Although I'd seen and shared photos, I had no idea when I wrote this post back back in 2022, that actual footage might exist of Charles' career at Footlights. Not a hope. But here it is. And, while not a fake, the King's material does share Ai's hallmark of not remotely understanding what a joke is, but prolifically turning something out anyway. As I head off now back to Square On,e to join the thousands who have faced the Unfightable Unknown of a first night Doing Edinburgh, all previous plaudits potentially worthless – show starts in an hour, TICKETS HERE – may we all find comfort today in the following baffled silence...
I wonder if we could get him to revisit his bagpipe bit.
First video with the Newphone. So maybe badphone wasn't bad after all. Maybe me bad?
Look! I'm in Edinburgh, and beginning to lose track of how many Jonah Non Grata-related PR assigments I've shared on here, but – as these italics suggest – there's more. I don't think the video above counts, but the influence of Jeremy
Hardingham’s brilliant Incarnate – the first site-specific show I ever appeared in back in 1997, and whose route I attempted to retrace last night – only occurred to me in the middle of answering a question about "lo-fi absurdity" for Made in Shoreditch.
Exciting new Youtube Ai feature.
Here then is that Q&A in full (although it's a bit weird seeing my speaking-to-a-publication voice on this blog... I'm not sure why. It's all public, innit):
Nearly 20 years after its first London outing, Simon Kane is reviving Jonah Non Grata,
a solo show that merges absurdism, hymns, and a heavy dose of holy
confusion. This surreal, comic exploration of power, extremism, and
meaning feels sharper than ever in 2025. We caught up with Simon Kane to unpack his return to the Fringe, the joy of “failed magic,” and the art of staying baffling.
You’re
reviving Jonah Non Grata nearly 20 years after its first London outing.
What made you return to this gloriously strange beast now?
It’s
tempting to say something glib about the absurdity of religious
conflict, but I think what’s most important about the show right now is
how baffling it is. Good art can get us talking, but really good art can
get us to shut up. There’s a lot to be said for reaching out to people
through a piece that defies demographics by not making sense to anyone.
But the real answer is, I missed it, and I could now afford it.
The
show mixes hymns, failed magic tricks, and audience interaction. How do
you choreograph chaos without completely surrendering to it?
Entropy
keeps the chaos in balance, and a lot of this show errs on the side of
grinding to a halt. I added a line this year: “Waiting is also a way of
joining in.” So it’s not really chaos. Also, all that’s just in the
first third. There are proper scenes and everything later on. It’s like
tapas.
You call it a “clownish mystery play.” What does that mean to you – and how does that genre-bending shape audience expectations?
I
guess that description is meant to suggest a shabby, human-scale stab
at the unknowable. Mystery Plays were the earliest plays in (sort of)
English – Bible stories played with a realism bordering upon absurdity
by local Guilds. I think it’s helpful to base an absurd work on a simple
story most people already know. Even if they don’t know that’s what
they’re watching, something will chime.
This is a solo show, but
it feels full of shifting characters and perspectives. How do you
maintain that energy and dynamism alone on stage?
I’ve realised a
lot of the inspiration for this show came from simply asking, what do I
want to do onstage. I know why my character does what they’re doing,
and I don’t mind if the audience doesn’t, because as long as I know, it
will still be watchable, maybe even more so than if the audience knew.
Their curiosity provides the dynamism. That, and the songs help.
Power,
extremism, meaning – your themes hit harder in 2025. How have the
world’s changes affected your interpretation of Jonah’s story?
Jonah’s
look of double denim, bare chin and big sideburns was originally based
on me very much not wanting to look like anyone’s idea of a terrorist,
and that certainly changed, but I don’t mourn the passing of that
prejudice. I was a little worried some themes might seem too glib now,
but I’d forgotten how abstract the piece is. Although a personal sequel
to Shunt’s Gunpowder-plot-inspired, coincidentally 9/11-adjacent show
Dance Bear Dance, it’s not really about terrorism at all. It’s about an
abandoned protagonist’s power fantasy, and love is as much a part of
that fantasy as obliteration.
What’s it like re-entering the belly of the beast – literally and figuratively – after so long away from this material?
I’m
incredibly excited. The body has modes, I guess. I’ve just been writing
television sketches for Mitchell and Webb again, and it turns out the
last time I did that was in 2010, but it doesn’t feel like that. Jonah
was never off the table, let’s put it like that. If you want someone to
see your work, and your work’s a show, you have to do it again.
You’ve
worked with experimental companies like Shunt. What role does ‘poor
theatre’ or lo-fi absurdity play in your creative process today?
