Jack…the Flames!

Hilary Westlake and I enjoyed a long and remarkable artistic partnership. For at least ten years, starting in 1972, we spoke to each other every day for at least half an hour either on the phone or in person. We didn’t talk only about theatre – that was, in some ways, a by-product of our delight in each other’s company. Having established this renewable pastime we decided to launch a theatre company. Hilary would direct our shows and I would write them. She had been an actress and now wished to withdraw from performance and I had been a film-maker tempted into theatre within a couple of years of leaving film school.

As a result of presenting our first show, Tip Top Condition  (1973), we found ourselves with some funds and the need to produce another show. The next one would have a full script, for the first time, and we would cast it, in part, from among the performers we had met on ‘TipTop’. While we did not, for a while, know what the show would be about, we were very confident about certain stylistic qualities that the work should have.

One of the things I wanted to do with dialogue was to avoid ‘the way people really talk as interpreted by playwrights’. I had been to the cinema a great deal as an undergraduate and later as a film student and had been attracted, mainly in American and French films, both to poetic speech and bald, direct speech. With regard to direct speech I liked characters to talk to each other without using metaphor or imagery. I was also strongly against characters having insight or being able to articulate their problems. On the occasions that I went to what I regarded as ‘straight theatre’ I reacted badly to the attempts of playwrights to capture, with their ‘good ear’, the rhythms and contents of everyday speech, combined with the extraordinary assumption that it was credible for hitherto unreflective characters to be blessed intermittently with the capacity to describe with precision their inner turmoils. I reacted so badly that I routinely felt furious and frequently walked out. For many years I walked out of 40% of everything I saw, including much of the experimental, physical, visual and political theatre that was starting to counter the Theatre of the Well Rounded and Articulate Character.

I always walked out quietly, from an aisle seat near the back, often removing my shoes until I had returned to the foyer. Leaving, for example, Theatre de Complicite’s ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol’ at the Riverside Theatre in 1994 (this is Late Period Leaving), I slipped off my casuals at my seat, padded to the nearest exit, passed silently through the doors and was at the bar, shod, quietly drinking, within moments.

When I did not walk out I frequently fell asleep but contrived, again, to do this discreetly so as not to disturb the actors, whose fault it rarely was that their material was soporific. It was, of course, the writers and directors who had to take the blame for failing to realise that theatre was not a by-product of radio which, in turn, was not a convenient repository for the continuation of the grand traditions of the novel (the recommended form for such novelistic aspirations is the novel). I used to say blithely, and continue to do so, that Shakespeare is to blame. I will develop this assertion elsewhere on this site sometime. In the meantime the visitor craving brief examples of dismissiveness with regard to the Bard is invited to inspect certain commentaries in the Plays section of Strength Weekly, here, here and here.

My early tastes vis a vis live dialogue were formed in part by reading Artaud. As well as working my way through ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’ I consumed all the collections of essays I could find and these, taken in tandem with my admiration for the writings of R.D.Laing and his anti-psychiatric colleagues, persuaded me that theatre speech must be very direct indeed. Artaud, who died in an asylum, had said “If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.” Such a conflagrant setting ought, I felt, to generate a rather unadorned speech style.

Artaud’s own plays – he only wrote two – were indeed direct. I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s translation of ‘A Spurt of Blood’ (1925) in ‘The Evergreen Review’ – an American literary periodical that published an intoxicating and eclectic range of avant-garde essays, poetry and excerpts from novels and plays. If you could find the mag in London – Better Books in Charing Cross Road sometimes had them – then excerpts from the barely published novels of Beckett, Burroughs and Kerouac were at your disposal, not to mention Absurdist drama from Ionesco and Arrabal plus lots of Beat poetry by the Beats.

‘A Spurt of Blood’ featured a pair of tortured lovers who declare, several times, “I love you and everything is beautiful”, a priest, a knight, a wet-nurse and a whore also a raining from the sky of a torrent of scorpions, snakes, live human body parts and architectural items such as columns, capitals and colonnades. At a point when God could no longer bear the behaviour of the Whore, His gigantic hand seizes her by the hair as a fearsome voice bellows from the heavens “Bitch, look at your body!” She bites His wrist and a jet of blood arcs across the stage. By the time the action has moved to page 4 (the playscript is five pages long), the Wet-Nurse, whose enormous breasts are made of gruyere cheese, endures a transformation in the course of which her genitals swell, become glassy and glow like the sun. The scorpions swarm into her.

Years before I took up writing for theatre, in 1967, I wrote to Lawrence Ferlinghetti asking for permission to use his translation in a production. The poet scrawled a reply on the bottom of my letter “Do it. Just mention my name.” I directed the play in my first year at Film School at the Royal College of Art. We used cows’ heads, live mice and a quantity of offal and tripe all rigged to fall from the elegant ceiling of the main gallery space. It was a spectacular occasion, featuring the partial burning of the gallery roof, the injury of an actress who plummeted down an unlit trap door and the dripping of cow-head blood onto the fur coat of the wife of the head of the drama school from whom we had borrowed a quantity of young talent. I’ll write it up for Strength Weekly some day.

