Journeys into Darkness part 5: theatrical terrors

Readers with long-memories will recall that I had been reporting on some horror-themed things I have experienced in the last while, starting with The Exorcist, continuing with some other films, then onto horror audio drama, and most recently to Lies We Tell, Lisa Mulcahy's film adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas. And now in the final episode of the current series we turn to the world of theatre, where the horror happens there in front of you. I should warn you that many of these theatrical horrors are ones I saw some considerable time ago, but there are ways of making them seem relevant to the way we live today.

Now, I don't know about you but I find the Luas Red Line to be pretty terrifying at the best of times, so it was with some trepidation that I found myself boarding it after work to head out to the Civic Theatre in Tallaght. What had me going out there was Robert Lloyd Parry performing two M. R. James short stories, "Lost Hearts" and "A Warning to the Curious", as part of the Red Line Festival. These are both ones I have seen Lloyd Parry perform previously online ("Lost Hearts" in particular he does every year on 24 March, the day of the story's disturbing climax), but it was great to see the performances in the flesh.

The two M. R. James stories might well be familiar to readers in their original form or through other adaptations. "Lost Hearts" is the one where a young orphan is adopted by Mr Abney, an eccentric distant relative, who seems friendly but who has had remarkably bad luck with previous attempts to adopt young children, who always seem to vanish just before their 12th birthday. It was memorably adapted for the BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas in the 1970s, with the famous still of ghostly children looking in a window. "A Warning to the Curious" meanwhile is from that M. R. James subgenre of Norfolk-coast-holiday-goes-wrong. They both allowed Lloyd Parry to show off his acting talents, inhabiting all the characters and expertly handling the shifts in tone from light comedy to creeping dread. "A Warning to the Curious" is the objectively better story, as the other one has some problems of internal logic. Nevertheless,"Lost Hearts" is somehow still my favourite, with its horrible villain and suggestions of crimes more terrible than the supernatural ones the story contemplates (I'm thinking in particular when Abney invites his young charge to meet him in his private study late at night for a special and secret treat, and to not tell anyone else that he will be going there).

It is actually so long since that performance in Tallaght that since then Robert Lloyd Parry has been back in Dublin again to read two early folk horror tales at an event to launch an anthology he has edited for Swan River Press. For upcoming events, check out his event schedule: if he isn't performing near you, there are always the livestreamed performances he has coming up of the M. R. James stories "Martin's Close", "Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book", and (on Christmas Eve) "The Mezzotint".

Revenant meanwhile was another one-man play, written and directed by Stuart Roche and performed by Patrick O’Donnell. It was staged in the Smock Alley Theatre as part of last year's Bram Stoker Festival, Dublin's attempt to cash in on the famous author of The Lair of the White Worm and The Lady of the Shroud. Revenant (not a Stoker adaptation) sees O'Donnell playing Carter, the director of a low budget Irish zombie horror film, and also the other members of the film's cast and crew. Carter's lead actor drops out of the production just before shooting is about to start, but he recommends an old actor bud as a replacement. This fellow is named Vardell, and he is suave, charismatic, and a natural in front of the camera, but someone who has somehow never appeared in anything anyone has ever heard of. The cast and crew head off to an island off the west coast of Ireland to shoot their film and, well, you can see where this is going. It's played somewhat for laughs but it does manage to ramp up the unease when the macabre goes into overdrive. Patrick O'Donnell's ability to bring Carter, Vardell, and the others to life before our eyes is incredible and it is small wonder he was nominated for prizes at the Manchester and Buxton Fringes in 2021 and 2023.

Dracula: A Journey into Darkness was another Bram Stoker Festival event, a staged reading in the Abbey Theatre of the first four chapters of Dracula, which are made up of diary entries by solicitor Jonathan Harker describing his journey to a remote part of Transylvania to assist a local nobleman in the purchasing of some properties in England. Andrew Bennett (whom you may have seen as the foster father in An Cailín Ciúin) plays Harker, with noted Dublin stage actor Barry McGovern providing the Count's disembodied voice.

Everyone in the world has read Dracula so you know what happens here, right? Initially it is somewhat comedic, Harker as the Englishman abroad commenting on the quaint customs of the locals and their interesting foods. As he gets closer to his goal he expresses some bafflement at the misgivings people have about his plans to visit Castle Dracula and their tendency to press holy charms on him. But the real transition happens when the coach he is travelling on is met by one sent by the Count; Harker is then conveyed into an increasingly strange realm before finding himself effectively imprisoned in the Count's castle. The odd chortles from the audience that greeted Harker's initial observations completely fade away as his terrible predicament becomes apparent. It was a stunning performance by Bennett (aided by impressive lighting and sound design) that completely held the audience. I generally disapprove of standing ovations in the theatre, seeing them as a bit pro-forma, but I had no hesitation in leaping to me feet at the end of this. It is a shame that something so striking was only being performed for one night only, but it did make the event all the more special for those of us who attended.

Because we were only getting the first four chapters of Dracula the piece did end on something of a cliffhanger. It was only later that it occurred to me that it actually ends on a literal cliffhanger; if you have read the book you will know what I am referring to.

For this year's Bram Stoker Festival the Abbey Theatre is staging Dracula: Lucy's Passion, a sequel of sorts to A Journey into Darkness, again for one night only. See you there.

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Robert Lloyd Parry (Civic Theatre)

Lost Hearts (BBC iPlayer)

Revenant (Smock Alley)

A Journey into Darkness (Bram Stoker Festival: 2023 Festival Crypt)

What I Did on My holidays part 5: Dinosaurs, a bookshop, and a play by William Shakespeare

The final instalment in my fascinating account of time taken off work last September. The previous episode can be read here.

The next day my friend C— took me to Crystal Palace Park, where I saw the empty space left when the famous Crystal Palace burned down in the 1930s (it was very big) and more importantly the park's collection of dinosaurs. These are models made in the 19th century by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of Richard Owen, at a time when dinosaur fossils first started being found in quantity, causing a sensation as they made plain that the world was much older than the Bible suggests and once contained strange animals not mentioned there. I've been fascinated by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs since first hearing about them as a child. Part of their charm comes from their reflecting a mid 19th century understanding of dinosaurs, with the animals being depicted in ways that do not reflect current views of them. As a result none of them are feathered and their colouring is fairly monochrome. Also, Hawkins and Owen made some choices about how the animals' bodies worked that would soon be out of step with scientific opinion, most famously depicting the iguanodons as four-legged and rather fierce looking when we know now they were bipedal herbivores. But there is a definite appeal to seeing the sculptures peeping out from behind bushes, and they do bring home how fucking enormous even small relatively dinosaurs like the iguanodon are.

Then into London, where on autopilot I did a circuit of the shops I typically visit in London: the LRB bookshop, Gosh comics, Sounds of the Universe, and Selectadisc. I bought nothing in these places as these days I find myself struck by the feeling of having too many records and comics, and in any case I don't really know if I actually like comics any more, and can never remember what I am looking for when I am in these places. Also it was hard not to shake the idea that everything these places were offering was available in Dublin, so why carry it all home? Nevertheless, I did stop for tea and cake in the LRB cakeshop (tasty, even if they are now using teabags (O Tempora! O Mores!)) and "availed of the facilities". I realise now that I forgot to check out Fopp, whose prominent display of mid-price CDs might have tempted me, as might their range of DVDs (I've been thinking for a while now I'd like to pick up a copy of problematic Doctor Who fave The Talons of Weng Chiang). But I did my bit to keep the London retail economy going in Foyles, where I picked up two things I have been looking for in vain here in Dublin: William Godwin's Caleb Williams, which I intend to reveal as the next subject of our gothic book club, and (from the handy music shop that nestles within Foyles) Glassworks by Philip Glass.

