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.
Margaret Cabourn-Smith reflects on her old sketch antics and why you shouldn't use real meat in your shows.
You can listen to the full conversation right here! shows.acast.com/out-of-chara...
#Comedy #Chat #Podcast #Sketch #Character #VictorianTimes #Liver #Magic #EdFringe
As "Jonah" turned from distant credit to looming "to do", I found these and other reminiscences about heading to the Edinburgh Fringe and making "magical worlds... trawling costumes around rooms above pubs" from fellow Finnemoreperson and rising star, Margaret Kaboom-Smith, both inspiring and grounding, and did not in the end use real fish.
Another reminiscence: Margaret, Carrie, Lawry and I independently tour our production of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "Мы" for ten seconds in 2019
Margaret is often inspiring and grounding, and I happen to have also recorded a (far more meandering) Out of Character with Alex Lynch back in 2022, but never got round to putting it up here, so why not listen to both episodes now, and compare our differing accounts of, say, making Series Nine? (I did not think it might be shit.)
Simultaneously. That's right. Listen to them simultaneously. It's like being in the room with us!
I remember enjoying myself a lot during the recording, and also the punishing heat – so today's actually perfect for a repost – I had just got back from "Bleak Expectations" in Newbury,
and had no idea at the time the show would go on to the
West End with an almost completely new cast, nor that Series Nine would indeed be the last series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme but that it would
continue as a series of annual specials, and I'd certainly no idea I would be writing for Mitchell and Webb again in 2025, which I should definitely write about, I know. But I think that's all the loose ends tied up. Our next Silly Voices Day is Friday.
Yet another reminiscence: Mayfly Season, Newbury, 2022. Intense.
Oh! The actor whose name I couldn't remember is James Callis, and Lillian Roth is the actress from "Animal Crackers". And I don't think that sound is me belching and rustling crisps, I think it's feedback. And it's a Newcastle accent Gilbert puts on as Len MacMonotony, not Birmingham, and Engelbert Humperdinck he mentions, not Sacha Distel. In fact, here is some "Gilbert's Fridge". They don't make kids' shows like etc.
Well, there is absolutely, positively no way I'm going to let myself stage Jonah Non Grata again for the first time in nearly ten years, without getting round to plugging it on here with at least twelve hours' notice, so here is that plug, and HERE are the tickets. It's on for one night only this Midsummer's Saturday, at the Soho
Theatre on Dean Street – a venue I've always hoped to infiltrate – as
part of the
London Clown Festival, a scene I've always similarly nursed a pang to
crash.
Me crashing clowns. Hi Dan. Hi Neil. Hi Ben. Hi Dan again.
After that one night only, the old bag of tricks, fish, and creamed rice – older even than this blog – will head up to Edinburgh for loads more nights in August, as threatened, and I do plan to bang on about that a lot more on here in future, so don't worry, but for now I'll just say that the Assembly Rooms tickets are HERE, and that I have a lot of people to thank for this happening but mainly one person. That person's precise attitude towards being so much as even mentioned on this blog, however, is currently unknown to me at half past one this morning, so I'll just – for anyone who doesn't know what PR is – post this helpful and unrelated video from 2012:
I didn't know what PR was either, but looking at the Metro, it... seems... to be... working... Does the writer below even know me? I don't think so. No reason they should, either: no explicit promise is actually made about the quality of whatever funny bones I may have, just that they'll be mine. 'An exciting biblical adventure'. Great. That's the "Why now?" taken care of too, I guess. So there I am, in today's paper. Being picked in the Must-Sees. Easy as that. Type discount code "FLIGHTRISK" for a fat fifth off tonight's tickets!
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.
Let the record show this post is actually going up on Thursday the 22nd, the day after President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the US Senate. I've been meaning to post something about March for a while, to catch up on the run-down of the year, and Zelensky's address has proved a good incentive, so here are more old photos.
Again, a lot of scenery,
including a reminder that a giant mound had been dismantled outside
Marble Arch, serving as the reminder it had ever gone up. It looked better
stripped of turf.
March appears to have seen no real change to my routine. I'd use my time walking, and photograph where I walked. Local parks. Local galleries.
I put off buying stuff for the room. We still wore masks at the Crystal Maze. The weather was changing though, behaving itself to begin with, showing no signs for example that in April this would all be snow...
And in August this would be dust...
Then, just as it seemed it had been decided the pandemic was over now, and "things" should be getting back to "normal", we suddenly remembered the possibility of nuclear annihilation.
Down the hill from me, outside Holland Park, flowers and signs of support started appearing at the feet of the statue of the Ukrainian Saint Volodymyr. Russia had invaded the Ukraine on February the 24th. I looked it up.