Ultimately,
all immersive work has to do is acknowledge your shared environment,
and that’s cheap as chips. Working with Shunt was a dream come true,
inasmuch I’d always wanted to make work that was funny in a way I hadn’t
seen things be funny before – because that’s what I grew up loving –
and Shunt were deadpan and pithy and wildly creative and wildly
ambitious, but of course they ended up with a real budget, and every -fi
going, which they used brilliantly. Maybe just as strong then is an
earlier influence: a writer, performer, and director a few Shunt artists
and I had worked with at Cambridge called Jeremy Hardingham. We did a
show with him in 1997 around the streets of Edinburgh called
“Incarnate”, based on the Gospels, and interspersed with interviews with
Drew Barrymore and sound bites from Reservoir Dogs, which maybe makes
it sound awful, but Jeremy’s script was brilliant and beguiling, and his
no-budget, Pop Absurdist pilfering was a huge influence on Jonah. He
never liked the title The Empty Space, because there are no empty spaces
– Who plays in an empty space? – but taking everything Peter Brook
wrote about “play”, and trying it out with an artist who actually knows
how to play… that freedom, that power… making a show up becomes
surprisingly easy once you’ve got that under your belt.
How do
you want audiences to feel when they leave Jonah Non Grata – confused,
comforted, or just covered in metaphorical rice pudding?
Do you
know the Monty Python Confuse-A-Cat sketch? Confused only like that cat.
Newly mobile. Reset. Maybe even like they want to make their own
version. Like they can do anything. I don’t want the venue to hate me
though, so no rice pudding. I want people to have had fun, and feel
they’ve come through something safely.
Yes, I now use wet soap instead of rice pudding so I can walk offstage all clean.
By the way, do you know the Confuse-A-Cat sketch? It's this:
Some of those answers were informed by six to seven-hundred words I'd written for Broadway World UK – before I'd clocked Jeremy's influence – attempting a brief historical rundown of other great immersive masters like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, the York Realist, me, Shunt, you know, that lot, so here's that...
Back when Shunt – the theatre collective of which I’m an associate
artist – started, we didn’t call it “immersive theatre”, we called it
“site-specific” because we took what we were given. One of the reasons
for choosing the Gunpowder Plot as an inspiration for DANCE BEAR DANCE
back in 2001 was that our venue was a railway arch. No rumbling of a
train overhead needed to be ignored now. All attention was rewarded. As
the collective grew, and designer Lizzie Clachan
could afford to create strange new spaces within found spaces,
acknowledgment of every detail of our environment remained crucial. The
site was the text.
Twenty years after first performing the thing most resembling the
shape it’s now in, I’m taking my solo show JONAH NON GRATA to Edinburgh.
I consider it very much a personal sequel to that work with Shunt but,
not wishing to give too much away, the logistics of the piece are those
of most other solo shows: me on a stage, and the audience in their
seats. Nevertheless, I still think of it as immersive, and here’s a
brief, cherry-picked history of what I think immersiveness is, to
explain why.
We could start with the Ancient Greeks. While I’ve not seen the
dramas of Sophocles described as immersive (and of course back then, you
could easily differentiate actors from spectators because, in a kind of
reverse Punchdrunk, the former wore masks) when Oedipus first steps
onstage to demand of his subjects through the hole in his face – at some
length – if any know who’s responsible for the curse fallen upon his
city, every citizen watching would already have known the story of
Oedipus, and known it’s him. Their silence wasn’t simply that of an
engaged audience; there was that added tension. They were complicit.
Permission to be complicit is a staple of immersive work. The
Mediaeval Mysteries are probably the earliest play-texts in (sort-of)
English: short, open-air adaptations of biblical incidents staged by
Professional Guilds. In one York Pageant, local “pinners and painters”
are seen hunched over a particularly slippery assignment, and it’s only
when the job is finished and erected, that the audience can see they
were roping and nailing Christ to the Cross. The author of this piece is
known simply as “the York realist”. Realism is also a staple.
Then there’s the Elizabethans. I’m old enough to have learnt – by
which I mean, old enough to have been wrongly taught – that
Shakespeare’s actors originally were rubbish, and crudely bellowed their
lines because the Globe was an open-air space, with no special lighting
to tell you who to look at. “Wrongly” of course, because once Sam Wanamaker had the thing rebuilt, its first actor manager was Mark Rylance, stammering and standing like Stan Laurel
wondering what he’d done with his keys, captivating audience after
audience with his brilliantly studied vulnerability because, in the open
air, they could see he could see them back. It wasn’t just
soliloquies that were played out to the audience now. Everything had to
be, thought and speech balloons alike. Numerous mob scenes, which had
proven such a headache in beautifully lit black boxes regardless of
their dimensions, were now a piece of piss at the Globe where the
audience was the mob, happy to be whipped up by whatever demagogue
stepped up. We didn’t call it “immersive” when the Globe reopened
either; that was still a word to be used in opposition to the idea of
“traditional” theatre. But the Globe Experiment proved Shakespeare’s
plays had been both.