In the evening I met two old pals from the Bowlie Forum (one of whom is also one of my Frank's APA buds). We discussed the Frank's festival divide (Le Guess Who v. Primavera) and I did find myself wondering whether we might need to set up a festival exchange programme. Then I had to rush off to the Globe Theatre for a performance of As You Like It, one of those Shakespeare plays featuring cross-dressing. In this one as well as having female characters disguising themselves as men for reasons, the play also had some characters being played by actors of the opposite gender, which led to no end of confusion for me. Weirdly though I think it was less gender fluid than stagings in Shakespeare's own day, where having boys playing women who would then be disguised as men was par for the course.

The play itself is fairly light, featuring some funny stuff and some mild danger before a happy ending that sees key characters falling in love with each other while legitimate rulers are restored to their inheritance and estranged siblings reconciled. You could argue it is a bit slight but those Shakespeare semi-comedies are always good fun. The play does also feature one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches (the one about all the world being a stage, which goes on to deliver that whole seven ages of man thing).

Two other things struck me about the show. I've been to a good few Globe performances, but this I think was my first time going to an evening show. As a cheapskate and as someone used to standing for gigs, I always buy groundling tickets for the Globe, which means that you are much closer to the action than the people who have paid more for the seats. This though was my first time experiencing what might well have been the authentic Elizabethan groundling experience: the crowd was full of yappers. There were a bunch of talkative younglings behind me and looking sternly at them with finger on lips only shut their yap temporarily. I did think of going full "SHUT UP YOU CUNT" on them but i) I naturally avoid confrontation and ii) maybe as noted above a degree of audience noise is part of the authentic cheap ticket experience. So I moved to another bit of the space, and so found myself near to a couple of somewhat yappy girls, who at least were kind of good-looking.

The other thing I was struck by was how the Globe has drifted a bit from what I took as its original mission of serving up performances that approximated closely to Elizabethan staging, making their shows both entertainments and windows into the past. For this while the costumery and so on seemed fairly vintage, the musical accompaniment was based on pop songs of our era, breaking the Elizabethan spell. Is this good or bad? You be the judge.

And then it was back to the wilds of South London, where I was staying with C—. After another night of being slept on by a black cat I got up early, made my way to Euston and took the train to Holyhead and the ferry home.

My exertions led to a certain fatigue and, more ominously, I found myself with a cold that I kept wondering about from the point of view of the dread Covid, so I ended up missing both of the Saturday night Dublin events I had rashly promised to attend (the Mindfuzz club night, at which Andy Votel was to feature on the decks, plus birthday party of Dublin's coolest person, at which a live karaoke was due to feature). For similar reasons I missed the Mick Harvey Dublin concert I had become aware of just before leaving for London. I did make my first gamelan class of the autumn session but by then I was back at work and my holiday was over.

Did you have a holiday? What did you do on yours?

What I did on my holidays part 4: jazz/improv, a gothic mansion, and promenade theatre in London

I am recounting what I did and experienced on a break from work in September. You can read the previous episode here.

In my short break I also travelled to London for the first time in a while (apart from an overnight stay last year on the way to Le Guess Who). I was only there for three days but it was pretty action packed. On the night of my arrival I went with friend C— to Cafe Oto to see a performance by John Butcher, Chris Corsano, & Florian Stoffner, respectively playing saxophone, drums, and guitar. Corsano was the one here with whom I had previous, as I remember seeing him in Dublin some time back when he might have been based in Glasgow.

I have in the past suggested that the boundary between jazz and improv is defined by the skills of the musicians, but this concert rather challenged that assumption, as it did seem to be billed as essentially improv despite the astonishing chops of the performers. Corsano's charismatic playing attracted considerable attention, which is not too surprising given how great it always is to see a topnotch drummer really go for it, but the others all deserved top marks, with Stoffner's guitar textures and Butcher's sax all worthy of praise.

The next day I went out to see Strawberry Hill, the gothic revival mansion Horace Walpole had built for himself in the late 18th century. In his lifetime Walpole was a noted man of letters and minor Whig politician, but there days he is most famous as the author of The Castle of Otranto, a faux mediaeval narrative that conjured the gothic novel into being. If you've never read it then I can reveal that it is a hoot; few books begin with a key character crushed to death by a giant helmet falling from the sky, which gives something of a taste of how the novel progresses. The house has an endearingly crazy quality to it, with funny little turrets and internal ornamentation that makes you imagine ghosts stepping out of portraits or phantoms appearing from behind hidden panels. It's an intriguing spot and well worth a visit.

That evening saw me travel out to Woolwich for what was the main driver of my trip to London: attendance with C— at the performance of The Burnt City, a piece of immersive promenade theatre served up by the Punchdrunk theatre company. This work was based on the Trojan War. In case readers are wondering, "immersive promenade theatre" means that instead of sitting on a chair and watching actors do stuff on stage, the audience wanders around the performance space, occasionally encountering the actors doing their stuff, with cast members identifiable because unlike the audience they are not wearing masks. Because the space is big and things are happening simultaneously, audience members will have unique experiences. It also means that the order in which people encounter scenes can be a bit random, which will disrupt more usual notions of narrative flow. Punchdrunk shows also use lighting and music to great effect.

This was my second Punchdrunk show, the previous one being The Drowned Man, which I now realise I saw in London almost ten years ago. That was to some extent inspired by Georg Büchner's Woyzeck but it also drew heavily on Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and had a Dark Hollywood vibe to it, with the sets evoking a vague kind of Americana that felt like it was from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps a bit earlier or later. Oddly, the staging of The Burnt City was quite similar, with the audience arriving initially into the Troy part of the set, which instead of feeling like something from antiquity evoked more the atmosphere of a 1930s film set with its cheap hotels, business premises, and pokey homes. The Greece (or Mycenae) part of the complex was a bit more abstract, with more in the way of large open spaces (but all still indoors and generally shrouded in darkness except when they weren't). And it is probably worth noting that although billed as theatre, the event was heavily dance based, with I think no actual dialogue spoken by the cast but a lot of movement.

And did I like it? Well it did make for an engaging evening but I think maybe I was a bit underwhelmed. I'm not 100% sure why that was. It might be that having previously seen another Punchdrunk show, this one did not have the shock of the new. But it might also be the nature of the performance. The Drowned Man had Dark Hollywood themes and a 1930s-1940s setting, but despite its Bronze Age setting, The Burnt City also had a 1930s-1940s feel to it. I think also that greater familiarity with the source material might have paradoxically made me enjoy the show less. With The Drowned Man, I had at that time no familiarity with Woyzeck or Day of the Locust, so I was approaching it with a blank slate, experiencing scenes from first principles in an impressionistic manner (I enjoyed reading The Day of the Locust some years later and recognising scenes from the show in it). But Greek myths and the Trojan War are things I have been familiar with for a long time. That meant that when I found anything happening in front of me I was trying to work out which bit of the Trojan myth I was watching instead of just letting the show wash over me.

What I did like was the bar. C— and I had a drink before we went into the show proper and then in the middle I came back for a cocktail break, cursing the fact that we had not pre-agreed a time for an interval drink together (you basically lose your friends in the show so you won't have a chance to day "Drink?" to them in there). Aside from the expensive cocktails, there was music from a band reminiscent of the synthpoppers in La-La-Land (the best music in the film I seem to recall) and a cabaret show tenuously linked to the Greek myths. At one point I was handed a spotlight I then had to keep on the performer, which is the kind of audience participation I am down with.

All in all an interesting and broadly enjoyable evening, but I would have to think a bit before I went to any further Punchdrunk shows.