Just up the hill from me, outside Kensington Gardens, fences were erected to protect the walls erected to protect the Russian Embassy from graffiti, and across the road from them, more fences, often peopled by protestors, but I'm normally too shy to take photos of people.
The fences are still there today.
And the signs.
A search for "Zelensky" conducted at the beginning of this invasion reminded me he'd been a popular television comedian before coming to office, and the extraordinary speech he gave in Russian on the day of the invasion reminded me how powerfully a comedian can communicate.
Remarkable speech. Addressed to the Russian people, it should also be heard everywhere. pic.twitter.com/RkrDGSYUYq
On one walk, I then bumped into the friend who'd invited me to that concert where the orchestra were all masked. She'd grown up in Yugoslavia, and outlived it, still holidaying as a teenager in what was becoming Croatia while living the rest of the time in what was becoming Serbia (Is that right? Have I got that right? I should look it up.) Anyway, she lived in a war.
"Vladimir Putin is an absolute fucking genocidal dictator," she explained over a pint in the Windsor Castle. "But –"
"America doesn't give a fuck about Europe either. The Cold War's been over for thirty years, why is there still NATO? Putin didn't do this without reason. I cannot believe this propaganda. News should be History. Nothing is being explained. We're not enemies. These are people! They're going to have to discuss! It's exactly like Yugoslavia... I'm sorry."
And now I'm thinking of that "Stalin Attacks Churchill" headline from 1946, in the copy of the Daily Mail we use as a prop in Love Goddess. It's a good prop. You can see the beginnings of the Cold War in the story beneath, as "Generalissimo Stalin" warns of an English-Speaking assumption of World Domination. The power of that narrative's still there today too.
Illustrations by E. H. Shepard. That dragonfly is just perfect.
Ernest Hemingway, who liked big, short statements, famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one
book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from
that."
I'm unlikely to change my mind that A. A. Milne's "Winnie-The-Pooh" holds a similar place in British Comedy, and since yesterday's post accidentally went out in the early hours of today, I'll linger a little longer on the story "In which Eeyore has a birthday and gets two presents". Here's an extact. I had forgotten Owl was in this story. I had also forgotten just how sketchy a character he is. (Does one lick pencils?)
"It's a nice pot," said Owl, looking at it all round. "Couldn't I give it too? From both of us?"
"No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan. Now I'll just wash it first, and then you can write on it."
Well, he washed the pot out, and dried it, while Owl licked the end of his pencil, and wondered how to spell "birthday."
"Can you read, Pooh?" he asked a little anxiously. "There's a notice about knocking and ringing outside my door, which Christopher Robin wrote. Could you read it?"
"Christopher Robin told me what it said, and then I could."
"Well, I'll tell you what this says, and then you'll be able to."
So Owl wrote... and this is what he wrote:
HIPY PAPY BTHUTHTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDAY.
Pooh looked on admiringly.
If the Hundred Acre Wood is Dunder Mifflin, Owl is its Creed. And like Dunder Mifflin, or Michael & Eagle Lettings, or the Muppets, the company of Pooh have little in common; they're a team, not a gang – and like Charlie Brown, every character is an absolute mood.
I had also forgotten that this story gave us one of Jim Henson's favourite songs, "Cottleston Pie". Here it is, performed by another bear.
Rab C. Nesbitt was my Holden Caulfield. At least I'm assuming he was, I didn't get past page two of Catcher In The Rye. But "Scotch and Wry" – a compilation of Scottish sketches Dad had on VHS starring Rikki Fulton and Gregor Fisher who would go on to play Nesbitt – was something I'd watch religiously, meaning not necessarily understanding all of it, and when Fisher got his own sitcom in 1988, it had my full attention. All beautifully scripted by Ian Pattison, "Rab C. Nesbitt"'s fourth episode was a particular revelation: What a journey this speech goes on, digging and digging until we're out the other side. I remember thinking, watching it: "Oh wow, comedy can also do this?" I would have been thirteen.
But what had I meant by "this"? Well, now I've spent a couple of days revisiting King Lear, I think I have a clearer idea. My first acquaintance with Lear and also Othello, two surprisingly entertaining and downright funny Great Works of Tragedy were around this time too, and I can see Rab's unaccommodated ranting at the Universe striking a similar chord. More compact than Shakespeare too. Comedy also equals tragedy minus time.
"... and on this." Different Play, Act III Scene 4
After the surprising delights of Peter Brook's seventy-three-minute-long 1953 King Learyesterday, I decided to revisit Gerolamo Lo Savio's extravagantly-hatted, fourteen-minute-long silent 1910 version from the BFI collection Silent Shakespeare, posted at the top.