Then theatre went indoors, and theatrical spaces stopped basing
themselves on the courtyards of inns. It became too expensive to light
an audience for the duration, and the relationship between performer and
spectator couldn’t help but be affected. Over two hundred years later,
in Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, the young Konstantin’s awkward rebelliousness
is exemplified by his attempt to stage his work in front of a real lake
beneath a real moon. Not a realist piece, but a hugely ambitious,
abstract poem about the beginning and end of all things, it’s still
immersive, albeit fictionally – it’s an attempt to recontextualize his
audience’s experience of their environment, like the rumbling of the
trains in DANCE BEAR DANCE, or the fleeing green figure in the EXIT sign
my reluctant prophet of doom can’t take his eyes off in JONAH NON
GRATA.
If your environment – audience included – is visible, and
acknowledged, a show cannot help but be “immersive”. And if it’s not,
you might be better off putting whatever you’re doing online, and giving
yourself the evening off. “Come and ignore where you are” is still the
default tradition when going to see a play. “Or don’t” is all
“immersive” really means.
I open tomorrow. My technical rehearsal was Monday, and everyone was lovely but the venue still hadn't been built, so I don't entirely know yet what there won't be to ignore there. But, just to prove my inspiration for Jonah changes every time I'm asked, here to play us out is a Q&A for Hinton magazine in which I add to the mix of Shakespeare, Shunt, Jeremy, Deburau and Chris Ware, not only Sulayman Al-Bassam, but the artist I finally, actually realised probably did inspire me to do a show about Jonah: Alasdair Gray, in his little Canongate Introduction to books of the Bible. These interviews have proved really useful. I hope it's not telling tales to say the one below originally went out under the headline "A Whale of a Mid-Life Crisis" but I do want to broadcast public thanks to my PR and her phones today for handling that narrative. I should probably also state explicitly that – apart from Voidspacezine in the previous post – all the Qs in these Q&As are based purely on a single press release (basically this). Maybe you knew that already. It's a new dynamic for me though. Take it away, liminal beings!
Rooted in the Book of Jonah but constantly spiralling into stranger territory, this solo performance is silly, profound, and as Kane puts it, “a temporary reprieve from having to be right.”
You describe Jonah Non Grata as “a clown take on a modern-day mystery play.” Tell us a bit more about this.
The first show I wrote on my own, rather than co-devising with fun people like Shunt who’d actually studied theatre, was a modern-day prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello, because I really wanted to play Iago, and had also just been to Cairo with Sulayman Al-Bassam’s “Al Hamlet Summit”, so any work seemed fair game. For my second play I wanted to go even further back for inspiration, to the old Mediaeval Mystery plays: rough, semi-realist adaptations of old stories from the Bible. Initially, I considered adapting Jesus’ awkward goodbyes on his return from the dead as described in various Gospels, but then I came across Alasdair Gray’s little Canongate introduction to The Book of Jonah, which he described as “a prose comedy” about “an unwilling prophet” who just “wants God to leave him alone”, and realised this should be the next show, and also that it should be – if not a clown show – at least a show where people felt very comfortable laughing at me.
The show originally debuted nearly 20 years ago. Why revive it now - and what’s changed?
In the show? My eyesight’s got worse, so there’s more audience interaction, as I have to ask people to read stuff out to me. Also, I received a very helpful note, after a late-night performance in 2008, to never let my character lose their temper. The technology that was lying around in 2005 is rarer to source now too, and you can’t just light candles onstage. Bits have been added. Bits have drifted off. But the biggest change is that stupid, evil, wrong people are even more of a problem in the world, and making sense doesn’t seem to be enough to diffuse that. So the show’s absurdity maybe seems more of a radical kindness now – a temporary reprieve from having to be right.
There are hymns, bungled magic tricks, a hotel room, and someone who might be on the moon. What’s your method for weaving such a mix into a cohesive narrative?
Bit by bit. I worry that the more I go into my inspirations for the piece, the more I risk closing off how people might enjoy it. It’s intentionally abstract, but the narrative’s there, in The Book of Jonah. I don’t want audiences to think it’s necessary for them to know that to enjoy the show though. Treat it like a concept album, or a cabaret. Music helps. A lot of the show was made to accompany the music I wanted to put into it. It’s practically a musical.
How does audience interaction influence the tone or outcome of the show if at all?
