Alright, If Immersed (Backtracking in Edinburgh)

 

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.

 Jonah Non Grata will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August. For tickets and more information, visit:: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/1076-jonah-non-grata

A Jonah-based mural by Alsadair Gray which I have only just this second found out existed.

Badphone's Last Stand

 

 To think there was a time I balked at the thought of putting my face on this blog. But here's a little record of my business trip to Praha! for another advert, and catching the mood board for my character at the wardrobe fitting, I see who I have to thank for it...

 

 Thank you, Michael Cera, for giving me a type. 

 In my time off, I revisited many sites still standing from my last trip with Lanna in 2011: the crazy babies crawling up TV Tower – I had forgotten the massive holes in their faces – the weird, giant metronome which replaced the statue of Stalin  – the third AD told me they were thinking of bringing the statue back, but pink this time, of which he approved – and there was, of course, new mad shit too...

   The Giant Prague Museum of Endless Glass Cases of Minerals now boasted other stuff as well! Like a life-sized diorama of "dog-bears" fighting Early Cenozioc ungulents, a complete whale skeleton...

 

 I've played smaller. And those beautiful Šalamoun "Hobbit" illustrations I mentioned last post – here are more...

 There were also harps you could play, suits of armour, skulls, typewriters, and that big, empty room in the video, none of which I remember from 2011, but what I really went to the Museum for of course was the stairs, and they never disappoint...

 

 I also – for the first time – went to the zoo, as recommended, which was huge, its enclosures far less enclosing than those of Regent's Park...

 

 At its centre was a giant statue of Radegast on Mount Radhošť. Not just a guano-soiled wizard played by Sylvester McCoy, Radegast is also it turns out a Slavic Beast God overthrown by Christian missionaries – a deeply disappointing legend. 

 With of all this, Badphone did its best, bless...

 

  But my PR's given me her old phone now, which I didn't take with me, and I think it's time to start taking better pictures.

 

 (Reviewing the video, I notice it's actually shot with a different – and possibly worse – Badphone from the one I took to Bucharest in '22. I fell for Prague just as hard [and indeed for Norwich, when I did Polar Express there {and indeed Croydon, when I went to voice video games there}] but while I did make it to the last two minutes of a band in a cellar playing Watermelon Man, I didn't discover any cool, new music to round off this post with like the Bucharest one.

 So here's Alan.)

 

Hat Hat Bang Bang

 

In which I belatedly honour THE film of 2023...

 

 (A placeholder's good for more than one day, right?)

 The summer evening I saw "Oppenheimer" I remember I raced hime to get to work on a version of this, inspired perhaps by Nolan's ruthless deployment of the formula: Man plus Hat times Cinema equals Importance. But I couldn't find an untreated soundtrack to the trailer I wanted to mix into it, and it wasn't really synching, and so I moved on. For the rest of the year however I continued to ponder just what that script had meant when targets other than Hiroshima were being dismissed by those men sat round the table as "too small". It was just a throwaway line, but how can a civilan target be "too small"? Noone ever explained that. This was well before thousands more non-combatants would be bombed to death with America's blessing in the Autumn. Anyway, cut to the end of year and I had another look at the edit, and decided it didn't really matter that it was shit; no less effort had gone into it than the idea deserved.

 

 

 

Also for your consideration: "There are some things you can't film" Yoshishige Yoshida

 

 And working on the mash-up further wouldn't stop anyone actually thinking that one film was a cinematic milestone and the other a risible vanity project, but I was still bugged I couldn't get an untreated soundtrack. Then, tonight, someone on F*c*b**k – already having gone into some length about how much they loathed the charmless Great Man narrative of "Maestro" – started watching "Oppenheimer" for the first time, so I decided to dust this off and join in, and here it is. Tone is tone, isn't it? Where did Michael Flatley go so wrong? Nowhere.

 

And: "When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting" David Lynch (as John Ford)

The German Choir of London go "Oh God"

 Here's matter ghoul adjacent. Back in March I took an iPad out to where Spitalfields borders The City, to see if I could get anything useful for a little promo Big Ben said we needed to make now that the Americans were favouring Harry Potter Tours – which we don't do – over the more nuanced, site-specific contextualising of the tragic murder and mutilation of unaccommodated Victorian women provided by Fred Strangebone's Ripper Walks. "Well, this will look terrible" I thought as it started to rain because I knew nothing about what makes a street look good. 