In looking that up I discovered an even earlier, thirteen-minute-long, German-subtitled version from 1909 credited to the Vitagraph Company of America, so I thought I'd post that too.
Comparisons are invidious, but what else are we going to do?
The most surprising thing both versions share is an absolutely stand-out Oswald. Goneril's servant, it's a small but satisfying role, whose job both literally and narratively is to just turn up and be a dick. Above is the Vitagraph version, fully understanding the assignment as he bounds out and tells everyone to eff off. Below is Lo Savio's. I remembered the 1910 version having excellent facial hair and helmets, and I was right. Just look at him there on the left. This Oswald may not have received the promotion to chief antagonist Brook gave him in 1953,
despite this 1910 version also cutting the subplot, but he definitely gets the outfit hardest to ignore, against stiff competition too.
That's Kent in the middle, gobsmacked by his cheek. Required by the plot to disguise himself as a servant by simply shaving, Kent looks very underdressed in this company. The shorter 1909 version not only keeps the suplot, involving Edmund and Edgar – YAY! – but also devotes a whole scene to Kent shaving. He gets to keep the moustache too. In the following scene, having picked another fight with Oswald, Kent is sentenced to the stocks. That's Oswald behind him leaping for joy. What a dick.
Compare this scene to the 1910 version. Again, excellent helmets. But...
These guys really do not know how to put someone in the stocks.
In general, as gorgeous as this later, hand-tinted version looks, it does come across as a bit of a shambles compared to Vitagraph's effort: Like many blockbusters, a lot more time and care seems to have been spent on it in post than during the actual shoot. Here's the 1910 version's storm scene...
... minus the storm, because we're filming outside on a clear day because it's 1910. Feigning madness without a script is also quite a big ask, especially when you're missing the rain and thunder that's meant to push you over the edge, so after quite a lot of faff with a cloak, Ermete Novelli's Lear tries to fix this narative lapse by punching a rock and going Ow.
Again though, it was 1910. Cut the film some slack.
Let's compare this to Vitagraph's earlier 1909 version...
Oh okay! Sure! If you want to go the traditional route, I suppose you could always bring out a backdrop, run a shower in front of the camera and scratch lighning flashes directly onto the film, but...
Okay no, this is clearly much better. But aren't you just rushing everything if you have to include the subplot? Only providing a series of tableaux vivants? What about later, when Lear is discovered lost to his madness but drifiting in and out of a state of revelation? (Sorry, SPOILERS... that's a joke of sorts, but actually if you don't know King Lear, there will be spoilers coming.) Here's the Vitagraph:
Having kept the subplot, this Lear also keeps its full complement of witnesses: Lear flanked by the banished and debased Edgar, and Gloucester, the father who banished and debased him, blinded now by allies of the son he promoted. Here's the 1910 version:
Having lost both the subplot and the blinding of Gloucester, and of course the storm – but having definitely hurt his hand, let's not forget that – Ermete Novelli now improvises some "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" business with a broomstick, abandoning the narrative pretty much entirely before shuffling off stage right with a cry of whatever the Italian is for "Wheee I'm a witch, byeeee!"
When he later comes to on a cheetah skin we're back in the play, but the hand-tinters seem to have called it a day...
For both 1909 and 1910 Lears, the reconciliation scene with his banished daughter Cordelia is played as eccentrically as the madness scenes, meaning Vitagraph's William V. Ranous gets to keep his dignity, while Novelli, for whom that ship had long sailed, still gets to go noodly noodly, but in a happier vein than before. The Vitagraph version also provides a harpist for Ranous. I don't know if that made any difference to the accompaniment. Nice helmet bottom right too.
Here, of course, is where the story should end, and where, even with their tiny truncated running times, both versions show the strength of the play's final act. Vitagraph also manages to cram in a final fight between Edmund and Edgar, before somehow managing to rig a slowly setting sun over the final image of Lear grieving for his hanged daughter through disintegrating filmstock.
And I even stopped laughing at Novelli (put that on your poster!) There is nothing comic in him bringing on Cordelia's body, and while the 1910 version doesn't give us a sunset, it does manage an impressive number of distant extras to the left of the frame and a possibly fake bridge.
Unfortunately 1910 Lear's grief turns loopy almost immediately, and the film cuts just as it looks like he was about to get better.
Still, I'm very glad there was a record of whatever it was Ermete Novelli thought he was up to.
In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose.
My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.
Here's the famous windmill scene.
King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.
Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.
I pity the Fool.
"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of
us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had
an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something
else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...
... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.
Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...
... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?
Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...
Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.
But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...
Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling
on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake
of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.
Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...
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...