I’ve realised, in many ways, the show is simply about a character trying to work out how to talk to other people. And those other people are, for the most part, the audience. But because the audience is real, and the character is not, and we know that’s the deal when you come to see a show – a bit like Hamlet’s soliloquies – nothing will ultimately be sorted out. So I think probably the outcome won’t be affected at all. But hopefully watching that failure play out will be something, and maybe even itself feel like a connection.
What’s the strangest or most memorable reaction you’ve had from an audience member?
I think it’s my duty to out-weird the audience, and the richness of an interaction is not in its uniqueness or anecdotal worth, but in the simple fact it’s a reaction. In other words, I don’t remember. Honestly, what I find weirdest is just that so many people get it.
What do you hope to take away from Edinburgh Fringe this year?
Apart from all the stuff you’d expect me to want to take away from performing a show at an International Arts Festival – like love and respect and glory and validation and happy memories and job and book offers – I hope to take away with me some idea of what to do next. I’ve never really made anything as a means to an end, and I have the CV to prove it.
I only finished reading Marianne Levy's Don't Forget To Scream on Monday so it's too early to say if it's changed my life, but I've definitely learnt something (beyond confirmation of a bias that polite society tragically underestimates how much people need looking after – you know, that bias). Specifically I've learnt that it won't matter if a book has words like "SCREAM" and "UNSPOKEN" on the front; if it also carries the word "MOTHERHOOD" that third will work like an aneasthetic against any content warning. (To try and mitigate this I've photographed the book on my most unpleasant table.) Like shouting for help in a language with no word for help, the very words used to describe "being a mum" have made protest impossible:
"Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic but it felt like the Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to make wrongthink impossible."
Marianne writes this in a chapter called Bumbo. In a later chapter, Some Discomfort, having described what the
British Medical Journal terms the "wide range of physical and
psychological consequences" of her episiotomy, she concludes:
"I almost hit delete before this made it onto the page."
I remember these two chapters as a swift double punch in the gut, but leafing back I find they're nearly a hundred pages apart. Partly that suggests how readable she is, but also it suggests why her cry for help needs to be the size of a book; because what Marianne describes is a living nightmare, and she descibes it over and over again, because she has to, because we're – I can't find another word for it – programmed by mumthink not to listen... Or, if we do listen, to place what we hear on its own separate, cuddlier scale of oppression. Because "being a mum" is clearly the most laughably trivial subject there is.
"Our dining table was designed for four..."
Who are those Doctor Who monsters you forget as soon as you can't see them?
Ideally, this is what "red-pilling" should refer to... I'd even read Marianne's interview in The Guardian, from which the photograph below is taken, describing very
specifically what the book would contain, but still my mind was going: "Being a mum. Yeah. Crayons on flock wallpaper. Meh." And I know Marianne, a little, which is why I'm calling her Marianne, but look at that photo, look how cosy it is! It was only the interview's closing words which made me realise I might have missed something: “I’m desperate for men to read it; I’m desperate for people without kids
to read it.”
So I did, and I learnt something, and like any other sap who's had a veil lifted, I can't now think of anyone who shouldn't. Thanks therefore, Marianne, and congratulations.
I know, Charles, I know. It's awful and stupid. Nothing fits now, I know. Still, grumpy kings are a fairy tale staple too, aren't they? But should we pack all this in anyway? Otherwise, you're staring down the barrel of it until you die. You're meant to love us too now. But why should you love us? We still
have those tapes of that private conversation where you joked about
being reincarnated as the new Queen's tampon. "Just my luck!" the transcript reads. I know what you mean. I wouldn't love us. Commiserations.
Happier days (source – there's one of him in a bin there as well.)
Hey, I just did a search for "Prince Charles" to find out how old you
were!
And here's what it looks like once you're sat down. This was taken an hour before we opened on Tuesday – a happy event, although I was unusually conscious of my spittle in the spotlight during my belter. Ellis and Claire, far right, have just spotted a cat.
Interrupting the blog silence to repost – almost belatedly (we open tonight) - the following message from Magnitsky the Musical's award-wining whimsyist Robbie Hudson (pictured above):
It’s the end of the world and it will be hilarious. The Official
Mighty Fin will have a 20th birthday next year. And so this year: Listen & Often, in association with TallTales, proudly presents:
ROBOTS!
by Robert Hudson and Susannah Pearse
It’s a rehearsed reading of a new comic musical for Radio 4. In other
news, Radio 3, which is focused on the classics, has commissioned a new
version of The Mighty Fin’s 2019 smash hit, Hall of Mirrors. Both these shows are recording in January, which means it’s impossible to do a fully-produced show now. But ROBOTS! will
be a joyful return to Waterloo’s delightful and incredibly convenient
Network Theatre (Surprising Tunnel! Jolly Bar! Bins!) and Charles
and the Technical Unit will do a special effect but they won’t tell us
what it is yet.
