Behind Closed Ghosts. Last Ghosts Post. Ghost Promise.

The opening credits of Ghosts provide a pretty good approximation of the interior of West Horsley Place, where the show is filmed. The real thing's deeper, of course, and wider (and I never got to see the basement), but at the bottom left – there – you can see the pillars where we had the ghost fight, and the stairs at the back do indeed take you to ballroom, where the wedding ceremony was held. Did I take photos of the actual interior? Absolutely. Was I even allowed to? I've no idea, but to hell with the rules, I'm going to let you in anyway, yeah! Welcome, once again, to Behind The Scene, with Kieth Darren Dean!

  Okay, it seems that's all I took. I have no idea what is wrong with me. Sorry. Back to the doll's house: To the far right of the ballroom is the green room, which I was lucky enough to share with not only the stars of the show but, as I intimated here, a star of my life:

 

 Ned Mond, to give Neil Edmond his myspace name  – as I would always scrupulously do back in the early days of this blog, in order to preserve people's anonymity from my millions of followers – appears in the very first post I wrote, here, and our friendship goes back even further. Above is a picture of us from 2002, him as Hamlet, me as Polonius, and Nigel Barrett as Claudius, in Sulayman Al-Bassam's Al-Hamlet Summit, which we won a prize for in Cairo. Neil and I visited the pyramids of Giza on horseback, wobbling at a canter like a pair of Denholm Elliotts. You're never shown the back of the pyramids on telly by the way, but they have a KFC. I think Nige and the musicians took a jeep.

 As the vicar, Neil was encouraged to improvise quite a bit around the filibuster Jim Howick and Mathew Baynton wrote for him. "I had a flat-head..." I think was one of his, and I also remember something about the bride in the anecdote having "quite a meaty smell" which never made the cut. It should also be noted that his vicar is from the United Reformed Church, as Jim and Mat discovered the Church of England does not perform same-sex weddings. Yet.

 God literally bless them.

 I think I will leave it there. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to field them in the comments. The episode Neil and I are in will be up here for another ten months, as will the entire series, I assume, and it really is very good. I would like to thank everyone at Button House for having me, and also my showreel for helping me land the role, by opening with me accidentally shooting someone, then looking distraught for four minutes. If you look very hard at the last shot of the series, you'll see me waving my arms with joy behind the leads, like a pro. 

 I was feeling it. 

 Here is your moment of Den:

 

 Oh! Also! I realised, a day into starting the countdown of my Frankenstein pieces, I’d completely mistimed it, and should have started a day earlier, but anyway, here is my far from penultimate piece on 1944′s House of Frankenstein.

More Espionage For Kids!

 Further to the spy kids' induction held over the weekend at the Imperial War Museum, here's a bold and beautiful set of Rainy Day activities from shunt's Nigel and Louise. I've not seen enough of their work since the shunt lounge closed, but these photos of the first "Spy Day" seem indicative of the kind of thing they've been up to: in this case, filling a warehouse in Weston Super Mare with children intent on defeating a man dressed as a raven.

 

 Thanks to the pandemic, the sequel to this show is now an adventure we can all go on. As with their more adult Party Skills For The End of the World, there's an embarrassment of exercises here that could easily fill the whole day, including passport forgery, and learning how to distinguish between a rook and a jackdaw. I personally have not yet tested the softness of my tread by laying a trip of toilet paper on the floor, nor built my own laser maze, but if you have time and children, and a bit of courage - it's recommended "for Dr Who aged kids (7-12ish)" - the whole thing is wonderful and free and waiting for you HERE.

 

 And speaking of the virtual work of shunt associates, you still have until Saturday the 31st to enjoy Silvia Mercuriali's Swimming Home in which I played a small part, and which I also enjoyed hugely as an audience, though some water did go up my nose, while Gemma Brockis' Winchester Mystery House of an online course, The Kiss, gets similarly immersive here.

 And finally, continuing the Frankenstein Hallowe'en countdown, here's what I wrote about 1939's Son of Frankenstein.

