Sure, another reason I haven't blogged so much might simply be procrastination. I didn't write much about Edinburgh, but since this year began with me wondering whether to take a show there, let's finish it by sweeping up the spoils. I got a trailer out of the venture for a start...
But I mean, look at that. It's not easy to PR a twenty-year-old show either. You're not up for any awards. Still, Madelaine worked actually literally round the clock to get me press even if I had to write it myself. I shared some of those think pieces back in July, but not the lot, so let me slip into italics now, as I present an article I wrote for Gareth Vile's Analogue magazine about why JONAH NON GRATA's a clown show...I remember an old interview with Dylan Moran where he stated an ambition to do absolutely nothing on stage, and have the audience get it.
In a time of such social upheaval no-one even noticed it, Woody Allen made three comedies – in a row –
about the assassination of a political leader: “Bananas, “Sleeper”, and
“Love and Death”. In each, the ethical and religious arguments against
taking human life were inextricably tangled with the protagonist’s
solipsistic, Bob-Hope-inspired cowardice and laziness.
It’s a cliché that every comedian wants to play Hamlet. The assumption, I think, is they hope to be taken more seriously. But Hamlet’s one of them already: more existentially comfortable splitting hairs and taking the piss than defeating Evil. The prophet Jonah also – at least in the most famous incident from the short book of the Bible bearing his name – is an inaction hero, comically human-sized. Initially, he refuses outright to call down the Wrath of God upon Nineveh, escaping on a boat. But then a storm comes, and there’s not much to do once you’re inside a whale.
When people ask me what “Jonah Non Grata” is about, I say it’s about that story – “sort of” – but it doesn’t matter if the audience don’t know it. When I’m asked what it is, I say it’s “a clown show”, because that’s what all my friends were making when I first devised it in my bedroom back in 2005. And if they ask me what a clown is, I‘m stuck.
The
word means something. It has to. But read any casting breakdown of an
advert calling for a “funny bones” or a “Zach Galifianakis/Martin
Freeman/Jack Black type” (I only get the male ones, sorry) and you’ll
see it’s hard to put into words. “Yes!” is one I remember from a
clowning weekend sometime last century given by the great Angela De
Castro – head of the “Why Not Institute” – and if you only have one word
with which to teach someone how to be a clown, “Yes” might be the best.
But doesn’t that then run entirely counter to my opening? Yes. And Why
Not? Harpo and Chico try to steal a painting. Chico hears someone coming
and hisses at Harpo to hide. Harpo stands on his head in the middle of
the room. He’s still saying yes, just to something else. “If thy mind
dislike anything,” Horatio tells Hamlet, “obey it.” Yes. Exactly. No.
I had a good pandemic. I hadn’t performed Shakespeare in a while, but with all the theatres shut, I decided to try performing the Complete Works on YouTube in my pyjamas, using a range of radio sketch show voices to differentiate characters, and some home-recorded foley, because why not? I hope the tone didn’t read as taking the piss. Or at least, no more than Rylance at the Globe – who never winked at the audience, but always let them in fully onto how weird everything going was. I like it when actors pretend to be the audience’s friend.
Weirdly though, I don’t like it when stand-ups do it. Maybe because stand-ups are pretending to be themselves. Every solo performer – or at least every solo performer with decent enough PR – is wildly outnumbered by their audience, which I find inherently, situationally funny. But stand-ups can’t acknowledge this power imbalance, because they’re not playing a character, so it’s just awkward. But Jonah is a character. And the audience’s friend, because – although he never uses the word “God” (or indeed “Jonah”) – they are clearly his congregation. The audience however, playing themselves, are under no obligation to be on Jonah’s side in return. That’s the motor of not just this show, but a lot of the work I was lucky enough to make with Shunt that inspired it: “Dance Bear Dance”… “Money”… The audience outnumbers the performer, but the performer knows the territory. I’ve made it sound like we’re at war. We’re not. But it’s nice if we’re strangers.
You describe Jonah Non Grata as "Hamlet, only sillier - or Tommy Cooper, only slower." What's the most ridiculous thing that happens onstage?
I don't want to give too much away, but possibly my entrance. And I'm not saying it's all downhill from there - my final exit's pretty ridiculous as well - but when you're presenting a solo immersive piece without any scenery, inspired by a three-thousand-year-old story about a prophet who lives in a fish, with self-penned soft techno songs (one of which is purely a three-verse summary of the Scrap Brain Zone of Sonic the Hedgehog) it's... Do you know, I think it's when I try to mime getting the air nozzle working on a plane. It's not good.
No. But it is five thirty-eighths true. I performed - forgive the abbreviations, but they're long titles and I'm a massive wanker - Two Gents, Shrew, Titus, Julius Caesar, and Richard the Second, that last one twice because I didn't like the first version. I absolutely nailed the others though.
It was lockdown. Everyone was making stuff online, and I'd always been YouTube-curious, so I started reading aloud Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. When I finished that, I looked around for something else to read, and realised if I did a Shakespeare a week, I'd be done by Christmas - performing one act a day, with summaries and regular content warnings - but that didn't happen in the end, because it turned out to be a lot harder than just reading a book, and things were beginning to open up, and Black Lives Mattered so distractions became less useful. But I'm incredibly proud of both the quality and quantity of that work. I remember everyone making so much during lockdown. We thought it was the internet keeping us from having hobbies. Turns out it was pubs. Oh, and they weren't my pyjamas.
What's harder - writing an existential clown show or delivering legal advice in EastEnders?
Both are phenomenally easy, it turns out. In the first case, you just take a really old story everyone knows, make a mix tape to accompany it, listen to it while pissing around in your bedroom, and write down anything you might want to do again in front of an audience. Then you wait twenty years until you land a nice advert and can take it to Edinburgh.
In the second case, you send in a self-tape playing one of a million faceless interfaces with authority soap characters have to face daily, then get a phone-call saying you've landed the role of "seedy lawyer". You turn up knowing your lines. Everyone is brilliant. Danny Dyer's brilliant. Kellie Bright's brilliant. The director's brilliant. You're brilliant. Three cameras record it, and it never happens again. It's brilliant.
That "had to" is interesting. So is "in character". I actually got to play Hamlet once. When Horatio tells him the ghost of his dead father has been sighted in a suit of armour on the battlements of Elsinore, his response is "This is very strange" which always got a laugh.
"You wouldn't shit on a bun" from the Shunt show Money also gets quoted back to me sometimes, but I wrote that one. The line I'll be declaiming on pavements in my final days though, like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, is Sir Maxwell House's intro to The Monster Hunters podcast: "Take two elements. Any two elements. Say, electricity and water. On their own, perfectly harmless. But mix them together, maybe in a bowl... Dynamite!"
Who's your dream audience member for this show - and who would be absolutely baffled?
While I make not claims for it as a "process", I went about making my first solo show the same way I would advise anyone to: I chose a very old story everyone knew as my starting point – in this case the Book of Jonah (of "and the whale" fame) – then, instead of worrying about how to tell it, built up a playlist of music which might accompany that story, and at my own leisure in my own bedroom, worked out things to do to it which I wouldn't mind doing again in front of an audience.
This may be a generational thing. When I was a student in the nineties, beginning to associate with people who were making theatre from scratch, we didn’t just put movie posters on our walls, we listened to carefully curated playlists of movie soundtracks. Trainspotting. Pulp Fiction. Romeo plus Juliet. Everyone had these CDs, and pre-existing songs beloved by a director were an integral – structural – part of work we found exciting.
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I hope this helps.
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