Seriously, though, we have really missed live theatre, this will be as
much fun as we can possibly make it, and it will be lovely to see you.
Book tickets at www.ticketsource.co.uk/listenandoften. See you there.
Will we? Dare you?
L to R: Me (redhead), Robbie, (not), Alexa Lamont (redhead), Musical
Director Harry Sever (redhead), Ianthe Cox-Willmott (redhead), Harry
again.
The Network Theatre is underneath Waterloo Station, down a tunnel, beyond the smells, and very pleasant. You can come tonight, Thursday or Friday. The special effect might be a zipwire. The night promises to be smart and silly (we're wearing shirts and doing voices) and the apocalypse-spanning songs, by Susannah Pearse, are typically astonishing – I love singing Sue's stuff at Christmas. The source material is Karel Čapek's play "Rossum's Universal Robots" – the source of the word "robot" and I think I'm playing the guy on the left. Olé!
It was this time last year. I was talking to Gemma Brockis about Home, whose second series had just aired, and we were basically firing off superlatives at each other. We both knew Rufus Jones, who created the show and plays the "lukewarm xenophobe" Peter, whose family attempt to accomodate a Syrian refugee, Sami, played by the excellent Youssef Kerkour as as unmoveable, vulnerable and intimately honest as a handprint. That's Peter above, in his new car, which he has to share with strangers on account of his new job, as an Uber driver. His previous job had disappeared in anticipation of Brexit, for which, naturally, Peter voted. Everything Rufus took on in choosing to write this requires the guts of a fire-breathing goat – as he says, "writing never feels easy, so you may as well write about something that matters" – but nowhere are those guts more gloriously on display than when Peter receives news of this redundancy, but I don't want to spoil it. Home is here. If you haven't seen it, absolutely do. Rufus is amazing, everyone in it is amazing, Carrie Quinlan's in it too, and it is directed with unwavering subtlety by one of the funniest clowns I've ever seen, Peepolykus' David Sant.
Questions:
What is lost? Can it be remembered?
Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
Are there people who surprisingly come to mind?
Location: Judith E Wilson Studio
Time: Monday 11th February 2008 10am- 12midday & 2pm - 4pm
Each of the following categories to be freely available -as material for activity- throughout the session. Each category must be engaged with,
even if only partly. Some may last, or hold, more or less than others.
We will each be doing them, with probable co-interruptions and overlaps.
I think there is no need for any stipulations about eating, drinking,
smoking or the toilet: it happens when it does. But we do not speak to
each other at all, even to say hello, except under the provisions of 1.
Writing is permitted, but only as an action within the work: no notes
for future reference, no recording of any kind
When it ends at 4, we can perhaps humanly speak to one another again for a bit!
1. NOISE
there will be microphones, there will be sound sources such as CDs.
Please add to these with:
) music / noise on CD or minidisc
) objects to manipulate & amplify through the microphone or not
) one piece of a learnt text (kept in your head: this, or words from
this, are the only intelligible words you may utter)
2. Finding a voice.
there is always a choice . . .
This is an exercise about selection: throughout the duration of the
session, please elect 4 things which you would like to utter; yet the
terms of the exercise prohibit you from actually speaking, so the words
or phrases which you would most like to utter, and which you must
remember exactly -paying strict attention to word order and intonation-
must be translated in to noiseless actions. Make each action distinct
and specific to the unutterable words/phrase(s), existing in its own FRAME.
3. 7 speeds.
Of bodily movement. The only rule is that they are identifiably distinct.
4. Uneven clothing.
Perhaps one boot is much tighter than the other, or maybe there are
cords that bind a section of the body, or perhaps a sense is censored.
Also, at least one item of clothing which is either too big or too small.
5. Cleaning.
Either: an object to clean and an object to clean it.
'Object' may be metaphysical, or physical, living or dead, or even an
abstract notion. The object to clean it is tangible and visible.
6. Memory / Locations / Time.
7 locations which are designated on the way to the studio. One location
must be an identifiable place between the station and the studio. Other
locations could be unreachable, notional, global, cosmic, microscopic etc.
Let me know somehow what you think about this.
:Jeremy
Mardy cast call, 1995. I'm the top row, slunk third from left, and between me and Tom Lyall is Jamie "Apollo" Bamber who played my dad.
