The single most simple invention 2: TE-DEE

 

 

"The single most simple invention" actually refers to that lengthy, and often mardy, tangent I was involved in over at Chris Goode's blog, the one I threatened at some point to try and summarize, the one I printed out yesterday that ran to more than fifty pages of A4, the one where Chris writes about "trying to reinvent" theatre, and I get shirty and counter with "but it's the single most simple invention known to man" thinking I'm quoting "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", only it turns out I'm not, because the passage I was actually thinking of goes like this:

""What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford? "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
"Alright, Mr Wiseguy, you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."

... and finally, after two weeks of fractious debate over the nature and definition of fiction, testimony, irony, God, and cats, the tangent ends, as I said, quite cheerily, with me going "this is what comedians do, and it's certainly not candour" and then Chris going "Stand-up comics, yes, YES", and then Chris going "the perfect mix of prepared material, technical facility, responsiveness, interaction, topicality, entertainment, liveness", and finally "All we have to do then is: replace the single figure with a group, preferably; lose the microphone; lose the raised stage; lose the necessity of 'being funny'. But heighten and intensify the sense of entertainment... I can see why you would want a drink in your hand."
So, sort of like I said, simple. 

 

And now I'm putting the tangent down, and I'm walking away from the tangent. I just thought I'd bung a record of it up here on the blog, because it's all stuff I've been thinking about in relation to the now-upcoming Jonah show I'll be doing in January... a show which I've often considered trying to pass off as stand-up, but with longeurs, and hymns. I had a very odd dream about it last night in fact (or rather this morning), where my request to move the audience about and have the run of Shunt's lobby and lift were sniffily rejected on, of all things, ARTISTIC grounds. And then I thought, oh this'll make an interesting post. And then I woke up. They were rejected in my dream by a man called Mischa Twitchin, who I've never known be anything other than totally supportive of anything I've ever done... except maybe the Primo Levi sketch – Maybe that's what the dream was actually about, now I come to think of it. That wee fear. Mischa makes a lot of pieces about literature relating to the Holocaust, and I've just written a sketch where Primo Levi goes "Te-dee!" a lot, and has his sleeping-pill-powered, imploding gin bagpipes confiscated by the landlady. That's real. I'm back to talking about real life now.

 

But clearly I've left the writing of these posts long enough for them to start acting like dreams, in other words, too long, because: A) They do seem quite confused and boring in hindsight, for which I apologize, but also B) You think you've been concentrating on one thing and then you start writing and it turns out something completely different floats to the surface, like a dead polar bear in a film star's pool where you were expecting William Holden. "Oh Primo!" was finally recorded on Monday night, after I called Nigel to say yes. Apparently, the producer recorded himself in the bath for one of the sound effects. Isn't that lovely. It's one of three sketches I have so far got round to writing for Laurence and Gus, and I'm very very pleased with how they've been going. And that's all I'll say for now... I'm not going to complain again about how corridory Broadcasting House is. Although it IS awful. It's awful. Like a check-in desk. You can't take plastic cups in, you've got to pour the BEER BACK INTO THE BOTTLE! And there are only two urinals! That's not liminal! Unless a huge queue of men hanging round the door of the gents – the GENTS! – at half time can be considered liminal because it means "threshold"... So I'll leave it. A friend of mine got married at the weekend. It was lovely. That's what I'll write about next...

 

 P.S. Anyone whose interest was piqued by yesterday's garbled post about David Rosenberg might find a visit to his website http://www.iwake.co.uk/ both useful and illuminating (heh-heh-heh).

The single most simple invention 1: DOOR

 

 Is the above a less attractive proposition than the below?

 

 

 It's Shunt's new door. I like it. The old one was just a flat grey surface, and had to be broken down by the Emergency Services when a reveler got locked in for the night… underground, in the dark, with the rats... imagine. We get a lot of revelers now. "What are they queueing for?" asked Nigel. I know. Closed, the door is the perfect entrance. Opened, everything starts to go a little wrong: a bucket is rattled, names put down if you want to see a show, necks stamped – "Just the write the fucking names down, Simon"... Season at the door "can't stand ditherers" (I had no pen) – But what can we do, ye cannae change the laws of physics... 

  No-one likes lists. But if they hand people a page of Danielle Steele instead, and say that everyone with a page of Danielle Steele will get in to see your show, then you're simply left three minutes before curtain running in and out of four-hundred pouting midriffs looking for the one friend you have to hand a page of Danielle Steele to because you couldn't just put their name down on a list... 

 And you really hope it's worth it... Even though so much fun is clearly being had, you really hope something somewhere in the future is being – well – funded by all this. Because if that thing in the future doesn't exist, then for two seconds, three seconds, all these beautiful people turn in your head into shiny insects swarming round a corpse. And that's loonythink. 

