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.
Being further unsorted contributions to the Church of the Cosmic Platypus, salvaged over the course of two seasons working at "Phantom Peak" from Pius' easel in the corner of Old Town, together with illuminations –
some by the author – also sundry anonymous annotations (click to embiggen)...
"Platypus Vobiscum. That's how you work the system. When it works, it works. Peace. Peace. Stop saying Peace. Take. For example take a moment. Did you mean Piece? Do you remember the psalm about the jigsaw? He puts pieces in the jigsaw. And he starts with the corners. The jigsaw is the pieces. Pushing can be pulled. Ink can run out. And then come back. Personally hopping about on the track, listening for rumbling.
Back to the Circle. Start again. Start at the side."
"Well we start there. Stop saying Stop.
Leave me be believe me. NOT EVERYTHING IS A CLUE! THERE you are, you
naughty little bargain. I'm not saying the gloves are 'off' off, but
nobody seems to be wearing gloves. 'I literally just got off my horse.'
It is perfectly possible to exist in a state where you can INSTANTLY
decide what being – say – this pen feels like. Or the candles. But I
don't know you can do it with your eyes closed. Or you would do it
differently. The whole concept of 'wrong', in a way, is – Oh I wanted to say 'wrong'. But."
"Is any dance a mandatory movement?
Vanity. Vanity. All is vanity. Apart from dressing as an Oompah Loompah.
Mockery is the sincerest form of flattery. No? But mockery just means imitiation.
In
spite of its numerous legs and armour, the millipede is not the
strongest animal in the pet shop. The strongest animal in the pet shop
is the shopkeeper, for they feed the pets."
"The olden times had no eraser. So sometimes the angels would just look
like bats. Imagine if angels hated their wings. What works is a piece of
man."
"Who
was the first to sit down? When we were shrews, did one of us sit down
and realise our hands were now free. But they had not the strength to
use them. The more shoes I wear, the more I realise how little I
understand about shoes. They go up and down with your feet.
But how?
I'm bang on time, and now does Time bang on me. Ribbons. Safer than candles. Three & four & never more."
"This is why old Mister Sleevey is very
careful about where he sets up his knockoffables. And a good scribe
always knows where the paper ends.
I
met a blogger from some retro land who said 'Two massive kneecaps –
nobody knows whose – take up the landing, hairy lean and tanned. I think
they might belong to Nerys Hughes, but now I can't remember how this
poem originally scanned.' That's all they said. Then, falling on their
face – as if to salvage some measure of grace, after such a dwindling
finish – they uttered one last 'Thanks' in accents tinnish. But I would
not be moved. I stood there still. I mean still like – oh, you know. And
moved, as in Not here because they're there now.
All water is a feature. Even ice.
'a' came after 'the' because it changes the subject.
INFECTIOUS"
"Ordinarily this is not a forum for factional hoots. Changing one's mind
can be be very useful. Two types – at least – of crossing out (motives
for deletion) A mistake or a change of heart."
"This is just to say that
I have sold the elephant
foot umbrella stand
Things fall on my back. And the trays are wet. And the shirts we wash are never as clean as the shirts we didn't buy.
Handwriting
wasn't always calligraphy. Who wants to learn cursive when you can
sprout the sentence separate and friendly. Not formal and exclusive. And
when did exclusive become a compliment?"
"I've drawn a little city. It's looking pretty pretty.
One can imagine the future, and spend all that time grieving.
SINGS:
Elbows and kneecaps and drops of brown liquid. Nicknames that hurt like
a stone or a stick would. Hairplugs that give you a tickle-y cough.
These are some things that I hope will fall off. Hubcaps and
breezeblocks and bits of old sofa. Pablo Neruda and Gordon the Gopher.
These lines are but a fraction of my contribution to "Phantom Peak" as Pius, High Priest of the Church of the Cosmic Platypus, mini-penned at an easel in the corner of Old Town, where I would sit to receive tourists as part of a step on their trail. (Everyone who visits Phantom Peak is a "tourist", including those who know the place far better than me, and have made even greater contributions.) My character's dependence upon psychedelic fungus after an orchestrated blimp crash is one of the few details of the world's deep lore I was sure completely of. When a message like the following would pop up from a Head of Department on our work WhatsApp –
– uncaptioned, I might be thrown, but I'd figure if I needed to know what it meant, I'd know, and that generally proved correct. Another contribution, perhaps my proudest, was the innovation on day one of asking tourists, once our scripted interaction had been logged: "Would you like to take a moment?" It was fascinating how well this offer nearly always went down. People seemed genuinely delighted to be just standing still for six seconds or so, stopping, and insufferably, I began to feel like an actual church. Any post introducing Peak though, should really be about the extraordinary company I worked with, but I'm making this all about me because taking a moment is how I've been spending my fiftieth birthday. Today's been lovely. Thanks to all who've said and sent nice things. According to this mural in Strangers' Hall, Norwich, I am now finally half-way through my life! I'm now trying to remember one of Pius' sign-offs.
Ah, yeah: Nine out of ten.
Photo credit: I've become lax, sorry. If anyone knows who took that picture of me, let me know.
And I think I may have found my people. Please don't alert them. My French isn't good enough to say for certain whether this advert definitely didn't have to be over three minutes long, but I get it. It's a nice little change, I guess. I leave France tomorrow. I hope I've given you a taste. Here's another.