Here is the final act of the first run of Richard the Second. Below, not above. As I'm going to be doing the play all over again I won't say much about Act Five this time round, except that I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Having a proper argument to perform, like that between York and the Duchess, is much easier to get a handle on, as are soliloquies that are actually spoken alone. Richard's talk of populating his cell with imaginary kings and beggars tempted me to perform King Lear next, packed as it is with absurdly shifting personalities and brutal fortunes and written, according to the convenional wisdom, in plague-occasioned isolation. But that would be giving up. I'll stick with the Histories. One detail: I was going to let the viewer choose what music Richard heard, as I'd done with previous musical cues, but he mentions it going a little out of time so I decided to insert the track myself so I could have a bit of a fiddle with it. It's iMovie's "Fifth Avenue Stroll" and I chose it for its simple instrumentation, and its associations with the eternally intered employees of Lightning Fast VCR Repair. Thank you to everyone who's seen this through with me.
And here is the whole first run, if you fancy it. I'm definitely pleased with bits. I'm by no means disowning it, just interested to see what it will be like with less screaming...
Oh and here's me rattling the cup for millionaires...
Okay, that wasn't really the line: what the Duchess of Gloucester was meant to say was "Grief boundeth",
but I think "bounceth" actually makes more sense as a metaphor so that's what I went for. Oh, the
power! The power of doing Shakespeare all on my own. And the shouting! Doing all of the shouting on my own. Here then is episode twenty-one of "Simon Goes Full
Shakespeare" in which I finally test the waters of the Histories by doing the one with the most standing around in: The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, an opaque anti-drama that still nearly managed to get its author executed for treason, but more of that later in the week.
Gemma Brockis fans might be also able to spot in this photo a Gemma Brockis.
Maybe I'm a little too acquainted with this play (see the photo above from 1995 of me asking if Bolingbroke might have, in addition to hair, fingerless leather gloves). There were quite a few things I forget to explain in the video's introduction for example, like what a
"gage" is, or "lists", but hopefully it'll still make some kind of sense. I look forward to hearing any thoughts you might have, whether you know what's coming, or have no idea. According to Simon Schama's History of
Britain, Richard II introduced both
the handerchief and the spoon to England. Might the play be about that? Let's see!
(I like that Mowbray gets played off in the middle of one of his speeches.
The fanfare was just too long so I brought it in early, but I do like it.)
When I finally do another Sung Blog Sunday, I'm definitely going to add words to this.
I had more sleep before recording Act Two, which is ironic – or at least relevant, given the number of characters who can't get to sleep in it. Don't the conspirators pretty much pull an allnighter? I'm not sure what the business with Casca pointing out which way's East with his sword is about. It feels like an in-joke. A heroic pose that loses all its glamour as soon as you turn the sound up. And I'd never noticed, until playing this scene, that Brutus completely reneges on his promise to tell Portia what's going on. He doesn't even not tell her. He just walks out.
"Cool. Which one are you?"
Watching the edit back, going from Brutus and Portia's scene to Caesar and Calpurnia's I felt an unexpected and overwhelming relief. That might seem odd, given the stakes and Calpurnia's dream, but one of the possible advantages of playing every role is that there's very little chance you'll repeat a scene – it's too knackering, for one thing – and I'd run out of trauma by the time it came to play Calpurnia, but I really like, in retrospect, how recognisably "married" she and Ceasar appear as a result. It makes sense; Caesar's always been in danger, Calpurnia would be used to this. If they felt any emotional toll, she wouldn't be Ceasar's wife. As for my Caeasar, at least two cuddly old men in later plays make reference to either being or having played him, so I decided all three roles must have been written for the same actor, which is why I've given him a touch of the Wilfrid Hyde-Whites (although Gus Brown, who now I think of it played both those roles at University – Escalus in "Measure for Measure" and Polonius in "Hamlet" – would also be a great Ceasar.) This same imaginary company member has also so far turned up as an unnamed Roman in my Titus, and the Pedant in my Shrew. There are other imaginary members of this company, and I can only apologise to my Chiron voice for saddling him once again with a servant role.
Fun fact: Two supporting characters swap voices in this act. It was bound to happen.
Long before I read or saw Titus Andronicus I'd known how it ended, because of Brian Cox's Acting in Tragedy posted above, whose standalone quote – "One of the myths I'd like to dispel* is that tragedy cannot be funny" – became a guiding principle for me, and something I felt the play itself really seemed to be leaning into when I finally got round to reading it at university. As I said in my introduction on Monday though (okay, Tuesday,) the tone of Titus isn't a mystery, it's Horror, so I tried to give it the full Tobe Hooper, which helped me realise I'll probably need to take a break soon.
Knackering.
However smudgy some of this week's work might be, though, at 3:48am on this Saturday morning I can honestly I say I'm really proud of how this turned out. Last Sunday I noted some of the decisions I'd already made (containing spoilers if you haven't already seen the video below):
"The Andronici will probably be Welsh: Titus deep
and exhausted, Marcus level, Lucius bordering on the shrill... Aaron will be a cockerney villain, and cry uncontrollably with laughter recounting his evils in Act 5.... The eating
of the pies will bring Titus no solace at all though, there's no such thing as revenge, and the murder of his daugher will be a
last ditch attempt to find solace in the precedents of mythlogy."