 

 The shed that stands in the corner of Gary's bar was covered in silver foil to mark a week of Andy Warhol, and it lasted a night. Roland's idea. He was curating for that week, the week of "contains violence". And what did Ned Mond say when he turned up? Something cool about this night being an antidote to the National Lottery ("a tax on the barely affluent") where the wealthy pile in to give artists money for booze and have their photos taken in front of a giant can of soup. 

 And then he started to tell me about the Nitrate Mining Ghost-towns of South America he'd been looking up on the internet. He'd found one with a theatre. And a population of one. He was thinking of taking a show over. 

 The audience for our little bit of "contains violence" was limited to the number of headphones. So forty-three, I think. It went well. It's going to be very good when it's finally on at (ie opposite) the Lyric in Hammersmith (there'll be two-hundred headphones by then, and two-hundred sets of opera glasses, and hopefully two-hundred punters standing on the balcony... that's going to look great). In it, I had to lip-synch to a speech about "arsehole-bleaching" originally recorded by David (Rosenberg, who made it). The only way to pull it off was to just do it as him, big eyes and arm-span, and so I found that interesting. I've tried lip-synching before, in shows I've made myself, but never come close to getting it right... or rather "never got it right", because it's lip-synching. It's either right or it's wrong. That's also what's so interesting… 

 

 

 I used to wonder if David always put in these "arsehole" references to weed out the no-fun crowd and stop his work being taken Seriously-For-The-Wrong-Reasons. But then Ned said something about how much easier it is to stage Threat than it is to stage Dread ("because Dread's like… almost the absence of Threat") and how well David pulls it off, and he's right, so now I think it might have something to do with creating that absence of threat, all the bumhole stuff. Like the head-banging to the Dead Kennedys in a neck brace I had to do. Or like the e-mail he sent out, requesting the presence of a bank of naked spectators for a photo-shoot to publicize the show. There's a sample of it up there. Except the Lyric aren't going to use this image now. And they didn't like his original title of "Upskirt". And the Lounge is closed now, and with it, that door.

 

   Nigel, who you can just make out backstage, he's going to be curating for three weeks when it re-opens in late January. And yesterday I said: sure, I'll do something. I'm going to resurrect something of mine called "Jonah Non Grata". The thing Roland didn't want to do.

 The original plan was, well, not to. But before I called Nigel up to say "No" I popped into Christ's Church in Spitalfields for the first time yesterday (I'd just finished milking money's last money at a corporate voice-over in Moorgate, and the door was open) and it was really disappointing. It looked like an enormous, well-lit writing desk. And I thought "Shunt's much better than this rubbish. I should do something there." I looked up the word "liminal" today (Chris Goode's blog very helpfully has a link) and Christ's Church certainly wasn't liminal. 

 So I might do a late show, close an area off, by the locked front door if I'm allowed. Right down the other end from the shinier revelers. If and when they return. The idea of doing a show about Jonah actually came to me first seven years ago, when I was at an audition, playing with a door and thinking about flight, and doing something funny. And "Liminal" refers to "the second stage of a ritual". It comes from "limen", which means threshold. So it is the state of not yet passing through a door. So yes, I said "Yes", and we'll see.

Monty Hall Problem? What Monty Hall Problem?

Hello again. I haven't been here in ages. Obviously I lack motivation. There is a cure for this though. I will come to it.

 

I haven't really been writing for Laurence and Gus either which is bad, there's going to be a read-through on Monday... It's just every time I've sat down to write since receiving the commission I've always seemed to end up returning - like Grendel - to a tired squall of my own making on Chris Goode's blog "Thompson's Bank Of Communicable Desire" (all hinted at in my last post - blimey - two weeks back!... It's been going on that long. Well it's over now, and actually it has a happy ending. If you're interested to know more, cut and paste this little honey:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=28051672&postID=8131853324620900174

 

I come in about half-way down and then never shut up. Actually I might try a summing up in my next post. No, come back.)  Anyway, yes, so as I was saying to the producer over a risotto, I am obviously phenomenally unmotivated. 

 

What does Derren Brown suggest? Well now I know because I've finally got round to reading his book (not to motivate myself, no, that was not the idea, no... nor to find out if he uses stooges. He states unequivocally in the book that he doesn't though. I'm a little disappointed by that. I think it's fine if he does. I didn't want to know.) Anyway he suggests "Playing with Pictures". Visualizing the writing of this blog, according to Derren Brown, means that I should picture it from a FIRST-PERSON perspective (ie not looking on at myself writing this, my first clear mistake) and big like IMAX (like the one in Hertfordshire where Miss Meikle and I saw Beowulf - "MONSTAH!" - after driving through the first snow I've seen this winter. Actually, yeah, good thing I didn't stay in London that evening and get some writing done, I'd have missed the snow) I should "make the colours rich and intense", turn up the brightness, bring it in closer, in my face. And finally I should "add sizzle". Thus:

 

And it works!