Job Dream

 The most recent one was just this afternoon: We all turned up to a basement wearing masks, invited there by Lewis to perfom the voices of inanimate objects for a Danish Museum. I'd befriended Lewis twenty years ago, on the first ever production of Hamlet in Kuwait (see below). That's also how I'd befriended Nige, and Nige was in the room too of course. Also there were Amalia, whom I'd befriended last year in Gemma's workshop of The Maid's Tragedy, Shim, whom I'd befriended a year earlier on An Execution (By Invitation Only), and Duncan, whom I'd befriended writing for Laurence and Gus back when this blog first started. We were all sat in pairs opposite each other across five tables, reading into microphones because other actors couldn't be in the room, including Fin who was now projected onto a wall, and whom I'd befriended when I first moved into his house in Brixton, again twenty years ago. And I had honestly forgotten what it's like to spend the day with friends making work, and how much the best of these jobs feel exactly like my dreams of them.

Hamlet CNN 1 from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Nightwalk, August the Twelfth

 The door was open so it seems I could, if I had wanted to, buy flowers at two o'clock in the morning. Back in the flat, Act Five of Richard the Second was slowly uploading - I don't still go for night walks on purpose, I'm just very late getting my steps in. There were quite a few other people out yesterday night, maybe waiting for the city to cool down. Blasts of hot air from the buildings along Gloucester Place, although I think they were simply blasting whatever air was there, and it just happened to be hot. Apart from that there was no wind. It barely felt like going outdoors. It felt like stepping out of the changing rooms. I could smell chlorine all over Mayfair. I think I've only known nights this warm before in Kuwait, when Nigel and I would bob on our backs in the Persian Gulf, a crisp packet clutched to our tummies providing just enough buoyancy to keep us from having to swim. The walls around Buckingham Palace are surprisingly low I noticed. There's an overhanging tree right next to a lampost, right next to a bus shelter on... (goes to look for the name of the road linking Hyde Park Corner to the Royal Mews)... the A302. A guard seemed to be sleeping against an arch. All the windows were closed. My phone always dies before I make it back so I count the remaining steps on my fingers.

What Do The Pills Do?

 Well, I didn't know they do this for a start:

 

 And now, apologies. The lights went out all over my old laptop a while back, but I have a new one now, so I can blog again woo! And I have something to plug which is ending very soon: "Coma" – a show ostensibly about lying down and taking a pill. The pill-taking is optional, but not the lying down, as space in the venue is limited (see below).

 Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.    

As part of their ongoing Darkfield project, creator David "shunt" Rosenberg, writer Glen "Ring" Neath, musicians Max and Ben Ringham, et al have recorded me and others doing things in a box, and then taken that box up to Summerhall, so people can lie in it in total darkness for half an hour, and be an audience. Given the absence of any live performer (as far as I know) it's extraordinary how live an event these shows still manage to be – the simple presence of others counts for a lot, it turns out, even if you can't see them. And the twitter reviews I've read have been incredibly pleasing, although the most pleasing was probably: "Neither pleasant nor unpleasant it sits just the right side of creative to make you feel that things are not good until you leave", because it's so confusing. You can book TICKETS HERE and then I think the show's moving to Canary Wharf in September. But, as I say, most of my work was done a month ago, outside Television Centre (see below). You know, in that heat wave. Water was on hand... that's not much of an anedote is it – Okay: I was asked to provide a component of something unique built by friends. It was fun. And still is. I'm assuming.

So yes I'm doing Edinburgh this year, sort of - not physically (which is a shame as London "Gabbie" Hughes is obviously KILLING IT UP THERE), but I hear it's like I'm really there, right down to the smell (see below – not sure which vial's me):

 

And of course David's been doing stuff with binaural sound for over a decade now. And shipping containers. Things were easier back in 2007, before the crunch, back when we were doing "Contains Violence" and were still allowed in buildings. I can't believe I've never posted this shot of the microphones going into Nigel's head so we could record me stoving it in with an Apple Mac before:

And here's the card handed to audiences from that first binaural gig, intended to minimise technical hiccups. The system's been refined a bit since.

 

25/08/19: P.S.: I've just remembered, my favourite review is actually this one comparing the character I voice to "one of those vaguely disreputable Cronenbergian scientists", and noting "in fact Cronenbrg's two earliest movies, Stereo and Crimes of the Future could provide acceptable alternative titles for this..."  Lovely stuff.

