside Jim Millea, a name that will mean little to most people, but is thrown into sharp, instant relief when it is remembered that joined the immortals as Neville: the endlessly incompetent pub landlord of Hollyoaks fame. For the uninitiated, Hollyoaks positively demands to be watched. It's by far the funniest thing on television in this day and age, sometimes intentionally, more often unintentionally, a sort of postmodern version of The Alchemist - a dark urban landscape populated with squalid, degrading and sinful characters who drum themselves into yet deeper cesspools of criminality, violence and sexual depravity. Anyway, Millea was great. Did the most convincing impression of a parrot I've heard in my life. Yes, that's right. A pet shop is the perfect venue for a mid-life crisis. All in all, a lovely experience. But when I listened to the broadcast, I found myself wincing a fair bit and leaving the room whenever I came back on. Make no mistake, it was 'JAMES SWANTON' (capitalised this time). It's a disquieting thought that the performance of mine that reached the largest number of people was rife with the natural tics and mannerisms that I despise so much - the same tics and mannerisms that stand in such firm opposition to my beliefs in the acting business. I have my suspicions that they're the reason I was cast in the first place. I regret nothing. I've listened to the CD since, and it's a tolerable effort - there are good points and there are bad points. The folks at the BBC never indicated that they were anything other than satisfied with my contribution, so full credit must go to them for their humbling professionalism.
One broadcast I didn't listen to was Jonathan Martin: The York Minster Incendiary. This was recorded at BBC Radio York for a production company known as Soundstage North. I had a number of small parts, amongst them one where I just coughed repeatedly, as though trapped in a burning cathedral. More importantly, the play offered a run-in with Berwick Kaler. This name will mean nothing to those not based in York. But to those bearing even a tangential connection to this Mecca of the Northern World, he bestrides the theatrical landscape as the almighty arch-dame: the undisputed king of British pantomime. Contrary to expectations, he was not wearing a frock when I strolled past him at the front doors. Rather, he was puffing on a fag and derisively claiming himself to be the doorman. A bit of a surly chap in person, but a true legend, so I didn't mind. He gave me a good deal of help with an accent I was doing, advice that was both pertinent and greatly appreciated. No other radio offers have been forthcoming, but these were both fascinating and rewarding experiences (paid too; I received no more and no less than two pounds for my Soundstage contribution!) and I look back on them fondly. Truly, this was a golden time - a time when solely my voice was required and seemed adequate for the task's demands.
Less prestigious than these professional engagements, but infinitely closer to my heart, is the long-running (getting on for five years now) Harry Potter spoof. This was the brainchild of my dear friend James Davies, who dashed out what was - to us at least - a mind-bogglingly witty few scenes that recklessly derided and pilloried the wonderful world of K. J. Railing. It's too laden with obscure in-jokes to make much sense to anyone other than us - an unholy, primordial soup of the alumni of Manor CE School, the productions that flourished there and (improbably in the first installment) The Sword in the Stone and A Christmas Carol. 'Chapter One: Hut on the Rock' is probably the finest insight into the kind of impenetrable weirdness that can only prosper with best friends. Watch out for Davies's flair for (kinda) understated metatheatrical flourishes in this first outing:
The series matured (regressed?) from that point on. James Davies took the roles of Harry, Hermione and McGonagall, whilst I played Hagrid, Ron (as a ginger sock puppet... no reason for this), Dumbledore (patterned on the senseless, nigh-incomprehensible wheezings of Richard Harris), Voldemort, Pince, Uncle Vernon, Snape and various others. Another idea that was knocking about from the early stages was to provide a narration in the style of the Harry Potter audio books. Happily enough, this gave me the chance to sling my feeble impression of Stephen Fry into the brew (in the video posted above, it doesn't even sound like his balls have dropped). Great fun, all in all, a little tiresome to edit together at times, but it gave me a restricted opportunity to practice the art of silly voices in the comfort of my own home. I think my favourite of the lot remains 'Chapter Five: The Dursley's House'. The writing was a team collaboration by this point, Mr Fry's voice had deepened to my satisfaction, and the twisted humour was stoked by our shared mockery of the fate of Bertha in Jane Eyre, the hilarious notion that Gordon Brown might soon be Prime Minister, and, most importantly of all, the Radcliffe-Griffiths team-up in Equus - a play that I'd just seen in the West End and been absolutely horrified by (for all the wrong reasons). Idiosyncrasy abounds:
We finally wrapped the series up last year with the recording of the epic song 'Dumbledore'. I have a lot of love for Les Miserables, and the idea that we might blow a respectful raspberry at its most powerful number, 'One Day More!', in the persona of various demented wizard caricatures, seemed too much fun for words. I had a whale of a time in thrusting together the obscene and pernicious lyrics, and even more fun lay in wait in our afternoon of recording, in which my bedroom gave way to a sea-change of caterwauling and diabolical screeches. There's not a correct note to found in the final recording (if you run across one, let me know, and I'll edit it out), and I've never failed to be deeply moved by the sheer quantity of blood that gushes from my ears in the final counterpoint:
This private war against my voice has been waging for so long now that you'd assume I'd have gotten over it. Not so. The latest vocally induced trauma came a mere six months ago, when I went merrily skipping through Cambridge to contribute to a society looking to record selected scenes from Shakespeare. It was a very small part - First Priest in Hamlet - and rehearsals for The Relapse had prevented me doing any meaningful sort of line preparation - not that there were that many of 'em to begin with. In retrospect though, these reminders of my task's humble nature were only to add to the humiliation of the ordeal to come. I should have seen it coming. I was soon pinned in a small room with assorted theatrical luminaries (by Cambridge standards, at any rate). I'd never seen actually seen any of them perform before, but knew two of them by reputation and would soon see a third act and develop a great respect for their ability. I was but a floundering fish, but in my stern dedication to my philosophy of constant utilisation, I was determined to do the best job I could. Well, we did a read-through. I got a note. Fair enough. Show me the path to improvement and I'll gladly follow, every time. But this was no simple note: 'Oh, James - could you make it less "Mr Voiceover Man" please?' Ah. Ah. Kneejerk reaction. 'OH, GOOD GOD...' I screamed internally, 'NOT THIS SITUATION AGAIN.' I tried to laugh it off. Feebly. It was no use. No way out. From that point on, I was dead inside. So it went on. On and on. Recording after recording after recording. And every time I provoked some snarky, biting, quite unintentionally soul-destroying response. The nightmare climaxed in my actually being led aside, as the others, to their credit, all retreated very politely to their own separate corners, making small talk to disguise their impression of quite how unforgivably bad I was. 'I'm sorry it's so terrible,' I remember saying. 'It's not terrible,' came the reply, which seemed to me near-certain evidence to the contrary, 'You have a great voice, it's just that...' Sometimes there are no words. The eventual conclusion was that I lengthened vowels unnecessarily, so I stumbled back into the recording process, throwing enunciation to the winds and garbling like a petulant steam-hammer to repent for my sins, finally escaping into the cooling nectar of the evening rain, feeling more dejected and miserable than I had for quite some time.
A number of elements conjoined here so precisely as to place me in a state bordering on torment. Having my pronunciation corrected by another actor (but then, that actor always corrects my pronunciation), which made me feel ignorant of how to speak or even read Shakespeare all over again. Projecting such a monstrously bad impression for people I'd only just met and still regarded as somewhat superhuman. The delivery of a promise that had been hovering over me since the audition, in which I'd been sternly instructed to be 'less villain-y' in my reading (whatever the hell that means). Perhaps most rattling was a throwaway comment from the director, which I suppose was meant as consolation: 'Don't let these ADC actors throw you off...' In other words, these people can act. And you can't. I must have been thought the soul of inexperience, and given my unforgivably shoddy performance, I can't blame anyone for getting that idea. Above and beyond it all was that atrocious and execrable voice of James Swanton - damp, unresponsive and ponderous - which was not only embarrassing me to an unprecedented degree, but inconveniencing, irritating and likely also embarrassing a group of people who I wished only to please. Oh, everything against me. Sweat trickling from every pore. Heart lodged in gullet. Shaking nervously. My God. I thought it would go on and on. Fortunately, it didn't, but the scars remained, and I opted to retreat behind my usual rut of protective masks for the remainder of the term. There's no way of proving it, but I believe this experience had a direct knock-on effect on my giving an unprecedentedly hammy performance as Coupler in The Relapse (even by my standards; but given this agenda, I feel no shame), before cutting out that loathsome voicebox entirely by appearing Silent Canonfire, in which my character's tongue being cut out rendered me a mute within a mute play.
I told a friend about the incident. They didn't say much except 'directors are idiots' - and as a prolific director themselves, I'm guessing that that's a general note and in no way a specific attack. It can't be denied that I was unforgivably, impossibly bad... but then I shouldn't have been cast at all on the basis of my equally mannered and uncontrolled audition. It's not the director's task to expunge inferiority from their midst by brute force. They should spot it at the outset and politely decline to get involved. Or else really take the time and effort to get the best from something that has a glimmer of potential, but remains in need of gentle provocation before anything worthy can be done with it. To cast someone and then beat them over the head with their own incompetence is, quite simply, unforgivable. Possibly the tension became a bit too much. The terrifying distinction with radio as opposed to theatre is that the ephemeral quality is gone. There's no lengthy time for development or gestation. One rehearsal, two at most - curtain up, light the lights - and into the can it goes. From this perspective, I can well understand the panic from the director's standpoint. But this carries us to wider problems surrounding the radio performer in general. How far can an actor go knowing they need never learn the lines? Or even scan them before the five minute mark? It's certainly an enviable skill to be able to get things 'right' at a stroke with a sight-reading. I'm a little more suspicious as to whether any of us were getting the best of the text within these stifling parameters. The name of the game was Shakespearean naturalism - which I assume relies on a protean familiarity with the particular texts, which I also assume none of us really possessed - and I failed outright. I'm just glad that I didn't get this same uncomfortable reception at the BBC. Now that would have been truly devastating.
By way of a happier postscript, I recorded the Porter's speech for a production of Macbeth located in the dingy, serpentine basements of the Cambridge English Faculty. This was nothing if not a positive experience. I'd done Macbeth once before, in that severely truncated, expressionistic version at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and had been disappointed to find the immortal Porter cut entirely. Quite by chance then, this play delivered on a dream that had lasted for a fair few years. The positivity was abundant. Yes! You can do it in an arbitrary character voice. Yes! We like that it's over-the-top - that'll be an interesting contrast with the prevalent naturalistic emphasis. Yes! Our recording equipment is only so-so, but our hearts are large and our appetite for play-making contagious! Actors are simple folk. Just pat them on the head and make them feel useful and they'll be pliable to your every whim. Happy performances tend, on the whole, to be good performances, so such an atmosphere is to be encouraged. Even if the sinewy grace and elevation of the Shakespearean nobleman will be forever beyond me, I can at least have a bit of hearty fun with trashing my way through the prose idiots. It gives me license to create my own rhythms in the text - and not fritter away the potential enjoyment of a performance by worrying about someone else's opinion on them.