‘A Spurt of Blood’ was fevered and dream-like, to say the least. It coincided with a period of self-induced personal delirium that was fed, at the literary level, by works of surrealism, decadence, absurdity and psychoanalysis. I felt that if ever I were to write for theatre or film it would be stylistically extreme, narratively inconsequential and imagistically lurid. The dialogue would, in some way that I hadn’t quite worked out yet, be bold, bald, brash and beautiful. When Hilary and I started to work together, we managed to produce spaces in which both of us could begin to work out a departure from the upper circle.

A few years after leaving Film School, in 1973, I wrote and Hilary directed our first full length scripted show ‘Jack…the Flames!’ It opened at the Bush Theatre in London, dismaying some and pleasing others.

15.11.2007

Football in Space

It had been two days. I had to get to a book shop lest my skin grew livid. I found myself passing a charity shop and walked straight in, years of habit inclining my head to the left so that it lay on my shoulder, the better to appraise spines. (If you do this too much the brain adjusts and, like the iPhone in browser mode, swings the vista through 90 degrees so that you see things the right way and cannot appraise spines then when you go back into the street and straighten your neck everything is at a right angle. Still, if you can’t take the heat…) Within moments I had eased from the shelf a copy of Andrew Crumey’s ‘Mobius Dick’, an entertaining and intricate novel of parallel universes that I had already read but had to give back to its owner but it’s always good to actually own everything you have ever read because you might want to use it somehow someday. Maybe. A steal at 50p.

Then I noticed a volume called ‘Vision & Difference – Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art’ by Griselda Pollock. As I flipped through it, thinking “Come off it, David, who are you trying to kid? You know you won’t ever read it despite it being a snip at £1,” I found myself in a chapter titled ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ and there, lodged unassumingly between two pages, was a colour photograph, a snapshot, in fact, possibly from Snappy Snaps or the chemist’s. Then I thought “For the sake of the readers of Strength Weekly I will transfer this photo from ‘Vision & Difference’ to ‘Mobius Dick’. My actions are perfectly understandable.” So I did this.

These are the questions that must be answered:
Is the guy famous or just a guy?
Is he dressed up or actually a footballer of the American persuasion?
Is the photo American?
Is the guy a woman?
Was the reader a woman? (who knew the guy)
Having read the book did the woman still like the guy?
Is there any reason, frankly, why she should not?
If the reader was the guy did he continue to play American football having read the book?
Is there any reason, frankly, why he should not?
If the reader was not the guy and not a woman and therefore another guy does he like football or was he just using the photo, in which he had no particular interest, as a handy bookmark?
If the reader was a woman who did or did not know the guy was her use of the photo a form of humour?
Was the photo applied randomly to the book by a reader of indeterminate gender for no reason other than, say, the chemist’s had accidentally printed two of that particular snap so they might as well use it as a bookmark although it is rather big?
Even so, did this undetermined reader appreciate that the inappositeness of the juxtaposition was, at the least, provocative?
Why is the guy’s shoe weird?
Why are his arms not rugged?

12.11.2007

Clubbable

A rolling billboard ad for British Airways Club Class bears the declaration ‘A new kind of club – the entrance in London, the exit in New York’. The image is a vertically split screen featuring a view of London on the left and one of New York on the right. The London view is shot from one side of the Millennium Bridge and looks across the river to a skyline dominated by St Paul’s. The waterline is laterally extended so that it becomes the Manhattan riverside skyline with skyscrapers etc. The two waterlines are exactly horizontally aligned so that, at first glance, the image is of one unbroken cityscape.

A conundrum here: on the one hand, yeah, BA will get you from one city to the other so fast and so nice that it feels going into a club and out again etc but on the other hand what’s the point of travelling if London is spatially continuous with New York to the point that you can’t tell the difference between them? Maybe it isn’t a problem – maybe BA’s ad agency senses that difference is a bit much these days and understands that it is possible to suggest: yeah, you can take this luxurious journey but it’s not really a journey because nothing’s going to change so why not take this journey?

The journey then becomes more important than the destination which, in turn, begins to suggest that a virtual, destination-free journey would be just as good, especially if it were akin to ‘clubbing’. It’s reminiscent of that disappointing reality TV thing a couple of years ago with Johnny Vaughan where they loaded some credulous people into a fake space capsule, shook it a bit and told them they were in orbit.

But globalisation – it’s good, right? It makes everywhere reliable. Yet if you’re in the travel business how are you going to make a virtue out of this homogeneity? Downgrade the destination. Space travel then becomes time travel in which you spend time not traversing space but staying in the same place until it’s time to leave the club. The club is actually more fun than B in the ‘from A to B’ formulation.