 The iPad was a gift from the Musical Director of the Deutscher Chor London, Barbara Hoefling. When I came to cut the Strangebone footage together I found a whole file of recordings she had made on it in preparation for a lockdown Hallowe'en Concert. Barbara's developed her own method of directing amateur choirs: instead of training each singer up to the standard of a soloist, she concentrates on perfecting the coherence of their untrained voices into a single instrument, to produce a sound I've heard no other human choir make. I tried playing one of the recordings I'd found over the footage of our route, and was instantly thrilled by how devastating I found the result – far too upsetting to attract even the Canadians however. So I knocked together a new soundtrack from some library numbers, Ben provided text and sound effects – car horns, golf swings, that kind of thing – and you can see the final trailer here, if you like. But Barbara Hoefling's brilliant work is below.

 

Remember to keep everything natural.

   

 Actually, there are a couple of self-tapes in here from August too now – I took down the original cut from youtube before I could blog about it, because I'd suddenly landed a second job and the clip I'd used from that was pretty much the entire role, and I'd signed a Non Disclosure Agreement, and I didn't want to lose the job, which films tomorrow (it's not this one:)

Otherwise, this has been a quiet year, which is why I decided to do something with all these old self-tapes that had been filling it. No complaints, although I do keep wondering about going back to the moustache, but my agents say no. Oh, I've got a voiceover agent now! That other – first – job which I landed from a self-tape, a clip of which opens this video, that was a voice over, but as you can see, I still decided to dig out – almost literally, as both the density and deriliction of my costume wardrobe have turned it quite earthy – my old London Dungeon shirt. So, yes, I got to be in "Good Omens" sort of. Those who can and who have not yet enjoyed John Finnemore's peerless take on the Book of Job in episode 2 are strongly recommended to do so ("Come back when you've made a whale." Outstanding stuff.) And for those who have not yet enjoyed this, and can, here you go...

The Delia Derbyshire of the Electronic Stomach

 

 

 Allow me to present these edited highlights of a tribute to the – apparently – thousands of sound effects artists required to bring a single episode of radio to life, according to this startlingly untrustworthy and increasingly Lynchian "Jam Handy Picture" from 1938 called, for some reason, Back of the Mike. Here are four men recreating the sound of a telephone:

 

 And here, over a decade before The Archers was first broadcast, is someone testily soothing a cow: 

 

 I was inspired to do some research into this subject by Margaret Cabourn-Smith's shining turn as The Goon Show's solo foley artist "Janet" in Spike, which I saw at the Richmond Theatre on Thursday with her husband Dan Tetsell who had just finished his own run on EastEnders, completing the BleakEnders trifecta...

 

 To save the kerfuffle of taking down bank details, I had given Dan two sleek tenners for the ticket – tenners aren't "crisp" any more, but is "sleek" the word? – which he then passed on to Mervyn Millar whom we met in the pub afterwards for tickets to My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican. Mervyn in turn handed these on to Barry Cryer's son Bob who was the fourth at our table – I don't know for what, but it didn't matter, I'd really enjoyed the show and some pints and was now in the mood to find transactions like these immensely pleasing.* Here's the sound of a horse chase:

 

 I talked to Mervyn about how much I'd been considering recently the increasing popularity of puppets in theatre, because I figured he must have played a part in that, and I asked how he got started: Apparently his first puppet had been a judge, built because there simply hadn't been enough time for the actor he was directing to do the full quick change. Here's a rain storm:

 

Bob Cryer was lovely too, and talked about the passing of his father, and the slight oddness of grieving alongside a parasocial fan community (Ray Galton's son had suggested they team up with Rory Kinnear and Lucy Briers to form the "Sons Or Daughters Of Famous Fathers", or SODOFF.) I had a great time.

 

  Naturally Margaret ended the show doing the splits. More surprisingly, she opened it accidently knocking her enormous gramophone off a trolley. I was very happy to be sitting next to Dan for that – that's the joy of live theatre – and I was also very happy the show ended with a performance of 1985. The tour ends soon, and the final Richmond show is going up within an hour of me posting this so sorry for that, but go if you can. 