Teaching Kids to Love Theatre by letting them Hate It

 Nigel Barrett is in a sensational kid's show at the Unicorn Theatre called "The Show in Which Hopefully Nothing Happens". Yesterday afternoon Tom and I went to sit at the back. Most of the rest of the audience were school parties of, I don't know, seven- to ten-year-olds, and witnessing them get to their feet and scream at the stage was, without a doubt, one of the best experiences I've had in a theatre. Here's some of what they screamed:

"DON'T COME ON!"

 "YOU ARE VERY BAD!"

"CAN'T YOU DO SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS?!"

 

 

"WE FORGIVE YOU!"

"JUST TELL US WHAT IT IS!"

 "STOP TRICKING US!"

 And from another afternoon's show, which Nigel passed onto us: "YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE! YOU STAND WHERE YOU STAND!"

Photos by Camilla Greenwell. Hopefully you can still get tickets here.

September 2013 - Ring

September is touring. Ring took me to Belfast, Cambridge (for the afternoon), Margate, Preston and Bournemouth.

Bournemouth Oceanarium

The MAC in Belfast is a superb venue, brutalist like the National, but whereas the RNT seems all about getting lost - no lines of sight, floors that don't meet each other - the MAC is all views: cavernous, deep, well-like and lagoony. It was here I got to put a face to the often-dropped name, Maddy Costa. She writes for the Guardian. This was the third time she'd donned Ring's headphones, and the first time she'd realised she was sometimes listening to a recording. It's funny what people who write about theatre write about. We were lucky enough to be in Belfast for the "Culture Evening". As well as the MAC, there's also a beautiful new museum, and a beautiful new waterfront, and yet - and not necessarily in spite of all this - the city reminded me of a boarding school. Everything seemed to close at six. Something far more tangible than just a shadow of Occupation is here. It clearly doesn't want any trouble. Another thing I noticed: Belfast had the largest proportion of blind people in the audience, by far. Six, against other cities' none or one or two. Two more things: Wandering around Belfast you'd think the Titanic was the Beatles. And the airport's named after George Best.

Bournemouth Pavilion

Margate: I'd seen Nigel and Louise raving about the Tom Thumb Theatre on twitter, and they are right to rave. It has a nice Shunty vibe - by which I mean the vibe Shunt used to have after everyone was kicked out. And by which I also mean kitsch without being ersatz, like a Coney Island seance parlour. Advertised as one of the smallest theatres in the world, hence the name, it's certainly the smallest venue we toured - and carpeted, so I had to keep to the stage to let the audience pick up my foot falls. A great, great bar... I think it might have been the work of Gary Cambpell, Shunt's first barchitect, who also co-founded the Stoke Newington International Airport and did such wonders with the bar at the CPT. Yes, I think it might well have been Gary. Margate too has a brand new Arts Centre. It was closed.

 

Premiere Inn, Bournemouth

Preston lives. Preston was extraordinary. My acquaintance with the North of England being almost as poor as my acquaintance with Ireland, nothing prepared me for how great I'd feel here. Walking around parts of Preston you'd think you could still take a train south for the day and catch the Great Exhibition. I'm used to thinking of Victorian architecture as Gothic and foreboding, medieval, crinkly - maybe because I'm so used to Westminster. But further north Victorian architecture means Classical, Democratic, Beaming with Pride. Civic Pride, it was called; not all Victorian values are bastards. Things were made here, and not just the Titanic. (I mean, The Titanic?! Belfast, you must have made something that didn't sink, why not celebrate that? I know - Who'd have heard of it - I know.) We performed at the Continental, a room behind a pub. A massive, massive room behind an excellent pub. I took photographs of all it, but something went wrong with the phone. It came back to life in Bournemouth.

 

A balloon in Bournemouth

Bournemouth was great too...

When I started writing this post it was going to be about Premier Inns and the value of boredom. I'm glad that's not how it turned out. I loved touring. When I got home I moved my bed away from the wall so it would feel more like a hotel... I'll save the Premier Inn stuff for my New Years' Resolution, once 2013 is fully cleared out.

And, in case I haven't mentioned it, Ring visits Aberystwyth next week.

 

God... I hope I still have these shoes.