Transposed to the notorious and allegedly manipulated Jean Charles de Menezes/Hussein Osman composite photograph, the business of photographically eliminating difference takes on a decidedly more sinister tone. According to this account of the recent trial of the Metropolitian Police, the prosecutor suggested that “…in the police composite, the picture of the Brazilian appeared to be have been brightened and had lost definition compared with the original. The brightening also appeared to have ‘got rid of the definition of some of the characteristics’ which could be seen in the original picture, including areas around the left nostril and the chin…”

In a previous post on the spiritual life of Paris Hilton, I wrote about the lack of psychological detail in Paris’s abrupt and cartoonish religious conversion, a journey from socialite to neophyte punctuated by the slammer. I suggested that this could contribute towards the situating of the funloving heiress in a mythologised role.

In the case of de Menezes it can be argued that the human hybrid presented in the composite photo demonstrates, among other things, an ambivalence towards racial difference in that de Menezes’ half-photo is, allegedly, brightened in order to make it seem closer to a darker skin tone. This is confusing. Wouldn’t you need to darken de Menezes to move him closer to Osman? The brightening removes facial detail, however – it decharacterises/denatures de Menezes to the extent that he becomes identifiable yet only as a type. The type is ‘Osman-like’ and it is, in turn, strongly associated with terrorism. The composite photo maps a journey with an entrance in Tulse Hill and the ultimate exit in Stockwell. For de Menezes the journey was, up to the very last moment, care-free. He left the house as a low resolution Osman and became de Menezes shortly after his violent death. At that terminal point the details returned. For the Metropolitan Police the transformation from Osman to de Menezes appears to border on the magical. As far as they were concerned he had made no journey.

07.11.2007

But Can You Get It In Your Pocket?

On a drab, cold November day in south-east England there’s nothing better than a tonic. Strength Weekly, as readers know, wishes to increase the sum of human happiness by any means possible. Today this will be effected by the publication of just one paragraph of technocultural clairvoyance. While reading the paragraph it is important to suppress any scepticism about the feasibility of the upbeat forecast contained within it.

The paragraph’s author, Kevin Kelly, is a long-running techno-utopian and founder editor of Wired magazine who generally sees only the very best futures unfolding from new technology. He is considerably exercised by the possibility (in his view, an inevitability) that the billions of computing objects in the world will eventually merge to produce a super-computer.
“The next stage in human technological evolution is a single thinking/web/computer that is planetary in dimensions. This planetary computer will be the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built. It will also be the platform that most business and culture will run on. The web is the initial OS (operating system) of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core. Future gizmos will be future gateways into the same One Machine. Designing products and services for this new machine require a unique mind-set.”

What fun this could be – you’d never have to think again! Religious in its unstated yet mythic referencing but also very much of its time insofar as it commends the amassing of gadgetry as a means of transcendence. Wouldn’t it be great if it happened next week? I think so.

Boiling Molecules

In a small, warm, windowless room to one side of the lab three balances stood glistening on a bench. Each balance was enclosed in a glass case with sliding doors. Two chromed pans – the scales – were suspended from the cross arm. Quantities were placed in one of the pans then quantified by the systematic addition and subtraction of weights to and from the other pan. While this is, of course, very much how potatoes, say, were purchased in the years before pre-packaging, it is the matter of tremendous accuracy which exercises me in this instance.

Beside each balance was a box, in blonde wood, containing a bed of purple velvet artfully slit and pouched so that a series of tiny weights could be lodged in it only in strict series. The largest of these tiny pieces, the 10 gramme, was bung shaped and bore a little knobbed handle by which it might be conveyed to the pan. Below 1 gramme a significant change took place. No more bungs: now leaves. Wispy leaves of shiny silver metal, rectangles and squares, all with one corner slightly turned up. Each with the gramme fraction impressed on the top side. These weights were not to be conveyed by hand – a pair of tweezers was provided so that the weight of human grease could not distort the reading.

I was amazed when my father told me of the dangers of grease. I realised that even if the obtrusive and widely reported ordinary secreta are discounted, the body wiped clean, we still carry on our hands, preceding even the fingerprints, a fine film that will give weight to all that we touch, however lightly. And, as I already knew, it wasn’t a one-way thing. The toucher, the hapless bearer of exudate, makes a deposit; he leaves some molecules. But he gets some back. Not, presumably, as many as he left. Unless it was butter, say, or jam.

It may be felt by some – the macrophiles – that the quantities under discussion are negligible. That they’re beneath consideration and at the end of the day who cares? People who feel like that are clearly unaware of the unreliability of matter. They don’t understand that we’re walking through mist all the time. Everything is boiling. It’s not touch and go, it ‘s touch and swap.

The end of edges and the unreliability of envelopes preoccupied me greatly and have stayed with me ever since, evolving into a central axiom of a set of occult principles that helped make sense of the world. Possibly they made nonsense of it as well. They were occult to the extent that I never talked about them to anyone. Not because I thought they were loopy. I just held my peace and ruminated on them.

I would sit in the balance room and weigh things, marvelling at the number of decimal places that could be added after the main figure. I wondered if it were possible to weigh things down to the last molecule. I imagined that if such a balance were to be made then the final, ultimate, definitive weight could never be determined for more than a moment because atoms and molecules would be jumping on and off all the time.

03.11.2007