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.

Spinach or Silence as Sources of Power

 "So, Art is something which is made when you use a material to change something... but it helps people to consider the Art which is in front of them if it is grouped with another set of Art, and it's very difficult to consider Art in isolation from other Art..."

 Born Yesterday has a great format: two twenty-four-hour-old clones of the hosts ask two guests to explain the world in terms of the only three things they've yet had time to learn about. Alexander Bennet and Andy Barr are its perfect hosts, digging down in just the right spots, and presenting perfectly packaged summaries, so no matter how a guest chooses to play it – as hilarious disruptor or dweebish stickler – it's almost impossible not to be entertaining. (Like Taskmaster.) As evidence, I'd like to submit this episode, in which I'm dropped in alongside Andrea Hubert (I'll let you decide which is which) to explain such topics as Cumbria and the concept of "The Ends Justifying the Means" with only Popeye, a Hog-roast, and Birmingham New Street Station as points of reference. Other topics also emerge during the episode, such as animal cruelty in early cinema, Insults, Joy, and whether or not – according to the mathematics of decapitation – Bradley Cooper's nose in Maestro makes him more alive. 

 I've been a fan of this podcast since it began, and obviously I'm always up for explaining the world to babies, so thanks to Andy and Alexander – an old Crystal Maze colleague – for inviting me, and thanks to Andrea for being such a great teammate/opponent and for showing me all her blades. (We appear nineteen minutes in. If you fancy a drinking game, down a shot every time you notice me avoiding saying her name because I get self-consciously stuck on whether "Andrea" has a long or short A, despite it being said numerous times during the record, and the way the name's always pronounced. I'll join you.)

 "So, in building our understanding of what a Mime is, we have been led to believe that, if a dog were to withhold from you its name, it would be able to pick you up..."

 

Wowee! An Official Film!

A Sketchy Account of The Martian Broadcast

 The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles. 

 

 Welles by Welles

 In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums. 

 

 

 Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do. 

 And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."

 

Reporting Back from the WandelProbe

 High Camp! We made it! This working week ended with a run-through of The Love Goddess that seemed to leave everyone happy, including our composer Logan Medland who now has to return to New York, and certainly me. I also learnt a new word: WandelProbe, pronounced "Vondelprobe", which means... well, what we just did. As I said when we started: everyone is lovely, and I'm trying not to be too weird. I don't think I'm always succeeding. However, I've decided to blame two decades of making work at the last minute with whatever was to hand for any sudden attacks of lip-chewing anxiety I've experienced when, say, asked suddenly to enter holding a phone that we don't have yet (because I mean how much of this phone will end up existing? Just the receiver? Or maybe it should be just the receiver? Or will there be a wire coming out of it? Why? Or why not? And how long will that wire be? Where does this world end?) or to dance in time with the music.

 

credit Sonia Sanchez Lopez

 

 (But wait no, because this bit isn't a dance, it's just a scene in which the characters happen to be dancing. And maybe my character isn't a good dancer. Or maybe he is. Maybe I haven't decided. Where does this world end?) "Trust the process," says our choreographer Jacqui Jameson who, let me remind you, has a dancing shoe named after her. I don't always understand the process though, I think. But then she says, "You're impatient." And she's right. And I knew this.

 

 credit Sonia Sanchez Lopez

 

 Also though, it has always for as long as I can remember made me uncomfortable in warm-ups when I have to bend over and stick my head through my legs, because now I can't see what everyone else is doing, and what if they suddenly do something else? How am I supposed to learn then? All bent over with my head through my legs? I don't know if that's necessarily impatience. Anyway, as I say: we made it this far. I feel very lucky to be working with these people, and look forward to playing with them. We open on Friday.

credit again Sonia Sanchez Lopez

 

 Here is fictional actor Nicholas Craig's take on the rehearsal process, care of Nigel Planer pictured at the top, and illustrated with some mercilessly harvested contributions from the non-fictional. The Naked Actor first went out in 1990 when I was still doing school plays, and was an instant hit in whatever crypt we happened to set our satchel down in. "Rehearsal! Aye! Ha-ha! Rehearsal!" we'd all quote. Or: "Janet my love?" Or: "A bit Freddy Frautington." Does that sound like the kind of gang you want to be in? Then enjoy. The opening credits are honestly the funniest I've seen, and distil perfectly a very specific moment in British culture when a happily subsidised mainstream could regularly present to the masses something a bit like something a bit like something thrilling and experimental which the director had popped in on.

