G. reat B. ritish H. oliday

With the US release of "Sightseers" today or something, what better time to publish this glowing assessment from resident cineaste Mary Ann Sputnik? (Apart from when they released the DVD, or maybe when the film actually came out over here last year anyway it's here):

You'll have to see the film to understand how great a still this is.

Dark and noisy and lying in wait, movies side naturally with monsters. Road Movies aren't about driving, they're about Sex and Death, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands and Five Easy Pieces (or, back in my day, Thelma and Louise, True Romance and Wild at Heart) - they're fantasies about turning your back on everything you've ever been given or had to take, following a plus-one into the wilderness, and then trying to hump and kill your way out of feeling like a trespasser. Also of course, they're movies about America. You couldn't set these stories in Britain - good old, naff, uncomplaining Britain with its not-massive cars, gun control, pencil museums and shaming dearth of deserts and peyote. The very idea of a British Road Movie is inherently comic, surely, which may be one reason Sightseers is billed as a comedy (although there are some outstanding jokes). But blow me if Sightseers isn't also the very first Actual British Road Movie.

The only stuff of Ben Wheatley's I'd seen previously was The Wrong Door, so nothing had really prepared me for the intoxicating wilderness he helped to serve up here. Holy cow, can he film! Places and faces. And those faces! Alice Lowe's tiny beams and frowns, Steve Oram's mug like thunder. And those places! When the killing come, as promised, it doesn't sneer as the trailer suggests. These aren't the killings of If... They don't denote a conquest. And they're not a judgment, they're arbitrary as Nature, a psychedelic framing of the question "What are people actually for?" As Chris and Tina conclude, "murder is green". I was reminded oddly of Dredd - another lean, mean exercise in fantasy violence unbound by the yucky dictates of orange and teal. I was also reminded of Four Lions, less oddly. In the end, the rage so happily submitted to comes as a relief. I left on a high.

Forbidden Corner, Tupgill Park Estate, Coverham as recommended in

"More Bollocks to Alton Towers - Far From the Sodding Crowd"

So there you go. You can always post nice words on twitter of course, but really that just looks a bit too much like you're saying "Hey, wow, I know these people". And I do know Alice Lowe, and Richard David Glover who's in it too, and is also brilliant, and I'm surprised I didn't mention him actually. I know them, and I was excited when Alice first spoke about this film, excited because a friend was making a film and that's exciting. But that excitement was nothing to what I feel now that I've seen it.

1925-2013

 Two days ago we arrived in France, took in the two-thousand-year-old Pont du Gard in perfect light along with its boob-heavy, garcon-silencing supplementary educational film, then headed back to Puisallicon to find out she was dead. My first reaction was "Ah. Oh." Now I'm at a computer here are the other thoughts. Feel free to join in.
So, secondly, I always thought it curious as a nipper how none of the caricatures looked like her. She didn't have a nose like a scythe. She had a high, wonky forehead. But when I came to caricature her in my visual notebook - along with the rest of the cabinet, many of whom I'd never seen outside of Spitting Image or Steve Bell - I went along with it.

 

The exception. Note: normal sized nose.