What I saw in "The Architects"

I was walking a little oddly yesterday, because I'd just done a photoshoot for David Rosenberg promoting his latest piece, the Glen Neath-scripted Ring. (Had David tried to call it "Ring Piece"? Of course he had.) None of which really brings me to this write up of Shunt's latest show, which ended last Saturday, but the post's late enough and at least I don't have to worry now about spoilers...

I loved "The Architects". I saw it tonight (for "tonight" read January 11th) and Keeps and I got back from Venice only yesterday, so my bar for using the word "love" is pretty high. 

 It was giddily rewarding to turn up, having felt so thrown by my non-involvement in this one, and be returned to the days when shunt was just a company I followed, and to find that they are still by far my favourite makers of pretty much anything. Critically they do themselves no favours by wearing their genius round their ankles I suppose, but good, it's still there on display, if only those without a sense of humour wouldn't be so squeamish. And still thrown, of course I come away wanting to tear off the stuff I think keeps it from being perfect, but that's what fans do, and here "perfect" doesn't mean something small and achievable, it means that thing which alerts you to what it is you should be wanting, which is massive. 

 The myth of the Labyrinth was the starting point this time, and I've long thought the labyrinth is shunt's real medium (there's a quote somewhere in Ken Campell's "Violin Time" which I can't find now, about how great it would be if the National Theatre could create works backstage). But there was also an interest in the myth of the feral child that goes back to devising of  "Money", which clearly informed the depiction of the Minotaur.

 

 

 Yes, we saw a Minotaur! And we got fed to it. Or at least in the perfect show in my head we did, as soon as it was revealed to us we'd never left the labyrinth (and the hollow cow wasn't the only commission in which people get screwed). But what do you do with an audience once you've killed them? "You kissed our children goodbye" the monitors said, and I realised that having been treated to the simulation of a cruise, only now were we really being made to feel like heroes, because now we were being sent to our deaths. Except it turns out we weren't. There was still some stage fighting and aeriel stuff simulating dying to get through, but in amongst that sudden shift in vocabulary was the glorious revelation of our killer: a child with a terrifying mask that hid an even more terrifying face, who looked lost and then lobbed a brick. 

 I remember Gemma talking about the seeds of it last year. She said the Athenians would never have seen anything like Minos' palace at Knossos. Of course it seemed like a Labyrinth. She said that "bull" meant what "wolf" meant, that "minotaur" maybe simply meant "feral", that Daedalus who designed the palace said to hold the Minotaur also, less famously, designed the cow-shaped contraption said to facilitate Queen Pasiphae's impregnation by a bull in the first place. And I knew the myth, the Athenian virgins sent by boat to be sacrificed, and I left for New Zealand imagining a pamphlet found through the letterbox entitled "Why We Eat Children". 

 So I knew all this, and maybe – maybe – this gave me the edge over the rest of the audience, but really it was all there in the show, SPOILER alert and all. Having sounded that, I must admit the spoilers I read probably helped my enjoyment, if anything, since I knew enough to time what in hindsight seems the best entrance, and to find what I suspect was the best seat. In fact, I'm pretty sure the show is unspoilable. No spoiler can prepare you for that scenery. It's no insult to go on about the scenery if your medium's a labyrinth, and Lizzie Clachan's scenery here is unbeatable (and I've just got back from Venice, remember.)

Nige?

 It was so simple, although making it that simple must have been complicated (Kudos, Louise Mari). And it was funny, really funny, and when your jokes involve two hundred and fifty moving subjects, blackouts and a live band, that too must take a while to get right, longer than any critic will give you. I hear there was only a month's rehearsal this time, an altogether more affordable working method I guess, and one that produced similarly happy results over a decade ago with the Tennis Show, my first experience of working with shunt, and again a beautifully simple idea. So this seems the way forward, and that it didn't include me I find a bit worrying. But not while I moved through it. Or sat at the back, in the corner, basking in the kind of isolated fantasy landscape Chris Goode probably finds so resistible, but for whose construction I only ever feel a child-like gratitude. And here, that construction is the subject. I mean, it's called "The Architects". It's the kernel of a myth told to us – and with us – smartly, lightly, meticulously, hilariously. Is anyone else doing this? I got it and I loved it.