That last decision wasn't necessarily what I ended up playing, which probably comes across as more premeditated, but I knew I had to decide whether or not Lavinia was consenting to her own death, and since in this presentation she'd have no presence, because she had no lines, there was no way to signal that consent, so it would have to be without. And since I didn't fancy playing "hey, it's an honour killing, they were different times, potato potarto" – and there's nothing in the text to suggest that I should – the whole story had to be secretly heading towards this moment, a far darker ending than the more famous serving up of Chiron and Demetrius in pasties, and so tradition had to be monstered, and especially the folly of Titus' even small-c conservatism. The extensive classical references made more sense here too; people were trying to understand their horrible lives through the stories that mirror them. All that, I realised on Sunday. Here are some things I only realised today:
I probably had to decide in what state Aaron's child was presented in the final scene, as there's no clue in the actual text whether they're alive or dead. I went with Lucius keeping his oath (that's me mewling in the background, you can probably tell,) and I really enjoy how it affects Aaron's final line... Aaron's mocking pronunciation of "god" felt like maybe one quirk too many, until I came to Lucius having to say the word immediately afterwards, and then it felt like a good and useful gag, speaking of which... I hadn't been paying nearly enough attention to
Tamora this week. I'd decided she would be Scottish but that was
kind of it (at least I'd decided Bassianus would be boring). So I finally put more work into her today, and that "yeah, maybe reel it in a touch?" glance she gives Chiron was my favourite thing to look back and watch... After editing the video, I realised I'd unconsciously used rain again as a shorthand
for exile. I just thought the scene could do
with some thunder... Having decribed the Emperor as a villian yesterday, I love the intimation that if Titus had actually just come to him with Lavinia's accusations, he would have got justice.
Here's act five, lovelies, and a playlist of all five acts is here.
"I had sent away for a plan of Anaskol and had received this map in return.
It was accompanied by a note saying Anaskol did not exist, but would this do."
I wrote before, here, about my ambivalent relationship with maps of non-existent worlds at the beginning of books, but non-maps of non-existent worlds compliment fantasy's undependability far better, and so are fine... Once, last century, when I was allowed to be a film critic for the university paper, I watched Peter Greenaway give an interview in which he said film was the perfect medium for him because he was interested in text and images, and I remember thinking, maybe he should be working in comics instead, because film isn't just words and pictures, it's also time, and his films are quite boring. But I hadn't yet grown to appreciate drifiting in and out of a work, nor had I yet seen his early funny stuff.
"According to Tulse Luper, Antilipe in Syria was the home of a unique species of
black maritime rook that mated with seagulls. That was obviously another Antilipe."
A Walk Through H (The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist) is a delight, and also forty minutes long. The film can be enjoyed in its entirety here, and if it weren't a film but simply a book of Greenaway's text and images, while I wouldn't feel so hassled by Michael Nyman's score (normally I love minimalism, but normally minimalism doesn't sound so impatient) I also wouldn't get to enjoy Colin Cantlie's brilliant - and swift - narration. A series of excellent sentences doing their thing rather than a saga, the script recalls Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Cantlie's delivery of it recalls Simon Jones' Arthur Dent, a perfect match, so I couldn't have been happier when this particular Ollie Evans posted the film on my f*c*book today saying my videos of Defoe had reminded him of it. Thank you, Ollie. Today's reading however is probably a bit too swift. Apologies for the gabble, but within it you will hear of the tribulations visited upon both those who were shut up because of the plague of 1665, and those who had to guard their doors (one of whom gets blown up SPOILERS!!!)
"I am the watchman! How do you do? What is the matter?"
I think this was called the "Arena Space". Everything was much lower-res back in 2007.
The zip's stuck on my jacket, so if I'm leaving the flat, which I very seldom do, I have to climb into it like a hazmat suit, which seems apt. Today was World Theatre Day, and because there's no theatre, and because this is what I was listening to when I went to the shops for salt, and because the Shunt Lounge was such a big, useful focus for this blog when it started over on myspace in 2007, I'm posting a conversation Gemma Brockis
had with Chris Goode about the Lounge in 2018 long after it had closed, (and just as we were working on restaging 2003's Invitation to a Beheading). Chris' retrospective take on the place provides a nice sequel to this post. I know he wasn't fond of the word "spaces", and he still might not be, preferring "places", and this rebellion against Peter Brook's idea of theatre as an "empty space" played a large part in the conversations we all used to have. I'm reminded of them these days when I talk to Helen Czerski about science presentation. She's a practical physicist - more specifcally a bubble physicist - and hates the aesthetic of the lab, as well as the word "discovery". Similarly, M. John Harrison posted recently in the comments on his blog that he hates "ideas". I love sticklers. And I hope Chris gets entirely better immediately.