 

Later on, Derren writes about the "Monty Hall Problem", and it's the following episode played out today at lunch (and slightly reminiscent of my conduct in the Thompson's squall) that I am actually here to record:

 Me - Jess, do you know about "the Monty Hall Problem"?
Jess (with whom I work, and who is American) - I know about Monty Hall. No.
Me - There's three closed doors, and behind one is car and behind the other two there are goats, and you have to choose a door. Then I open a door behind which I know to be a goat. Okay? Now I ask you if you want to stick with your choice, or change and pick the remaining closed door. What do you do?
Jess - I stick.
Me - WRONG!
Jess - No it's not.
Me - YES! YES! Okay, say there were a HUNDRED doors instead, and you picked one, and then I opened up NINETY-EIGHT doors and they all had goats and there was just now the two doors left again. Yours and mine. Think of the probability. Would you still stick with your first choice?
Jess - Yes.
Me - But that's wrong.
Jess - No it's not.
Me - Wh... why not?
Jess - Because you never asked me how I feel about goats.

 Excelsior, Jess! I'll write about Shunt next time. Catch up then.

(Floor) filler

I think I'm allowed to do this. What follows is some of a response from me to a response posted by Chris Goode in response to responses posted to his response to a Guardian interview with the new head of the Royal Court that name-checked Shunt thus:

"With the formally inventive companies like Punchdrunk or Shunt, I'm always impressed by the exploration of theatrical language. But the challenge is to ally that to rich content. To get those two things working together, you need a writer."

You can maybe guess what followed. Anger, some interesting marking out of artistic territory, and also some depressing and unnecessary marking out of artistic territory - none of the latter, I have to say, from Chris who, I think partly inspired by Sesame Street, appears on paper hearteningly keen on accepting and coordinating the differences between things. 

 

For example: In his response to which this is a response Chris suddenly becomes sidetracked by the idea of "a building that you drop in to pretty much anytime, at least from mid-morning till midnight, and what you're able to do is sit with a rolling theatre event. You can just watch, or you can intervene; you can stay for five minutes or five hours. Like going to a gallery, or the pub, or a church."

 So I responded...

RE: your sidetrack, and churchgoing. The nearest thing to what you seem to be writing about here (and I do indeed pop into a church for the same reason I pop into a gallery, I was thinking about that recently, historically etc.) is the Shunt Lounge, which you don't like, and I'm interested why not. (There was stuff about this between you and Tassos [Stevens] a while back but I found it just very wordy and unclear what either of you were actually ever saying). Is it the public? You see, sometimes there is dancing, but even that relates a bit to what you and Ian are discussing... [The Ian here is Ian Shuttleworth... Shunt's first and greatest critical supporter (sorry that's another Ian, no Ian Shuttleworth hates Shunt) here found sensibly championing the "collective context" of a personal theatrical experience; in other words I suppose, yes your experience is personal, but part of that experience is that you're in a crowd. Even when, as in some promenade work, you choose to leave it.] A lot in fact [You might have to read over that again] Someone please try and untangle dancing's private/communal threads while we're here - and when I saw Bobby Francois [Shunt's first big big show] at the Drome, now I think of it, the audience did at one point start dancing. Just an aside really, not evidence of a project's merit.
And do you know about Nijinsky Karaoke, because your sidetrack has suddenly made that exercise seem very worthwhile?
[Here I post a link to the video up on my homepage. Then I pick up on something Chris says about a work being a testimony, and therefore public, but also necessarily to be presented by the testimonee, which I don't agree with, at ugly length:]
"This is who we are." I couldn't care less. Art need not be self-expression, simply expression... I've read it over again, no you're definitely wrong. And what happened to "the people coming out of my mouth" you discovered doing Hippo World? Any play text that is any good will REQUIRE the performer to implicate him or herself. That's an actor's job. You see this is what aggravated me so much when you kept talking about "asking these people to walk through fire" when working on Speed Death [his last show, a play]. Chris, YOU WERE WORKING WITH PROFESSIONAL FIRE WALKERS. That's their job! They WANT to walk through fire! ...

And I go on and on like that, but end I hope friendlily. Chris's is a great blog. Very funny (for example). Do give it a look: here.