Right, there's a "Sightseers" review knocking round here somewhere as well...

He too woke with his head in the toilet of an inconceivably large house he must have once commissioned, with the odd rope hanging between platforms, and walls you couldn't see, "If I was a Rich Man" playing in every wing, and his very own Nightmare Room.

Show 317 (... Always Be Closing, cont.)

So hey! As you may have seen, we finally finished making that Money trailer. And into our fourth run the houses are full once again. COINCIDENCE?!?!?!?!? We're well past the three-hundredth show, and it's still fun to perform, more fun than when we started in fact, because all the niggling ideas of the other shows this might have been have long since faded now, and we can just get on with it. BUT... now, yes... the bad news is – here we go – Shunt's newly desperate straights have forced them to serve us two and half weeks' notice on the show! I KNOW! So, ignore the trailer. Stupid old trailer. We're running until August 7th now, NOT the end of September. ALLEZ therefore! VITE already!

There is a slim chance, after the 7th, that we'll be running the show part-time, rather than killing the old girl off entirely. but you know, who knows? I hope she lives, of course, because this job has been a life-saver: it was there to take care of me from the moment I came out of hospital to a life of homelessness and burnt goods back in March 2009, and it paid for that flat-share with Mossad, and the pool and sauna that helped me catch my breath while I fell in love.

And it's been my creative focus for over a year now, something I've been able to work upon, and within, alongside people whose company over a complimentary bottle of whatever's-nearest, in a car park full of chairs come dusk, cannot be matched. And it's offered us complete artistic freedom (and no artistic control, but that's the deal in any system, isn't it, freedom or control... but, now I think of it, that's probably why I made this trailer, to snatch a little measure of control). But most importantly, it is quite simply a very exciting show, and not enough people have seen it. No, I'll be gutted if she gets killed off. Chugging away there... Well I sent an invitation to Terry Gilliam yesterday, anyway. Priorities, exactly.

ReTweet @antimega "It's the London Dungeon for cultured adults. That's not a bad thing." I liked that.

Always Be Closing

 There is a cabaret tonight at Shunt, starting at 6. You are all invited. Only, Shunt is now at Bermondsey Street. All of it. So, if you're lucky, you might even be able to pick up a cheap chair. They're good, I've bought two, carried them off like a bailiff following the father's downfall in a Perrault. In other fairy-tale news: that small door on Joiner Street leads nowhere now, because of course the Lounge beneath London Bridge has – as I may have hinted at – after months of happy and open communication between all parties keen to prove the viable compatibility of artistic and commercial concerns, been suddenly thrown out on its arse by a shower of useless pricks.

 

 No news is good news, and that's the news. I'm not really sure even now, some three or four weeks after its last night, how much I'm allowed to say, or what the plan is, which is a bit why this blog – in which the Lounge featured so centrally – has been so quiet recently... that, and just the abominable anger and sadness of how's it all transpired. Anyway, here belatedly are some stills from that last night, the 26th of June:

 

 Of course, we'd already had a last night back in November, with the place stripped, and old changing-rooms re-revealed, and the recognition that this wasn't just the Lounge we were saying goodbye to but the spaces of "Tropicana" and "Amalto Saltone", and that was a nice night, with seeing old friends and looking ahead and we knew where we stood. This night was different, of course.

 

(I don't know what's going on here, 

but four hours later there was an egg and spoon race.) 

 

 And naturally the Shard asked Shunt to "leave the place as they found it", but while we're not short of volunteers, none were found willing to rip out the toilets and the plumbing and the electricity, replant the sawn-off steel, or smear shit back onto the walls, so sorry about that.

 

 Two nights ago someone called Hilary came to see "Money". She had programmed what turned out to be the Lounge's penultimate week, and had hung from piercings in her shoulder while singing Verdi, something she can only do once a month, but that's not the point, the point is on Friday she lit up as she told me something I had found for myself whenever I came to put on work at the Lounge, but have probably never acknowledged here: that there was nowhere as helpful, as generous, as responsible, as unquestioningly encouraging, or as just plain big and playable-in as those vaults, let alone for free.