 What else did I enjoy about that night? The pub was giving out free dog biscuits. Eating those took me back. 

 Here's more research:

 

 

* UPDATE: Margaret has just informed me it was for a ticket to Spike. Perfect.

Badphone Does Bucharest

 Last month I spent three nights in Bucharest. Beyond the flight times in my diary and the self tape I'd made pretending to look sad at a dog, I knew nothing about either the job or the city that I was heading to. It was only on the plane that I looked up which country I'd even be in, but I didn't know anything about Romania either. Something to do with vampires? I just knew everything would be taken of, which it was. And Vlad the Impaler was on a mural outside the hotel, so yeah, something to do with vampires.

 

  As I hint or mumble in the video above, heading out onto the streets that first evening after a heavy make-up test – (I'm not sure I can say too much about the job, but it was my first professional experience of waiting two hours for glue to dry: proper acting) – felt pleasantly like taking pot luck through a portal, except the changes this multiverse threw up weren't just that the traffic lights are a different colour now and there are more trees, although there were more trees. God, one month on, does that reference make any sense? Did "Multiverse of Madness" even happen?

 

  It's not just my bad phone's fault that this shoddily-ratioed video is so inadequate a record of how thrilling I remember the place. Also partly to blame was my lack of confidence at filming stangers, and the fact that I was normally out after midnight, so of course some of the city was "surreally deserted". For every empty street I trained my camera on though, there were equally cobbled quarters still bustling and pumping with colour, fresh techno and al fresco you name it, down which I idled avoiding eye contact, and enaged in perhaps that most subconscious-baring of games: making up new titles for Bond films.

 

I still know very little about Romania. I don't know whose any of those heads are in Cismigiu Gardens for example. But I do know the country's a member of the EU, and that the victory mentioned in the place names was over former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which might explain all the trees – I was thinking of something Helen Czerski had tweeted about an aspect of twentieth century totalitarian civics I'd never considered.

 

 Also, I can now say "Oh, I discovered this DJ in Bucharest," which sounds cool, doesn't it? Why not bung this in your ears next time you fancy a strut?

 

Turpintude

 The fact my laptop now crashes every time I so much as look at iMovie has made editing this video an act of pointilism, and for all the the time it took, it clearly needed more, but once I'd imagined the haves of Metropolis confronted with Ben Turpin in A Clever Dummy, I knew I had to see it. So at least now that's done. And let's face it, for all his singing, George Seurat wasn't so hot at painting hats either. Speaking of a Sunday on La Grande Jatte, here's some people meeting today in groups of no more than six...

 

Demo

NEW SHOWREEL!

 

 Finished. It's a shame my laptop's literally killing me, because I've remembered how much I love editing. Thanks are due to my agent Marie Findley, for once again being so bracingly ruthless in her suggestions of what to cut – five minutes is too long, she's right – including one clip from Death Meets Lisolette where I electrocuted myself, because it was "a bit of a lull". 

 Thanks also to Joel Morris, for noting how much a showreel is like the demo mode on a Casio keyboard: I only have Revenge, Horny and "Ah, Mister Bond" to go now, then I'll have the full set of timbres, the perfect showreel, and I can finally give up acting. 

 And thanks, finally, to the previous showreel, for helping me get some jobs to make this new one: acidentally killing someone on a sports day followed by four mintues of looking haunted and saying my name's Keith almost definitely got me Ghosts...

 

OLD SHOWREEL!

Sometimes this blog will just be me playing "Tiny Sticks" on the ukelele.

With thanks to – and for – Emerald Sapphire and Gold. (First wormed into my ear in The Tennis Show.)

 

 

(recorded 11pm this evening)

dinosaurs

dinosaurs

A Salute to the Many Excellent Drunk Women Portrayed in "Werewolf of London" (1935)

Apologies for the low resolution. I tried to put this on youtube, but it all got blocked. 