 

I've been at Shunt a lot lately, doing work with David on "contains violence". I won't write about it here, I haven't the time. That will come next. Along with some thoughts on "the public" that week. It might just be worth adding though, while cannibalising my own opini-spew, something I found panning through the notebooks for Laurence and Gus which, while a year old now, still rings true: 

I am in the business of making people pay attention, and learning how to make people pay attention and keep their attention - NOT because what I have to say is important, but because paying attention is important - and stories are a very good way of keeping people's attention, and so is music - and nor is comedy, which is why the writing of sketches comes so unnaturally to me, and why sketches packed with punchlines are so full of "Hey" & "And Just think..."

Laurence likes stories though. And Gus likes music. So, good. There was also this:

Brief (catching the light)

.. And when I stumbled home from the party there on the kitchen table was a commission for 12 minutes of material for Laurence and Gus: Hearts and Minds - my first commission! - recording in December. So yes an excellent birthday, but I should probably not be blogging now but focusing instead on that brief: the eternal verities, hopes and fears, an intimate history of humanity, heartfelt knobgags (nobgags? the spelling of "nob", that was also brought up at the brief).

 

The Dungeon's nice and quiet now. (Perhaps too quiet: our senior actor emerged from his office with a shirt and forehead covered in pink dye just in time for a visit from York, which it turns out is what happens if you squeeze too hard on a stress reliever). I took five year's worth of notebooks onto the floor and, trying to catch the light in Whitechapel, panned for one-liners.

Meanwhile Shunt had got its hand on the Blackpool illuminations. I spoke to a designer called Phillip who had accrued more than a thousand pieces before being let go. A designer - Blackpool had finally decided - was surplus to requirements, and Phillip spoke darkly of the flashing mess left in his wake as a giant fibreglass tulip very conspicuously bloomed above the bar.

33rd

 An excellent party and I didn't even have to throw it.

 

Ruffians, toffs and catty slags hanging by the gibbet at the Prospect of Whitby, watching the fireworks going off in Blackheath, sporting sparklers and gins, cakes and tails, stage blood and corsets. And Ms. Meikle makes it over with a big bag of watercolours, colouring sheets, pudding mix and "FOUR INTERNATIONAL GAMES" taped to a board for 99p. All for me! And let me here record that she whppped my ass at Chinese Checkers, and immortalize the butterflies coloured in by the stragglers at 4am washing their brushes in pink champagne, irrespective of insignia.

 

Where to Put the Present (with thanks)

 I had my birthday lie-in today, one day early. I was woken up by fireworks in the street so I knew that it must have already turned dark. On one side of the warm bed was my phone telling me it was half-past six in the evening, on the other lay three unread copies of 2000AD and at the foot, blocking my view of the shirts hung drying for a week now - currently from the venetian blinds - stood a large, white gift from my sister and her boyfriend.

 

Susy and David had warned me that it would be very big, and that it came in two parts currently standing in their corridor, wrapped, and that I might have nowhere to put it, so I went over to their place in Hampstead a couple of nights ago to take it home with me in a people carrier. It was a lovely evening. David was making his television debut in "History of the World Backwards" so we all sat and watched that and I showed them some of my scars from work and spilt the Chinese on the carpet. He was playing a George Harrison tribute act who crash-lands in the Amazon inadvertently inspiring the indigenous peoples' pudding bowl haircuts. (He's in the Bootleg Beatles in real life. Only he's Paul. I didn't know he could do George as well. I'm told he also does an excellent Syd.) On the way home the driver asked me if I'd ever been in prison, and then told me about a fight he'd witnessed the night before where someone had had his ear chewed off in the street. The driver told me, because I asked him, that he worked twelve hours a day six days a week and actually lived in Luton with his family. I think he was Indian. Seeing a man get his ear bitten off had clearly got him thinking about prison. He made about four hundred pounds a week.

 Outside my house we unloaded the present, and I saw that on the former-pub-now-boarded-up-hole-in-the-ground on the corner Morgan from next-door had drawn a big picture of Leonardo da Vinci. He had lobster-claws instead of hands and the words "THE WORLD NEEDS A PAINT BRUSH AND A HUG!" coming out of him. It took two trips to get the present upstairs. I set it up in my room as an interim measure and then went online. I'd warned Susy and David that I would probably have to keep it in the attic until I had more space but it was too late now. What they'd given me was a large, white drawing table. A cast-iron cartoonist's drawing table and four pilot pens and a pad of A2. I had set it up as a sort of easel because of space. It looked really good. And hunched over my laptop I began to think about Heather, who when given a pair of boxing gloves for her birthday had decided she might as well learn how to box... I got up and stretched my legs... Outside of painting my face I hadn't held a brush in ages...

 

 

Of course it was a drawing table, not actually an easel, so there was nothing to stop the paper occasionally slipping off, or the paint, but I had a lot of fun that night. I was up until six. As I have been every night since. 

Hence the lie-in.