...
wwwwwas made on Monday evening in the insensitively well-lit Crypt of
Saint-Martin's-in-the-Field - Saint-Martin-in-the-Field's -
Saint's-Martin's-in-the's-Fields's-whatever it is. Time was, I remember,
you could pop down there for a coffee and barely see who you were
talking to, but now it's lit like a prison. Or Ikea. Perhaps nobody had
told that to the people at Bloomsbury when they chose it as the location
for the launch of Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, hiring a couple of
actors to drift eerily past disguised as Victorian ghouls. Still it was
packed. A bit too packed as my opposite undead number Alice (who actually did look great in her sulky cowl despite the absence of candle
light) pointed out. You couldn't really "drift" anywhere, you had to
more, kind of, "barge" eerily. So mainly we stood still and I decided to
look a bit lost and pensive and hanger-onnish (I'd been generously
invited that day to the Evening Standard Theatre Awards by Ella who'd
just been nominated best newcomer - YAY - and guessed I'd be adopting
much the same attitude) and I attempted to hold my hands in the manner
of a Chris Riddell illustration.
And below is a lovely little film by one of the greatest illustrators
ever to work in comics, Dave McKean, who was also at the launch which
made me very excited. And above is a little image from The Tempest film I
made eleven willion years ago which I realize now shows his influence
puh-retty clearly. In the flesh
Dave McKean looks like some extraordinary household spirit, or the
patriarch and sole beard-owner of an arboreal race visible only to the
drinkers of neat willow hooch. Also a lot like a trimmed Arvo Part.
His son and I had a staring contest. And I got him and Neil Gaiman to
sign the inside of my battered dungeon topper. I'm getting paid in
books. Not a bad gig really.
(I think that last caption reads "God finds an important use for the third, and previously spare dimension".)
The
Proscenium Arch: My little cameraphone can do no justice to the
cavernous, blackboardish, mouldering oddness of the three large brick
arches that make up the space in Shunt called the Arena. Having found
myself at the wrong attention-end of the table in the pub after work I
popped into the Shunt Vaults and the netaudio
festival being hosted there (whence these photos) just in time to catch
a gothic dance piece based on the works of Spike Jones and Doodles
Weaver.
I
couldn't remember when I'd last seen the Arena look like such an
attractive proposition for a performance. It may be because I'd never
seen it look so bare, or it may have been because I'd learnt on Thursday
that our days in this place were finally numbered. Or it may have been
that I'd recently been thinking about Jonah Non Grata thus (and thank you again, Andrew Haydon, for that review): If I were to perform it again in the Vaults much of the set I'd used for the promenade version back in January (the lobby, the lift)
had now been dismantled, so restaging that wasn't an option, and as
much fun as running around with the audience and pulling tricks with
doors and light had been, there was always an argument for taking the
show back to what it had started out as ie. a man gutting about onstage
for an hour in front of an audience allowed to keep their places and, as
a consequence, their anonymity... an argument now made all the stronger
by the rich, found seediness of this Arena. It really did look like a
great, godawful place to see one man stand.
But
how likely am I really to perform Jonah here agan? What have I already
got on my plate? For a start there's this film I'm going to make with Gemma Brockis,
although neither of us really have any idea what it's going to be.
We've mentioned "Fat Adolf" of course (I'm finding it very useful to
write Winnie Verloc with the casting of Gemma in mind) but should LA not
come knocking, or - Heaven Forfuckingfend - I never even get round to
writing the bloody thing and live out the rest of my days teetotal, we
also considered making a short. The one idea I had was to get Gemma to
play me, film it in black and white and call it "The Git." Gemma, a
little to my surprise, really seems to like this.
Okay,
so what should the Git do? Well as of last night I think he should
stand in the Arena and perform to the camera. Start with what you know.
Gemma, now I think of it, is also fascinated by the proscenium arch (for
her upcoming curatorship of the Vaults I think she's going to turn the
long corridor into a series of Pollock Toy Theatre style flats) while
I'm having enough problems working out how to make Iago work outside of
the traditional thearical seating arrangement and I'm only doing that
because it's going on the radio, so I see no need to fight this any
more: REGARDLESS of the medium, there is clearly something about a
person standing on a stage (preferably a big, bare stage) and facing
front that I find potentially hilarious and complicated. Let's start
there then, and just hope we get the whole thing wrapped before they
move us to the sewage farm.