It's undeniable that there's too much pretension surrounding Shakespeare nowadays -and interesting that Dickens, top candidate for England's second greatest writer in terms of volume and quality of output, has fostered little to none of it. Dickens has retained his connection with the common man. Shakespeare has too, but not to so great an extent. The swift and brutal termination of all that god-awful, wallowy romantic criticism of Shakespeare (usually any text in which that unwieldy term 'genius' is repeatedly abused) was a needed step, but the mind-boggling technical pedantry that was to follow, whilst a considerable boon to scholarship, has proved positively disastrous for severing the Bard from his audiences. In preparation for Richard III, we enjoyed the brief but overbearingly energetic services of a fellow who'd once worked for the National Theatre. An absolutely lovely man, but he did have a way of crushing the life out of me and the rest of the cast by forcing us to repeat a line over and over for five minute stretches, until such time as he felt we were grasping it properly. Only then had we accomplished... what? Self-loathing? Awareness of our own mediocrity? A belief that Shakespeare is forever impenetrable? There was a knock-on effect too. I was left in a state of mild panic ahead of Pericles, my second go-around on the Theatre Royal's main stage, where I'd been asked, in a rare, rare change of pace, to play a basically normal human being. Speaking Shakespeare in my natural voice? Inconceivable! These good-natured bully-boy tactics are all very well in a drama school. But ineffective and counter-productive as a one-off. And certainly a large part of my lack of confidence in approaching Shakespeare. I can like Shakespeare. I can admire him, wonder at him, delight in him, laugh with him, all the frenzied, appreciative gestures. Oh, you bet I can like him - with such focused, driven fixation. But love him? No. There'll always be that fine veneer of academically-charged suspicion. Funnily enough, I get on with Marlowe just fine. Probably because, Doctor Faustus aside, there's not such a devastating cult of searing, white-hot pretension hissing round about him. Dickens remains my idol among writers. Not to mention a more helpful route into learning the ins and outs of acting... But the marathon wrestling match between Shakespeare and Dickens must wait for another blog entry. And another writer who dares feel qualified to write on Shakespeare at all...
Many thanks for trawling through my copious and unrequested ramblings. The topic is at the forefront of my mind due to the sheer virtuoso range of character voices demanded by The York Dungeon. Eight characters, and each in need of a different form of bonkers vocalisation. The fact that some five weeks of constant shouting have caused my vocal facilities to realign means that such things have required a daily reimaging. More than this however, looms the upcoming challenge of Pickwick & Nickleby. All those voices, all clamouring to get out... It's enough to drive anyone crazy.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Clifford's Tower
So it's come to this. Full frontal immersion in all things Dungeonesque. No escape now - not from this point in! Clifford's Tower is the very first section of The York Dungeon that visitors properly experience. First and foremost however is a quite elaborate entrance and queue area. A little digging through old newspaper archives reveals that this section of the Dungeon was the progeny of an extensive refurbishment in 2001 - something that surprised me when I first read it, since I'm so used to the current set-up that I can't imagine the entrance being anywhere else. Here it is:
As this helpful illustration shows, the current entrance is situated dead ahead, within the double doors. It seems the old entrance was just past the bus shelter, through the imposing stone archway on the left. If you pay close attention when hanging about around there (it's now a fire exit - and as a result, a common route for actors leading out the easily terrified once they reach the Ghosts of York section), you can make out the remnants of decorations indicative of the old entrance. There's a hidden sign bearing the legend 'Enter at Your Peril' in bloody red letters, as well as an extremely impressive grim reaper, pitched at an enormous size and bearing down from the ceiling with Draculean fangs and bared talons.
This curiosity aside, the current entrance is a wondrous creation. Once through the doors, visitors are ushered up an imposing wooden staircase flanked by decaying castle architecture. It's every cliched Hollywood Dungeon distilled into one glorious whole; evenly pitched between the monolithic majesty of Universal's Tower of London, the depressive squalor of The Black Sleep and the colourful pulp sensationalism of The Terror by Roger Corman. Just within the doors is the caged figure of an axe-wielding executioner, accompanied by a headless victim kneeling at the block. In one of the Dungeon's many attractive water features, blood gushes from the victim's neck with insatiable gusto for the entire eight hours of the attraction's opening. A hidden smoke machine means that the vignette is usually wreathed in cost-effective atmosphere; a nice little effect when picked up by the wind outside. There's also the bonus of a hidden censor that causes the display to intermittently shoot water at the guests. This can be a little infuriating for even the staff - no matter how many times I pass the damn thing, and no matter how many objects I hurl past it in a vain effort to trigger it before I pass, I still can't figure out a formula for avoiding its severe drenching effects. Just opposite is the carefully themed door that affords safe passage to our underground staff room, from which ghouls in varying states of disrepair emerge at all hours. Seeing as there's no connecting passage between the staff room and the attraction's interior, actors have no option but to walk around the building to access their positions - which at least offers an all-too-rare exposure to the undyingly precious commodity of sunlight - in full view of the queuing guests. This can be fun at times, irritating at others. It very much depends on the crowd and your particular mood. In peak times (and summer is certainly one of 'em), there's usually one actor (bedecked in monk-like raiments and sporting a skull on a stick) stationed at the entrance to entertain the crowd and supply vital information - guidance for anxious parents and children, historical background, our extortionate ticket prices, and so forth. However, that doesn't exempt poor, innocent, undeserving you from public interaction when trying to walk past the crowd as inconspicuously as possible - no mean feat when you're dripping every which way in your flouncy, blood-spattered shirt and period breeches. I can't improvise for toffee, so I tend to growl in some guttural, baleful tone if confronted, and then bolt as quickly as possible. Just this week, fellow Dungeonites took it upon themselves to bellow 'ALL HAIL THE LEGEND!' at me as I crossed to the secret entrance, forcing me to break into an embarrassed dash as they cheered, hollered and broke into Munchkin-style song. Humiliating each other within controlled boundaries is a daily custom at the Dungeon - a constant trial and sometime amusement...
Once up the staircase, there was until very recently a lovely vignette of a man being branded, resplendent in blazing orange, with chains and shackles throwing shadows on the walls behind. It's vanished recently, so it's probably being repaired - it's simply too good an image to be disposed of completely. There's also an elaborate figure of Queen Elizabeth I, wrapped in one of her signature dresses and staring at guests from a raised platform. This was originally part of a special exhibit on wicked women through the ages, which, among others, featured the warrior queen Boadicea (still there last summer, spear aloft and face a horror) and Anne Robinson (a figure loaned out from The London Dungeon - and apparently kept here by popular demand). Elizabeth alone remains. She used to have a sinister black raven perched on her shoulder, a probable nod to the Tower of London's lasting fixation on them, so it's a shame that this too has disappeared. Guests next reach the cash desk, stacked with the inevitable souvenir booklets and glow sticks (one of the most frustrating items in all creation... for a number of reasons I'll go into later), as well as a photo spot featuring an axe and severed head for guests to hold, the stocks for further adventuring, and, in the background, a wonderful skeleton wreathed with cobwebs. Certainly high on my list of Dungeon props I would most like to own. Another skeleton hovers above the cash desk, at once tangled up in and wielding a threatening hangman's noose. Skeletons are my earliest memory of my fascination with horror. Slight creepiness aside, there's something so aesthetically pleasing about them. None of the messy human nonsense - sleek emblems of high design; automatons even, near-robotic in appearance. By this criteria, it was probably equally likely at one time that I'd want to be a doctor, but it seems that less profitable dabblings in English lay ahead.
The atmosphere intensifies tenfold with the entrance into the first show: Clifford's Tower. It's probably the tamest and least ambitious of the current Dungeon shows, but that may just be me speaking as a jaded old cynic, forever annoyed that there's no real place for an actor in there. Visitors enter into an extremely dark wooden corridor - the deepest recesses of a heavily fortified Yorkshire castle. It can get very claustrophobic in there. The sole illumination is provided by flame. It can be seen licking away at the walls, peeping in at every chink and corner, the wood quite black by contrast. There are five or six different means by which the illusion of a blazing inferno is created. There are your standard spotlights mingling red, orange and yellow, a number of burning torches hanging from the walls, and an especially eye-catching device that produces a violent, strobe-like flickering. Most impressive of all is a turret window that provides a view of a sheet of flame. This is a very simple effect - quite literally a sheet, albeit one appropriately fanned and lit - but surprisingly effective. The earliest use of this particular effect in a dark attraction was Pirates of the Caribbean (not the film - the far superior theme park ride... now forever besmirched by the addition of an animatronic Johnny Depp). The story goes that Uncle Walt invited a select colloquy of guests to tour the attraction ahead of the grand opening. As Karl Bacon recalls:
I remember the head of the fire department coming through the lower doors way down there, and he looked up there and saw it and said 'You can't have fire in here!' As he got closer he saw that it was done with colored plastic. He was going to shut them down!
If you'll forgive the pun, this is surefire testament to the effect's powers of persuasion. Many of the Dungeon's special effects are deeply indebted to the wonderful world of Imagineering, so I imagine I'll be referring to Disney attractions quite a bit more as I roll on with my pontifications.
