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.

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...

 

Peas Before Memes. Yes Always.

 

 

"Here, under protest, is beefburgers."

 

 First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...

 

 

 

 John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...

 

 

  But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...

 

Is Orson Welles the Perfect Hamlet or the Absolute Opposite? There's Only One Way to Find Out.

   Love Goddess, the musical in which I play – among other husbands of Rita Hayworth – Orson Welles, opens this Friday, and you can get tickets here. We're deep into tech week, so I don't have much time to blog, and I haven't even listened yet to what I'm posting today, but I'm looking forward to it.

 

Archie, Jane, me, Imogen, and Joey. I believe it's called proof of sweat.

 

 You'd have thought that, of all the big Shakespearean roles which the erudite, intellectual, procrastinatingly impatient, fatally disappointed, theatre-obsessed Welles had tackled, Hamlet would among them, and it turns out you'd be right. The only reason I didn't know this until I looked it up today, is that it was back in 1936 when Welles was still twenty-one, in a self-directed radio adaptation. Of course, he'd already staged Macbeth by then. My parents sent me the first volume of Simon Callow's massive biography "The Road To Xanadu" for my birthday, so I'll see what that has to say about it...

 

 Oh. Okay. So much for my interpretation then – of either Welles or Hamlet, take your pick. But no! Both feared they might be phonies, both feared their own monstrousness while also wishing they were more like the monsters, and there's not a single speech of Hamlet's I can't imagine in Welles' voice, so maybe it's Callow who's wrong. But he did write a massive biography. But he says it was a thirty-minute adaptation, and it's actually two thirty-minute adaptions. But they didn't have the internet back in 1995. But we do.

 

 

UPDATE: Okay, I've listened to it. I think it's fair to say there is one quite heavy omission. Can you guess what got cut?

The Thane of Harlem – Welles' Macbeths

 In the lead-up to Love Goddess, which starts rehearsals next week, I've been doing a little research into some of the Orson Welles stuff I know less about, and found this photo of his first ever professional job as director. Before I get into that however, I have a question: In 1948 he made a film of Macbeth*, and "to save time" he decided to record audio of all his actors speaking their lines first, then film them lip-syncing to it like a music video, and I have no idea why. I know about recording dialogue and image separately, and obviously Welles did too – half his output is him re-recording other actors' lines – but why this way round? Did other directors do this? 

 Was he just not sure he'd be able to get the actors back? 

 The result is probably the stage-iest film of Shakespeare I've seen, including those actually set on a stage. Here's a watermarked still from it. See if you recognise the set...

 

 It's the same arch and staircase configuration as the picture at the top. That was from Welles' first Macbeth – indeed his first anything – a Depression jobs programme from the Federal Theatre Project employing a hundred-and-thirty-seven black actors and stagehands, and one wild-eyed white, pipe-smoking twenty-year-old who decided to set the whole thing in Haiti.

 

 The way Welles talks about the "Voodoo Macbeth", even making his first film Citizen Kane a few years later feels like a come-down, and one can see why when you watch the four minutes preserved of it in the newsreel below. To go from nothing to this... (I think they may have added a line not in the original Shakespeare by the way. See if you can spot it.)

 

 

 Unlike the arch and stair combo, the brilliant line "Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! My Name's Macbeth!" did not alas make it in to the 1948 film, which consequently has very little to match this production's energy. It's just occured to me it might not originally have appeared in this production either, but simply been added for the newsreel to give viewers unfamiliar with the play some clue as to what's going on. The later film did, however, also end with the witches' return and the line: "Peace, the charm's wound up!" although I think "wound up" here means ready to go, like a clock, rather than finished like a story, so I'm not sure why it's at the end of either. Pessimistic circularity? Did Welles innovate that? The actor absolutely killing it with that line, as Hecate the god of witches, is Eric Burroughs, whose son recently wrote a graphic novel all about the production here, which I think they might be turning into a movie here. Further fantastic reminiscences follow. Enjoy:

 

 

 

 *UPDATE: I've just found the whole film – each helmet siller than the last – up on youtube HERE.

Peter Brook's Soft Pink Pincers

 Another white box: Sally Jacobs' hugely influential set for Peter Brook's magic-redefining production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", in which my Dad played Puck. That's him stage right, in the yellow Chinese Circus bloomers and blue skullcap, entering on stilts. He also rode a trapeze and spun plates. Mum was a dresser on the show, having worked for a while at an actual circus, and that's how they met. All this was before my time of course, but as a child I still found something strangely magical about squash courts. Here's some footage.

 

 

 The Dream stayed with Dad, who always described Peter Brook as a ghost on his shoulder. Brook never shared Dad's love of Gilbert and Sullivan, for example. "Tacky." When he was just twenty-six, Dad wrote a beautiful essay about working with him which Alan Cox dug out and to sent to me the day Brook died, in July, the same month as David Warner. This is another belated In Memoriam then (and there may be a third, in which case this will be a two-parter, but also there may not). You'll notice the actor's account of the rehearsal room here differs a bit from the director's:

  "Unseen by us, Peter carefully prepared the ground for these 'revelations'... Peter could drive us to distraction by his demands for an incease in our self-awareness. He would sit down with us and shake his head in disbelief that we could have gone so far forward in one direction while taking so many steps back in another..."

 And then Dad goes on to explain how he escaped, and where he got the idea for the stilts. Click to enlarge.

David Warner's Juliet, and other dirt

 

 

A trip to Marx's grave

 

 I used to watch "Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment" all the time when I was at school. Of all the fictional, whimsical pests the sixties had thrown up, David Warner's Morgan was the only one I wanted to share a cup of tea with. He didn't seem to have that rockstar ego. He seemed like a listener. It made sense that my parents said he was the Hamlet of his generation. A lot of people said that. It was only when Warner died in July that I found out my old neighbout turned housemate Morgan had been named after him, also that I was now living on exactly the same slopes of Notting Hill where the film had been set – have I said I've moved to Notting Hill? 

 I can't find any way of seeing his Hamlet now, but here are some photos taken by Lord Snowdon which, according to the captions, show the actor in character. Researching the original production I can't find any confirmation, but I hope the captions are right. Look at him enjoying himself...

 

 Once I'd left school I actually got to share a cup of tea with David Warner. I was in Hollywood for my gap year, and he knew my Dad because they'd been in the Royal Shakespeare Company together back in the sixties. He was a gentle giant. Later, when he would come to London, he and Dad would reminisce about the night he tried to jump out of a window because he thought he'd be caught by a cloud. It was the first time I'd ever heard the word "bi-polar", encunciated by David with arms oustretched in a shrug as wide as I was tall. Over tea in Los Angeles, I asked him why he'd stopped working with the RSC and he explained that they'd wanted to cast him as Romeo, and he said he'd only do it if he could choose his Juliet, so they fired him. 

 He'd asked for Frances de la Tour. 

 David and Dad worked together again years later, on a television production of "Love's Labours Lost" that I rewatched the night he died. I posted a few clips on instagram, because I think they're just gorgeous together. Here's one...

 

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 So, yes, now the death of Her Majesty has brought me back to the blog, I thought I'd catch up on my old In Memoriams. And having moved, I'm also sorting through my boxes once again. I found this: the fax David Warner sent me when I came to play Hamlet myself at University. Director Simon Godwin's face was a picture. David said he had no advice, but I took it anyway.