The Reviews Are In!

  Photo: Roswitha Chesher     

Yes, two reviews are in! 

 Enormous thanks to tried and trusted unatendees A sea lion in a hat and RedScharlach for generously attending the matinee of Love Goddess today. I don't want you to think from their kind words that we do a total hatchet job on Welles, but this is Rita Hayworth's story, and he was "a man of the world", and to quote London Hughes: "Play silly games, win silly prizes."

 Tech week continues into the actual Press Night tomorrow. We'll do two shows tomorrow, and we did two today, but with every show I feel less and less like John Daker, so COME!  (John Daker is the man in this clip. It is a hard clip to search for if you don't know that, so thanks to my sister Susy for knowing what I was talking about.)

  

Peas Before Memes. Yes Always.

 

 

"Here, under protest, is beefburgers."

 

 First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...

 

 

 

 John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...

 

 

  But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...

 

One Use of Sanitary Pads in a Revolution

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A post shared by Sareh Ghomi (@sarehghomi)

 

                  "I am sitting here now with a bag of boiling water on my heart"

 

 So the twenty-one-year-old Orson Welles cut Ophelia almost entirely from his hour-long Hamlet it turns out, only introducing her ten minutes from the end to drown her so that he could do the grave-digger scene. That's quite a cut. Let's put a pin in that then, and rejoin the Womens' Revolution in Iran. Among the death sentences and other horrors of state retaliation following the death in custody of Mahsa Ahmini after her arrest for inappropriate headwear, there are also sanitary pads being put up to blind security cameras now. Instagram's translation of Sareh Ghomi's brilliant post above provides both illumination and a poetry of its own, but take any gendered pronouns with a pinch of salt because I think Farsi only has the one. Thanks to my friend Faren for sharing this:

 

 "This is the women's revolution, I mean this picture, I am sitting right now with a bag of boiling water on my heart and rolling in pain to myself and thinking why I shouldn't have seen this one piece all these years, special black bags that when you said: a pack of purple blinks, please! The local superintendent wouldn’t hand you in that thick, smelly black bag. I mean, during her pregnancy, the path of the drawer from the room to the bathroom had to be put like a bartender in your pocket or pull your pants and shirt over it so that the male elements of the family and friends would not see it and get upset! I mean my friend who never threw his used tape in the trash bin at his workplace and took it with him to an urban trash bin because he thought the environment was too masculine! That day when your boyfriend, after a big party, wants to clean the toilet, but his laziness in putting the bag in the bucket and sticking one of the same used ones to the bottom of the bucket, makes him face a scene he had never seen before and sound Don't forget to throw it up! They don't know what winged means! They don't know what to buy when you're in trouble and slamming the door and wall! Or even ashamed to buy and load a super so that the important package is not visible, sometimes out of kindness buy diapers like because you're in so much pain. Sanitary tape is a white fragrant piece that prevents the bleeding from spreading, and right here in this picture, it's glued itself to the wagon camera to stop the bleeding so it doesn't get lost! So the female body and all that's connected with it is changing user, it's taking over, it's breaking all taboos, see this white piece stuck to the camera and remember to be safe you are safe too. #women_life_freedom"

Is Orson Welles the Perfect Hamlet or the Absolute Opposite? There's Only One Way to Find Out.

   Love Goddess, the musical in which I play – among other husbands of Rita Hayworth – Orson Welles, opens this Friday, and you can get tickets here. We're deep into tech week, so I don't have much time to blog, and I haven't even listened yet to what I'm posting today, but I'm looking forward to it.

 

Archie, Jane, me, Imogen, and Joey. I believe it's called proof of sweat.

 

 You'd have thought that, of all the big Shakespearean roles which the erudite, intellectual, procrastinatingly impatient, fatally disappointed, theatre-obsessed Welles had tackled, Hamlet would among them, and it turns out you'd be right. The only reason I didn't know this until I looked it up today, is that it was back in 1936 when Welles was still twenty-one, in a self-directed radio adaptation. Of course, he'd already staged Macbeth by then. My parents sent me the first volume of Simon Callow's massive biography "The Road To Xanadu" for my birthday, so I'll see what that has to say about it...

 

 Oh. Okay. So much for my interpretation then – of either Welles or Hamlet, take your pick. But no! Both feared they might be phonies, both feared their own monstrousness while also wishing they were more like the monsters, and there's not a single speech of Hamlet's I can't imagine in Welles' voice, so maybe it's Callow who's wrong. But he did write a massive biography. But he says it was a thirty-minute adaptation, and it's actually two thirty-minute adaptions. But they didn't have the internet back in 1995. But we do.

 

 

UPDATE: Okay, I've listened to it. I think it's fair to say there is one quite heavy omission. Can you guess what got cut?

Sometimes this blog will just be "Venice In Peril"

 Another canal. Maybe you can imagine how much Angus McKie's artwork for Rondò Veniziano's 1983 album "Venice In Peril" blew the mind of a young boy rifling through records in WHSmith, although I didn't know it was called that back then, and having my mind blown by album art was literally the only reason I rifled through records in WHSmith in the eighties. Click to enlage if you like, but don't blame me if you never come back, and here's another.

