Hospitality (featuring Woodlouse or Moth)

 "The PSC (pre show coffee) Award: Simon" – smudged in transit

 

 Oh my God, I never win anything!

 The "Best Actor Oscar" from Morgan was an honorary thing really, but that paper plate to the left of it came with ceremony, cheers, and tables in the corner of an upstairs room of the Lyric Pub Soho – the full Dundies, in other words – a coherence. The PSC is an award that speaks to me. It says, "You make coffee before a show, Simon. You are seen. You did not just crash the Crystal Maze hosts' social last Monday. You were expected, it's fine." 

 After the ceremony we lugged our plastic medals over to the Pheonix – when was I last there?... I bounded home smoothed by compliments received for a person I barely recognised, and fortified by the hope of a world reoreinting itself to accommodate the plans of those just starting out. 

 Christmas had started early. 

 In fact, as soon as Halloween was over – bang on All Hallows' – we'd transitioned into playing reindeer, and the Crystal Maze wasn't the only business decking its halls earlier than seemed seemly, in the unspoken shadow of another possible lockdown sometime in actual December. So it was good we got the  celebrating in when we did, before Omicron Week. 

 However it does mean I ended up posting nothing on Monday evening. Or since. So to make up for that, here's a working week's worth of unposted quiz rounds from the Dungeon Zoom, beginning with - from May the 14th – "Woodlouse or Moth?"... There are ten of each, but which is which? I'll post the answers in the comments below, but you can also find them for yourself here and here.

1. Dandy Postman

2. Apple Leaf Skeletonizer

3. Charlie Pig

4. Oak Lutestring

5. Scarce Vapourer

6. Billy Baker

7. Humidity Bug

8. Manchester Treble-Bar

9. Blair's Shoulder-Knot

10. Cheesy Papa

11. Roly-Poly

12. Old Lady

13. Triangle

14. Chuggy Peg

15. Least Minor

16. Damp Beetle

17. Clifden Nonpareil

18. Leather-Jacket

19. Snout

20. Granny Grunter 

Quizzes You May Have Missed: Performing Toys Round

 My friend Tom of our number gave me this cursed book back in 1994 – not the specific copy above, mine's more fire-damaged – but I never got round to making anything in it because I never seemed to have the requisite cigarette packets, golf tees or fringed tweed. Look at the fun I missed out on though.

  During this blog's hiatus, however, I did manage to fashion this picture round from it for the Dungeon Zoomers who continued to quiz online, and now – to round off a week that started with robots – I thought YOU coud play along TOO, maybe, if you open this page in a few different tabs? I don't really know how this will work. Anyway, all you have to do is match the following names and raw materials...

1.

 

 

2.

 

 

3.

 

 

4.

 

 

5.

 

 

6.

 

 

7.

 

 

8.

 

 

9.

 

 

10.

 

... with the corresponding, delightful toys pictured below. I'll post the correct answers in the comments although this one's actually pretty easy so maybe I won't. CHWAT!

 

 

a)

 

 

b)

 

 

 

c)

 

 

 

d)

 

 

 

e)

 

 

f)

 

 

 

g)

 

 

 

h)

 

 

 

i)

 

 

j)

 

Going Back to the "WELL..."

  Speaking of wars and uncles and secrets and years, I can't imagine that anyone reading this blog hasn't by now listened at least once through to the ninth series of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. But if you haven't, I would love it if you did, and then you can learn why producer Ed Morrish bought us all these lovely glasses. In fact, you'll learn the reason for that in Episode One, but you'll have to wait until Episode Four to learn the reason for the reason, which is as good a guide for how to listen to Finnemore's Ninth as I can probably give. Here's the link. And here's John's own advice for how to listen to it. 

 When I heard the episodes go out this Summer, week after week, it felt like what finding treasure must feel like, and when John first suggested to me over Zoom what he was planning for the series – given the difficulty of performing sketches in front of a live audience at the beginning of 2021 – I was thrilled giddy by the idea that he might finally, finally, be making something that just wouldn't work AT ALL (like the fairy tale about a giant condemned to carry people across a river until finally he drops one in the water, and everyone stops asking him, and so he's free) but in the end we never got to witness that. John didn't drop a thing. That's my only disappointment regarding this otherwise perfect answer to the question "How do you follow the Heist Episode from series 7?" And I will definitely at some point write more about it from the beach in my mind I'm spending the rest of my life on because I got to be in it.

 

 

*This* is why I wouldn't call it a sketch show though.

Uncle Francis Postscript: Fatespotting

"Shelter Drawing: Three Fates" by Henry Moore (source)

 

 Following on from what I hope was a tribute to my late uncle Francis yesterday: looking for pictures of him to accompany the post, I was surprised to find the video below, from 2014. I never expected to see Francis in a video. Possibly because the first extraordinary fact I ever learnt about him was that Uncle Francis didn't own a television! He composed epic dramas in blank verse, and themes for organ. He didn't pop up on youtube. But here he suddenly is, less spry than I remember, I hope it's okay to say, which is why I suspect the last time I saw him was before this. But maybe we're just witnessing the toll upon Francis of talking about the Blitz. These aren't happy memories, which is one of the reasons I think they're so worth sharing. I remember, in the class he gave in 1999, Francis talking about growing up in "Bomb Alley",watching "men murder each other in the sky above us." I forgot – if I ever knew – that he was also friends with Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.

"It's not spooky. It's just a city waiting to be crucified."

 

 You can see Francis talk at far greater length about this moonlit childhood beneath the bombing in his other youtube appearance here: "Armageddon and faith - a survivor's meditation on the Blitz".