When I Googled Stooky Bill

 

 Probably not the original Stooky Bill

 Yeah, I'm not sure sticking that disclaimer up is... Anyway, here – probably – is sculptor and video artist David Hall making a light meal of the fact that the first ever subject to be televised was a puppet. I read somewhere that teething problems meant John Logie Baird's pioneering televisor had required more light than the human epidermis could withstand, but I can't now find where, and the wikipedia entry for "Stooky Bill" only says that human faces had "inadequate contrast" and a puppet would show up better, so maybe it's not true.

 

 

Also probably not the original Stooky Bill (source)

 

 It does sound like an odd reason for using a puppet. And I know the original performers for The Man With the Flower in His Mouth whitened their faces and gave themselves blue lips (although I can't now find where I read that either *UPDATE: it was here.*) Anyway, I learnt of the thrillingly Smirhesesque existence of Stooky Bill yesterday when I decided to do a little more research into television's origins, and then realised he'd actually appeared on this blog before, back in January of 2020. Here's another picture of him alongside a second puppet called simply "James". (That's certainly a lot of lightbulbs.)

 

The original Stoooky Bill. Don't know which one's him though.

 

  And it was in researching Stooky Bill I then learnt of the existence of David Hall, whom I'm only assuming produced the uncredited or miscredited video above from a mention of something very similar on his site here. Hall made a number of similar "TV interruptions" for MTV in the nineties, and earlier, for Scottish Television, back in the seventies. Here's one of those:

 

 I enjoy the brattiness of having the water drain at an angle – Sorry, SPOILERS! This was decades before the tyranny of choice, of course, when television was just something you had on, and if broadcasters decided they were going to take four minutes out to pretend your television was filling up with water, that's what you'd get. I suppose this country never produced an Andy Kaufman because it never needed one. 

 Here's a lovely little film of Hall at work, the kind of work the tag "thinginess" was created for...

 

 

"We've seen you this morning putting grass in what looks like a fish tank."

Lucy McCormick Draws a Spider Diagram

  So. In other business this week, I'm lucky enough to have been invited by old London Dungeon cohort Lucy McCormick to come on board with the excellent Hannah Maxwell (also pictured) as "actual actors" (Lucy calls us this despite being on a break from playing Cathy in an international tour of "Wuthering Heights" – THAT Lucy McCormick) to help her with a few days' research & development on an as yet unwritten play she was commissioned to have a think about by the Soho Theatre. Lucy's a hero of mine – I want people I know to see her, and I want people I don't know to know I know her – but this is the first time I've ever collaborated with her theatrically, and the couple of days' fun we've thus far had has reminded me of working with Shunt in two quite specific ways.

 

 

 Firstly, most of the exercises Lucy asks us to do turn up something sustainably entertaining which might be the basis of a whole show by itself. And secondly, none of these exercises seem to have anything to do with each other – despite there being nowhere else I'd rather be, I've no idea what's going on. No, that's not true; while I was dragging myself along the floor yesterday singing harmonies on a Billie Eilish number before tearing into the salad Lucy had gaffer-taped to her legs, I knew exactly what was going on: That. What I mean is, I've no idea what Lucy wants to make. But that's fine, because Lucy does and she says this is exactly what she's needed, so that's great. (That spider diagram was my idea by the way. Its centre was never filled.)

 

Also, THIS Lucy McCormick

The Persistence of Memory Round

 I noticed, on the walk I took on Sunday evening, that the moon – like myself – had risen a little later than the day before, and I was reassured by this. Previously I had known only theoretically that it couldn't always show up on time for nightfall, as that's not how orbits work, but my regular urban surroundings had never been flat enough to prove it. I missed the city's pavements, though. The roads between these villages are fringed instead with ditches. I assume that's so you'll crash your car if you skid, rather than drive over a vine. You've got to protect the vines. 