What I Did On My Holidays Part 1: DruidO'Casey

I took some time off work in September and did various things. On my first day off my beloved and went to the Abbey for a theatre triple bill, as the Druid theatre company was performing Sean O'Casey's three plays about the dawn of independent Ireland: The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and then finally Juno and the Paycock. These have the 1916 Rising, the 1919-1921 War of Independence and the depressing Civil War of 1922-1923 as their backdrop.

Some years back we travelled to York for another theatre triple bill, where the Globe was touring all three of Shakespeare's plays about Henry VI. Both trilogies are similar in dealing with historical events and not having been written as a trilogy, but in other respects they diverge markedly. Shakespeare was writing more than a hundred years after the events he describes, while O'Casey was writing almost contemporaneously with the turmoil of independent Ireland's birth (The Shadow of a Gunman premiered towards the end of the Civil War, with Juno and the Paycock hitting the stage in 1924 and The Plough and the Stars marking the Easter Rising's tenth anniversary in 1926). And crucially, while Shakespeare's focus is on those who directed the historical struggles of Henry VI's reign, O'Casey is looking at the ordinary people who are caught up in the conflicts swirling around them, sometimes as minor participants but more often as bystanders or people trying to get on with their lives in a time of chaos. O'Casey is looking in particular at the working class people inhabiting the grotty tenements of central Dublin (though The Shadow of a Gunman felt like it might be looking at a slightly more prosperous strata of boarding house residents). His sympathy for his subjects means that he is ambivalent or hostile to the supposedly heroic struggles wrecking their lives (the 1916 Rising is presented as a pointless bloodbath directed by a raving madman while the Civil War comes across as little more than a tit-for-tat gang war).

What is stylistically strange about these plays is the way they mix tragedy and comedy, with scenes of great pathos preceded or followed by chortlesome drunken buffoonery. These are the only O'Casey plays I have any familiarity with, but awkward juxtapositions of laughs and tears is for me almost the defining thing of his stagecraft. And it's not easy to stage successfully. Back in the 1990s I saw another production of Juno and the Paycock, which played up the laughs so much that the moments of tragedy were like awkward interludes to be run through as quickly as possible so that the actors could get back to the laughs. In the Druid production however, the direction of Garry Hynes does not shy away from the sense of tragedy, with the final scene in Juno not being a return to roffles but empty laughter as the hangman places the noose.

One other point of similarity with the Shakespeare plays strikes me, this being the historical resonances of their staging. One of the major characters in the Henry VI plays found himself executed at York, his head stuck on a spike outside the walls near to where we were staying (it had been removed by the time of our visit). With the O'Casey plays the historical resonance comes more from seeing them performed in the theatre they had originally been staged in, as their first stagings had themselves been historical events, particularly for The Plough and the Stars. Its first performance in 1926, the tenth anniversary year of the Easter Rising, apparently went well, but on subsequent nights increasing numbers of Republicans appeared in the audience, making their displeasure at its non-observance of nationalist pieties known. On the fourth night, the audience was packed with Republican malcontents, including many who had lost relatives in the 1916 Rising. They progressed from hissing to full-blown rioting in the second act, which sees a prostitute interacting with various members of the cast in a pub while an unnamed off-stage orator delivers some of the more deranged lines from speeches by Patrick Pearse (the future leader of the Rising and still a hero to many); the Abbey's director, W. B. Yeats, addressed the crowd, saying "You have disgraced yourselves again" (a reference to the outrage that greeted The Playboy of the Western World in 1907).

One final thing struck me about the three plays. O'Casey was a socialist, but there is something strange about the way he portrays his working class subjects. The women are generally presented favourably, holding down jobs and keeping families together. But the men are typically a bunch of drunken wasters. You could argue that in an oppressive capitalist society drunken fecklessness is a way of striking back against the man, but when it leads to the further impoverishment of your nearest and dearest it has elements of cutting off your nose to strike your face. And even if you were to imagine that somehow 1920s Ireland had seen a socialist revolution, it is very hard to see the men of O'Casey's plays working hard to build the wonderful new society of tomorrow. More likely an Irish Stalin would have sent all the tenement dwellers off to the Gulag (i.e. Longford) and created a new proletariat out of the industrious sons of our peasantry.

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All photographs by Ros Kavanagh

Gabriel Adewusi, Liam Heslin, Sean Kearns and Garrett Lombard in The Plough and the Stars (Druid)

Caitríona Ennis, Marty Rea, and Rory Nolan and in The Shadow of a Gunman (Druid)

Zara Devlin in Juno and the Paycock (Druid)

Aaron Monaghan and Rory Nolan in Juno and the Paycock (Druid)

Excerpts from the Odyssey (a new version by Gavin Kostick)

This performance took place as one of the Sunday at noon concerts in the Hugh Lane Gallery, but arguably it was more in the character of a theatrical event than a concert. It did feature music, composed and performed by pianist Andrew Synnott, but the event was more focused on Gavin Kostick's delivery of his adapted episodes from Homer's Odyssey, with the piano (mostly) coming in during breaks in Kostick's delivery, at which point it provided an accompaniment to the dancing of Megan Kennedy.

We were treated to three episodes from the Odyssey. First we have Odysseus and the last of his ships arriving on an island. He sends some of his crew to explore the interior, but only one of the party returns, to report that a sorceress has transformed the others into pigs. This of course is the beginning of the memorable encounter with Circe. Then we had a later episode in which Odysseus and his ship first sails past first the Sirens and then attempts to navigate the straits of the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Finally we have a disguised Odysseus back in Ithaka, preparing to deal with the dissolute suitors who are trying to get his wife to marry one of them, eating her out of house and home while she demurs.

To my embarrassment, I have never actually read the Odyssey, either in translation or in the original archaic Greek. My Odyssey is still Barbara Leonie Picard's The Odyssey of Homer, which I read in primary school (despite my teacher warning that I would find the names too hard, which I took as a challenge). What struck me from Kostick's version was that it is not the events but the telling that is important: it's not that Scylla eats six of Odysseus's sailors as his ship goes past, but that as they are pulled away to their doom their eyes and arms desperately reach out to Odysseus in the pathetic hope that he will save them, reported by Odysseus to be "the most pitiable sight I ever saw out there on the waves of the sea" (I'm hoping that a full read of the Odyssey would explain why Odysseus had to sail past Scylla and her neighbour Charybdis, and not avoid them by retracing his steps and then returning home by his original route).

I mentioned that the music mostly accompanied Megan Kennedy's dancing. That felt like its own thing, separate to the storytelling, but still impressive in its own right. But I did like the moment when the piano joined in with the narration, with notes coming in just as Odysseus is approaching the Sirens, Synnott's playing suggesting their song heard by the bound Odysseus while his sailors row on with blocked ears.

I'm curious as to where this will go. Some years ago Kostick memorised all of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and then delivered it as a monologue in a theatrical event (the book is supposedly a story recounted after dinner so it kind of makes sense). But the Odyssey must be longer than that, particularly if you add in episodes of music and dance, surely much too long for a single performance? Or perhaps that is just me being a lightweight and we will soon discover that there is an audience out there for a 12 hour poetry-theatre-music-dance event adapted from Homer's classic.

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Joan Kiddell-Monroe cover for Barbara Leonie Picard's The Odyssey of Homer (Goodreads)

Possible nominations for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Hugo Award

Yesterday I grumbled about how the Hugo nomination rules work against non-mainstream cinema and highlighted some films that would have been great nominees for the 2021 Hugos if 2019 festival screenings had not invalidated them. Now for some dramatic presentations that are actually eligible, starting with ones shorter than 90 minutes, which compete in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category.

Last and First Men - This is Jóhann Jóhannsson's adaptation of Olaf Stapledon's classic novel of future history, featuring Tilda Swinton as the voice of our descendants from the unimaginably far future. This austere work is not for everyone but I think the film would be a worthy Hugo award flag-bearer for cerebral science fiction. It is available to view on the kind of streaming services that offer up weirdo art house films.