One detail that I used to adore about this window view was subtle enough to be easily missed. If you looked out far enough, you could make out a charred, skeletal corpse, lying prostrate in agony at the base of the fire. Very reminiscent of those interminable scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean of skeletons in various Holbeinesque poses - playing cards, drinking wine, lying in four-poster beds and other sainted nonsense. The corpse has shifted location - now it lies in the corner, pinned beneath the feet of a monk, who hisses prophecies of relentless doom at his captives and does much to increase the tension. In my opinion, this is one of the Dungeon's most effective (not to mention economical) new features. I've been told that The Edinburgh Dungeon opens with the infamous court-room scene, the script slightly rewritten to include references to the multitude of horrors that visitors are yet to experience. It's a truth rarely acknowledged in tourist attractions, but their primary mission is to be good theatre. With this low-key generation of suspense, Edinburgh has the beginnings of an overarching dramatic structure to tie together what risks dissolving into a series of fairly impressive but unrelated vignettes. With the introduction of the monk, The York Dungeon has gone some way towards duplicating this, as well as providing a genuine show to elegantly wallpaper over the Tower's function as a glorified waiting room prior to the first actor-led show. So we hear about The Great Plague (cheery accusations from the monk that one among the audience will soon infect the others), Guy Fawkes (the classic Dungeon description of being hung, drawn and quartered, conveyed in graphic, mouth-watering detail), the Viking invaders (Erik Bloodaxe gets so many grand introductions in the Dungeon that it's disappointing when you meet him, but the name more than warrants it) and witch-burning (clearly a sign that the Dungeon plans on keeping its newest horror for years to come... despite the slight technological dilemmas). Most importantly, we get an intelligible explanation of the history of Clifford's Tower for probably the first time since the feature's 2001 introduction. It is the plaque situated at the foot of the Tower itself - a mere two minute walk from the Dungeon premises - that puts it most succinctly:
On the night of Friday 16 March 1190 some 150 Jews and Jewesses of York, having sought protection in the Royal Castle on this site from a mob incited by Richard Malebisse and others, chose to die at each other's hands rather than renounce their faith.
A considerable amount of Jewish citizens were killed by the fire that the crowd started as siege degenerated into blood-lust, but the greater number died as suicides. Despite the plaque's cheerily low estimate, some have placed the death total as high as five hundred. The Tower was later rebuilt with stones taken from a Tadcaster quarry. These were soon observed to release a suspicious red liquid - an incident that got far too many locals hissing inane superstition about the ghostly blood of restless Jews. In reality, the liquid was produced by the release of small deposits of iron oxide in the stone. Rather than commemorate this idiotic footnote, unworthy of even The Amityville Horror, the Dungeon replicates the inferno. Unlike almost every other event the Dungeon covers, there's not a shred of exploitative fun or self-knowing, cynical irony to be found in it. Frankly, I'm amazed that they went ahead and built it. Maybe my hope that the Dungeon will someday house an exhibit based on Bedern (the York school in which the mad headmaster murdered his pupils and stashed the bodies in a cupboard) isn't quite so improbable. Or maybe the Clifford's Tower section is a product of its time: nine years is a virtual life-age in the realm of the politically correct. In fact, the feature can be argued as an emblem of a time when the Dungeon really did aim to be thought-provoking in exposing the atrocities of the past. Then again, you could also argue that it's just in very bad taste. Yet we receive no complaints about it. Clearly it's a little upstaged by the bad taste yet to come...
The special effects wizardry by which the monk tirelessly delivers and redelivers his fifteen minutes of doom is worthy of comment. As I said a bit earlier, this is one of the Dungeon's few sections not to feature an actor, not that you'd guess this from certain remarks that you hear from the public. Some insist the monk is a real person (usually followed with a comment to the effect of 'the eyes - THEY BE FOLLOWIN' ME!'); others that the head is a hologram, which is vague to say the least and assumes too much of our capabilities; best of the bunch (and always from young children) is 'the head is real - but the body is fake!' Yes. Come to The York Dungeon. Home of the world's first fully functioning disembodied head. Catch him next season with the RSC in Hamlet, alternating as Yorick in Hamlet and post-execution Buckingham in Richard III. The effect is actually no more than a blank, featureless bust onto which the footage of an actor is projected. This is another deception that originated with those tricksy Imagineering folk, who first set it to use in The Haunted Mansion in 1969. The illusion was apparently discovered almost by accident - the happy result of some unstructured play with a statue of an American President and a film reel of actor Hans Conreid impersonating the Magic Mirror. The near-mythic legacy of The Haunted Mansion has led to some memorable pop folklore in America. Among them is Madame Leota, a medium trapped in her own crystal ball, and the unlikely fusion of the remarkable face of Leota Toombs and the chilling voice of Eleanor Audley (harbinger of childhood nightmares the world over with her roles as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty):
Even better are the Mansion's crowd-pleasing Singing Busts. In the lead is the almighty Thurl Ravenscroft, who not only sung the show-stopping 'You're a Mean One, Mr Grinch' for the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Boris Karloff narrated, as well as voicing the immortal green nasty), but gained eternal glory as the never less than grrr-rrr-rrreat voice of Tony the Tiger in innumerable Frosties adverts. Far better than the kid who replaced him, I'm sure you'll agree:
The only downside to this effect is that it precludes the lashings and lashings of smoke that originally made Clifford's Tower that bit more frightening as the first of the Dungeon experiences. So despite the blazing fire, despite the power of all that sound and fury, Clifford's Tower is surprisingly bereft of, well, smoke. Swamp the chamber in a foggy soup and the projector's location is instantly revealed by the telltale streaks of light gushing from the ceiling. I suppose that internal projection is the solution, but apart from being ludicrously expensive, relying on fiber-optics and whatnot, it does tend to make characters look as though their faces are inside out. However, this limitation certainly didn't stop the management piping in gallons of smoke when the figure was in its original location - standing at the docks of a plague-ridden city, dispensing choice witticisms such as 'ALL OF YOU WILL DIE!' (always a popular line in the staff room, where it was quite audible at all times) in the person of a different actor entirely. That always seemed a softer projection than the crisp, digital image that we now have, but that might well have been the smoke working its reductive magic. It's fitting that I end this installment on the topic of The Great Plague, because that's precisely where I'll be picking up next time. And since there'll be a non-projected, flesh-and-blood actor about, I might even get round to discussing some dramatic articles. So: less indulgence of my insane fetish for ghost trains and more nearly on-topic blodgery! Hurrah!
As this helpful illustration shows, the current entrance is situated dead ahead, within the double doors. It seems the old entrance was just past the bus shelter, through the imposing stone archway on the left. If you pay close attention when hanging about around there (it's now a fire exit - and as a result, a common route for actors leading out the easily terrified once they reach the Ghosts of York section), you can make out the remnants of decorations indicative of the old entrance. There's a hidden sign bearing the legend 'Enter at Your Peril' in bloody red letters, as well as an extremely impressive grim reaper, pitched at an enormous size and bearing down from the ceiling with Draculean fangs and bared talons.
This curiosity aside, the current entrance is a wondrous creation. Once through the doors, visitors are ushered up an imposing wooden staircase flanked by decaying castle architecture. It's every cliched Hollywood Dungeon distilled into one glorious whole; evenly pitched between the monolithic majesty of Universal's Tower of London, the depressive squalor of The Black Sleep and the colourful pulp sensationalism of The Terror by Roger Corman. Just within the doors is the caged figure of an axe-wielding executioner, accompanied by a headless victim kneeling at the block. In one of the Dungeon's many attractive water features, blood gushes from the victim's neck with insatiable gusto for the entire eight hours of the attraction's opening. A hidden smoke machine means that the vignette is usually wreathed in cost-effective atmosphere; a nice little effect when picked up by the wind outside. There's also the bonus of a hidden censor that causes the display to intermittently shoot water at the guests. This can be a little infuriating for even the staff - no matter how many times I pass the damn thing, and no matter how many objects I hurl past it in a vain effort to trigger it before I pass, I still can't figure out a formula for avoiding its severe drenching effects. Just opposite is the carefully themed door that affords safe passage to our underground staff room, from which ghouls in varying states of disrepair emerge at all hours. Seeing as there's no connecting passage between the staff room and the attraction's interior, actors have no option but to walk around the building to access their positions - which at least offers an all-too-rare exposure to the undyingly precious commodity of sunlight - in full view of the queuing guests. This can be fun at times, irritating at others. It very much depends on the crowd and your particular mood. In peak times (and summer is certainly one of 'em), there's usually one actor (bedecked in monk-like raiments and sporting a skull on a stick) stationed at the entrance to entertain the crowd and supply vital information - guidance for anxious parents and children, historical background, our extortionate ticket prices, and so forth. However, that doesn't exempt poor, innocent, undeserving you from public interaction when trying to walk past the crowd as inconspicuously as possible - no mean feat when you're dripping every which way in your flouncy, blood-spattered shirt and period breeches. I can't improvise for toffee, so I tend to growl in some guttural, baleful tone if confronted, and then bolt as quickly as possible. Just this week, fellow Dungeonites took it upon themselves to bellow 'ALL HAIL THE LEGEND!' at me as I crossed to the secret entrance, forcing me to break into an embarrassed dash as they cheered, hollered and broke into Munchkin-style song. Humiliating each other within controlled boundaries is a daily custom at the Dungeon - a constant trial and sometime amusement...
Once up the staircase, there was until very recently a lovely vignette of a man being branded, resplendent in blazing orange, with chains and shackles throwing shadows on the walls behind. It's vanished recently, so it's probably being repaired - it's simply too good an image to be disposed of completely. There's also an elaborate figure of Queen Elizabeth I, wrapped in one of her signature dresses and staring at guests from a raised platform. This was originally part of a special exhibit on wicked women through the ages, which, among others, featured the warrior queen Boadicea (still there last summer, spear aloft and face a horror) and Anne Robinson (a figure loaned out from The London Dungeon - and apparently kept here by popular demand). Elizabeth alone remains. She used to have a sinister black raven perched on her shoulder, a probable nod to the Tower of London's lasting fixation on them, so it's a shame that this too has disappeared. Guests next reach the cash desk, stacked with the inevitable souvenir booklets and glow sticks (one of the most frustrating items in all creation... for a number of reasons I'll go into later), as well as a photo spot featuring an axe and severed head for guests to hold, the stocks for further adventuring, and, in the background, a wonderful skeleton wreathed with cobwebs. Certainly high on my list of Dungeon props I would most like to own. Another skeleton hovers above the cash desk, at once tangled up in and wielding a threatening hangman's noose. Skeletons are my earliest memory of my fascination with horror. Slight creepiness aside, there's something so aesthetically pleasing about them. None of the messy human nonsense - sleek emblems of high design; automatons even, near-robotic in appearance. By this criteria, it was probably equally likely at one time that I'd want to be a doctor, but it seems that less profitable dabblings in English lay ahead.