 When I got home, my laptop died – or at least coudn't be woken – and I spent the next few days trying to bring it back to life, which is why this post is actually going out on the night of Wednesday the 22nd. Now the factory settings have been restored though, here, by the light of Sunday's moon, is another quiz for you, this one from August. Match the following ten Surrealist titles: 

 

"The Decoy"... 

"Disturbing Presence"... 

"Floor 4706"... 

"Men Shall now Nothing of This"... 

"The Persistence of Memory"... 

"Hamlet"... 

"The Son of Man"... 

"Stage Fright"... 

"The Uncertainty of the Poet"... 

and finally, "Bicycle Wheel"...  

 

to the following ten Surrealist works. And I'll post the answers in the comments.

 

1. René Magritte, 1964

 

 

 2. Salvador Dali, 1931

 

 3. Remedios Varo, 1959

 

 

4. Marcel Duchamp, 1913 (originally, but pretty easy to throw together, and repeated since)

 

 

5. Gertrude Abercrombie, 1952

 

 

6. Giorgio de Chirico, 1913

 

 

7. Man Ray 1949

 

8. Leonora Carrington,  1958

 

 

9. Edith Rimmington, 1948

 

 

10. Max Ernst, 1923

 

FLAGS... INFLATABLE DOLL...

 MENS COULOURED SHIRTS... 

 Table clothes... Curtains... Sheets + Blankets... 

 MENS TROUSERS...

 

 KNITWEAR... MEN'S TIES... Collars, CummerBunds... 

 SCARVES... LADIES UNDER GARMENTS (+ PJ's)... BELTS... 

 BELTS...

 

 Nuns, Cows, Scarecrow... 

 FEATHERS, MASKS, GLAM... 

 HATS... ANIMALS: Horse, Monkey + ?

 

 "?"?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It feels great to be back at "London's Secret Community Theatre", the Mighty Fin's home for the last nine winters – I had forgotten what festive treasures it boasts. If you're thinking of coming to see Robots at the Network Theatre this Thursday or Friday, there are definitely still tickets available, and this is definitely the way in.

 And here's what it looks like once you're sat down. This was taken an hour before we opened on Tuesday – a happy event, although I was unusually conscious of my spittle in the spotlight during my belter. Ellis and Claire, far right, have just spotted a cat.

 

Workaround with Pat & Mat

 

"... and that's it!"

 

 Thanks to Faren Taghizadeh for introducing me to this!

 Apparently, growing up up in Tehran, you got your clownish antics and bywords for ineptitude, not from the Chuckle Brothers, but from any Laurel and Hardy short that didn't have wives in it, or – thanks to the fact that neither were identifiably female – from Czechoslovak Television's Pat & Mat. But do you know what? I'll take it. Because every episode I've seen so far of Lubomir Beneš' and Vladimir Jiránek's "... a je to!" ("... and that's it!") is beautifully animated and unimprovably funny, powered by a genuine love and undersanding for the detail of how things actually break. Silent partners Pat and Mat are a charming realisation of the differently ept; endlessly creative, endlessy unfazed; the architects of both their own undoing and their making do. This is the stuff, and there's hours of it.

 

 "I have called it 'Slapstick' because it is grotesque, situational poetry."

Kurt Vonnegut

Make Yourself At Home

 I shower and get dressed before sitting down to work these days, and showering's still new enough to me to trigger memories, but I don't know of what, of being on holiday perhaps. I work mainly in the kitchen as well, on the hardwood floor, so when I step into the living room now, where I used to try to work, the carpet beneath my feet triggers– but again, I don't what. I suppose if I can't remember, I shouldn't really call them memories, but they seem to occupy the same imaginary space. It might also be the same space that going outside occupies if you're not used to going outside, or being somewhere new, remembering something as it's happening. Not déja vu, but feeling exactly as you'll come to feel again when you remember it. "Membering" is probably not the best word for it, but I think it's whatever the opposite of waiting is. I also think it might have something to do with posture.

