Themepunk Roundup: Heads, Chapel, Flesh

 Happy Hallowe’en! When the Polar Express ended last year, I knew I wanted to keep active in costume in 2024, maybe not as active as developing sea legs on a diesel locomotive doing four shows a day, but certainly more active than in 2023, and something in character, and something with cover. 

“Why, to the North Po- to Whitechap- to London Bridge, of course! This is the Polar Exp- the Ten Bell- the Star Inn!”

 So I started work at the London Bridge Experience in February. They let you write your own script if you want, and read between shows, just as the London Dungeon used to do when it stood on the other side of Tooley Street. You also get to paint yourself a jawline and more cheekbones.

 Not that vanity is the priority. But if you compare the portrait above with the one taken below in 2007 of me posing next to a stuffed tapir, you’ll see that rejuvenation of a kind has been achieved.

 

 They pump the same odours as the Dungeon as well, and even play some of the same tunes. Ducking out of Fleshmongers to check on my microwaved Shanghai rice in the green room (every position has a name: Ripper, Flesh, Chapel, Heads, Viking, Roman, and Brownlow, although I’ve honestly never found out who Brownlow was) I’d hear the same plainsong that played up the steps to the boat ride a decade and a half ago…

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 There are differences too: old Horror posters on the wall as you enter which make me feel more at home than ever, real swords and a Viking longboat, chainsaws, clowns, a wall of broken dolls, and the fact it’s genuinely underground - you don’t see damp like this in County Hall or the Trocadero - 

 It’s possibly also a money-laundering outfit, although nothing about the care, craft and - again and perhaps most importantly - the cover that goes into this place betrays that. Cover, yes. I haven’t worked here over Halloween because I think it might obliterate me. Everyone works their arse off like they grew up through Covid or something, physically, verbally, chemically, performatively begrudgingly. No two actors share a superpower. It’s the only job on which I’ve lost my voice, bloody Vikings. I’m still on the work WhatsApp. It’s like a black box with manners.

 Beyond the historical content I slum it in is the Scare Maze, where actors spend, it seems to me, at least a full morning guiding coloured contacts onto their eyeballs or affixing staples to their forehead to be glimpsed for three seconds in a strobe light, a new broken face every day, a workshop perfecting its monsters’ arsenal, all a content warning and world away from my own whiteface daub.

 But I’ve never been made to feel unuseful. Readers, work with people who work. Between bouts of bursting through a blood-drenched shower curtain, Sam for example would have his laptop out in the green room, editing this beautifully simple, one-shot disturbance. There’s Jess and Preston in the bushes…

 

  

 I’m very glad to have finally found out what happens here. I’ve met good people. I’ve read good books. And I seem to have got through this whole post without mentioning death. 

 But why mention something you’re not going to talk about, and what is there to say about death? 

 A month into my working here, a lot of us from the Dungeon started getting in touch with each other again after years, and some beautiful words were written, because we lost a friend. “The death of a friend is the world at its worst” was all I managed, and “at least she wasn’t one of those dickheads who didn’t know how much they’re loved.” 

 It didn’t put me off working with resettable guts, but there’s only so much you can reset. 

 As a writer, you like think you can put a button on anything, find the fix. 

 There’s no fix though. 

 Pull faces.

 Here’s a lovely cartoon.

Themepunk Roundup: My Life as an Action Butler

 

Thanks to Gerard Giorgi-Coll. 

 

 This year, unlike last, I've been doing jobs. They've been jobs I've enjoyed, and sought out, but also what you might call out-of-work-actor jobs. There should be a better name for these though, not because I fancy arguing the toss about what counts as acting, but because, ever since I worked at the London Dungeon I have actively enjoyed performing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends in front of as broad a demographic as possible – Tourism jobs, if you like – and "out-of-work-actor job" doesn't really do that justice. A lot of performance work won't guarantee these things. Themepunk, as I'm going to try calling it for now, hopefully does, although you might get less time to rehearse. Here are Neil Frost and I finalising the route of The Classic Tour back in July:

  

  Press my tummy to view.

 

 I was definitely surprised when Big Ben – below with Neil, both fellow Dungeon alumni – got in touch to say the two of them had been asked by the Ghost Bus Tours to come up with a new, family-friendly, two-handed blockbuster alternative cabaret, complete with songs, costume changes, and a light dusting of Eat The Rich for its open top bus route, and to ask if I'd like to help develop the tour for actual money, and maybe perform it with Neil too, but it was a nice surprise. I figured doing a show on a bus with Neil would be an excellent way to spend a summer without having to go up to Edinburgh, and so it has proved. It's called "The Classic Tour" because that's what was written on the buses. Here's where they keep them:

 

All the other actors Neil brought on for this gig are beautiful too, although audiences have also been pretty Edinburgh-sized as well – appreciative twos and threes until tours were cut – but I'd spent long enough doing Time Tours not to be surprised by this, and I'd heard the Ghost Bus Tours was down to one actor a show as well now, hence my orginal surprise at Ben's call. But this is the bus tour I've always wanted to do, and I'm doing a few in November too, so if you fancy it, HERE.

 

 Yes! This was a plug all along! I'm also going to plug a beautifully written, handsomely received Big Finish Audio Drama I recorded last year: "Torchwood: Art Decadence", in which, as you can hear from the trailer below, I inadvertently play exactly the same character I do above. Don't tell Big Finish, They think I've got range. But I'm in, readers! I'm IN! ACTUAL ACTING JOBS! Available HERE.