Featuring:
 Spring Byington as Ettie Coombes ("Shh.") whose work in this film is as good as anything out of Lee Strasberg.
 Charlotte Granville as Lady Forsyth ("Please don't yank me, Paul.")
 Maude Leslie as Mrs. Charteris ("I simply jitter to go to Java.") or, at least, I'm assuming that's who this character is. I'm not sure she and Lady Forsyth are that drunk, either.
 Jeanne Bartlett as Daisy ("Give me a nice kiss, Alf."). Definitely meant to be drunk, but again I'm only assuming from IMDB that this is "Daisy".
 Ethel Griffies as Mrs. Whack ("Is your tripe tough, Mrs. Moncaster?") and Zeffie Tilbury as Mrs. Moncaster ("Spear the canary with a fork.") These two attributions I'm sure about; they're very good about saying each other's names.
 And Tempe Pigott ("I want two gins for two ladies") credited simply as "Drunk Woman" on IMDB, which is a bit rich in this company.
 Parenthetically, in contrast to all the superb character work above, the film's two werewolves, Warner Oland and Henry Hull, appear to have been genuinely paralytic for most of the filming, making their many conversations about the fictional plant Mariphasa Lupina Lumina particularly nail-biting. It's a mouthful.

"Mariphasa... Lupina... Lumina..."

 Screenplay by John Colton, from a story by Robert Harris. Direction by Stuart Walker. Second viewing by means of the Wolf Man boxset at Peter Davis and Laura Marshall's, where I finally gave this film the attention it was due. Excellent party. Peter's just extended his horror podcast output, by the way. "Horror Movie Maniacs" pleases me greatly, and might please you too, and the Hellraiser-inspired audio guignol that he and fellow maniac Phil wrote and produced – Piercing The Veil" – in which I get to play an absolute rotter, is still audible here.

Frankenstein Wednesdays! Prologue... Deadzoning Dracula!

 Sorry, but I'm really pleased with this discovery.

 Silence is creepy, and talking pictures were still pretty new when Todd Browning's film of "Dracula" came out in 1931, so a film without music was probably an innovation, and what I'm suggesting is obviously heresy... 

 Nevertheless, I've always wanted to see "Dracula" be given a proper musical score. Even the film's most ardent fans would admit, once we leave Transylvania, things becomes a bit slow and stagey, but what makes a film "stagey"? It's based on a stage adaptation, but the problem isn't so much a failure to open the play up, perhaps, as a failure to allow the audience in. Here's a clip...

 

 Before.

  And here it is again, but this time I've done a Super Kool Kane Mix, and plastered Michael Kamen's score for "The Dead Zone" all over it, and come on!

   After.

 

 Music helps broadcast an inner life, and that's pretty useful in a story about mind control. There's nothing "stagey" about these performances now, at least not to me. They're big, yes, but it's "Dracula"! I'm in the room now. I get it. I care. There's dread, yearning, regret, bloodshed, romance... I'm really trying to avoid using the word "stakes"... Kamen's score has it all, and it turns out so did Browning's film.  

 Again, here's a clip without the score. And now with:

   Again! Again!
 

 It's worth forking out for the Blu-Rays if you can next time you're in CEX, and maybe having your own fun with the soundtrack. Dwight Frye as Renfield particularly benefits from Universal's gorgeous restorations. His teeth really glisten, his eyes really gleam. Anyway, now that I've touched upon "The Creature From The Black Lagoon" and completely fixed "Dracula", next Wednesday we'll (hopefully) begin this trawl through Universal's original "Dark Universe" in earnest, with a film that absolutely allows the audience in. This is what I'll be working with. And your homework is James Whale's "Frankenstein".

 (If you actually want to hear something informed and enlightening about this film by the way, I can really recommend "Why is there cardboard in Dracula?")

I made a video to honour the passing today of Neil Innes and Norma Tanega. It is very bad and at the bottom of this blog.

Goodbye and thank you, Neil Innes. Here's three of you, offering superb advice on how to avoid extinction in 2020. In the Bonzos - a band that always managed to do its own thing - you still managed to stand out, doing your own thing squared (and never blacking up). You were very cool, never impressed by yourself. I remember, off my nut on steroids over a protracted stay in hospital ten years ago "Humanoid Boogie" was one of the only songs I could bear to listen to, and once I was out I managed to get a friend of yours to text you that I thought it was the best song ever written, and you texted back saying I was kind but wrong. And I never knew this about you:

 And goodbye and thank you, Norma Tanega. I know of you because the opening theme to "What We Do In The Shadows" used to hit me in the heart with anger, joy, despair and yeehahs all in the space of ten seconds. I heard we lost you today too. Here is my terrible double tribute:

Sorry.