The atmosphere intensifies tenfold with the entrance into the first show: Clifford's Tower. It's probably the tamest and least ambitious of the current Dungeon shows, but that may just be me speaking as a jaded old cynic, forever annoyed that there's no real place for an actor in there. Visitors enter into an extremely dark wooden corridor - the deepest recesses of a heavily fortified Yorkshire castle. It can get very claustrophobic in there. The sole illumination is provided by flame. It can be seen licking away at the walls, peeping in at every chink and corner, the wood quite black by contrast. There are five or six different means by which the illusion of a blazing inferno is created. There are your standard spotlights mingling red, orange and yellow, a number of burning torches hanging from the walls, and an especially eye-catching device that produces a violent, strobe-like flickering. Most impressive of all is a turret window that provides a view of a sheet of flame. This is a very simple effect - quite literally a sheet, albeit one appropriately fanned and lit - but surprisingly effective. The earliest use of this particular effect in a dark attraction was Pirates of the Caribbean (not the film - the far superior theme park ride... now forever besmirched by the addition of an animatronic Johnny Depp). The story goes that Uncle Walt invited a select colloquy of guests to tour the attraction ahead of the grand opening. As Karl Bacon recalls:
I remember the head of the fire department coming through the lower doors way down there, and he looked up there and saw it and said 'You can't have fire in here!' As he got closer he saw that it was done with colored plastic. He was going to shut them down!
If you'll forgive the pun, this is surefire testament to the effect's powers of persuasion. Many of the Dungeon's special effects are deeply indebted to the wonderful world of Imagineering, so I imagine I'll be referring to Disney attractions quite a bit more as I roll on with my pontifications.
One detail that I used to adore about this window view was subtle enough to be easily missed. If you looked out far enough, you could make out a charred, skeletal corpse, lying prostrate in agony at the base of the fire. Very reminiscent of those interminable scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean of skeletons in various Holbeinesque poses - playing cards, drinking wine, lying in four-poster beds and other sainted nonsense. The corpse has shifted location - now it lies in the corner, pinned beneath the feet of a monk, who hisses prophecies of relentless doom at his captives and does much to increase the tension. In my opinion, this is one of the Dungeon's most effective (not to mention economical) new features. I've been told that The Edinburgh Dungeon opens with the infamous court-room scene, the script slightly rewritten to include references to the multitude of horrors that visitors are yet to experience. It's a truth rarely acknowledged in tourist attractions, but their primary mission is to be good theatre. With this low-key generation of suspense, Edinburgh has the beginnings of an overarching dramatic structure to tie together what risks dissolving into a series of fairly impressive but unrelated vignettes. With the introduction of the monk, The York Dungeon has gone some way towards duplicating this, as well as providing a genuine show to elegantly wallpaper over the Tower's function as a glorified waiting room prior to the first actor-led show. So we hear about The Great Plague (cheery accusations from the monk that one among the audience will soon infect the others), Guy Fawkes (the classic Dungeon description of being hung, drawn and quartered, conveyed in graphic, mouth-watering detail), the Viking invaders (Erik Bloodaxe gets so many grand introductions in the Dungeon that it's disappointing when you meet him, but the name more than warrants it) and witch-burning (clearly a sign that the Dungeon plans on keeping its newest horror for years to come... despite the slight technological dilemmas). Most importantly, we get an intelligible explanation of the history of Clifford's Tower for probably the first time since the feature's 2001 introduction. It is the plaque situated at the foot of the Tower itself - a mere two minute walk from the Dungeon premises - that puts it most succinctly:
On the night of Friday 16 March 1190 some 150 Jews and Jewesses of York, having sought protection in the Royal Castle on this site from a mob incited by Richard Malebisse and others, chose to die at each other's hands rather than renounce their faith.
A considerable amount of Jewish citizens were killed by the fire that the crowd started as siege degenerated into blood-lust, but the greater number died as suicides. Despite the plaque's cheerily low estimate, some have placed the death total as high as five hundred. The Tower was later rebuilt with stones taken from a Tadcaster quarry. These were soon observed to release a suspicious red liquid - an incident that got far too many locals hissing inane superstition about the ghostly blood of restless Jews. In reality, the liquid was produced by the release of small deposits of iron oxide in the stone. Rather than commemorate this idiotic footnote, unworthy of even The Amityville Horror, the Dungeon replicates the inferno. Unlike almost every other event the Dungeon covers, there's not a shred of exploitative fun or self-knowing, cynical irony to be found in it. Frankly, I'm amazed that they went ahead and built it. Maybe my hope that the Dungeon will someday house an exhibit based on Bedern (the York school in which the mad headmaster murdered his pupils and stashed the bodies in a cupboard) isn't quite so improbable. Or maybe the Clifford's Tower section is a product of its time: nine years is a virtual life-age in the realm of the politically correct. In fact, the feature can be argued as an emblem of a time when the Dungeon really did aim to be thought-provoking in exposing the atrocities of the past. Then again, you could also argue that it's just in very bad taste. Yet we receive no complaints about it. Clearly it's a little upstaged by the bad taste yet to come...
The special effects wizardry by which the monk tirelessly delivers and redelivers his fifteen minutes of doom is worthy of comment. As I said a bit earlier, this is one of the Dungeon's few sections not to feature an actor, not that you'd guess this from certain remarks that you hear from the public. Some insist the monk is a real person (usually followed with a comment to the effect of 'the eyes - THEY BE FOLLOWIN' ME!'); others that the head is a hologram, which is vague to say the least and assumes too much of our capabilities; best of the bunch (and always from young children) is 'the head is real - but the body is fake!' Yes. Come to The York Dungeon. Home of the world's first fully functioning disembodied head. Catch him next season with the RSC in Hamlet, alternating as Yorick in Hamlet and post-execution Buckingham in Richard III. The effect is actually no more than a blank, featureless bust onto which the footage of an actor is projected. This is another deception that originated with those tricksy Imagineering folk, who first set it to use in The Haunted Mansion in 1969. The illusion was apparently discovered almost by accident - the happy result of some unstructured play with a statue of an American President and a film reel of actor Hans Conreid impersonating the Magic Mirror. The near-mythic legacy of The Haunted Mansion has led to some memorable pop folklore in America. Among them is Madame Leota, a medium trapped in her own crystal ball, and the unlikely fusion of the remarkable face of Leota Toombs and the chilling voice of Eleanor Audley (harbinger of childhood nightmares the world over with her roles as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty):
Even better are the Mansion's crowd-pleasing Singing Busts. In the lead is the almighty Thurl Ravenscroft, who not only sung the show-stopping 'You're a Mean One, Mr Grinch' for the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (Boris Karloff narrated, as well as voicing the immortal green nasty), but gained eternal glory as the never less than grrr-rrr-rrreat voice of Tony the Tiger in innumerable Frosties adverts. Far better than the kid who replaced him, I'm sure you'll agree:
The only downside to this effect is that it precludes the lashings and lashings of smoke that originally made Clifford's Tower that bit more frightening as the first of the Dungeon experiences. So despite the blazing fire, despite the power of all that sound and fury, Clifford's Tower is surprisingly bereft of, well, smoke. Swamp the chamber in a foggy soup and the projector's location is instantly revealed by the telltale streaks of light gushing from the ceiling. I suppose that internal projection is the solution, but apart from being ludicrously expensive, relying on fiber-optics and whatnot, it does tend to make characters look as though their faces are inside out. However, this limitation certainly didn't stop the management piping in gallons of smoke when the figure was in its original location - standing at the docks of a plague-ridden city, dispensing choice witticisms such as 'ALL OF YOU WILL DIE!' (always a popular line in the staff room, where it was quite audible at all times) in the person of a different actor entirely. That always seemed a softer projection than the crisp, digital image that we now have, but that might well have been the smoke working its reductive magic. It's fitting that I end this installment on the topic of The Great Plague, because that's precisely where I'll be picking up next time. And since there'll be a non-projected, flesh-and-blood actor about, I might even get round to discussing some dramatic articles. So: less indulgence of my insane fetish for ghost trains and more nearly on-topic blodgery! Hurrah!
Saturday, 31 July 2010
Odds and Ends
Just a short entry this time. First of all, I'd like to apologise for my mounting sloth over the last few weeks with regards to updating the old blodgings. A host of events have conspired to impair me from being the least bit productive recently. But rest assured, my sprawling militia of devoted readers! I have plans for the continued prosperity of this production diary, as well as the realistic (if bleak) resolve to wind down its perspicacity ahead of the onslaught of the coming term. There's a heck of a lot of reading yet to be done in aid of this blasted degree, and my long-running catholic guilt complex where work is concerned demands the job be done - as thoroughly as my limited faculties and even more limited attention span will allow.
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.
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.
Releasin' the Press Release
I must first flag up that Chrystal had nothing at all to do with the creation of the press release. Now, I don't mean this in the nasty, fawning sense of 'GAH, YA LAZY PUBLICIST, YOU - WHADDAYA GET YA ACTOR TO DO DA PRESS RELEASE FOR! EH EH EH?' Truth be told, I never asked her, and I only hope that I haven't offended her in the process. Chrystal is one of the more phenomenally busy women in Great Britain round about now. Not only has she been simultaneously in rehearsal for two Edinburgh shows - the rebooted Silent Cannonfire (the extra 'n' persists - gladsome!) and The Cure - but she's been dashing off to London and heaven knows where else in aid of the publicity for Rent. (I've been privileged enough to view what Chrystal deemed a rough pencil sketch via webcam... Suffice it to say that if that's what 'rough' means, I can incinerate my GCSE Art portfolio in good conscience, choking away my misery on the compound fumes of pastel and PVA.) Now I understand she's been clapped in iron handcuffs by the company of The Cure, who have opportunely press-ganged her into grinding out multitudinous meals of a foody-based nature to satiate their gaping maws - morning, noon and night! - all while snap-snapper-snaps her photographalist-type renderings and spouts the verse of Auden like a deranged sprinkler system. So, rather than drag her from her RIGHTFUL PLACE in THE KITCHEN (feminists will slay me for that one), I thought I'd have a crack at putting the thing together myself.
Directory James forwarded me the email from the ADC that got me kick-started. Turns out that it's standard practice to put together a large selection of advertising materials to unleash on the press. This came as a nice surprise, simultaneously betraying just how little I know about theatre production. So, I set to slamming together all that I remembered from the glory days of Microsoft Word (circa 1997). You know the sort of thing. Autoshapes - oh, yes, lots an' lotsa Autoshapes. Free Rotation. Text boxes. Different fonts. (Why is it that young children impulsively put their titles in bold and italics and then underline 'em? COULD THERE BE ANY GREATER FORM OF EMPHASIS?) Word Art! Well. Not Word Art. Or Clip Art for that matter. It's but a poor minstrel's version of Chrystal's sumptuous poster design (which I'll post up here when the final one is ready), but it does at least pay homage to the colour scheme... and make use of her photographs! And, self-deprecation aside, I'm reasonably happy with the fruits of my mediocre design skills:
As always, clicking enlarges, but should the text still prove difficult to decipher, I've pasted it beneath for your continued ocular comfort:
'I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy...'
In this unique entertainment, one desperate actor will play twenty characters to bring the world of England's greatest comic writer to vivid, anarchic life. The public readings of Charles Dickens have passed into legend. The most famous man of his day, Dickens's genius as an author was matched only by his astounding gifts as an actor, and audiences flocked by the thousand to see him perform in person. The public readings are often considered the greatest of all lost dramatic experiences. Drawn from the exuberant texts of The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, PICKWICK & NICKLEBY will reclaim all the humour, horror and boundless heart of the defining theatrical event of the Victorian age.
Candlelit, swathed in smoke and smelling of plum pudding, the atmospheric background of a provincial theatre sets the stage for the character actor's audition from hell. Featuring a sprawling ensemble of Dickensian grotesques – the flamboyant Vincent Crummles, the blustering Serjeant Buzfuz, the demented Wackford Squeers – PICKWICK & NICKLEBY promises an evening like no other. There will be wigs. There will be costume changes. There will be facial gesticulations, outlandish walks and utterly unhinged voices. Perhaps even the ghost of Dickens himself will put in an appearance... With all the bombast, bravado and barnstorming one could possibly desire, PICKWICK & NICKLEBY is unmissable.
In many ways, the text is no more than an expansion of the blurb I devised for the ADC brochure. I was fairly pleased with that blurb and starved of imaginative new selling points, so it seemed appropriate to renovate rather than demolish and build from scratch. It's curious how labouring on something as highly-worked as a little bit of advertising gives you an entirely new insight into your own writing style. Just by scrutinising the above, I've come to realise how dependent on the gimmicky nonsense of alliteration, tricolons and list-making my writing has become. Not to mention a growing repertoire of pretty much interchangeable adjectives denoting generic splashes of elation... The text is sensationalistic to put it mildly (it's advertising - you'd be a fool to expect anything less), but I'm pleased to say that it doesn't contain any out-and-out lies. Treat it as a little preview of some of the concoctions brewing in our theatrical laboratory.
To recant for my overexcited misdemeanour in fashioning my own press release (I am miserably chastised...), I'll leave you with an image of Chrystal's own taking. It was snapped while I was all unawares, trying to flatten my unholy mop by aid of partially wettened comb in my Cripp's Court silverfish conservation centre (ie: 'bathroom'), shortly before shooting the image for the ADC brochure. It's been up on Facebook for some time now, but I recently stumbled on it sequestered away in Chrystal's sanctum sanctorum; her wonderful online gallery located just here. Attached was the following caption, which provided warmth and fuzziness all round:
James Swanton, fellow Selwyn English student and character actor, prepares for a publicity photo shoot for his show 'Pickwick and Nickleby' due to be performed at the ADC Larkum Studio.
It's one of the very few non-gurning photos of myself that I don't mind. But perhaps this is a bit of a gurn. The sole comment said: 'oo! The concentration!'. Hmm. Concentration my foot. It's a gurn, no bones about it. As I said, it was caught without my knowledge and/or consent... and I know that that's precisely the sort of photo Chrystal likes best! Goodbye for now!
Directory James forwarded me the email from the ADC that got me kick-started. Turns out that it's standard practice to put together a large selection of advertising materials to unleash on the press. This came as a nice surprise, simultaneously betraying just how little I know about theatre production. So, I set to slamming together all that I remembered from the glory days of Microsoft Word (circa 1997). You know the sort of thing. Autoshapes - oh, yes, lots an' lotsa Autoshapes. Free Rotation. Text boxes. Different fonts. (Why is it that young children impulsively put their titles in bold and italics and then underline 'em? COULD THERE BE ANY GREATER FORM OF EMPHASIS?) Word Art! Well. Not Word Art. Or Clip Art for that matter. It's but a poor minstrel's version of Chrystal's sumptuous poster design (which I'll post up here when the final one is ready), but it does at least pay homage to the colour scheme... and make use of her photographs! And, self-deprecation aside, I'm reasonably happy with the fruits of my mediocre design skills:
As always, clicking enlarges, but should the text still prove difficult to decipher, I've pasted it beneath for your continued ocular comfort:
'I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy...'
In this unique entertainment, one desperate actor will play twenty characters to bring the world of England's greatest comic writer to vivid, anarchic life. The public readings of Charles Dickens have passed into legend. The most famous man of his day, Dickens's genius as an author was matched only by his astounding gifts as an actor, and audiences flocked by the thousand to see him perform in person. The public readings are often considered the greatest of all lost dramatic experiences. Drawn from the exuberant texts of The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, PICKWICK & NICKLEBY will reclaim all the humour, horror and boundless heart of the defining theatrical event of the Victorian age.
Candlelit, swathed in smoke and smelling of plum pudding, the atmospheric background of a provincial theatre sets the stage for the character actor's audition from hell. Featuring a sprawling ensemble of Dickensian grotesques – the flamboyant Vincent Crummles, the blustering Serjeant Buzfuz, the demented Wackford Squeers – PICKWICK & NICKLEBY promises an evening like no other. There will be wigs. There will be costume changes. There will be facial gesticulations, outlandish walks and utterly unhinged voices. Perhaps even the ghost of Dickens himself will put in an appearance... With all the bombast, bravado and barnstorming one could possibly desire, PICKWICK & NICKLEBY is unmissable.
In many ways, the text is no more than an expansion of the blurb I devised for the ADC brochure. I was fairly pleased with that blurb and starved of imaginative new selling points, so it seemed appropriate to renovate rather than demolish and build from scratch. It's curious how labouring on something as highly-worked as a little bit of advertising gives you an entirely new insight into your own writing style. Just by scrutinising the above, I've come to realise how dependent on the gimmicky nonsense of alliteration, tricolons and list-making my writing has become. Not to mention a growing repertoire of pretty much interchangeable adjectives denoting generic splashes of elation... The text is sensationalistic to put it mildly (it's advertising - you'd be a fool to expect anything less), but I'm pleased to say that it doesn't contain any out-and-out lies. Treat it as a little preview of some of the concoctions brewing in our theatrical laboratory.
To recant for my overexcited misdemeanour in fashioning my own press release (I am miserably chastised...), I'll leave you with an image of Chrystal's own taking. It was snapped while I was all unawares, trying to flatten my unholy mop by aid of partially wettened comb in my Cripp's Court silverfish conservation centre (ie: 'bathroom'), shortly before shooting the image for the ADC brochure. It's been up on Facebook for some time now, but I recently stumbled on it sequestered away in Chrystal's sanctum sanctorum; her wonderful online gallery located just here. Attached was the following caption, which provided warmth and fuzziness all round:
James Swanton, fellow Selwyn English student and character actor, prepares for a publicity photo shoot for his show 'Pickwick and Nickleby' due to be performed at the ADC Larkum Studio.
It's one of the very few non-gurning photos of myself that I don't mind. But perhaps this is a bit of a gurn. The sole comment said: 'oo! The concentration!'. Hmm. Concentration my foot. It's a gurn, no bones about it. As I said, it was caught without my knowledge and/or consent... and I know that that's precisely the sort of photo Chrystal likes best! Goodbye for now!
Friday, 30 July 2010
Five Favourite Actors
My very strong OCD tendencies mean that I've long been inclined to cultivate and maintain all manner of charts and tables in an effort to make sense of the fundamentally illogical. On that basis then, I present to you a list of my ten favourite actors - embroidered with unstructured personal diatribes, but a list nonetheless! - grouped with what I believe to constitute their three canonical performances. Still to come is a sequel in which I talk up the virtues of the remaining five candidates. Well... try to have a little fun with it. Matters will run altogether more smoothly if you're on affable terms with classic horror films. If not though, now is the perfect opportunity to become so! In any case, I hope that my ruminations will provide you with the requisite get-up-and-go to persuade you to seek out the work of some of these wonderful performers. And, hey - it might even reveal why my acting style is as screwed up as it is!
1. TOD SLAUGHTER (1885 - 1956)
Squire William Corder, Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)
Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)
The False Percival Glyde, Crimes at the Dark House (1940)
My passion for Slaughter was written in the stars. For years I'd read about the eminent lunacy of the man's performances, yet remained unable to track down any of his maddeningly obscure films. For those unfamiliar with the Slaughter legend, I present a simple image. Picture a man in black. A beaver-fur top hat and a full-length opera cape are his humble accessories. Now - picture this figure moved to maniacal animation, and engaged in the serious business of shackling a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. Infernal, grating cackling seems to ignite the air. And the moustache. Pointed - lascivious - impeccably waxed; the horns of the devil transposed to a cringing upper lip... Tod Slaughter is, quite simply, the living embodiment of melodrama. In Crimes at the Dark House, a very loose adaptation of The Woman in White and by far the most cinematic of Slaughter's films, Slaughter does indeed get down to the serious business of twirling his moustache in fiendish glee. Seminal stuff. Incidentally, this tradition seems to have emerged with the loathsome Rigaud in Little Dorrit by (who else?) Charles Dickens - which makes it a perfect addition to the work of his close friend and contemporary Wilkie Collins! Slaughter's performances are an all-too-rare rare artefact of a way of acting long since dead. It's an oft-repeated truism that Slaughter's pictures demonstrate what Victorian filmmaking might have looked like. All of the man's performances contain at least one elusive, unforgettable moment that brands itself upon the memory by its absolute strangeness. In Maria Marten, it's the truly alarming way that his voice crackles and warps when gazing down on the exhumed body of his peasant lover, exclaiming of her murder that 'But you forced me to! You forced me to!' As Sweeney Todd, Slaughter's signature role, it's the bizarre curl of the fingers as he hisses 'Come here, Tobias...!' - which miraculously conjures up every awful, skin-crawling stereotype of paedophilia imaginable. Crimes at the Dark House came late enough in Slaughter's screen career that it's a (comparatively) restrained performance, but he still manages to deliver the immortal line 'I'll feed your entrails to the pigs!' with what seems a disarming level of conviction. Slaughter's performances are deranged, maniacal, barnstorming ham in the very best sense of the word. As an actor, he is strangely impressive for it - and always hugely entertaining. The history books have played no small part in perpetuating the lie that Slaughter was a deluded hack. There is no way that anyone possessed of even half a brain-cell could vault so consistently over-the-top across such a long career without being aware of what a grand joke the whole business was. Demand-and-supply is the name of the game: the public appetite for melodrama has always been unquenchable - even if it is stifled and filtered through the medium of the television soap nowadays. The Face at the Window (a gaslit Parisian werewolf mystery that must be seen to be believed) even opens with a prologue that ensures its audience is as thoroughly prepared for chuckles as chills. For me at least, Tod Slaughter is also a man whose career is an inspiring example. Slaughter is an enduring relic of the real provincial actor. Quite incapable of cut-glass, upper-class polish, Slaughter is rough and raw in his performance style, but with quite enough enthusiasm to carry him through. It's a real shame that Slaughter's stage production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was never filmed... but in complete honesty, it's hard to imagine him playing anyone but Hyde! Slaughter's films have now passed into the public domain, which means that most of them are available to watch online. If ever have the time to spare, you can count on a very interesting hour...