 

 Hillary told me she had made exactly what she wanted to make there, and everyone had come, and nobody known what to expect. (And then I walked home with a chair on my head.) So all I'm saying is, when I would describe the Lounge in terms of a mini-Edinburgh-Fringe reprogrammed weekly, impressive as that sounds, I actually did it an enormous disservice: it was far easier than that. Art got made there, even by accident. Not good art necessarily, of course not, but how are you going to know until you put it in front of strangers? 

 

 

 And there was no flyering, no feedback forms, no mentoring schemes, nothing except anything you wanted. Half a panzer coming through a wall? George would build it. A live, seven-foot wide video link to New York above the bar, or the running of a fake lift for your own promenade? Andrea would rig it up and get two volunteers to stand either side with a cue sheet and pneumatic forklift. And on and on. That was the Lounge. Something like one hundred people on that payroll, three of them paid for by the Arts Council. No really, just three. And now what? The Foundry gone this past month too. And East 10. But it's the Eighties Revival, non? "Always be closing." 

 

  

 "Oh well, it keeps you honest!" said an old acquaintance. God I hate poets. Okay then, back to the ghetto. And while fifty per cent of the world's cranes stand idle in Dubai, the Great Work of transforming London from a temperamental network of human-scale cultures into a collection of incredibly large, fucking stupid objects best viewed from twenty storeys high proudly changes up a gear.

 

 

 P.S. With not quite the numb pang that accompanies the deleting of a dead friend's number from your phone, I have removed the Lounge's video from my myspace homepage and placed it below. It's more of an advert than a tribute I know, but what are you going to do? Oh yeah, you're going to come to the cabaret! Tonight, quick! Here.

 

 

The Shunt Lounge

from Susanne Dietz on Vimeo.

Random Acts of C***ness

(originally posted on myspace here)

The scene of the crime

BLOOD AND GUTS UPDATE: Well Hywel's go on the laurels was pretty short lived because Friday night (Banker night) saw ME become the hero when - you remember! - your boyfriend Belmondo'd me in the face halfway through a show (Cliveowened me, Danielcraiged me, Neesoned, Mitchumed, "nutted" - what you will,) then ran off and abandoned you while the show went on, as it must, with blue roll up its nose. Good thing there was a doctor in the house, our own esteemed Dr. David Rosenberg who having been denied entry to South Africa because there was literally not enough room in his passport for another stamp (true true!) found himself freed up now to give Hywel the crash-course on Thursday, and on Friday witness your boyfriend hit and run mid-show leaving behind only you, mumbling and panicked, and of course all his booking details at the box office.

Nice men. Do not hurt them.

Crikey you were drunk, weren't you, whoever you were, and terribly annoying. You must have known that. And I guess I sort of know where your boyfriend was coming from because even I felt a bit bad about singling you out when you were so clearly barely able to even stand. Then again though, it could be argued you actually singled yourself out by wibbling on about carbon in the corner of the auditorium, I don't know... but I mean why didn't your boyfriend make any attempt to try and keep you quiet, that's what I don't get, or to even acknowledge your presence until you wanted to be escorted out of the show? Why did he try and take it out on that volunteer in the riot gear? Did your boyfriend not get that it was pretend? Did your boyfriend just have a bad day? Was your boyfriend actually, secretly mad at you? Well this is all academic I guess... Man I just can't believe your boyfriend ran out and left you like that, that's all. 

And poor old Hywel! A second baptism of fire for day two. (Oh yeah, fire. Did I mention the pyrotechnics? Yeah he's great, Hywel.) And Nigel's had his appendectomy now I hear. They eschewed keyhole surgery in favour of the full Jack the Ripper, that's all I know. Dr. David only works on electro-shock therapy cases these days, says he misses the smell of an operating theatre, the smell of cauterised meat. And me? Well I almost look TOO gorgeous but on the down side every face pressed towards mine on the tube now makes me just that bit more bristly. Like I said, I don't know. Things fall apart, mistakes are made, the Machine begins to warp and split but the run continues, and Friday Night will always be Banker Night. Applying Goode's Pertinent Binary (see Feb 18) we deal with it... Honestly though, your boyfriend! It almost makes me wish now that I'd listened to your Dad! 

(Thank you videogum.)

The devastating effects of a Belmondoing