I Am Not Legend - This is an edited version of George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead. The film-makers overdub new dialogue and replace the zombies with white blobs, apparently after printing off every frame from the original and manually altering them. I'm not sure the end result is that essential but it would make a great eligibility head scratcher for this year's Hugo administration team if a load of people tried to nominate it. However, I am not sure how one could go about seeing this (I saw it as part of the online Bram Stoker Festival).

Eternal - All kinds of items can be nominated in the Hugo dramatic presentation categories, not just films and TV programmes. Eternal, from Darkfield Radio, is an audio drama, designed so that you listen to it while lying in bed alone in a darkened room. I heard it as part of the Bram Stoker Festival, so you may be correctly guessing that it features vampires. UK-based readers can pay money to stream it from the Darkfield Radio website.

A Spell At Home, With Hester - This was a piece of live-streamed theatre by the Hermetic Arts theatre company, in which Carrie Thompson played the eponymous Hester. It was set up as though we were taking part in a Zoom magick ritual during which flaky Hester reveals the dark side of the quaint village she lives in. It is a companion piece to Carbury Gifts, which I have not yet seen. Both of these were performed at Rural Gothic events organised by the Folklore Podcast and Room 207 Press. I'm not sure how you could go about seeing either of these and I may be the only Hugo nominator who has actually seen A Spell At Home, With Hester.

I will probably nominate at least three of the above, though I suspect that Last and First Men is the only one with a chance of making it onto the final ballot, and even that is a long shot.

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Last and First Men (Observations on Film Art - Vancouver: First sightings)

[theatre] "Ganesh versus the Third Reich" in the O'Reilly Theatre

I theoretically love going to the theatre but never seem to do so in practice. This is one of just two things I saw in the Dublin Theatre Festival last year. What I picked up from the programme was that this play was about Ganesh (you know, elephant headed Hindu deity) coming to the Third Reich in order to reclaim the ancient symbol of the swastika from the Nazis, which was enough to make it sound like it would be worth seeing. I also registered that it was being performed by Australians.

When the play started, though, I had a slight moment of "where's the fucking Nazis?", as there were neither Nazis nor Hindu deities on stage but two fellows not dressed in 1940s garb. When they started talking I was further confused, as their speech was a bit hard to understand. My first thought was that they were speaking with incomprehensible Australian accents or else that some incompetent had taken over the theatre's sound. But something else soon became apparent: the two actors onstage were both people with intellectual disabilities.

It turned out that the play had three actors with intellectual disabilities and two without. And it was a bi-level thing, partly about Ganesh trying to take the swastika from the Nazis and partly about a theatre company featuring people with intellectual disabilities trying to put together a play about Ganesh trying to reclaim the swastika from the Nazis; the narrative about the actors was probably the dominant one here.

Split narratives often suffer from the problem that one of the narratives is a lot more interesting than the other. In this, though, they both seemed to work well enough together. In the Third Reich narrative Ganesh teams up with an intellectually disabled Jewish lad he rescues from Auschwitz, which of course reminds us that the Nazis were not exactly friends of people with intellectual disabilities.

Each strand of the narrative had at least one great scene. The Third Reich story had a great train carriage episode in which an over-familiar black marketeer starts trying to sell tights to the escaped Jew (who is in disguise, obv), asking an endless series of questions about his girlfriend, her sisters, his sisters, his mother and so on, all potential purchasers of nylons, with the questions forcing the invention of ever more outlandish details about all these non-existent people. It was a scene of the kind of building menace you get in Quentin Tarantino films (think in particular of that opening scene in the farmhouse in Inglorious Basterds).

The outer narrative, meanwhile, has a wonderful extended scene in which the increasingly unhinged actor-director is trying to get one of the ID actors to die properly when shot. It too builds and builds, from a physical comedy of frustration to a deeply uncomfortable episode of rage, to actual theatrical violence.

The ID actors were interesting, in that they were all really good albeit within a limited range. I don't think any of them would be able to convincingly play a character who was not intellectually disabled, but they very much came across as playing roles rather than just being themselves onstage.

There is a scene where the actor-director addresses the audience (or imagines addressing the audience when the play is being staged), accusing them/us of having come along for an evening of "freak porn". I think we were meant to shuffle uncomfortably in our seats at that, but it washed over me. I had no advance awareness that the play featured intellectually disabled actors and this must have been the case for many other people present, as the theatre festival programme did not mention it. Even if you had come along to this expecting something of that type you would probably leave a bit disappointed. The acting is too good and the play too tight to have any kind of freakshow aspect.

So all in all this made for an enjoyable if strange night of theatre.

image source (Sydney Morning Herald)

[Theatre] "Titus Andronicus"

During the summer I went to a performance in Shakespeare's Globe of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. That is the one with a pretty extreme level of violence that for a long time was considered more or less unperformable; as tastes have changed it has in recent year become a bit of a staple. The play follows the eponymous character, a Roman general, as he gets caught up in a vicious blood feud with the captured Queen of the Goths. This eventually features people being butchered and fed in pies to their parent and, most notoriously, the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, daughter of Titus.
Titus Andronicus was apparently Shakespeare's first big hit, and I can see why. It is loud and brash and never short of action. I can also see why it fell out of favour. Aside from its shocking violence, it seems to lack any obvious moral or intellectual point to it. People keep striking out at their enemies and in turn suffer terrible responses to past slights, with no great sense that there is any good person here. Nor is it offering us any obvious message about the evils of blood feuds. Titus himself occupies the central role that a heroic figure should occupy, but he is terribly tainted by the violence around him, violence that he too is happy enough to dish out for reasons that to us are somewhat bizarre (he kills one of his sons in a brawl and eventually murders his daughter to avoid being depressed by her crippled figure).

You can see, though, why this has become a popular play again. For all the high culture associations of Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus offers the violent thrill of a gangster drama or the brutal struggles of unsavoury yet compelling characters served up in something like Game of Thrones.

Music is a big thing in Globe productions, usually with some approximation to an Elizabethan ensemble playing in a box behind the actors. They went away from that for this, with the music being more based on drums and strange long pipes. And they were often played in the audience, combined with the banging of metal on the wheeled metal towers that they would occasionally push through the crowds, with actors on the back. Naturally I was standing, and having to continually jump out of the way of people who were playing the part of thugs a little too convincingly was all part of the fun. The dance at the end (all Globe plays end with a dance) seemed a bit wilder than usual, maybe deliberately designed to remind of one of those mediaeval dances of death.

All in all this was an engaging trip to the theatre, but I think Titus Andronicus could be filed under enjoyable trash rather than something that is actually good.

image source (Independent)

Loncon3 - I Was There

Being an account of my visit to the World Science Fiction Convention in London in which I describe various things I saw there and furthermore mention the controversies that surrounded the Hugo Awards of this year.

This year the World Science Fiction Convention was held in London. As this was the third time this has happened, the event was known as Loncon 3. I was there. This was only the second science fiction convention I have ever been to. The last one was 20 years ago and had attendees in the hundreds while there was apparently something like 10,000 registered attendees of Loncon. Two things drew me to this event: my interest in science fiction and my curiosity as to what a big convention of this kind would be like.

The programme included screenings of films and SF TV episodes, performance of theatrical events, awards ceremonies, readings, book signings, talks and panel discussions. For me the talks and panel discussions were the heart of the convention, though the beauty of a large event like this is that attendees can make their own choices as to what they get up to… there probably were some attendees who spent the entire thing boozing in the Fan Village (which actually seems like a great idea, why did I not do this?).