 Thirdly, I found it odd to have a government whose message so flatly contradicted the basic demarcations of right and wrong being instilled in me as a future adult, to have a PM so boldly mean and incurious. I don't know what I thought a government was for, but when they started privatising the utilities it reminded me of Tom Sawyer charging kids to paint his fence.
 Fourthly, it also bugged me when I was being driven into school to hear politicians on the radio say "We can't just wave a magic wand." Nobody was proposing that. They're doing it again and it's still annoying, which leads me to -
 Fifthly, I was educated in a Church of England school in Tory Wandsworth, then Westmister Prep and Public Schools - I know, lucky me - and in every one of those conservative establishments nobody liked her... Nobody... Actually by the time I was fifteen that's probably not true. There were of course a few vocal Tory children whose arguments remain unchanged over twenty years later, "fully-formed" as some describe Michael Gove, or just ungrown-up, and it's possibly a fault of my upbringing but I couldn't begin to understand where they were coming from. I still don't. I do try. It's something to do with ninety-five per cent of capital being invested in property or something, yes? Anyway my point is when she was finally ousted - just round the corner from us - the glee resounded up and down our toast-scented corridors pretty much unopposed.
 Sixthly... and yet, somehow nowadays "being taken serious politically" seems to mean operating on her terms. So she can't have started the fire (self-interest isn't transmitted from above). But don't tell me in your obituaries she didn't know the meaning of the word "can't". For many she embodied "can't". Her talent was for recognising strength and siding with it, and I'd say sticking to those kind of principles is pretty easy. She served her idea of justice by doing everything within her power to sell this country to her heroes, and that idea hasn't really gone away, this is still the eighties and Thatcher's passing seems like just another of those endlessly replicating shadows cast by street lamps as you walk home, hence perhaps the feeling of "Ah. Oh." And her heroes were dicks.
 Seventhly, her funeral procession from Westminster to Saint Paul's via St. Clement Danes - the procession we can definitely afford because in spite of my sixth point we can afford anything we like if there is the political will, of course we can - will follow exactly the route of the Ghost Bus Tours. Tickets here.
 Finally, I keep thinking of something Clive James wrote in 1975: "In real life, Mrs Thatcher either believes that everybody can help himself without anybody getting hurt, which means she is unhinged; or else believes that everybody who can help himself ought to do so no manner who gets hurt, which means she is a villain; a sinister prospect either way." I don't know if he still stands by this remark, but I can't see why he wouldn't.
 This is also good.

Blacking up

This is the Council Chamber of the Battersea Art Centre, where "Ring" takes place. The picture was taken Monday afternoon. Those aren't lights being rigged I now realise, they're whatever the opposite of lights are: black velvet gaffered to the holes in the ceiling. As part of a less specific refit the chamber walls have also undergone a rushed, artificial school-play ageing. Even in this light you can make out the phoney splurts of grey around the detail in the roof. 

It's a lost space dolled up as a found one. Tea candles burn everywhere, sheet metal mirrors have been screwed into the ceiling and lightbulbs hang like bunting, unfitted. I've no idea how much of this is temporary: there's a lot of building work going on (and the dressing room I'm sharing with Daniel Kitson has a few sheets of plastic where a wall might later go). I hope they keep the carpeted dining booths they've erected on the central staircase, those are dreamlike. And I hope they lose the "Arbeit Macht Frei" buzzguff beneath:

Apart from one "scratch" night, eight years ago, of the never continued Self Portrait As Frida Kahlo, this is perhaps surprisingly my first time performing at the BAC. I used to come here as a child and print badges, but I don't think I ever saw a show here, not back in those days - That's not true I've just remembered! When I was ten I saw my Dad's friend Ted tell a story about two crows nattering to each other while feasting on a dead soldier's eyes! Eeee, that must have been in the Council Chamber, and thirty odd years later here I am, in the dark.

We finally had someone leave tonight. Total darkness is strangely claustrophobic. That's not the right word. Claustrophrightening. Everything seems taken care of though, The staff are incredible, most of them I'm assuming are volunteers. It's all a bit out of my hands anyway. I'm keeping the headphones on now. 

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is, none.

The buzz has been good. It's selling out around me. I think it's all going according to plan. You should come, we should see. In the meantime there's an excellent, spoiler-free interview with David Rosenberg here. And you can hear him have more binaural fun in his podcast "The Ear" here. And you can get tickets here. And here are some reviews - spoiler-free summary: Like, and even the people who don't like are coming again:

One Stop Arts
Whats On Stage
A Younger Theatre
The Upcoming
Spoonfed
Evening Standard
The Guardian
Time Out
Everything Theatre
Exeunt
London Magazine 
What's Peen Seen

The Man Who Would Be King Of Popes

Topical

It was the press night of Ring tonight, so, and yikes - there's people moving in that dark - take your headphones off (don't take your headphones off!) and you'll be astounded at the amount of slithering people produce... in that dark. Anyway, regardless, today was also New Old Pope Day, so thanks to Alan Cox for drawing my attention to this beautiful thing from Second City Television *. Also thank you Canada, for realising Victor Spinetti is a thing. The winner of this sketch has to be Dave Thomas whose "Richard Hariss" is good enough to raise the question of why Richard Harris impressions are not now more prevalent. All it should take is for someone to get it right - see Christopher Walken impressions post Kevin Spacey doing it at the Oscars, or Blair post Bremner... (We're still waiting for a decent impression of any of the current cabinet by the way. What happened?)