Dream City Cheats

Not like this.

 

 Ian Hubert's youtube channel hosts beautiful minute-long performances – "tutorials" in the same way that watching someone make balloon animals is a tutorial. Comparing him to a guest on The Paul Daniels Show is meant as a compliment by the way, but I'm sure bafflement isn't Hubert's chief aim and that for anyone with Blender who understands what he's saying, this patter's packed with practical advice. Still I just enjoy watching him. 

 I wonder if there's something in these shortcuts which might help to answer a question about the human brain that's been bothering me for decades: how every single place we go to in our dreams, from the old bedroom that's not quite our old bedroom, to the cities we're driven through and the crowds we're passing, are fabricated night after night, without gaps or repeats, for just a second. Let alone why. Here's Ian building a city:

 

 And its people:

 And its moths:

 

(art by anon) 

You have forgotten how bad the video to "Steam" was, I guarantee it.

 So...

This is not the video to "Steam".

  Stephen R. Johnson's video for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is famously ground-breaking. It teamed the Brothers Quay with Nick Park, and seemed an impossible act to follow. But their next collaboration, Big Time, was even better, and made the Sledgehammer video look, if anything, a little one-note...

Hi there! This is also not the video to "Steam".

  Well, I think so, anyway (and it breaks my heart that I can't find anything higher definition). But maybe I just like songs about lonely supervillains. 

 Stephen R. Johnson made three videos for Peter Gabriel in total, and by the release of Steam he'd clearly decided to move on from puppetry, stop motion animation, practical effects and the like, and embrace the new technonology... CGI.... motion capture. But some ground is perhaps better left unbroken, because – Well...

 I can't honestly tell if the ideas in this video are actually any worse than what Johnson had put on screen previously, but still, more than anything that has ever been made – more than even the Star Wars prequels – it provides blinding, petrifying evidence of the hitherto unachievable stupidity of a thing that, thanks to CGI, could now be made without anyone having to work out how. 

 Readers, this is the video to "Steam". It might be the worst video ever made. Stand back:

 Forgive me, Peter.

 And feel free to tell me your favourite bits in the comments below. Here's today's Defoe, a tale containing both craft and craftiness: 

Cats. It's about Cats.

 Here's a figure from today's Defoe that took me surprise, relating to the number of domestic animals in London at the time of the Great Plague: "I think they talked of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house." That is a lot of cats. So many cats. I really didn't think of seventeenth century London as having that many cats. I'm finding it hard to stop thinking about cats. Ever since I saw the film of Cats in fact, which was like hearing Pennywise the Dancing Clown was back in Derry. Staring that beast in the face once more, however, I realised my uneasiness watching the movie was, if anything, the opposite of the uneasiness I'd felt watching the show as a child. There was no mystery to the movie, it was simply a mistake. But the stage show was not a mistake. It was intentional, unfathomable.

 (source)

 And as an adult I now admire that; particularly as an adult lucky enough to have participated in shunt, incredibly odd but popular theatre made entirely on its own terms, theatre - I guess like Cats - where there was nothing to "get". No questions. And yesterday I found myself actually defending Andrew Lloyd Webber on f*c*book, when Ed Morrish was having a pop at Jesus Christ Superstar - entirely fairly, he'd just seen it for the first time, and hated it - but I wrote: "A musical's really got to know what it is, and more and more I'm, quite reluctantly, realising how well Lloyd Webber's hits do this, given how mad the ideas are... Mad subject matter may actually help a musical, because its only quality can be its total 'itself'iness... Itselfiness is a very fragile thing though. There's so much not-getting-a-project that can happen down the line. That's what makes the hits so interesting to me." 

Interesting, I said. Not necessarily great.

 And I should probably go into this idea in more detail, but my eyes are tired and reasearching Cats does not help tired eyes. Lyndsay Ellis, who makes great videos about musicals, including the contribution at the top of today's post, does quite a deep dive into the differing fortunes of - and motivations behind - the Cats stage show and Tom Hooper's intughpretation here if you're interested. Here's today's Defoe, in which an adventure begins, an adventure in editing that I probably won't try again: