Sometimes this blog will just be Three Weeks

A pull-quote. I have a pull-quote. 

 

"Jonah Non Grata" is getting another London outing! Next Saturday the nineteenth of July, at 9.30pm up the stairs of that old stalwart of the Edinburgh preview – but a duck-breaking first for me – the Hen and Chickens pub in Islingon. You can get tickets for just (over) a tenner HERE, and if you have any further questions... well, maybe I've answered them below. Maybe not. Maybe you have some questions about my answers. (And if any of them concern the penultimate anwer, I had a lovely meeting about the book on Monday: Apparently, translation rights are where a lot of the money is in childrens' writing. France doesn't like mermaids, because they're sleazy, and – possibly for the same reason – Germany does not like circuses, so take note.)

 

(Also here are some gorgeous, unpublished Hobbit illustrations from Eva Natus-Šalamounová and her husband Jiří, on display HERE, in Prague, which was yesterday. A good week.)

 

 I now have quite a few articles to to-do over the next few days plugging the show, so let's see how many more end up on here. Apologies in advance. Take it away, Caro Moses of THREE WEEKS...

As you know – because we are always talking about it – we like new stuff here at TW Towers. But you know what, we also like stuff that was first really good a few years ago and which is now getting another run. 

And all that relates to the show ‘Jonah Non Grata’, which was originally staged in London back in 2004 to much acclaim, and is going to Edinburgh this year. It’s the work of Simon Kane, an actor and writer who has worked on loads of stuff I love from various media, like ‘Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme’ and ‘Ghosts’. 

‘Jonah Non Grata’ is an absurdist solo show based on the events that befell the biblical Jonah and I wanted to find out more about it. I put some questions to Simon ahead of his upcoming edfringe run. 

Can you start by explaining the premise of ‘Jonah Non Grata’? Who is it about and what story does it tell?

 Inasmuch as it tells a story, it’s the Book Of Jonah, as in Jonah and the whale.

 A very short, possibly satirical shaggy dog story from the Old Testament about a prophet who refuses the call, tries to run away, is swallowed by a large fish sent by God, does what He wants, but is ultimately disappointed by the outcome. 

 The “premise” of the show, however, is that you don’t need to know any of this, but will nevertheless spend an hour not being bored.

 It’s a solo sequel to work I did with a beautiful immersive collective called Shunt, whose greatest review may have come from someone who’d missed the opening forty minutes of one show and so could just enjoy what they saw without worrying about being expected to get it.

 

What themes are explored through the play?

 

 Exactly the same themes as ‘Hamlet’? Yeah, I’m happy with that answer…

 Refusing the call to adventure. The comforts of inaction. Weighing one’s love for people against one’s anger at the world. The very nature of performance. Depression. Loneliness. Christianity. Extremism.

All that. But with songs and a bit where he thinks he’s gone to the moon.

 

How would you describe it in terms of style or genre?

 

 Pop absurdist clowning. A strange world on a tight budget. A church for a churchless faith.

 

What was the inspiration for this piece?

 A lot of friends were making solo shows that weren’t particularly text-based and, although I love writing, I wanted to join in making something more in the clown genre. 

 One of those friends’ shows was about the performer’s Jewishness, “although,” as he said, “I’m not Jewish, because I don’t believe in God”, so I realised that even though I’m an atheist, I’m also, similarly – or at least culturally – a Christian, and that engaging with this big mood might be a good starting point. 

 I’d also been thinking about the very first plays in English: Mysteries, which might read like spoofs but were the work of people who absolutely believed in the biblical reality of what they were performing, and so I thought about writing my own. You know, something “traditional”.

 Initially, I had considered the various accounts of what Jesus got up to after returning from the dead, but then, after reading a note about Jonah in Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’, I opted for this Old Testament alt, as he seemed a good clown.

 I’ve always liked comedies about heroes who run away – I would later make a Radio 4 show called ‘Time Spanner’ about something similar – and a show that plays with thresholds is a good, cheap concept – every venue has doors. 

 As I mentioned, a third influence was the show I’d just been performing with Shunt, ‘Dance Bear Dance’, a clownish immersive piece about the Gunpowder Plot coincidentally devised during the opening months of the War On Terror.

 I wanted to play more both with the idea of making an audience complicit in a religiously motivated act of violence – but with laffs – and the idea of presenting a surreal church service as a basis for audience interaction – it’s nice if the audience has some clue as to what’s expected of them. 

 My work with Shunt in general also made me want to ensure every show was different and surprising, hence the levels of audience participation, as it used to be called. Basically, everything I do in the show is built upon things I’d already enjoyed doing, and had seen people enjoy me doing. 

 

It’s been quite a while since you first performed it – what motivated you to revive it now? 