The talks and panel discussions appealed to me because they presented at least the possibility of hearing interesting people putting across interesting ideas, almost like attending an academic conference (and many of the speakers were academics). Some of the discussions I went to were more interesting than others, such is life. Presentations by academics often turned out to be the best, simply because the format of letting the academic deliver a short paper allowed for a more structured exposition of ideas. With the talks generally it was often what they did not deal with that was most fascinating. I will do a separate post where I list all the talks I went to and make comments on them. The one big disappointment for me with the talks was the apparent cancellation of all the music related talks in the programme that I tried to go to.

The convention featured a surprising amount of theatre. I went to two things, an adaptation by Ruth Pe Palileo of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers and The Cancellation and Re-imagining of Captain Tartan by David Wake. The Anubis Gates was performed by professional actors with high production values, while Captain Tartan seemed a bit rougher round the ages. The Anubis Gates was more like something you could imagine people paying real money to see in a proper theatre (if theatre-goers were inclined to see plays about time-travellers and body-swapping magicians). Captain Tartan was more fannish, in that it was about both science fiction and fandom rather than just having a science fiction or fantasy theme. I enjoyed them both, in different ways, and was sorry that I did not catch more of the convention's theatrical offerings.

There was a fair amount of film and TV stuff being shown at the con, which I largely avoided on the basis that I can see that kind of stuff anywhere. One thing I did go to was the 1950s BBC production of 1984, with Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. This was a great piece of work, capturing well the grotty war-damaged London of the book and the sense of everything being completely rubbish even aside from the in-your-face totalitarianism of Ingsoc. This production seemed to have every role played by the best possible actor for the part. The programme was made by the same team that produced the BBC Quatermass programmes and it made me very interested in tracking down the DVD compilation of those.

The other thing I saw was the first two episodes of The Changes, a cosy catastrophe story for older children based on the books by Peter Dickinson. In it people inexplicably turn violently against machines and technology, smashing up anything that seems even slightly modern. When I was small I was so frightened by the first episode that I had to stop watching half way through and made sure I would never see any of it again. Seeing the episodes now was like an exorcism for me. I could see why they would terrify the sensitive child I had once been but they no longer hold any fears for me. Definitely not.

One thing non-SF fans associate with conventions is people dressing up in funny costumes. There was a bit of that at Loncon. I did not go to the Masquerade, a competition for cosplayers (as people who dress up in funny costumes are known), mainly because it threatened to go on for a lot longer than my interest in cosplay would last. But I did enjoy seeing people wandering around in costume. My favourites were probably Thor, Loki (played daringly by a woman, well I never etc.), the two Jawas (who had the actions and voices as well as the looks), or the woman who dressed as a Dalek and posed fetchingly beside the TARDIS (there was a TARDIS).

A strand of the convention I should really have engaged with more were readings by authors. I stayed away from these partly because I do not know that many contemporary writers. I went to just one reading, randomly taking in a writer called Tobias Buckell who read an excerpt from a work in progress he billed as kind of a science fictional retelling of Treasure Island (one of those books I have never got round to reading). I found this work quite intriguing. I did wonder though whether someone like myself would be better off just reading Treasure Island, while someone who had read Treasure Island would not really see the point of reading a new version of the story. Mr Buckell did seem to be doing more with the transition than adding the word "space" before "ship" wherever it appeared or turning cutlasses into "laser cutlasses" and so on. I did like the wreck-tech aspect of the excerpt and will be curious to see how he progresses with it.

Loncon also featured awards ceremonies for the Hugos and Retro Hugos. I did not vote in either competition and have not yet read the items sent to me in my voter pack (though I did try to nominate things in each, notably Upstream Color, which failed to secure enough votes to be nominated for best dramatic work in the Hugos #fraudatthepolls). The Retro Hugos were for works written in 1938. This event was on the first night of the convention and was hosted by Mary Robinette Kowal and Rob Shearman. The event was done as though it was actually taking place in 1939, complete with a live swing band with which Ms Kowal sang a big number (a song called 'Retro Hugos', to the tune of 'Anything Goes', my only exposure to Filk at the entire convention). Orson Welles' War of the Worlds had been nominated for an award and they turned the awards ceremony partly into a pastiche of that radio play, with cuts off to worried correspondents reporting on a Martian invasion (that ended with the Martians dying and their war machines being mistaken for the disused cranes lurking outside the conference centre).

Fewer people voted in the Retro Hugos than in the real Hugos, probably because people who like SF look forward rather than backward. But the Retro Hugos were probably of more interest to me, because I had at least heard of things that were nominated for it. I was pleased to see Welles' War of the Worlds win; having listened to it for the first time recently I can confirm that it is a stunning piece of work. It was also nice to see T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone collect an award; maybe it is time I went back and re-read that much-loved book of my childhood.

The real Hugos this year were marked by Controversy. The first controversy I became aware of was that over who was going to present the awards. Earlier this year it was announced that Jonathan Ross was going to be the master of ceremonies. But then the Unpleasantness ensued, with many people getting very angry about Mr Ross being chosen, mainly out of a fear that he would leer at female award winners or make unkind comments about their appearance. As you know, the controversy forced Mr Ross to step down as the Hugos' host. In retrospect, my feeling is that the anti-Ross people over-reacted terribly and may even have made fools of themselves, though I do have some sympathy for their concerns. But the whole business is over now, as is customary with the past.

The Unpleasantness meant that at a late stage the Hugos were without hosts. It may also have made it very difficult to attract new hosts, as any prospective candidate would have feared an eruption of Twitter outrage once their selection was announced (I gather this forced Robin Thicke and Roy "Chubby" Brown to decline invitations). But in the end the event was hosted by Geoff Ryman and Justina Robson, who were so good at it that I feel bad even mentioning the Unpleasantness again here.

The other Hugos controversy was something I only started hearing about at Loncon itself. Apparently some grumpy people had become angry that SF fandom has been taken over by pinko feminist leftists and they decided to try and get some writers of true blue fiction onto the ballot. An organised campaign grew legs and writing by some rightwing authors was nominated in several categories. As I heard this I assumed that by rightwing, what was meant was Ayn Rand inspired libertarian bollocks, but I started hearing that in some cases we were talking about borderline far right stuff; apparently one of the nominees has been known to refer to black women as "subhuman" (though I did not hear him say this myself).

The main organiser of this rightwing slate for some reason started referring to his gang as the Sad Puppies, which must have been very upsetting to the world's many leftist puppies. My only knowledge of all this is what I heard at the convention, but the Sad Puppy people seem to have made odd choices as what they wanted to push onto the ballot. As well as fairly respectable militaristic SF (one of those genres largely beloved of neanderthals, I fear, but such neanderthals are not necessarily racists or far right gobshites), the Sad Puppy people did rather dirty their bib by arranging for the nomination of the (alleged) racist bloke. They also seem to have had to scrape the bottom of the SF barrel to find material to nominate, as in one category they had to put forward a piece of war game tie-in fiction, whose author was probably bemused at finding himself up for a Hugo.

As someone who loves chaos I was secretly hoping that the far-right guy would win an award. I imagined him sweeping up to the podium while the Imperial March played, flanked by supporters in SS uniforms, there to receive his prize and present a speech in which he thanked all born men of Aryan stock for rallying to the cause of science fictional racial hygiene. But the liberal elite who run SF fandom ensured that this did not happen and the rightwingers were drubbed out of it in all their categories. This must have made the Sad Puppies especially sad. As previously mentioned, I am very behind the curve with contemporary SF, so I knew next to none of the winning authors. I was pleased to see that Retro Hugos host Mary Robinette Kowal won in the best novelette category, but mainly because her hosting those awards had made her familiar to me.

