Is the above a less attractive proposition than the below?
It's
Shunt's new door. I like it. The old one was just a flat grey surface
and had to be broken down by the Emergency Services when a reveler got
locked in for the night… underground, in the dark, with the rats…
imagine. We get a lot of revelers now. "What are they queueing for?"
asked Nigel. I know. Closed, the door is the perfect entrance. Opened,
everything starts to go a little wrong: a bucket is rattled, names put
down if you want to see a show, necks stamped - "Just the write the
fucking names down, Simon"… Season at the door "can't stand ditherers"
(I had no pen) - But what can we do, ye cannae change the laws of
physics...
No-one likes lists. But if they hand people a page of
Danielle Steele instead and say that everyone with a page of Danielle
Steele will get in to see your show then you're simply left three
minutes before curtain running in and out of four-hundred pouting
midriffs looking for the one friend you have to hand a page of Danielle
Steele to because you couldn't just put their name down on a list... And
you really hope it's worth it... Even though so much fun is clearly
being had you really hope something somewhere in the future is being –
well – funded by all this. Because if that thing in the future doesn't
exist then for two seconds, three seconds, all these beautiful people
turn in your head into shiny insects swarming round a corpse. And that's
loonythink. The
shed that stands in the corner of Gary's bar was covered in silver foil
to mark a week of Andy Warhol, and it lasted a night. Roland's idea. He
was curating for that week, the week of "contains violence". And what
did Ned Mond say when he turned up? Something cool about this night
being an antidote to the National Lottery ("a tax on the barely
affluent") where the wealthy pile in to give artists money for booze and
have their photos taken in front of a giant can of soup. And
then he started to tell me about the Nitrate Mining Ghost-towns of South
America he'd been looking up on the internet. He'd found one with a
theatre. And a population of one. He was thinking of taking a show over. The audience for our little bit of "contains violence" was
limited to the number of headphones. So forty-three, I think. It went
well. It's going to be very good when it's finally on at (ie opposite)
the Lyric in Hammersmith (there'll be two-hundred headphones by then,
and two-hundred sets of opera glasses, and hopefully two-hundred punters
standing on the balcony… that's going to look great). In it I had to
lip-synch to a speech about "arsehole-bleaching" originally recorded by
David (Rosenberg, who made it). The only way to pull it off was to just
do it as him, big eyes and arm-span, and so I found that interesting.
I've tried lip-synching before, in shows I've made myself, but never
come close to getting it right... or rather "never got it right",
because it's lip-synching. It's either right or it's wrong. That's also
what's so interesting… 
I
used to wonder if David always put in these "arsehole" references to
weed out the no-fun crowd and stop his work being taken
Seriously-For-The-Wrong-Reasons. But then Ned said something about how
much easier it is to stage Threat than it is to stage Dread ("because
Dread's like… almost the absence of Threat") and how well David pulls it
off, and he's right, so now I think it might have something to do with
creating that absence of threat, all the bumhole stuff. Like the
head-banging to the Dead Kennedys in a neck brace I had to do. Or like
the e-mail he sent out requesting the presence of a bank of naked
spectators for a photo-shoot to publicize the show. There's a sample of
it up there. Except the Lyric aren't going to use this image now. And
they didn't like his original title of "Upskirt". And the Lounge is
closed now, and with it, that door.
Nigel
who you can just make out backstage, he's going to be curating for
three weeks when it re-opens in late January. And yesterday I said: sure
I'll do something. I'm going to resurrect something of mine called
"Jonah Non Grata". The thing Roland didn't want to do. The
original plan was, well, not to. But before I called Nigel up to say
"No" I popped into Christ's Church in Spitalfields for the first time
yesterday (I'd just finished milking Money's last money at a corporate
voice-over in Moorgate and the door was open) and it was really
disappointing. It looked like an enormous, well-lit writing desk. And I
thought "Shunt's much better than this rubbish. I should do something
there." I looked up the word "liminal" today (Chris Goode's blog very
helpfully has a link) and Christ's Church certainly wasn't liminal. So
I might do a late show, close an area off, by the locked front door if
I'm allowed. Right down the other end from the shinier revelers. If and
when they return. The idea of doing a show about Jonah actually came to
me first seven years ago when I was at an audition, playing with a door
and thinking about flight and doing something funny. And "Liminal"
refers to "the second stage of a ritual". It comes from "limen", which
means threshold. So it is the state of not yet passing through a door.
So yes, I said "Yes", and we'll see.
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