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...

A Comparison of Two Silent, Short King Lears... or "Helmets! Helmet! Helmets!"

 

"Look here, upon this picture..."

 

 
"... and on this." Different Play, Act III Scene 4

 

 After the surprising delights of Peter Brook's seventy-three-minute-long 1953 King Lear yesterday, 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. 

 And the hats are great. 

 Also, good to see Oswald survived.

 

 

UPDATE: I've just looked up what Novelli looked like without the beard...

 

Peter Brook's Orson Welles' "King Lear". I KNOW!

 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...

 

Guise? Guise!

 Using this blog simply to regurgitate videos from the BBC Archive does feel a little lazy, but it keeps putting out such treasure, and I wanted something properly unsettling to post for Hallowe'en weekend. Unfortunately this package delivers so fully that I now want the whole heathen atrocity of a "holiday" banished from the memory of the Earth. What are these poor innocents doing? What have they been taught? What is this programme?

 

 

 Full marks to whoever decided to overlay the subtle howling of wind over footage of children limping through a wood singing about their own ugliness. Until now I had entirely bought into the idea that trick or treating was something we picked up from the States – I blame Fry and Laurie – but I was ten in 1984 and yet I don't remember "guising". Or sticking my head under water to make contact with another world. Or eating apples to learn the future. I knew a little about carving faces into turnips, but only because we had to wear one at the London Dungeon as "Stingy Jack". That was a scary costume. It had nothing on this kid's Licorice Allsorts mascot Bertie Bassett though. Oh God. Oh Jesus Christ.

 

The Absolute State Of Me

 Oh well, the episode of the popular soap I may have been in might not have aired yesterday as planned, but my Bucharest job went up online. Look, there I am, far right.

 

 Notice the careful cactus placement? I heard there were a few takes of that. Another interesting story from the set– OOH HANG ON IT'S UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 And Alicia's in it?! You lucky people! Well, this is the best day ever.

Ad Break (Hey It's June!)

 

 

 Here's an Ocado ad I shot last November. That's right, this blog's a cough and a spit archive too now. Although I didn't even have to do that. It was my first interaction with an animated character: off camera is someone wafting a large piece of card to simulate a potentially self-aware articulated table. As with my first advert I play a dad (although you can't see our kid on the stairs). I'm sure my moustache was a factor in the casting, even though dads haven't really sported moustaches since the eighties. Nostalgia, as Don Draper says, is subtle but potent. The following day I flew to Bulgaria to push a child in a dinghy through a mock up of a flooded town for Deutsche Telekom, but I can't find that online. 

 

 The moustache was still around when I shot this ad in April, although who knows whether or not "John" is a dad? Maybe he's from Head Office in Frankfurt. Maybe he's a cannibal. It's a strong look, whatever he is. I love it. Some of these people had to sing "English Country Garden" for eight hours.

 

 Miming the piano is June Hudson. This is very under-dressed for June. The director had used her a lot, and he wasn't alone. One advert she had done called for her to jump out of a aeroplane strapped to a parachutist. She's in her eighties. It was her first experience of skydiving. 

 Before doing adverts June taught Science Fiction Costume Design at the Univerty of Redlands in California. Before that she was Head Costume Designer on the original no-budget "Doctor Who". Anyone who has been to Angels' costume warehouse in Hendon will probably know her work...

 

Bonus Mystery Clip Round: Spot The Difference!

 

 Oo now, this might be fun.

 Can you tell the difference between these two videos: one, a normal, thirty second advert which has been on the telly for a couple of months – above – and – below – a slightly longer version for some reason, which I can only find online? Can you see what they added? Or what they took away? And maybe why?

 

 In other news, I decided to keep most of that big Watson moustache from the Bolton run of Hound of the Baskervilles I did back in the Summer, and I suddenly found myself getting cast as dads, in some very nicely paid jobs, like a regular professional. That's not really news I guess, more of a catching-up. I'm still quite a screen novice though, not that used yet to seeing my own face on- JESUS JESUS NO WHAT JESUS NO!!!

 

Persian Dress

 

 Yes, enough Greeks for a bit, back to the Persians: Faren Taghizadeh – whose instagram account had introduced me to the shivering quills and eyelash-batting masks of Behnaz Farahi – has also shared the following short but bracing book review from performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon, whose findings were all completely new to me despite my previous professional toying with both angels and moustaches...

 Alok's instagram is here, and if you're looking for some ungendered goodies of your own to put under the tree, my friends from the London Dungeon Charlotte and Nav have moved to Folkstone and opened this fantastic shop.