2. GEORGE ZUCCO (1886 - 1960)
Professor Moriarty, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
Dr. Lloyd Clayton / Dr. Elwyn Clayton, Dead Men Walk (1943)
Richard Stanley, Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)
The appeal of George Zucco is instant - and magnetic. Zucco had - or at least gave the impression of having - one of the most extraoridnary natural instruments of any actor in history. His composure was ever that of the polite English gentleman; his voice the purr of a satanically inspired cat; his eyeballs ever glowing like possessed moons, crystal balls primed to summon up the spirits of the dead... It seems that Zucco could do most anything and endow it with an absolute fascination and integrity. Predictably, the man was a theatrical heavyweight. For a number of years, he was an acting teacher at RADA... I'm sure that the employment qualifications were far less standardised than they are today, and that can mean only one thing - the man was an outstanding actor at the very top of his game. A glance at the man's stage experience only confirms the suspicion. Zucco created the role of Osbourne in the original production of Journey's End - which co-starred a very young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope. Yet by all accounts, it was Zucco who got the most thunderous applause of the evening. Olivier's replacement in the part, the woefully underrated Colin Clive, transformed the production into a prescient celebration of cinemacabre. Clive and director James Whale were fated to collaborate on the movie masterpieces Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, with Zucco turning up for an inglorious strangulation in the later series potboiler House of Frankenstein. Zucco also gained worldwide acclaim for playing Disraeli in the now-forgotten smash-hit Victoria Regina (which featured Vincent Price, a great Zucco-booster, as Prince Albert). Yet in Hollywood, a very different career beckoned. George Zucco fast became the master of the bit part, the cameo, the walk-on role. It's heartening to reflect on just how often he stopped the show. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a fine example of this phenomenon, with Zucco turning up in monk-like raiments for roughly five seconds to dispense proclamations of doom - but then, so is The Black Swan, in which Zucco's magisterial progress down a monolothic stone staircase upstages the attention-seeking antics of the outrageous Laird Cregar and the annoyingly pretty Tyrone Power. As with all such bit-players, Zucco appeared in a great deal of junk. Dead Men Walk was among the first films in in which I was consciously aware of Zucco as an actor. It's also one of the worst films I've seen - perhaps a surprise to those who think I dismiss only films veneered in colour, widescreen and pseudo-philosophical pretension (Inception springs to mind). Zucco just about carries it, playing the insane dual role of a benevolent doctor and his vampiric brother, but he's fighting a losing battle. For a very long time actually, Zucco's Scared to Death truly was the worst film that I'd seen... His turns in Basil Rathbone's Holmes series are much more fun, delivering not only a definitive Moriarty in the finest installment of the series, but another fun turn as the proprietor of an antique shop equipped with such choice items as a knife-projecting casket deployed to decapitate world-famous detectives. And always with such dignity... He surely knew what trash he was making - quite a fall-off from the glory days of Journey's End - but the absolute class with which he did it has endeared him to a new generation of audiences. It is the dreck that endures, sadly enough, and it is fortunate for Zucco's continued reputation that he always gave his all. And, lest it be forgotten, his favourite author was Dickens. Now that's got to count for something!
3. BORIS KARLOFF (1887 - 1969)
Ardath Bey, The Mummy (1932)
The Monster, Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Byron Orlock, Targets (1968)
Karloff is a man so famous that he requires little introduction. A man so famous that he was once referred to on cinema marquees by surname alone, a feat rivalled only by the glitzy MGM starpower of Garbo. Karloff's great bequest to acting was the niche he carved for the macabre as a separate dramatic area. Horror, mystery and melodrama - all dragged shrieking from the Grand Guignol and flung smack-bang into the heart of modern pop culture. True, Bela Lugosi got the ball rolling with Dracula a little earlier in 1931, but Karloff was the man who carried the torch so triumphantly and set it forever blazing in the cinematic firmament. In addition to his unparalleled box office fire, Karloff managed to court the terror business a strange amount of respectability, and even, at times, a sort of gentility - something that certainly hasn't endured into this modern age of hockey masks, torture porn and human centipedes. But in spite of Karloff's fame and success (a celebrity you felt you knew if ever there was one), a certain feeling of mystery clings to Karloff the man. Frankenstein made Karloff a star in 1931. By that time he was aged forty-four - strikingly old in a period where the careers of leading ladies were summarily terminated in their late twenties. Great chunks of his life are lost to history. He was born to the upper classes - yet was almost certainly illegitimate. He deserted a promising education for decades of unsuccessful work in the repertory system. He was married at least six times, although recent evidence might well bump this figure up to seven. He was dedicated to trade unions and sought reform at a time when blacklisting was a very grave peril. He was identified as (raise eyebrows here) 'Hollywood's greatest swordsman' by a gaggle of prostitutes arrested on a Californian roadside. He owned a pet pig named Violet. This depth is what survives in Karloff's work on film. Whatever far-flung psychological resonances that murky past contained, it haunts his performances with an unsettling aura of the 'other' - perhaps unsurprisingly, 'the Uncanny' were the words that most often followed his monolithic surname on theatre marquees. Nowhere is this displayed to greater advantage than in The Mummy, in which Karloff sets the screen ablaze with his grandiose, crumbling presence. His co-star, Zita Johann, later recalled the indescribable sadness of Karloff, his eyes appearing to her as 'shattered mirrors'. It's a worn old cliche, but it seems fitting to say that experience is what made Karloff so great as an actor. And such a wealth of sterling performances... Frankenstein is naturally seminal, so much so that it is easy to overlook - to the extent that I found myself not liking it that much the first time round. That's a shameful thing for a horror nut like myself to admit to, so I'll elucidate a little. Lugosi's Dracula, Frankenstein's natural bookend, is a film so universally derided that I wound up enjoying its paltry, dusty merits to the direct exclusion of its (many) defects. Frankenstein, being the masterpiece that it is, draws little attention to its brilliance. It sets out its virtues in a disarmingly primitive, unfussy manner, perhaps only half-aware that what it contains is riding on the crest of a new wave, and is, in fact, history-making. 'Why such fuss over Karloff?' I wondered. 'He's not really doing anything. Everyone knows that that's the way the Monster's meant to act...' Little heed did I pay to the fact that Karloff was creating the time-tested stereotypes as he went along. It's a truly majestic performance, and only improved on by the addition of speech and screentime in the follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein. My pre-teen rashness has come full circle now, and today Karloff reigns as my favourite actor of all time. The Body Snatcher is often acclaimed as Karloff's greatest performance, and it is certainly grand, more than deserving of an Oscar nomination, though not perfect. It's perhaps a little too full of what his daughter, Sara Karloff, refers to as her father's sing-song acting voice... Better to my mind is Targets, which came when Karloff had had time to really relax into his persona - and play it out to its natural conclusion, playing the part of an aging horror star who shuns his domesticated terrors for those of the real world. The Walking Dead is a much earlier work (a gangster-horror hybrid from the Warner lot), and too often forgotten. It's heart-wrenching in the extreme, and well worth a viewing.
4. CLAUDE RAINS (1889 - 1967)
Jack Griffin, The Invisible Man (1933)
Erique Claudin, Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Job Skeffington, Mr. Skeffington (1944)
It's only now that it strikes me, but my passion for Rains is very similar to my passion for Zucco, so far as both men project the impression of a stunning, fascinating, but entirely natural presence. It is the voice beyond all that triumphs in Rains, an especially useful gift for an actor who made his name by playing The Invisible One. Nor is it a surprise to discover that Rains, as an acting teacher at RADA (another Zucco crossover), became the hero and mentor of John Gielgud, whose own delivery (as beautiful as it could be) was so fantastically constrained and mannered that Rains can be tentatively labelled its naturalistic original. An earnest effort to describe Rains's vocal capabilities quickly descends into hyperbole, so I won't tire you with an excess of cheery remarks about the great quantity of phone-related books I'd pay good money to hear him read unabridged. Like so much in theatre, nothing is quite what it seems. Rains worked on his voice with an arduous, driven commitment that is both admirable and rather scary. Claude's daughter, Jessica Rains, has vivid recollections of her father slipping into his natural, cockney accent when she was a child - and being unable to understand a single word of it! It's curious that the actors I admire most deeply are not those who plays naturalistically, nor even those who paste character on top of themselves as though with a trowel to cultivate audience interest. It is those who seem to have been fantastically fascinating humans - whether by accident or rigidly enforced, intensely focused design - that have been emblazoned on my memory. For all this though, it was that most brazenly theatrical of turns in The Invisible Man that first endeared Rains to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the greatest films ever made, and this is due in no small part to Rains's barnstorming performance. The script, penned by playwright R. C. Sherriff (and yes, I am aware that this blog is operating on an increasingly narrow continuum of Journey's End, long-dead RADA teachers and old horror films...), jousts with the likes of All About Eve for the pithiest of filmic writing, and Rains delivers his every line to fiendish, staccato perfection. A particular favourite of mine is his hilariously relaxed speech on world domination, delivered in a languid, swooning posture from a gently swaying rocking chair: 'We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction... We might even wreck a train or two. Just these hands - around a signalman's throat - that's all!' This is an atypical turn for Rains. His conventional screen presence was a great deal more polite and reserved. He always reminds me of Ian Holm in his manner and appearance. Holm has advanced an outstanding observation on acting that might just as easily apply to the effortless naturalism of Claude Rains: "I've always been a minimalist. It was Bogart who once said, 'If you think the right thoughts, the camera will pick it up". The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, you're halfway there.' The same can be said for Rains, whose own quasi-mystical approach to acting was nonetheless deeply rooted in the undervalued virtue of simplicity: 'I learn the lines and pray to God'. Perhaps this gets to the root of my bugbear with naturalism. It is absolutely to be encouraged - provided you are a fascinating human being to start with. Rains possessed this quality, and he was capable of the most touching and pure things onscreen. I've harped on about the strengths of his Phantom of the Opera in an earlier entry, so I won't repeat myself here, but Mr. Skeffington has made it into my selection for much the same reason. Watch the scene where he goes to lunch with his infant daughter without crying. I dare ya! The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca and Hitchcock's Notorious are his mainstream hits, and all are worth seeking out.