Apparently the inverting of town signs is nationwide: a protest organised by local farmers. Isn't it suave?
Thanks for playing! Just the one question: I have always been a song and dance machine. But who am I dressed as in this picture?
You have the entirety of Kate Bush's Christmas Special from 1979 to leave your answer in the comments. Go!
(Tangentially: after hearing Paul Putner and Joel Morris discuss the "Divine Madness" VHS on Joel's brilliant podcast Comfort Blanket, I realise I've always been drawn to piano-playing singer-songwriters more than guitar-playing ones, not a distinction I'd previously noticed. Okay, NOW go!)
Fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to explain further why, but for now here's a picture of Tom Driberg. I don't expect you to know who he is. I didn't until just now. Initially a member of the Communist Party, and openly gay when it was incredibly illegal, Driberg became Chairman of the Labour Party in 1958, but there's a lot more to know about him than even that. Here's a brief extract from the wikipedia entry where I found his picture:
One of Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to
Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing
lavatory. Newspaper accounts of this event raised the interest of the occultist Aleister Crowley.
But that's not why I was resarching Tom Driberg either. I was researching him because his was the name which turned up when I searched "MP Driberg 1946," which I did after readingthis point of order recorded in Hansard on the thirteenth of March 1946...
FASCIST ACTIVITIES (ALBERT HALL MEETING)
HC Deb 13 March 1946 vol 420 cc1113-4
1113
The following Question stood upon the Order Paper in the name of Mr. Driberg:
137. To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he
is aware that a public demonstration is to be held at the Albert Hall,
on Wednesday, 13th March, by a body known as the Britons' Vigilantes
Action League; and if, in view of the fact that much of the propaganda
of this League is identical with that of our enemies in the late war and
of the consequent likelihood that a breach of the peace will be
provoked, he will prevent this demonstration from taking place.
Mrs. Braddock
On a point of Order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the urgency and
the possible far-reaching effect of any reply which may be given, can
we have an oral answer to Question No. 137?
Mr. Speaker
No, I can see no need and this is not a matter for me to decide.
Mr. Driberg
Further to that point of Order, Mr. Speaker. Should I be in Order in raising on the Miscellaneous Financial Provisions Bill this afternoon the question of this Fascist demonstration?
Mr. Speaker
That is a matter for the Chairman of the Committee. It has nothing to do with me.
Mr. Driberg
May I, in view of the urgency of this matter, ask your
leave, Mr. Speaker, to move the Adjournment of the House on a definite
matter of urgent public importance—that is, the revival of Fascism in
this country and the public demonstration by Fascists which is due to
take place at the Albert Hall tonight?
Mr. Speaker
That is hypothetical, and I cannot accept it.
Back to
Women's Garments (Down pointing)
... And that's what turned up when I searched "the Briton's Vigilantes Action League," which I did because they're mentioned on the front page of the Daily Mail from the sixteenth of March 1946, in a story entitled "Police crushed by Communist demonstrators," and I know about that because it's currently a prop in Love Goddess.
I never really think about 1946. As I say, hopefully more to follow. Click to enlarge.
And how successful was the act? Because, if it was successful, why have I never
seen any contemporary imitations? Why would we not see this level of
articulation in a puppet again until "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"? If Vaudeville could come up with something this impressive in 1907, why would a Master of Cinema like Fritz Lang, the creator of Metropolis, have such difficulty building a convincing dragon nearly twenty years later? If I was Lang I'd have gone "Get me the dancing pig people, STAT!" Or
maybe he did. Maybe they built this dragon too, but it wasn't as good. Who
built this pig!
(Okay, now I've looked it out, it's better than I remember, but it's still no dancing pig.)
I have a question too about the technology used to clean this clip up – less about the wherewithal, and more about its effect. I assume it's some kind of rougher, off-the-peg version of whatever Ai Peter Jackson used to clean up the Beatles footage in "Get Back". A few other youtube clips suggested by my algorithm use the same tech. Here's the first I saw...
My old workplace, the Trocadero, and the next time I was there I took a photograph, to compare the two...
Because, when I watch these clips I feel – as I felt watching "Get Back" –
that I'm somehow being transported in time, and then I have to check why,
because documentaries aren't new, and film has been around for long
enough for me not to be surprised by it. That's my question.
So I've decided, it's not that the retouching makes footage look more realistic, but that it makes it less immeditaely familiar as "footage", and so the brain reads it more literally. One can – rightly – condemn the artificiality of this, if what's intended is the creation of a more accurate record. But what this technology reminds me is that, from its inception, film has never been just a record, it is also a genuine marvel.
Here's a Saturday treat! No need to wait now for "The Dial of Destiny" to get your additional Indy content. Have eight minutes of the very first iteration of Old Indy, dashing through the snow in a wraparound for a "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles "spinoff movie I'd never heard of called – terribly – "The Mystery of the Blues!" I prefer my title, even if it is a bit of a spoiler for the ending.
Doesn't he look great with the beard? I guess it was for "The Fugitive", so this was actually filmed only a couple of years after "The Last Crusade" but it's a great Old Indy look regardless. I think he should have kept the beard. I also think he should also have kept that stuntman they used for the shot of Indy just getting out of the car, then he wouldn't have hit his head on the Millenium Falcon in "Force Awakens". Enjoy!
"... 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...
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