It's
an odd thing but sitting in a spotlight in the dark you're constantly
glimpsing bits of your own face in the peripheries. This happened as I
watched Mel perform Iris Brunette
sitting beside us one by one, assigning characters and engaging us in
coversation. I was there as a member of the audience but also (like
quite a few others there) as somebody who knew her and somebody used to
performing off the cuff, so when it came time for her to address me it
was difficult to know quite how to play it: She was being brilliant,
should I shut up? Was I having to pretend to be a member of the audience
even though I was one? I watched silently for as long as was polite.
Then I was asked my name, which I guess was a question anybody could
answer, so I answered that. Then I was asked what made my heart race? I
said "noise" which was dumb - I was very conscious of my heart racing
right then in fact as both she and the spotlight stayed on me. But what I
wish I'd said was "hiding."
And I think I got an idea of how to
end "Iago's Little Book of Calm" (the radio adaptation of something
sweary I wrote for the stage five years ago which ends with the central
character noticing the audience, a much harder trick to pull off if
they're not there). I think the solution might have something to do with
talking to yourself. So thanks for that, Mel. Her shows often give me
ideas, not directly as such, they're just good places to think.
The
same can be true of Chris Goode's blogging. Laid up with this cold I
finally got round to looking at his rehearsal diary for Hey Mathew
this afternoon (upon which Jamie opposite is currently employed). It's
an eloquent, passionate, generous and witty account of a type of
rehearsal process I instinctively distrust (perhaps, as Chris suggests,
because it's not a process of rehearsal towards a show as such but a
process of investigation that should - and on this evidence, justifiably
does - exist for its own sake). It was here I saw posted: "Can anyone
help me out with thinking about this thing about stripping away the
privacy from intimacy? And -- if you fancy it -- what exactly are you
using your privacy to do?"... and I tried to post the following in
response. The capchta was sletedso:
"Privacy is simply being
granted control over the company you keep, isn't it? 'Let's go somewhere
private' means 'Let's get rid of the unknowns.' A couple of years ago I
was thinking a lot about hiding... about writing a children's book
about a boy who loved playing games involving hiding, and then found out
that being onstage felt entirely the same (dozens of copies where then
made of him, all of whom ended up after an initial polite camaraderie
keeping out of each other's way). So yes I was thinking about the joy of
hiding (on one's own, rather than in a den, although THAT IS YES THE
SAME) and about the stage as a counter-intuitively perfect hiding place.
When I turned eight I would spend every school break walking up and
down talking to myself, and this continued until I graduated. It was and
is simultaneously a completely private yet public activity, and
inasmuch as I am taking on different voices while talking to myself and,
in a sense improvising dialogue, it is also a performance, even though
it is not done for an audience, which is only something that's just
occurred to me. I would say you hide on stage because you disappear, but
this takes us down needlessly controversial, well-farrowed tracks about
the nature of truth in performance, so won't. Maybe I made some notes
I'll have a look no I can't find them. What do we use our privacy for?
People affect each other - (actually I'd accidentally written "People
effect each other" which is a bit more profound) - It is polite to
refrain from effecting somebody without their consent. So privacy I
think exists in case we're scary. Intimacy, on the other hand, requires
company. A person can't be intimate on their own, can they? As an
adjective "intimate" almost means "descriptive of an atmosphere requiring
privacy" or something you wouldn't do in front of a third party. Except
in the case of performance where it really just means somebody's doing
their job. Maybe."
So yes I wrote that and then I went and saw
Melanie's show. Mental, eh? And it's true about the school breaks. They
used to call me "Walkie Talkie". Cough.