5. HENRY DANIELL (1894 - 1963)
Henry Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre (1943)
Doctor MacFarlane, The Body Snatcher (1945)
Doctor Moriarty, The Woman in Green (1945)
If I was to sum up Henry Daniell in a soundbite, it might well be 'the Alan Rickman of the early twentieth century'. Daniell was quite brilliant in every respect, and another proof of how little variety there is in my choice of favourite actors. His Moriarty is a particularly interesting creation, and a neat way into Daniell's wider approach to acting. This is a performance containing none of the jovial, good-natured hamminess of his series rivals, George Zucco and Lionel Atwill. Daniell suggests a vain, pampered reptile - strangely stiffened, as though stricken with arthiritis, with unreadable dead eyes. Impeccable coldness is the general impression. I certainly didn't care for Daniell the first time round, and while I still place his Moriarty a peg below Zucco's merry turn (and perhaps Eric Porter's perfectly monstrous characterisation in the Jeremy Brett TV series), it's a performance I've come to appreciate on its own silky, seductive merits. It's not a warm or appealing turn at all, but then, that's exactly the point - the very idea that Moriarty should court charisma is an invention of Hollywood, and Daniell gives a performance that serves the script and story indelibly well. The Woman in Green is among the darkest of Holmes mysteries, with Moriarty dispatching his henchmen to murder and sever the fingers of London citizens. Daniell never seeks to upstage his material, and for that alone he deserves respect - the mark of the really good character actor. It's also worth nothing that Daniell was Basil Rathbone's personal favourite of all of his series adversaries, a choice that has often surprised its followers, but might make a bit more sense with this rationale. Now The Body Snatcher is a completely different kettle of fish. In my estimation, it's one of the most underrated performances in film history. And yes, without a doubt, Oscar worthy. Typecasting was at once the most life-affirming yet soul-crushing force in old Hollywood. Whilst it assured many actors a comfortable living and a restricted immortality as archetypal forces indicative of so many different things (Western gunslinger; tough old bird; crazed gold-digger; English butler; gypsy peasant, ad nauseum), it tended to fundamentally limit screentime as performers slipped ever further into 'character' status. Without The Body Snatcher to his credit, Daniell may have gone the way of someone like Frederic Worlock, delivering a series of memorably insane performances in thirty-second chunks, but never showing much in the way of range or (dare I say it?) humanity. The Body Snatcher must be seen to be believed. It's a stunner, and so many details in Daniell's Doctor MacFarlane have returned to me through the years that it unnerves me a little. At the moment, it's his outburst in the surgery when faced with a disabled girl, congealing ambition and frustration and that unremitting, pitch-black coldness when he lets rip with (at lightning speed) 'confound it, the child's a cripple, of course she wants to walk!' This same cruelty was greatly in evidence in his Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. The white, searing hatred that Charlotte Bronte instils in the reader for the fanatical schoolmaster is one of the greatest things that any writer can hope to achieve, and Daniell absolutely nails it in his performance, at his best when telling young Jane of the delightful tortures of hell. But what Daniell creates in MacFarlane is his lasting legacy. It may be Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs that walked off with the horror genre's only Best Actor Oscars, but, for my money, Daniell delivers a greater performance than either of them, one of the four or five most riveting bits of acting I've seen in my life. Why so many people harp on about Karloff in The Body Snatcher, I'll never know. Daniell owns its every frame. And, as a sidebar, might I add just how deeply unsettling it was to be interviewed by the English Faculty's own Doctor MacFarlane when I applied to this mad institution we call Cambridge, the ghost of Henry Daniell still ringing in my head as I tried desperately to concoct more lies about W. B. Yeats... At some point, I explained my concerns to the undergraduate so efficiently marshalling me from place to place. She didn't get the reference. Such moments in life are to be treasured.
1. TOD SLAUGHTER (1885 - 1956)
Squire William Corder, Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)
Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)
The False Percival Glyde, Crimes at the Dark House (1940)
My passion for Slaughter was written in the stars. For years I'd read about the eminent lunacy of the man's performances, yet remained unable to track down any of his maddeningly obscure films. For those unfamiliar with the Slaughter legend, I present a simple image. Picture a man in black. A beaver-fur top hat and a full-length opera cape are his humble accessories. Now - picture this figure moved to maniacal animation, and engaged in the serious business of shackling a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. Infernal, grating cackling seems to ignite the air. And the moustache. Pointed - lascivious - impeccably waxed; the horns of the devil transposed to a cringing upper lip... Tod Slaughter is, quite simply, the living embodiment of melodrama. In Crimes at the Dark House, a very loose adaptation of The Woman in White and by far the most cinematic of Slaughter's films, Slaughter does indeed get down to the serious business of twirling his moustache in fiendish glee. Seminal stuff. Incidentally, this tradition seems to have emerged with the loathsome Rigaud in Little Dorrit by (who else?) Charles Dickens - which makes it a perfect addition to the work of his close friend and contemporary Wilkie Collins! Slaughter's performances are an all-too-rare rare artefact of a way of acting long since dead. It's an oft-repeated truism that Slaughter's pictures demonstrate what Victorian filmmaking might have looked like. All of the man's performances contain at least one elusive, unforgettable moment that brands itself upon the memory by its absolute strangeness. In Maria Marten, it's the truly alarming way that his voice crackles and warps when gazing down on the exhumed body of his peasant lover, exclaiming of her murder that 'But you forced me to! You forced me to!' As Sweeney Todd, Slaughter's signature role, it's the bizarre curl of the fingers as he hisses 'Come here, Tobias...!' - which miraculously conjures up every awful, skin-crawling stereotype of paedophilia imaginable. Crimes at the Dark House came late enough in Slaughter's screen career that it's a (comparatively) restrained performance, but he still manages to deliver the immortal line 'I'll feed your entrails to the pigs!' with what seems a disarming level of conviction. Slaughter's performances are deranged, maniacal, barnstorming ham in the very best sense of the word. As an actor, he is strangely impressive for it - and always hugely entertaining. The history books have played no small part in perpetuating the lie that Slaughter was a deluded hack. There is no way that anyone possessed of even half a brain-cell could vault so consistently over-the-top across such a long career without being aware of what a grand joke the whole business was. Demand-and-supply is the name of the game: the public appetite for melodrama has always been unquenchable - even if it is stifled and filtered through the medium of the television soap nowadays. The Face at the Window (a gaslit Parisian werewolf mystery that must be seen to be believed) even opens with a prologue that ensures its audience is as thoroughly prepared for chuckles as chills. For me at least, Tod Slaughter is also a man whose career is an inspiring example. Slaughter is an enduring relic of the real provincial actor. Quite incapable of cut-glass, upper-class polish, Slaughter is rough and raw in his performance style, but with quite enough enthusiasm to carry him through. It's a real shame that Slaughter's stage production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was never filmed... but in complete honesty, it's hard to imagine him playing anyone but Hyde! Slaughter's films have now passed into the public domain, which means that most of them are available to watch online. If ever have the time to spare, you can count on a very interesting hour...
2. GEORGE ZUCCO (1886 - 1960)
Professor Moriarty, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
Dr. Lloyd Clayton / Dr. Elwyn Clayton, Dead Men Walk (1943)
Richard Stanley, Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)
The appeal of George Zucco is instant - and magnetic. Zucco had - or at least gave the impression of having - one of the most extraoridnary natural instruments of any actor in history. His composure was ever that of the polite English gentleman; his voice the purr of a satanically inspired cat; his eyeballs ever glowing like possessed moons, crystal balls primed to summon up the spirits of the dead... It seems that Zucco could do most anything and endow it with an absolute fascination and integrity. Predictably, the man was a theatrical heavyweight. For a number of years, he was an acting teacher at RADA... I'm sure that the employment qualifications were far less standardised than they are today, and that can mean only one thing - the man was an outstanding actor at the very top of his game. A glance at the man's stage experience only confirms the suspicion. Zucco created the role of Osbourne in the original production of Journey's End - which co-starred a very young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope. Yet by all accounts, it was Zucco who got the most thunderous applause of the evening. Olivier's replacement in the part, the woefully underrated Colin Clive, transformed the production into a prescient celebration of cinemacabre. Clive and director James Whale were fated to collaborate on the movie masterpieces Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, with Zucco turning up for an inglorious strangulation in the later series potboiler House of Frankenstein. Zucco also gained worldwide acclaim for playing Disraeli in the now-forgotten smash-hit Victoria Regina (which featured Vincent Price, a great Zucco-booster, as Prince Albert). Yet in Hollywood, a very different career beckoned. George Zucco fast became the master of the bit part, the cameo, the walk-on role. It's heartening to reflect on just how often he stopped the show. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a fine example of this phenomenon, with Zucco turning up in monk-like raiments for roughly five seconds to dispense proclamations of doom - but then, so is The Black Swan, in which Zucco's magisterial progress down a monolothic stone staircase upstages the attention-seeking antics of the outrageous Laird Cregar and the annoyingly pretty Tyrone Power. As with all such bit-players, Zucco appeared in a great deal of junk. Dead Men Walk was among the first films in in which I was consciously aware of Zucco as an actor. It's also one of the worst films I've seen - perhaps a surprise to those who think I dismiss only films veneered in colour, widescreen and pseudo-philosophical pretension (Inception springs to mind). Zucco just about carries it, playing the insane dual role of a benevolent doctor and his vampiric brother, but he's fighting a losing battle. For a very long time actually, Zucco's Scared to Death truly was the worst film that I'd seen... His turns in Basil Rathbone's Holmes series are much more fun, delivering not only a definitive Moriarty in the finest installment of the series, but another fun turn as the proprietor of an antique shop equipped with such choice items as a knife-projecting casket deployed to decapitate world-famous detectives. And always with such dignity... He surely knew what trash he was making - quite a fall-off from the glory days of Journey's End - but the absolute class with which he did it has endeared him to a new generation of audiences. It is the dreck that endures, sadly enough, and it is fortunate for Zucco's continued reputation that he always gave his all. And, lest it be forgotten, his favourite author was Dickens. Now that's got to count for something!