"But there's now so many ways in which that space is overlaid. Even when we were there in 2010, six years after Tropicana,
the technicians would be referring to the 'Autopsy Space'... even
though they were at school when we were doing that show, which had the
autopsy in that space, and there's absolutely nothing in that space to
suggest it was the 'Autopsy Space'... One space was called the 'Act Two
Space', even though Act One, and Three, Four and Five fell away before
we even opened the show... The cumulative effect of all of these
references, all of which were theatrical, basically, and ephemeral..."
It was even more low-res in 2005.
Make space. Make room. I've just realised the words"space" and "room" are entirely synonymous. If we can have rooms then, I guess we can have spaces. But yes, neither's ever entirely empty.
Last year - I can't remember when but it was clearly hot - the writer Chris Power and I were invited onto the excellent podcast of Postcards from the Past curator Tom Jackson. You can hear it here, and can see which postcards we brought along here. According to Tom "this is a lively one", and I do appear to have a lot on my mind, but I had a lot of fun unloading it (and got a great introduction) so thank you, Tom and Chris. (I wonder if Chris has worked out by now who either Wayne or Wendy were.)
- I wasn't alone in finding the idea of somebody voluntarily turning up to someone else's house to be eaten funny. My friend Will's favourite detail of the case is Miewes accidentally letting Brandes' severed penis burn on the stove in pepper, wine and garlic because he was so engrossed in a Star Trek novel. Will liked this thwarted attempt at Hannibal Lecterish sophistication. (Ironically, the casting of Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal probably has more to do with the Miewes case than it does any previous incarnation of Lecter. I haven't seen it. Is he into Star Trek?)
- The fox is named "Grace" after the Jeff Buckley album. This line was
cut. Also cut was the line "Drop the cheese", fox slang for
"Show me the money". As I say this was one of my first sketches.
- According to Wikipedia, Miewes has since become a vegetarian.
Well, "Exciting Space Adventures" are all well and good, but what have you been up to?
What do you mean? Who are you?
You did another series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, didn't you?
Oh! Yes! Yeah, but I assumed anyone who read this blog would already know about –
Can that still be heard?
Yes. Absolutely. It's up on, erm – Oh, some episodes have gone now – but there's still some left on iplayer. Yeah, it's great. So good. Listening back, I feel I could have maybe toned it down for some of the sketches, but –
You're not happy with your work on it?
No no no! It's – Not at all. It was really – Oh, and the Quasimodo sketch is up now on something called Radio 4 in Four.
What? Um... Yeah. It was really fun. I think the original shot of John drawing a beard on his own reflection is maybe more original, and better suited for press, but it –
You'd rather not appear in the publicity?
No! No, it's great! A huge compliment. And if you buy the CD you can see some of our feet. No. I just –
The Boy Who Climbed Out Of His Face – The Build by Floro Azqueta
Okay. You've written a lot about shunt on this blog. Want to talk about it?
Um. Wouldn't you rather hear another Exciting Space Adventure?
Do you not want to talk about theatre any more?
No! No no! Actually there's a few interesting things from the rehearsal I'd like to put up. And I did Ring. Again. And I've done – er, actually I've done a couple of shows, as a part of the London Horror festival. Just one-offs.
Where can we see them?
Um. They're – They've – They happened. Back in October. Yeah! But no, I had great fun doing –
Okay. Where can we see you next?
What? Oh! I'm in a panto. Well, it's more of a musical. A company called the Mighty Fin do one nearly every year or so, and Susannah Pearse writes the songs, and John Finnemore's in it as well, which is actually how we met, and it will be brilliant. Yes. You can get tickets... Oh wait, you can't. It's sold out.
Oh, AND, I've popped my panel show cherry! Yes, I was invited to take part in the excellent transatlantic comedy podcast "International Waters". It went online on Monday, and you can hear me laughing my "dad laugh" on it, and plugging stuff even more poorly than I've just done here. Thank you, and MERRYCHRISTMAS!
Although I'd seen and shared photos, I had no idea when I wrote this post back back in 2022, that actual footage might exist of Charles' career at Footlights. Not a hope. But here it is. And, while not a fake, the King's material does share Ai's hallmark of not remotely understanding what a joke is, but prolifically turning something out anyway. As I head off now back to Square On,e to join the thousands who have faced the Unfightable Unknown of a first night Doing Edinburgh, all previous plaudits potentially worthless – show starts in an hour, TICKETS HERE – may we all find comfort today in the following baffled silence...