The one bit of actual controversy at the awards ceremony was provided by Kameron Hurley, who won two awards for fan writing. I gathered from things said at the convention that she had written a piece called "We have always fought", in which llamas become a metaphor for something to do with women and gender (I have not yet read this piece myself). Ms Hurley was not present to accept her awards, but she wrote acceptance speeches delivered on her behalf by others. These speeches seemed rather combative and almost to be insulting of the Hugo Awards ceremony attendees, who were after all the people who had voted to give her the awards. I thought this a bit churlish. It contrasted with the speech given by John Chu when accepting an award for best short story; he came across as another outsider figure but one pleased at having overcome obstacles to break through rather than using the occasion to berate his audience.

I should also mention the Chingford Morris Men (some of whom were women). I am guessing they were here to show foreign visitors a bit of traditional English culture. I love morris dancing and was very pleased to see them.

One final thing to mention was the other attendees. They ranged in ages from people who looked quite young to ones who have probably been going to these conventions for many many years. There were far less blokes wandering around with rucksacks than I expected. Like most things I go to, the attendees were pretty white looking. The gender balance was less skewed than might have been expected. The most amazing attendee for me was this guy who was physically at a robotics conference in the USA but was using a remote controlled robot to attend the conference.

So that really is that. I found the whole event very enjoyable and stimulating of further interest in the great literature of ideas that is science fiction. I also found myself thinking that I should really start engaging with fandom and going to conventions and stuff like that. Maybe one day I will even travel to another Worldcon happening far away in the USA or somewhere. I also note with interest that there is a bid in for Dublin to host Worldcon in 2019, which would be held in the Convention Centre. If the Dublin bid wins then this will be an event of great excitement.


More of my Loncon pictures

More Loncon pictures, mostly not by me

Puppies (University of St. Andrews)

Worldcon 2015 (Sasquan. In Spokane)

Dublin 2019 Worldcon bid

Loads of other Loncon reviews

Recent awesome posts

In case you missed them, here are links to some of the amazing things I wrote about recently for issue 138 of Frank's APA.

I sang with the Unthanks

[theatre] The Drowned Man

[film] The Missing Picture

[theatre] The Threepenny Opera

[theatre] Assassins

[film] Epic of Everest

[record review] Tom Glazer A Treasury of Civil War Songs

[record review] World of Twist Quality Street

[record review] Eleni Karaindrou Medea

[Live Music] Rocket From The Crypt

[live music] A trip to Cafe Oto

[record review] Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

[live music] Julia Holter

Thoughtful Panda image source

An inuit panda production

[theatre] "Assassins"

I saw this Stephen Sondheim musical a bit before Christmas. It was being performed in a relatively low budget production by the well known Irish theatre company Rough Magic. This lot are no strangers to the musical, having treated us previously to Improbable Frequency, a musical play featuring John Betjeman, Erwin Schrödinger, Flann O'Brien and various fictional characters hanging out together in neutral Ireland during the Second World War. Rough Magic is a company whose name I see as a reliable mark of quality; or did until that Canadian unpleasantness of some years ago, of which I will speak no further.

Assassins is about assassins. In particular it is about people who have assassinated US presidents, or had a crack at one of those leaders of the free world. Partly it presents all of the assassins (successful or not) in a strange surreal otherworld, and then separately we have vignettes of each of their lives, either showing them as they get ready for their crack at Mr President or else some other formative experience. Perhaps in an attempt to shoehorn some kind of overall plot, things climax in with all the assassins joining Lee Harvey Oswald in the Book Depository, urging him to shoot Kennedy rather than kill himself.

There is quite a range of thematic mood in what is on offer here. Some of the stories are rather poignant (that of Leon Czolgosz, say, the lone wolf anarchist who murdered President McKinley). Others are dealt with more humorously (e.g. the tale of Samuel Byck, who tried to assassinate Nixon by hijacking a plane and flying it into the White House).

Assassins presents its subjects mostly as dysfunctional individuals who tried to kill the President as a way of validating their pathetic existences or for other similarly inconsequential reasons. That works for some of them more than others. My sense is that Czolgosz was not the loser motivated by a sad infatuation with Emma Goldman, as shown here, but someone genuinely motivated by a desire to effect social change by striking at the top man of capitalist society, as was a common enough idea in anarchism of the time. Likewise with John Wilkes Booth, murderer of Abraham Lincoln, presented here as another saddo. I am in no way sympathetic with his pro-slavery and white supremacist views, but it seems to me that Booth was a committed ideological assassin and not the delusional fantasist he is presented here as.

On the other hand, John Hinckley Jr. (the guy who shot Reagan because he was obsessed with Jodie Foster) and Samuel Byck are probably presented accurately as fucked up saddos. Because saddos are funny, Assassins gets a lot of mileage out of these two, with some of the stuff with Byck being quite hilarious on a number of levels. Byck seems to have been one of those crazies (as they like to be called) who recorded tapes outlining his view of the world to send to famous people. One of the people he recorded tapes for was Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and composer, Sondheim's previous collaborator on West Side Story. I have no idea how well or badly Sondheim and Bernstein got on together, but there is something funny about a Sondheim musical in which a character rants and raves at Bernstein. Jack Olohan's performance as Byck was an impressive one.

Byck's actual attempt to kill Nixon resulted in his own death and that of an airport policeman and pilot; he shot another pilot but that man survived. The plane he tried to hijack never left the ground.

Possibly because it gets to have dialogue between two assassins (who in real life I think never met each other), the scenes with Sara Jane Moore and Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme are perhaps the best in the play. Fromme and Moore separately tried to kill Gerald Ford a few weeks apart in 1975. Moore was an eccentric far leftist while Fromme was a member of the Manson Family who had until then somehow escaped conviction for serious crime. Assassins presents them both as oddballs, but Fromme comes across as the more driven and less delusional one of the two, with Moore presented as more of a flake, someone who had slipped into the whole assassination business almost by accident and certainly without thinking things through properly. The performances of Clare Barrett as Moore and Erica Murray as Fromme are probably the most striking in Assassins, though that might be because they have the most meaty roles.

I will stop there lest I bore you with an outline of everyone who ever tried to kill a president and how Assassins deals with them (but you should definitely investigate the strange career of Charles Guiteau). One thing I will draw to your attention as I finish writing about the show is the music. Careful readers will by now notice that I have said nothing about it. And in truth, that is because it has not lingered in my memory. I did enjoy it while I heard it but I would not know be able to hum a single tune sung in the show. This may be why Assassins has proved so much less successful than such other Sondheim musicals as Sweeney Todd or A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

image source (Flickr set of shots of the play)

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[theatre] "The Threepenny Opera"

People who fancy themselves as advanced lovers of music scoff at musicals, yet recently I found myself attending two of them. This was the first, the adaptation by Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht of the 18th century Beggar's Opera by John Gay. It is pretty famous and you have probably heard at least one of the songs from it before, that song being 'Mack the Knife' (the more alliterative 'Mackie Messer' in German). You may also have heard the Pirate Jenny song or read the somewhat unpleasant League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic that dramatises it. This production of the Threepenny Opera was in Dublin's Gate Theatre, a place that has a reputation for being commercially driven and keen to service the desires of its well-heeled clientele. As with all productions there, the show begins with the Gate's front of house manager making a short announcement about how people must srsly turn their mobile phones off before explaining various ways in which he is there to help with their post-performance needs. I was struck yet again by what an amazing man this guy is. He has such an air of poise and assurance that I could imagine people going up to him after the show and asking for help with the most existential of crises and yet finding him able to offer calm words of sensible advice. I really think it is time someone wrote a play about him. Or that the Gate just charged people money to hear him dispense words of wisdom and calm assurance.