3. BORIS KARLOFF (1887 - 1969)
Ardath Bey, The Mummy (1932)
The Monster, Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Byron Orlock, Targets (1968)
Karloff is a man so famous that he requires little introduction. A man so famous that he was once referred to on cinema marquees by surname alone, a feat rivalled only by the glitzy MGM starpower of Garbo. Karloff's great bequest to acting was the niche he carved for the macabre as a separate dramatic area. Horror, mystery and melodrama - all dragged shrieking from the Grand Guignol and flung smack-bang into the heart of modern pop culture. True, Bela Lugosi got the ball rolling with Dracula a little earlier in 1931, but Karloff was the man who carried the torch so triumphantly and set it forever blazing in the cinematic firmament. In addition to his unparalleled box office fire, Karloff managed to court the terror business a strange amount of respectability, and even, at times, a sort of gentility - something that certainly hasn't endured into this modern age of hockey masks, torture porn and human centipedes. But in spite of Karloff's fame and success (a celebrity you felt you knew if ever there was one), a certain feeling of mystery clings to Karloff the man. Frankenstein made Karloff a star in 1931. By that time he was aged forty-four - strikingly old in a period where the careers of leading ladies were summarily terminated in their late twenties. Great chunks of his life are lost to history. He was born to the upper classes - yet was almost certainly illegitimate. He deserted a promising education for decades of unsuccessful work in the repertory system. He was married at least six times, although recent evidence might well bump this figure up to seven. He was dedicated to trade unions and sought reform at a time when blacklisting was a very grave peril. He was identified as (raise eyebrows here) 'Hollywood's greatest swordsman' by a gaggle of prostitutes arrested on a Californian roadside. He owned a pet pig named Violet. This depth is what survives in Karloff's work on film. Whatever far-flung psychological resonances that murky past contained, it haunts his performances with an unsettling aura of the 'other' - perhaps unsurprisingly, 'the Uncanny' were the words that most often followed his monolithic surname on theatre marquees. Nowhere is this displayed to greater advantage than in The Mummy, in which Karloff sets the screen ablaze with his grandiose, crumbling presence. His co-star, Zita Johann, later recalled the indescribable sadness of Karloff, his eyes appearing to her as 'shattered mirrors'. It's a worn old cliche, but it seems fitting to say that experience is what made Karloff so great as an actor. And such a wealth of sterling performances... Frankenstein is naturally seminal, so much so that it is easy to overlook - to the extent that I found myself not liking it that much the first time round. That's a shameful thing for a horror nut like myself to admit to, so I'll elucidate a little. Lugosi's Dracula, Frankenstein's natural bookend, is a film so universally derided that I wound up enjoying its paltry, dusty merits to the direct exclusion of its (many) defects. Frankenstein, being the masterpiece that it is, draws little attention to its brilliance. It sets out its virtues in a disarmingly primitive, unfussy manner, perhaps only half-aware that what it contains is riding on the crest of a new wave, and is, in fact, history-making. 'Why such fuss over Karloff?' I wondered. 'He's not really doing anything. Everyone knows that that's the way the Monster's meant to act...' Little heed did I pay to the fact that Karloff was creating the time-tested stereotypes as he went along. It's a truly majestic performance, and only improved on by the addition of speech and screentime in the follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein. My pre-teen rashness has come full circle now, and today Karloff reigns as my favourite actor of all time. The Body Snatcher is often acclaimed as Karloff's greatest performance, and it is certainly grand, more than deserving of an Oscar nomination, though not perfect. It's perhaps a little too full of what his daughter, Sara Karloff, refers to as her father's sing-song acting voice... Better to my mind is Targets, which came when Karloff had had time to really relax into his persona - and play it out to its natural conclusion, playing the part of an aging horror star who shuns his domesticated terrors for those of the real world. The Walking Dead is a much earlier work (a gangster-horror hybrid from the Warner lot), and too often forgotten. It's heart-wrenching in the extreme, and well worth a viewing.
4. CLAUDE RAINS (1889 - 1967)
Jack Griffin, The Invisible Man (1933)
Erique Claudin, Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Job Skeffington, Mr. Skeffington (1944)
It's only now that it strikes me, but my passion for Rains is very similar to my passion for Zucco, so far as both men project the impression of a stunning, fascinating, but entirely natural presence. It is the voice beyond all that triumphs in Rains, an especially useful gift for an actor who made his name by playing The Invisible One. Nor is it a surprise to discover that Rains, as an acting teacher at RADA (another Zucco crossover), became the hero and mentor of John Gielgud, whose own delivery (as beautiful as it could be) was so fantastically constrained and mannered that Rains can be tentatively labelled its naturalistic original. An earnest effort to describe Rains's vocal capabilities quickly descends into hyperbole, so I won't tire you with an excess of cheery remarks about the great quantity of phone-related books I'd pay good money to hear him read unabridged. Like so much in theatre, nothing is quite what it seems. Rains worked on his voice with an arduous, driven commitment that is both admirable and rather scary. Claude's daughter, Jessica Rains, has vivid recollections of her father slipping into his natural, cockney accent when she was a child - and being unable to understand a single word of it! It's curious that the actors I admire most deeply are not those who plays naturalistically, nor even those who paste character on top of themselves as though with a trowel to cultivate audience interest. It is those who seem to have been fantastically fascinating humans - whether by accident or rigidly enforced, intensely focused design - that have been emblazoned on my memory. For all this though, it was that most brazenly theatrical of turns in The Invisible Man that first endeared Rains to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the greatest films ever made, and this is due in no small part to Rains's barnstorming performance. The script, penned by playwright R. C. Sherriff (and yes, I am aware that this blog is operating on an increasingly narrow continuum of Journey's End, long-dead RADA teachers and old horror films...), jousts with the likes of All About Eve for the pithiest of filmic writing, and Rains delivers his every line to fiendish, staccato perfection. A particular favourite of mine is his hilariously relaxed speech on world domination, delivered in a languid, swooning posture from a gently swaying rocking chair: 'We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction... We might even wreck a train or two. Just these hands - around a signalman's throat - that's all!' This is an atypical turn for Rains. His conventional screen presence was a great deal more polite and reserved. He always reminds me of Ian Holm in his manner and appearance. Holm has advanced an outstanding observation on acting that might just as easily apply to the effortless naturalism of Claude Rains: "I've always been a minimalist. It was Bogart who once said, 'If you think the right thoughts, the camera will pick it up". The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, you're halfway there.' The same can be said for Rains, whose own quasi-mystical approach to acting was nonetheless deeply rooted in the undervalued virtue of simplicity: 'I learn the lines and pray to God'. Perhaps this gets to the root of my bugbear with naturalism. It is absolutely to be encouraged - provided you are a fascinating human being to start with. Rains possessed this quality, and he was capable of the most touching and pure things onscreen. I've harped on about the strengths of his Phantom of the Opera in an earlier entry, so I won't repeat myself here, but Mr. Skeffington has made it into my selection for much the same reason. Watch the scene where he goes to lunch with his infant daughter without crying. I dare ya! The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca and Hitchcock's Notorious are his mainstream hits, and all are worth seeking out.
5. HENRY DANIELL (1894 - 1963)
Henry Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre (1943)
Doctor MacFarlane, The Body Snatcher (1945)
Doctor Moriarty, The Woman in Green (1945)
If I was to sum up Henry Daniell in a soundbite, it might well be 'the Alan Rickman of the early twentieth century'. Daniell was quite brilliant in every respect, and another proof of how little variety there is in my choice of favourite actors. His Moriarty is a particularly interesting creation, and a neat way into Daniell's wider approach to acting. This is a performance containing none of the jovial, good-natured hamminess of his series rivals, George Zucco and Lionel Atwill. Daniell suggests a vain, pampered reptile - strangely stiffened, as though stricken with arthiritis, with unreadable dead eyes. Impeccable coldness is the general impression. I certainly didn't care for Daniell the first time round, and while I still place his Moriarty a peg below Zucco's merry turn (and perhaps Eric Porter's perfectly monstrous characterisation in the Jeremy Brett TV series), it's a performance I've come to appreciate on its own silky, seductive merits. It's not a warm or appealing turn at all, but then, that's exactly the point - the very idea that Moriarty should court charisma is an invention of Hollywood, and Daniell gives a performance that serves the script and story indelibly well. The Woman in Green is among the darkest of Holmes mysteries, with Moriarty dispatching his henchmen to murder and sever the fingers of London citizens. Daniell never seeks to upstage his material, and for that alone he deserves respect - the mark of the really good character actor. It's also worth nothing that Daniell was Basil Rathbone's personal favourite of all of his series adversaries, a choice that has often surprised its followers, but might make a bit more sense with this rationale. Now The Body Snatcher is a completely different kettle of fish. In my estimation, it's one of the most underrated performances in film history. And yes, without a doubt, Oscar worthy. Typecasting was at once the most life-affirming yet soul-crushing force in old Hollywood. Whilst it assured many actors a comfortable living and a restricted immortality as archetypal forces indicative of so many different things (Western gunslinger; tough old bird; crazed gold-digger; English butler; gypsy peasant, ad nauseum), it tended to fundamentally limit screentime as performers slipped ever further into 'character' status. Without The Body Snatcher to his credit, Daniell may have gone the way of someone like Frederic Worlock, delivering a series of memorably insane performances in thirty-second chunks, but never showing much in the way of range or (dare I say it?) humanity. The Body Snatcher must be seen to be believed. It's a stunner, and so many details in Daniell's Doctor MacFarlane have returned to me through the years that it unnerves me a little. At the moment, it's his outburst in the surgery when faced with a disabled girl, congealing ambition and frustration and that unremitting, pitch-black coldness when he lets rip with (at lightning speed) 'confound it, the child's a cripple, of course she wants to walk!' This same cruelty was greatly in evidence in his Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. The white, searing hatred that Charlotte Bronte instils in the reader for the fanatical schoolmaster is one of the greatest things that any writer can hope to achieve, and Daniell absolutely nails it in his performance, at his best when telling young Jane of the delightful tortures of hell. But what Daniell creates in MacFarlane is his lasting legacy. It may be Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs that walked off with the horror genre's only Best Actor Oscars, but, for my money, Daniell delivers a greater performance than either of them, one of the four or five most riveting bits of acting I've seen in my life. Why so many people harp on about Karloff in The Body Snatcher, I'll never know. Daniell owns its every frame. And, as a sidebar, might I add just how deeply unsettling it was to be interviewed by the English Faculty's own Doctor MacFarlane when I applied to this mad institution we call Cambridge, the ghost of Henry Daniell still ringing in my head as I tried desperately to concoct more lies about W. B. Yeats... At some point, I explained my concerns to the undergraduate so efficiently marshalling me from place to place. She didn't get the reference. Such moments in life are to be treasured.
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