Post one-hundred-and-one, a time to take stock. Average time spent
on one of these things: Four hours... which is daft. One hour of that's
just spent looking over punctuation for the love of - Enough. We can no
longer afford these fancy production numbers. There's a crunch
on, and papa needs to quit this tinkering, pick up a proper job hammer
and hit the coal- It's twelve past eight! I've got to have some breakf-
I've got a COLD, oh this is EXACTLY what I'm talking ab- Here:
Fully
qualified veterinarian Dr. Meikle and I said a second goodbye-of-sorts
to each other a number of Mondays back, up in Hampstead, the afternoon
before I visited the Death Ray set I think. I uncharacteristically
teared up over a hot chocolate and rather more characteristically bought
a rubber duck and took photos... But it was relaxing, and she gave me a
word of advice I shall pass on to you now, in this my hundredth post,
because it's a good word of advice, and to name something is to give
yourself a measure of control over it, so here it is:
Cockgoggles.
I
had been worrying to her in passing about a scheduled meeting coming up
with a former object of desire, and she said "You're empowered. You're
completely empowered. Just don't wear your cockgoggles."
It's
very important to be reminded that's an option. Yes, cockgoggles. Of
course. As a salutary reminder I took myself off a few days later to see
Elegy,
in which Ben Kingsley plays a public intellectual who meets, falls in
love with and then has to say goodbye to Penelope Cruz's breasts (the
title can only refer to her masectomy), and with the saddening clarity
now afforded by the good doctor's advice I could see that every decision
here weighed and every savvy pronouncement delivered in this movie was
just patently dotty: the sayings of a sap who'd thought he'd made sense
of this world at sixty, but had accidentally kept his cockgoggles on.
All this time. Like a sixty-year-old cucumber seed in your beard nobody
has thought to mention. Take 'em off, Philip Roth.
And I got a
call from Dr. Meikle this evening, well yesterday evening now, sounding
kind and happy. She's working 13-hour-days now at a veterinary practice
up in the Pyrenees. Yeah I wonder what she does... Here's today's death
ray:
Is
this - ? Why - What was the point of this blog again? Anyway Hamlet
(abridged) happened on Sunday again in front of four charming witnesses.
"Let's film a trailer next," thought our producer aloud, "With better
costumes and lighting - Just set two days aside and -" Back to the
lab... That night I was up with a cold watching "Have I Got News For
You?" on iplayer, answering everything and realizing that I get most of
my news now from youtube. I'm THAT bored. Clips isn't really news
though, is it. Clips is just clips, they'll never tell you what's really
going on. Unlike THIS!
Here's
an exciting interview with author, Doctor Judy Wood: Could the collapse
of the Twin Towers be the work of a Giant Death Ray? What exactly IS
the "dustification" point of steel?... I'm sorry but Sarah Palin's
clearly given me a real taste for watching dumb lies squirm under
scrutiny, how about you? Dr. Judy's haggard appearance admittedly skews
one's schadefreude a tad, but still:
Oh listen no actually that's not important. What I
really want to draw to your attention is this. This is what actually
happens when you point a Laser at a building in Manhattan. This is what a
Graffiti Research Lab actually gets up to. I'm going to build one for Morgan:
James helps to design robots on Mars. James wears a hood. James rules.
The following short is a favourite at my Dad's film evenings in
Puisallicon and features one of the dirtiest women ever to appear in
cartoons (and the thirties were full of them). "Whopper" here I think
means fib:
In other news, the wedding of Hannah Lou to Trevor Moss
in Wandsworth Town Hall yesterday was a paragon, a paean, a peach. We
all sat in the Council Chamber playing with our flip out desks, enjoying
the soft, Godless strains of Salt and Blue,
and when Hannah walked she looking so young. They both looked so young.
They are young. They fell in love young. Trevor's moustache (a lot of
us had moustaches) only made him look younger, and his father was the
best man and even he looked young. The best man speech at the Ivy House
would later make me break my pledge.
And soon they'll be off to honeymoon in Finland (where the finals of the Mad Scientist's Laugh Competition
are held). Bishop had begun to plan for his own wedding. Hiring a fake
groom seemed like a good idea, then Bish could make a dramatic entrance
through a window when the time came to ask if anyone knew of any lawful
impediment. Heidi C. Mace said she actually knew someone who hires
herself out daily as a shotgun-wielding, pregnant wedding-crasher. There
is a market.
I found a payslip in my trouser pocket walking
home that night through Peckham Rye. I'm finding payslips all over the
place these days. That's the really insidious thing about a regular job,
I realized: waiting for the payslip. You shouldn't be waiting for the
end of the week. Time should not pass quickly. Good for Hannah and Trev.