 I missed it. And I’d landed an advert, so could afford to take it to Edinburgh. The show had never had a proper launch. It was just a thing I did, that people liked.

 But I’m finally now beginning to learn, not only how to make a show, but how to keep it alive, something I’d never known how to do on my own before. 

 Also, I’m seeing less and less stuff like it, and wanted to see if there was still an appetite for this kind of recklessly – if not irresponsibly – personal silliness. I think you can do anything onstage. I hope this show communicates that.

 

Has the show changed at all in the meantime? 

 Barely. I’ve written a few more jokes about the nature of audience interaction to help me get from A to B. And I might not use a real candle any more, but that’s actually funnier. One of the things that’s so exciting to me is how much it still chimes, but how differently.

 

You haven’t brought it to the Fringe before – why not before and why now? 

 See my previous answer! I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know how. And I can now and I know how. But also, I think my confidence in the show has grown.

 There are a lot of things I’ve wanted to make a show about right now, but it turns out Jonah is still that show.

 

Are there any post Fringe plans for the show? 

 Hopes, currently, rather than plans. This is why I’ve got a producer. I very much want to just get it in front of as many people as possible for as long as possible.

 It’s my clown show. But I’m also curious how it works as a play text. Theatrical criticism is still very ‘play’-based.

 

What do you like about the Fringe? What will you get up to in Edinburgh when not performing?

 It’s people making things. I’ll see things. Sometimes I’ll see five things in a day and they’ll form into one big thing in my mind. It’s magic.

So do you have a hit list of other shows you would like to see?

 I like finding out what’s interesting once I’m up there, but I will definitely be seeing ‘Simple Town’, and I will definitely be seeing Neil Frost’s ‘The Door’.

 

What drew you to performing as a career? Was it what you always wanted to do? 

 I could do it. I could hide in plain sight.

 My Dad’s an actor and a writer, but he mainly stayed at home on the typewriter when we were growing up, which was very nice for us.

 His brother, however, my wonderful Uncle Gordon, was a proper jobbing, touring actor, and we loved him, and everyone loved him, and acting professionally seemed a very nice, fun, feasible way to not grow up.

 In that sense, yes, it’s something I always wanted to do.

I have to say that you’ve been involved to a greater or lesser extent with some of my Very Favourite Things. What would you say have been the highlights of your career thus far? 

 

 That’s nice! I don’t really think I have a career, because it’s so often work with friends, but I suspect they’re definitely My Very Favourite Things too, and it’s a broad if not hefty mix.

I think the work with John Finnemore is unique in that it has fans who will be fans until I die. Cunningly, however, it’s all been highlights.

 Even the terrible work has been with brilliant people, and having brilliant people in your life is the very best thing. I’ve only one rule: never ever work with or for the bored.

 

What aims and ambitions do you have for the future? 

 I think I still want to do everything.

 

What’s coming up next for you after this?

 I’ve no idea. The next show? I’ve written a screenplay. I’m writing a book. I guess the next thing – now I seem to have worked out how making a show works – is to work out how all that other stuff works too. 

Simon Kane will perform ‘Jonah Non Grata’ at The Assembly Rooms from 31 Jul – 24 Aug, find the edfringe listing here. 

... But you guys knew that.

Music To Put Off Putting The Heating On To

  

 

 Looking-out-of-the-window weather has arrived, and here's the perfect accompaniment. Bouncing between Renaissance madrigals and Late Romantic pre-post-modernism, Stephen Oliver's 1981 score for the BBC's radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings sounds like the kind of thing Benjamin Britten might have come up with if given the gig, and feels to me a lot more like the inside of Tolkein's head than Howard Shore's risk-averse brass and whistles. Shore's score soars above the scenery, but Oliver's is harder on the shoe leather. It's the first tape I ever put into a walkman. Good walking music. Sure, some of the "elves" sound a bit flat, but apart from that, a perfect compliment to raindrops.

Frankenstein Wednesdays: "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) – Mate

 Continuing my weekly "But What Do I Know!" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 James Whale's "Bride of Frankenstein" is a morality tale, by which I mean it lets the world off the hook, so I'm not sure I agree with those who think it's better than its pitiless predecessor. For one thing - as I said last week - "Frankenstein" is "Frankenstein"! According to Scott MacQueen's excellent Blu-Ray commentary, Whale didn't even want to make a sequel, Karloff didn't want to talk in it, and suave newbie Claude Rains couldn't play the villain, and so was replaced by Ernest Thesiger, which is a bit like casting Brian Blessed because you can't get Ed Harris.

  I suppose one should ask next, "So how did it go so right?" because there are at least three great films in "Bride". The only problem is, they're great for completely different reasons, and when they come together at the end there's no way to resolve the differences, except pull the lever and blow the place to atoms. In no particular order then – Film One:

 Film One I like to call "Just Let Elsa Lanchester Do Whatever The Hell She Wants!" Tragically, only fragments exist, but they give every indication this might have proved the best of the three. Every decision she makes – as both the prologue's Mary Shelley with her sassy, shit-eating grin ("It will be published. I think") and the Bride hissing like a swan with her mouth in a scream – proves better than correct, astounding but true, mind-expanding. It's just a shame these two decisions count for more than half of the total sum she was allowed to make, because, unlike Karloff's beautiful abomination, Lanchester's is shown no pity at all, and immediately destroyed. Still her work is so haunting, maybe it's wrong to want more. No, to hell with that! I wanted more. And I'm pretty sure she was never allowed to do anything as bold again. There were simply no stories being told for the monsters she could make. Even this story, named after her, wasn't hers. That's Film One. Film Two:

 "The Story That Wouldn't Die!" Karloff's monster survives the fire (if a little scorched and puffier – did he keep his teeth in this time?) only to be condemned to a new tragedy: a life long enough to experience loneliness and a seemingly inescapable cycle of violence. It should be noted that Mary Shelley's recap (in a prologue delivered at least a hundred years before the events depicted in the film, if all dates are to be believed, which is fine, in fact I love it) shows the monster strangle a villager. This never happened in the original film, and revises the creature's history into a pattern of Escape, Killing Spree, Persecution and Capture, which "Bride" will then repeat: In this new version he escapes immolation, drowns Maria's parents in front of an uncaring owl (the father here is recast, although Reginald Barlow heroically attempts Micheal Mark's thousand-yard stare), then attempts a kindness in saving a shepherdess from drowning, is spotted, hunted, caught, crucified (the film opened on Good Friday)...

 ... and imprisoned, then escapes, is hunted etc. It's the hopelessness of this cycle that makes his encounter with the blind hermit so powerful, because suddenly, finally, hope pervades this film, and Karloff plays the wounded animal perfectly here. Only his tears betray his humanity. They're tears of relief.

 It's here too that the monster (against Karloff's wishes) is taught to talk, and as someone who prefers the prequel I agree it's a shame. I didn't need to hear "I hate life... want dead..." to know what was going on. But again, it helps us hope, and the hermit's lessons also help the couple bond. They eat, smoke, play music and love each other, a nation of two. Until the hunters come, and the monster flees, and we're back in the cycle, and it couldn't last, but actually no, to hell with that too! It should have lasted. This is what I mean about the film letting the world off the hook. 

 Meanwhile, the monster's creator has been returned to a far more delirious vision of the ancestral pile than the claustrophobic drawing rooms of the first film, and his wife (fiancée?) is now the seventeen year-old Valerie Hobson – who would later marry John Profumo! – but thankfully, Frankenstein as played by Colin Clive hasn't changed a bit. He may have renounced his studies, but he's still impossibly weak, and literally itching. Enter the monster, echoing his creator's original barked commands to Sit Down, in the one really great use of his new-found power of speech (as also noted by David Cairns), and demanding a mate. Henry refuses. The monster kidnaps his wife until a partner is provided (apparently the hermit also taught him to tie knots). And so Frankenstein the scientist returns to the lab. His twisted watchtower, intantly recognisable, now has kites. His creation's tragedy has forced him into a similarly inescapable cycle, and the buzzing and screaming of his equipment seems to go on for ever, but he's no longer itching.

 Film Three:

"Tales From The Crypt - or - Una, Ernie and E. E. Clive get up to more mad shit, with a guest appearance from Dwight and we hope you have as much fun watching this as we had making it etc." The year after James Whale made "Frankenstein", he worked with Karloff a second time on "The Old Dark House". It might be the film of Whale's I watch most often, and the one I'm most keen to show others. In it, a sexy bunch of know-nothings with their whole lives ahead of them, are forced to take shelter on a dark and stormy night, in the home of an ageing, deranged family and their drunkenly incoherent, psychotic butler, played by Karloff. Thesiger plays the saddest and sanest member of this family, delivering the line "Have a potato" in a way you'll remember for the rest of your life. The year after "Old Dark House", Whale continued his experiments in horror with "The Invisible Man", starring Claude Rains (and hopefully you'll have clocked by now the director's enormous influence on "The Rocky Horror Show"). You never see Rains until the final shot, but you see a lot of Una O'Connor, who plays the landlady of the inn in which his mad scientist holes up, and you see a nice amount of E.E. Clive too, as the head of police. These are the villain's anatagonists, and they're hilarious. Their performances are shrill and dull respectively, but also enormous, and precise, and musically human. To Rains' mad scientist, everyone else in the world is an expendable idiot, but thanks to the strengths of its comic relief, "The Invisible Man" seems more a celebration of us expendable idiots, and I adore both films. Two years later, Whale finally acquiesced to demands for him to make a sequel, and cast E. E. Clive as a burgomaster (as with Maria's parents, a recasting), Una O'Connor as a housekeeper, and Thesiger as Claude Rains. And I'm very happy to see them all back, but I'm not really sure what any of them are doing here.