* SCTV's alumnibunch include Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis, John Candy and Martin Short. I first encountered them on network awesome where their eight-minute-long sketch pitting Vikings against Beekeepers alerted me to their esoteric fabness.

P.S. It's only after posting this I realised the new Pope's called Francis. Which if you come and see Ring... you'll... well, you'll see. Rosenberg just keeps nailing that zeitgeist.

Break a Leg.

Do you trust these two men? I do. But it might be more fun if you don't.

David Rosenberg & Glen Neath in conversation about RING

from Susanne Dietz on Vimeo.

Tonight the show formerly titled "Ring Piece" opens at the Battersea Arts Centre. I'm just about to head in and rehearse it now - typing this surrounded by boxes, but not as many boxes as I need. I've been very much in Limbo over this past fortnight: between homes, between jobs, between drafts, and hanging around Lanna house-sitting Schrodinger's cat in a beautiful flat in Mudchute that overlooks the Thames and little else. This handsomely-paid, two-and-a-half-week run of Ring has been the one fixed point in all of that. And now it's here, whatever it is.

Perhaps it's best described as a social experiment. That at least avoids spoilers. David and Glen seem happy with how it's gone so far, at least. Here's the former making some of it in a sandpit in Victoria Park which we broke into a few evenings back, lit by his own device. David's turf. He told me the only way in was down a slide. This turned out to be a lie. The slide seemed massive. You can just make it out on the left. 

Anyway I'd better go. I think I know my lines. I'll write more soon. I'm excited.

See you there?

RING by David Rosenberg & Glen Neath from Susanne Dietz on Vimeo.

The Choosatron

Very quickly - Last night I was in the Hen and Chickens in Islingtonto see "Pekka and Strangebone's Comedy Showpiece" for a third time (it's excellent by the way, if you're doing nothing tonight get yourself along) and I ran into some friends from the Wireless Theatre Company all huddled round a guy from Minnesota called Jerry. In his hands was this:

What looked like a receipt printer was in fact printing the text of a choose-your-own adventure, and the thing that looked like a calculator was actually the number pad into which you key your choices. Written in marker on the lid after the fashion of Calvin and Hobbes was the name "The Choosatron". It was Jerry's own invention and you can out more about it here. He was not short of drinks that night.

"You Are A Shark"...?!

The bloody basics

It is, of course, the most fundamental rule of story-making-up that you work out what your characters want from the outset. I say story-making-up rather than story-telling, because if somebody else has made your story up that's a lot easier to get a handle on. As John Finnemore just tweeted "They're slippery buggers, made-up people". His hero's called Martin too. But yes, that's the thing, what if you get what they want wrong?

Two weeks ago I suggested that actually, excitingly, my Martin was juggling a double wish, to be a hero and to be a scapegoat, and while I'm very happy with that as an idea, I've realised tonight it's not THE THING. I only think this worth recording because for the last two weeks I've felt, well, powerless and I've now realised it was because I'd lost all sense that I had a right to tell this person's story, and that felt terrible. It felt terrible not least because the Real World during those two weeks was pitching Sci Fi left, right and centre: Iranian space monkeys...

Excellent work as ever, people!

Russian Meteor Showers...

Shadows! Car alarms! Wheee!

The screening on BBC4 of this superb, level-headed, Wells and Kafka-quoting documentary on Google and the World Brain...

And then there was also the sad, but happily much-commented-upon passing of The Daddy Of All Martins.

But tonight I think I've remembered now what my Martin really wants, which is not to be hero, or to be dead, but simply to go back. Around that, everything else at this hour now seems to fall into place, as it did when I was first making it up however many years ago that was, when it seemed to come so naturally. It seems there, but then that's what I said a fortnight ago. Still, I am writing.

While I'm here, and continuing my sci-fi kick, I found James Burke made an excellent (and crazy) history of the world in fifty minutes back in 1989, if you're interested here.
And John's knowledge of his onions is very much to the fore in this post on cliffhangers. I should get some post-it notes.