The Threepenny Opera is notionally set in London at some point in the past, but this production seemed to have adopted an approach of deliberate abstraction. The actors avoided any attempts at adopting London accents and the clothes they wore did not suggest any time or place in particular, apart from seeming generally old fashioned. The various low-life characters mostly talked with something approximating to Dublin working class accents, but this was not so overdone that I felt like I was being treated to a performance of the Skanger's Opera. I liked this approach. Brecht and Weill's setting was always a bit stylised, and with the passing of time the danger of going for more specific period detail is that you end up with something that is a retro nostalgia fest. The lack of a specific setting here makes it more abstract and mythic, a tale for all ages.

I feel like everyone in the world has seen a production of the Threepenny's Opera but I will recap the plot quickly. It begins with the 'Mack the Knife' song, sung by the suave narrator (played by David Shannon) about that terrifying man, and then the story proper begins, with notorious criminal Macheath (Mack the Knife of the song) having married a pretty young bride while said bride's creepy parents try to have him thrown in jail so they can get their daughter back (having her around was good for business).


There is an odd piece of cognitive dissonance here. In the song, Macheath is presented as a maniac, a force of malevolent destruction with whom it is impossible to sympathise, someone that any sensible person would want to see carted off to jail at the earliest possible opportunity. But in the drama itself Macheath is a far more sympathetic character. He is still a thoroughly disreputable character, a treacherous thug who will sell out his nearest and dearest, a sinister exploiter of women. And yet, and yet… the play largely tells the story from his point of view, so it is hard not to slip into seeing him as the protagonist and to sympathise with his struggles against incompetent subordinates or equally treacherous old friends. I am guessing that this ambiguity is there in the original, but I am sure that here it is greatly assisted by the direction of Wayne Jordan and David Ganly's strangely sensitive performance are important here.

I was also struck by how Macheath's innocent young wife Polly (played adroitly by Charlotte McCurry) manages to take over his criminal empire while retaining this sense of being an ingenue in a big nasty world. And Hilda Fay as Pirate Jenny brings a great air of ancient sadness to the role of a jaded and beaten down brothel keeper, someone who has suffered terrible abuse at the hands of Macheath and yet is still bound to him. And again there is that strange ambiguity to her character and that of Macheath. Just as 'Mac the Knife' paints him as a maniac and yet we see him as something a bit more sensitive and appealing, so Jenny's song details the abuse he has inflicted on her but their interaction displayed onstage is relatively tender (though not without its ambiguities and betrayals).


I understand Jenny to be one of the great theatrical roles for any older woman actor (i.e. anyone past her early 20s) and Ms Fay really seizes it. Like some other people I found her performance revelatory. From what I hear she is not someone who hitherto has found roles to match her obvious talents and I hope she is able to use this success to her advantage.

I am in danger of just listing everyone who was in the play and talking about how great they were so in the interests of brevity I will just make clear that this was a piece with a great ensemble cast. I am glad to have finally seen the Threepenny Opera and to have found that it lives up to its reputation.


An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[theatre] "The Drowned Man"

Punchdrunk - The Drowned Man Trailer from The Difference Engine on Vimeo.

A friend in Edinburgh suggested going to the Punchdrunk show The Drowned Man when I went down to London. So I did. This proved to be one of those immersive theatre pieces, performed in a former post office building near Paddington Station. The audience wear masks and walk around watching unmasked actors performing scenes from a drama set around a film studio, set vaguely in the early 1960s. The audience is unguided, so you have to decided for yourself whether to follow individual characters around, to stay in one place and see what happens there (probably a bad move), or drift around exploring and seeing what you come across. The place is dimly lit and atmospheric music plays. The non-linearity of the plot (an inevitable consequence of the audience being unable to see everything and not necessarily seeing what they do in chronological order) together with the slightly creepy voyeuristic aspect of things made me feel like I was wandering around in a David Lynch film.

The whole thing is very dance-oriented. The fight scenes are so choreographed that they flowed seamlessly into and out of dance routines. This all added to the strange surreality of it all. And the featureless white masks of the audience members give them a ghostly appearance as they cluster around the actors.

If you are my friend on Facebook you may have seen a gentleman commenting on how he found The Drowned Man to be a bit unsatisfying, largely because an audience member misses so much that he felt like he was not getting the full experience. I can see where he is coming from, but for me this was all about being swept along and seeing what you see rather than trying to see everything and having a full understanding of what is going on. Going with someone else and then separating from them seems like the best way to approach this, as you can compare notes afterwards, or half way through in the bar. So I was able to tell my friend K— about the very David Lynch dance routine that turned into something approximating to an orgy and then he told me how he was taken aside into a tiny room by one of the cast for a special encounter (he was afraid, but the cast member was afraid too).

So I loved it and am already thinking about going again, partly to see different things and partly because it was so much fun the first time. On a second visit I reckon I would knock back a double whisky before going in, to heighten the sense of unreality. And because everything is better with booze.

image source 1 (Official London Theatre)

image source 2 (The Bespoke Black Book)



An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

The Sad History of King Henry VI

I went to York. I went to see plays. The people that run Shakespeare's Globe in London were touring performances of Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays to places in England that are significant to the action within them (including to some of the battlefield sites). York is significant because one of the big battles takes place near to it, with the loser's head ending up stuck on a pole over the city walls.

Although the plays are known to us now as Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, they were not written in that order and were not conceived as a trilogy. And they were only given those titles retrospectively by some posthumous publisher of Shakespeare's plays. It seems that our Parts 2 and 3 were performed first, with titles something like The Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York. Our Part 1 was written later, as Harry the Sixth, for a different theatre company, to tell the early years of the reign of Henry VI (who ascended the throne as a young child on the early death of his father). This makes it one of history's first prequels, with all that that implies.

The first play is mainly about the loss of the English empire in France as bickering nobles fail to assist the brave fighters there against the treacherous Frenchies, who have managed to enlist the aid of one Joan de la Pucelle, a young woman in league with satanic forces. The play has great bits in it (the Joan of Arc scenes, the heroic English fighters in France who are blatantly maniacal nutters, a worldly bishop, a scene where it is ponderously explained to Richard of York that he is actually the rightful king of England, etc.) but it seems to be one of those plays were loads of things happen without there being any real narrative thread. Strangely, this seems to have been the most popular of the three plays back in Shakespeare's time, with the story of the loss of the French empire and the death of heroic figures like Talbot (a blood-crazed thug) having audiences weeping in the aisles.

In the second play, the feuding of the English nobles explodes into vendetta and then open conflict. Richard of York stakes a claim for the throne, backed by some powerful nobles. He also has his sons behind him, with the thrill power ramping up considerably once this trio of badasses appears. He is opposed not so much by the King, a saintly figure a bit too prone to simpering, but by the King's wife and various other nobles. They all lay into each other in a series of battles. York, an ambiguous figure, also causes trouble by inciting a mob of revolting peasants to descend on London and murder anyone who can read, Khmer Rouge style.

It all turns into a bit of a bloodbath, with various nobles murdering each other and then being murdered themselves by their victims' friends and relations. One of the grimmer scenes is the one in which Richard of York is humiliated and tortured by the Queen and her associates, before being beheaded (it was his head that ended up on a stake on York's' walls, over a guardhouse near to where I was staying).


By the end, Richard of York's son Edward is reigning as King Edward IV, largely because everyone else is dead. Well, his two shifty brothers are still alive but one of them has changed sides so often that no one could take him seriously. And the other (Richard Jr, Duke of Gloucester) - well he is a deformed hunchback so there is no way he could be plotting to engineer everyone's death so that he can become king, right? So all is well, kind of like at the end of a game of Family Business when peace reigns because the graveyard is full.