 Well look, Terry Jones has just died, so I'm in no mood to say anything about O'Connor's Tyrolean pepperpot other than congratulations! But if Thesiger's Dr. Pretorius had not turned up to seek a collaboration with Henry Frankenstein, wouldn't the story still have worked? Would it not in fact have worked even better, with the monster seeking out his creator directly, rather than through a go-between? And while it's Pretorius who toasts to "a New World of Gods and Monsters" what is this newcomer actually bringing to the table, apart from jars of comedy homunculi, and the House of Lords gin? I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like with Rains in the role. Thesiger better suits a dingy attic, but I'd feel a lot more uncomfortable watching Rains handle a tiny king with tweezers...

 ... perhaps because Rains has the air of a sadist, while Thesiger seems more a masochist. It's impossible from me to imagine this Pretorius actually wanting power, so maybe he's just seeking out people even more wretched. This might be why he's at his best in his first encounter with Karloff, picnicking in a crypt, after the monster has fled from the hermit, and returned to the cemetery from "Frankenstein" where he was dug up. Here, Thesiger perfectly communicates the air of someone always found in the worst possible place for a human being to wind up. He's a great host, just a lousy guest.

 One thing he does bring to the table, actually, is Dwight Frye, recast as a bodysnatcher with a string of gallows one-liners... "Pretty little thing in her way, wasn't she"... "This is no life for a murderer" etc... And again, I'm very happy to see Frye back, but when he turns up with a freshly extracted human heart Frankenstein asks no questions either, and so is every bit as culpable as Pretorius – more so in fact, as I doubt Thesiger's sea monkeys ever went on a killing spree. Yet, when the monster is rejected by the bride, it is Henry and Elizabeth who are spared his fit of incel pique, and Pretorius who goes up in smoke. Why doesn't he escape too? No idea. Why does the monster spare the breeding pair? How did Elizabeth get out of those ropes? Why is there suddenly a wooden lever that blows everything up? We're not supposed to ask any of these questions, and if we're honest we know the answer anyway, and it's a shame. It's the film surrendering to straightness. Karloff might have been crucified, but it's Pretorius who dies for all our sins.

 Two more points: Instead of Edward Van Sloan offering a prologue, "Bride" opens rather surprisingly with a poster for the NRA. This was not the National Rifle Association, however, but the extremely shortlived "National Recovery Administration". So, phew! And finally, since this is the last Whale film I'll talk about in this series: It's easy to imagine all classic books ever written came before any films, but, since they didn't, I often enjoy wondering how big an influence the work of this beautiful man (pictured above) and his collaborators may have had upon fantasy literature. Gormenghast, for example, with its deranged, vaudeville grotesques and gothic slapstick. Or even the influence Dwight Frye's murderous, pitiful, gimlet stare may have had upon Smeagol.

 Your homework for next week is 1939's "Son of Frankenstein", in which Karloff gives his final turn as the monster, and we finally get to say "WULL HELLOooo" to Ygor.

Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that imagined lands can be depicted objectively.

 It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that map tomorrow). According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the explosive act of reading":

Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:

"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."

  I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.

 That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here). Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades later, "Brazil", would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century"  – similarly vague.

 So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are impossible. That said...

  I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody monsters.

Kari Vaananen doubles Klonkku and Konkari!

Kudos! And "Kudos" to everyone at Finland's Yle TV1 for having the gumption back in 1993 to attempt a small screen adaptation of Lord of the Rings without recourse to CGI, motion capture, or any technology not readily available to the makers of Michael Bentine's Potty Time. "Take what you've got and fly with it" as Jim Henson said. So, okay, stuff like the Balrog may have to go, and the whole "Mines of Moria" sequence may have to be cut down to a minute and a half...




... but  cast it correctly, adapt judiciously, and who's to say you won't have another Brook's Mahabharata? Not me! Now December is here, the 'taches of Movember have fallen, and the grey dawn greets unopened windows like something distant, brilliant, viewed from the bottom of a well while dusk begins to take the piss, I for one am happy to join those huddled round the glogg in fingerless gloves and, transported by the sound of goat bell and sax, hear tales told in comic sans and glimpse adventurously cast faces in the fire. (Is that Paul Putner?)