 And his funeral service will be held on the 20th. Here.

Uncle Francis' Advice to Writers

 

 Portrait by Lucy Stopford  

 "Take firm hold of a goose. Yank out a feather. Trim it. Whittle the tip. Dip that in ink, and the one thing you'll find you can't do with it is draw a diagonal line. You can't cross out a paragraph with a quill." I remember, if not verbatim, this explanation from my Uncle Francis – complete with actions – for the appearance of two different versions of the same exchange at the end of Love's Labours Lost. I also remember his dissection of Shakespeare's reasons for redrafting it: "One idea, one line: good... One idea, two lines: bad!" 

 I saw him give this class in 1999, in Oxford where he'd invited me to rehearse an installment of his blank-verse epic of Western Culture, Agora. A few months earlier, he'd invited me to a mysterious meeting at the Athenaeum Club - Mum had always said she and his other siblings thought he might be a spy - then he walked me across Pall Mall into the National Gallery, stood me in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait and asked, "How do you fancy playing him?" It was my first paid acting job outside of touring schools.

 

  It was fun. 

  Francis Robert Le Plastrier Warner was an excellent uncle, who lived right up until this Tuesday. He was also possibly one of Theatre's greatest friends. He studied under C. S. Lewis, and taught Ian McKellen. He strolled along the Sein with Samuel Beckett. He strolled with Burton and Taylor. He invited R. Buckminster Fuller – architect of EPCOT's Spaceship Earth, and populariser of domed cities – to design the first ever "black box" theatre, deep beneath St. Peter's College.

 

(source)

 

 This was never built in the end, but the money raised for it became the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust, whose annual award you can still apply for here.

 I'm bad at visiting, and I think the last time I saw him was when he came to see me in Ring at the Cambridge Junction in 2013 (Francis was a Fellow of both Universities). This was David Rosenberg's first binaural collaboration with Glen Neath, taking place in total darkness in front of an audience wearing headphones: "What it reminded me most of, of course," said Francis in the restaurant afterwards, quite out of the blue, "was being interrogated: I was in Egypt. Lucy and Georgie were with me. I'd gone out to look for eggs to scramble, because my daughters wanted scrambled eggs for breakfast, and some men bundled me into a car. In the end the only thing that saved me was that I didn't have a gun on me. Everyone had told me, going out, I should carry a gun. But it saved me. They had to let me go. Never carry a gun." Presumably, then, the Official Secrets Act's thirty years' injunction was finally over. Mum was right. 

 That's Lucy's wonderful portrait of her father at the top of this post. 

 He would always ask what I was writing. 

FLAGS... INFLATABLE DOLL...

 MENS COULOURED SHIRTS... 

 Table clothes... Curtains... Sheets + Blankets... 

 MENS TROUSERS...

 

 KNITWEAR... MEN'S TIES... Collars, CummerBunds... 

 SCARVES... LADIES UNDER GARMENTS (+ PJ's)... BELTS... 

 BELTS...

 

 Nuns, Cows, Scarecrow... 

 FEATHERS, MASKS, GLAM... 

 HATS... ANIMALS: Horse, Monkey + ?

 

 "?"?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It feels great to be back at "London's Secret Community Theatre", the Mighty Fin's home for the last nine winters – I had forgotten what festive treasures it boasts. If you're thinking of coming to see Robots at the Network Theatre this Thursday or Friday, there are definitely still tickets available, and this is definitely the way in.

 And here's what it looks like once you're sat down. This was taken an hour before we opened on Tuesday – a happy event, although I was unusually conscious of my spittle in the spotlight during my belter. Ellis and Claire, far right, have just spotted a cat.

 

Rossum's Universal Redheads!

 Interrupting the blog silence to repost – almost belatedly (we open tonight) - the following message from Magnitsky the Musical's award-wining whimsyist Robbie Hudson (pictured above): 

 

 It’s the end of the world and it will be hilarious. The Official Mighty Fin will have a 20th birthday next year. And so this year: Listen & Often, in association with Tall Tales, proudly presents:

ROBOTS!
by Robert Hudson and Susannah Pearse

It’s a rehearsed reading of a new comic musical for Radio 4. In other news, Radio 3, which is focused on the classics, has commissioned a new version of The Mighty Fin’s 2019 smash hit, Hall of Mirrors. Both these shows are recording in January, which means it’s impossible to do a fully-produced show now. But ROBOTS! will be a joyful return to Waterloo’s delightful and incredibly convenient Network Theatre (Surprising Tunnel! Jolly Bar! Bins!) and Charles and the Technical Unit will do a special effect but they won’t tell us what it is yet.

Seriously, though, we have really missed live theatre, this will be as much fun as we can possibly make it, and it will be lovely to see you.
Book tickets at www.ticketsource.co.uk/listenandoften. See you there.

 

 Will we? Dare you? 

 L to R: Me (redhead), Robbie, (not), Alexa Lamont (redhead), Musical Director Harry Sever (redhead), Ianthe Cox-Willmott (redhead), Harry again.  

 The Network Theatre is underneath Waterloo Station, down a tunnel, beyond the smells, and very pleasant. You can come tonight, Thursday or Friday. The special effect might be a zipwire. The night promises to be smart and silly (we're wearing shirts and doing voices) and the apocalypse-spanning songs, by Susannah Pearse, are typically astonishing – I love singing Sue's stuff at Christmas. The source material is Karel Čapek's play "Rossum's Universal Robots" – the source of the word "robot" and I think I'm playing the guy on the left. Olé!

 

 (source)

 

Further interruptions to follow.