 

 I've just started watching Dennis Potter's Casanova: its scenes of an imprisoned writer suffering pornographic flashbacks and raging against his cellmates are very reminiscent of The Singing Detective, but its sumptious and creepy Venetian exteriors are giving me welcome flashbacks of my own, specifically to how powerful a role some idea of this city played in my childhood imagination. The mad cover art on a Rondò Veniziano record is probably what started it.

 A decade after "Venice In Peril" was released I would have my first ever pizza (I was scared of cheese) and, as I've written before, I chose a Veniziana because for every one ordered Pizza Express would pay "a discretionary 25p" to the "Venice In Peril fund" and I still hadn't been. In the end Venice did not disappoint, but that discretionary 25p would never change in value over the next three decades of my ordering Venizianas. Then, last weekend, I went to the Pizza Express in Paddington basin and found out it was no longer on the menu. I asked why. Apparently Pizza Express no longer has the necesary sultanas. I blame Brexit. How are we going to pay for that spaceship now?

fog blog

 I've looked it up. 

 If you can't see through it further than a kilometre, it's fog. If you can, it's mist. 

 That seems quite far.

 

 Yesterday evening I headed out into the darkness and walked along the towpath from Ladbroke Grove to Acton, heading towards Perivale even though noone I know lives in Perivale now, but there's a lot of night these days so one might as well do something with it and I was surprised to be home before eight.

 I love mist, and so did Badphone. The last time I'd strolled down a canal at night I remember resolving with some excitement to get a replacement far better at recording my surroundings, but it really took to the mist last night.

 

  It could focus now there were no points of light to dazzle, just shades in harmony giving way to each other, autotuned by the mist, every shape picked out against the absence of darkness, sorted by its distance.

 

 I reconsidered Badphone's replacing. Maybe it's good to stick with something that doesn't work, to learn its foibles and grow old with it. Do I "need" a new phone? I'd never given a phone a name before. And my own eyesight's going.

 Nothing drastic. I'm just getting old. Nothing glasses couldn't solve completely. But do I "need" glasses? For some reason I don't want glasses. I like how I look in glasses so it's not vanity that's stopped me. Is it the faff? Pride takes other forms.

 

 But why not be proud? Why not just say I have bad eyesight now, and I have bad phone. Let's see what this is like. Why should everything be useful? I looked again at this delineated scenery. Form following function. Even in the ducks. So hang on, when did I stop wanting to be useful? 

 When did that become something I questioned? 

 Of course. I'm getting old.

 

Not Safe For Work

  On Tuesday I held a place for the Webcamming Chronicles (a very different show from Spike) which Maud Madlyn and Andrès Montes Zuluaga will be performing again tonight at the Cockpit Theatre as part of Trojana – either the name of their company, or of the very specific sex-work-based project this show is a part of, I'm not quite sure which – and as this is a recommendation I'm going to try to get it written and posted while there's still time to get a ticket. There's a Q and A after tonight's show as well. I guarantee you will have questions, but I can't guarantee you'll necessarily want the answers. 

 To quote Trojana's f*c*b**k page:

"For this particular piece, performer Maud Madlyn took on her most demanding personal and professional challenge to date: work as an adult webcam model and trainer. She infiltrated the industry from a clandestine studio in Cali, Colombia, second world-leading power in this business. Why? To see what sexual desire looked and sounded like when decency and political correctness were stripped away."

 Along with many mutual friends from the London Dungeon I'd known Maude from when she ran the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms in Camden, and after she left the country – (side note: I love that she describes herself as "French-born" rather than French; I might start describing myself as British-born, it immediately seems a little freeing) – I knew from her instagram posts she was doing something involving not wearing clothes, but it wasn't until I saw this show on Tuesday that I realised her specific level of commitment, and that Trojana may have taken its name from the horse.

Image taken from this review of Webcamming Chronicles' Covid times, online premiere

 

 Not knowing much about the show beforehand however probably made it more unforgettable, and so I don't want to say too much more about Andrès' and Maude's investigations (I also want to get this posted pretty quickly, as I said) but – with the proviso that every audience will make every show different, and so what it felt like when I saw it might not be what it feels like any other night – I will say that the two things I probably loved most about the show were: 1) That I really wasn't prepared for it, and that it didn't seem to care – content warnings are incredilbly important but I hadn't realised until I watched this how much they also really make me feel like a consumer, like I'm in the shops – but I only loved this because 2) While a piece of staged journalism, it never stopped being art, by which I mean liminal, by which I'm trying to find a word that sounds less pretentious but still describes the necessary protective shared understanding that you don't have to immediately engage with the work as fact, that you can interrogate it without feeling you're interrogating the artist. That's what I mean. That thing that Nanette didn't have. Interrogating a work means you can create a conversation within yourself. And I don't know if I ever heard these specific words said, but the phrase "unsafely human" was something powerful I was left with,

 Of course, Trojana might also take its name from the first ever webcamming star: the coffee pot outside the Trojan Room of Cambridge University. If you're going tonight, maybe you could ask.