Nearly there.

Nearly, nearly there. What were your favourite bits of this wonderful year?

Actually that's from this.

Odd to see something as old as Norden's "Alright On The Night" overlap a genre as not-as-old as a talking-heads time-filler. Was this the first of its kind? Who cares? And was this a wonderful year? In many ways of course it was as grim as a peeled cat in a pram, but let's not dwell, it's still December the 27th, John Finnemore wrote a sketch about that and it's in his Holiday Special from Series Six which was repeated on the radio today, and I'm in it too, and so of course are all those turkeys who voted for Christmas. I never blogged about that series I now realise, not even about the musical. Oh well. The producer did, including a number of photographs of us in Santa Hats, standing at a poignant distance. Series Seven starts on January the 4th. YES! PLUGGED SOMETHING BEFORE IT HAPPENED! Enjoy, my lovelies.

not this wonderful year

Update: I have just learnt from twitter that Margaret Cabourn-Smith calls this period, between Christmas and New Year's, the "Merry-neum". What did you learn from twitter today?

Rushed Smudge

The film I shot on a potato in the woods surrounding Frankfurt is now online, so you can finally see how strangely out of focus everything was on that day, and enjoy the deeply disappointing results of a month's never giving up. Stupid magic phone that does everything! Sorry – Enjoy:

UPDATE: They say a film is never finished, only abandoned, but I abandoned this a little too early. Tinkering around with the re-edit, I've now upped the volume, changed the soundtrack to give it a bit more shape, and hit the filter that makes it look more super-8ey, to lampshade the amateurism. Less rushed. Still a smudge. The original crud is up here.

Me at the zoo

"And now, Watson, it only remains for us to find out by wire the identity of the cabman, No. 2704, and then we will drop into one of the Bond Street picture galleries and fill in the time until we are due at the hotel."

 One of the excellent things about reading Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is how positively it affects your time-keeping: Holmes' energy is contagious, he clearly loves living in London and he knows how to use it – the city is his Bat-belt. I'm currently not in London, however. I'm in Frankfurt, playing an Obelicised Watson in a "Hound of the Baskervilles", and using neither the city nor my time here nearly as effectively as SH (I've been here a month so far. I've heard a lot of podcasts in bed). But now that we have a week off I thought I should mark it somehow, so I started reading the book, as I said, and it's clearly put some baking soda up my aft, because yesterday I actually went to the zoo.

It was terrifying.

 

 And I then I made my first film on a phone. And here it is. Good old blog. We must catch up. In the meantime, here is a sustained invasion of privacy:

 Yes. Something escaped.

"Here are some phrases..."

  This is me trying to transcribe an audience's reactions to a show I performed nine years ago, a promenade version of Jonah Non Grata at the Shunt Lounge: Is that someone saying "This is an asshole of a night" 40 minutes, 40 seconds in? I can't be sure. I might leave that bit out. It's tricky. What sounds like "Good question" on one cheap set of headphones turns out to be "Is it Russian?" on another, and if anyone can tell me what I'm saying 22 minutes and 28 seconds into this, please let me know, or I'll just have to go with "I've discovered a new version of ham" which it definitely isn't.

 But it's a surprisingly creative procrastination exercise. Initially I just wanted to subtitle the video using youtube's CC function because so much of it was inaudible (and because it beat writing something new), but the subtitles seem to be taking on a nice life of their own now, and something new seems to be making itself. Of course it might just seem like that because subtitles immediately make something look more like a documentary, or it might seem like that simply because I've spent nearly a week staring at the thing, but so much of the show concerned the reading or repeating of text - phrases in a foreign accent, instructions, hymns, Ian Livingstone's "City of Thieves" - that it seems apt to see this text finally take centre stage. Subtitling also means that any audience murmur I can make out also becomes part of the text now. An unpleasantly fraught audience relationship has become an engaging dramatic narrative. You could never do this in the live show. This is the book. It's almost like a comic. Finally. And the fact that so many of the words are inaudible might actually be helping that transition. Words and pictures.

 I still haven't made a decision about Edinburgh though, obviously. This transcription is what I'm doing instead. I'll let you know when I've finished, but in the meantime here's the test piece I did a few weeks ago. I say "test piece" but I don't know who or what I was testing, maybe just people's capacity for attention.