The portrayal of Gloucester, the future King Richard III, was interesting. In the Globe last year I saw a performance of Richard III, the play that depicts his final rise to the throne and brief but bloody reign. Mark Rylance played the part of this great Shakespearean villain in a manner reminiscent of Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius, someone using physical disability as a mask, in this case to hide his lust for power. In the last two parts of Henry VI, Simon Harrison plays the younger character as a creature of pure malevolence. To a modern viewer, however, the continuous jibes he receives about his twisted form are strikingly unpleasant.

With our more enlightened views of such matters, it seems hardly surprising that someone subjected to such abuse would develop a warped character and a general hostility to the human race. I think perhaps this is what makes Shakespeare's character oddly sympathetic to modern viewers. He is a violent and malevolent creature, to be sure, but with a modern mindset we can see him as made like that by society rather than cruel fate. And with the hostility he has had to endure from his fellows on account of his form, he makes for a perfect outsider anti-hero.

If you have ever been to the Globe in London you will know that music is a big part of the way their plays are presented, with musicians playing before the performance starts and then accompanying the dance of the actors that happens at the end. With these performances the music was a bit stripped down, perhaps because it was a cut-price touring production. Any music in the play was made by the actors themselves. This was either percussive (good for the military stuff) or made by scraping the edge of something to create strange disconcerting droning sounds. The latter in particular sounded almost electronic. Perhaps because the plays were being performed over one day, making them seem like one monster play, they left the actors' dance to the very end.

These plays are on over the summer in a number of places, including back in London. I encourage you to see them, ideally all in one day for the fully immersive experience. If that sounds like too much, you could skip Harry VI, and if you reckoned one would be enough then I say to make that one The True Tragedy of the Duke of York.

Seeing these plays has also got me thinking about other theatre marathons that would appeal to me. One thing I would love would be if someone could stage all eight of the Plantagenet plays (dealing with the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III) over, say, four days with two plays a day. Another obvious one would be the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the only surviving trilogy of plays from ancient Greece. That one deals with a terrible cycle of murder and vengeance within the kind of dysfunctional family that is so common in Greek tragedy. A performance of all these plays in one go would make for a fascinating theatrical experience.

Links:

These plays are being performed in the Globe and around England and Northern Ireland, sometimes in places of relevance to the occurrences depicted, including battlefield sites. See if they are playing near you here.

Shakespeare on the battlefield: the Globe theatre step out - a piece in the Guardian on the battlefield staging of these plays, with particular reference to Towton, the bloodiest battle ever fought in England. The illustration of Henry VI and the three sons of the Duke of York are sourced from here.

More pictures of York

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The Olympics: I was there

In an unlikely sequence of events, I found myself in London during the Olympic games. But I was not there for them, but rather for a number of cultural events. First up, I went to the Globe Theatre for a performance of Richard III, with Mark Rylance as the titular king. He played him as an evil version of Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius, the harmless differently abled person that everyone writes off until he is having you carted off to be executed. Richard is one of the great Shakespeare villains and it was impressive of Rylance to make him something other than a scenery-chewing monster.

Later that same day, I met some other people (who included my beloved) and went to see Selda playing in the Meltdown festival. The Turkish sensation was the reason we had come to London. If you are not Turkish then if you know Selda at all it will be from the reissue of her first album by Finders Keepers, or because people like me keep putting tracks by her onto CD-Rs. Her first album is an interesting record, in that it manages to effectively combine Selda's folkie-protest songs with an accompaniment that mixes Anatolian psych, early electronics and some traditional Turkish instruments. As previously noted, this kind of thing should not work but in that case it does.

The live concert repeats the same format, more or less. Selda sings, other musicians play keyboards, guitar, drums, and a saz, a Turkish instrument similar to the bouzouki or suchlike. Selda's voice still has it, she has not gone all softy rock or smooth jazz, her band are great, so it was all good.

What was funny, though, was how Turkish it all was. Particularly in London, when you are at some ethnic music show, there is always the question of whether the audience will primarily be Western hipsters or members of the particular ethnicity. At this one there were a lot of Turks present and if they were not the majority the event certainly felt like it was being primarily run for them. Selda yapped away onstage in Turkish between songs, cracking jokes that had her compatriots chortling and leaving us befuddled. And she played the songs so that they featured a lot of call and response stuff, which I and my fellow round-eyed devils found a bit confusing. They also waved Turkish flags from the stage, which some people may have found a bit disconcerting.

That all sounds like a moan, not at all, it was a big bag of fun for this cultural tourist.

We did quite like that the concert started and finished early, meaning that we were then able to go for pints to a divey spot called The Hole In The Wall with which our friend "Dave" had a certain familiarity. It is near Waterloo and serves troglodytes.

The next day my beloved and I saw Henry V in the Globe, in which King Henry V invades France and stuffs the French out of it. It seemed like a jolly business. At the end of the play they did what they always do in the Globe - the cast do a big dance number in lieu of the more normal kind of bowing actors are famous for. The actor who was playing the French princess Henry V marries seemed to step out of character and be really enjoying the dancing - and then I remembered, she is an actor, it is her job to project emotions that she may or may not be feeling.

We also visited the British Museum and, in the company of one Mad King Ken went for lunch in the famous Gaby's Deli. Their falafel sandwich proved to be as nice as promised.
Mark Rylance in Richard III image source

Henry V image source


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Summer in London – part 3: This is Hell and We are in it

There is maybe not too much more to say about our trip to London. We visited the new Gosh comics on Berwick Street. With the Soul Jazz shop round the corner and Sister Ray probably still hanging in, the Berwick Street area may become once more a gravitational centre for any trip to the big smoke. And we went to Shakespeare's Globe (TM) to see Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

I love visiting the Globe (a reconstruction of the theatre in which Shakespeare's works were originally performed). It has some winning features. Firstly, the plays are staged in something vaguely approximating to how they would have been in Elizabethan England, which is fascinating to someone like me who is interested in theatre history. Secondly, you can get in for a fiver if you are willing to stand for the performances' duration – not a problem if you are as used to standing at gigs as I am.

Doctor Faustus was a particular draw for me, as it is one of the classics of Elizabethan drama and so of theatre generally. As you know, it concerns this fellow Faustus (a doctor) who hits on the bright idea of selling his soul to the Devil. The Devil grants him an extended life in which he will have the demonic prince Mephistopheles as his servant. The play follows first Mephistopheles luring Faustus into the pact and then distracting him with fun stuff (like kicking the Pope or letting him shag Helen of Troy) to prevent him from renouncing the pact and throwing himself on God's mercy. For comic relief, the idiot servants of Dr Faustus also dabble in the black arts, with hilarious consequences.

I suppose what makes the play work so well is its sense of gothic doom and of the dreadful awfulness of the damnation to which Faustus has signed himself. You can tell that the demons are all miserable – there are lovely scenes where Mephistopheles and even the Devil himself wince whenever God is mentioned or respond in pained tones whenever they are asked to describe Hell ("This is Hell and we are in it", or some such replies Mephistopheles – when you no longer behold the Countenance Divine then everywhere is damnation). For all that Faustus is meant to be one of the great brains of his age, he is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer if he is willing to align himself with this bunch of malevolent losers. We know this will end very badly for him.

One amusing thing about this production was that Mephistopheles was played by Arthur Darville – a man probably better known for his portrayal of Rory From Doctor Who. Rory From Doctor Who has a certain gormless quality (albeit a loveable gormlessness that goes with a character a bit more fully rounded than might be expected from Gormless Boyfriend Of Doctor's Assistant) but Darville showed here that he is not just a one trick pony by being able to convey the melancholic and malevolent qualities of a Prince of Hell. Paul Hilton as Faustus was also excellent, though I don't think he has ever been in Doctor Who.

And that was almost that, though we did also find time to meet people in a pub and visit Highgate cemetery.

image source

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