Soonly!

Claire B-T xxx

The ever-succulent Chris Goode is currently doing a show about doubting his atheism. It’s called GOD/HEAD and it’s a true story about God, neuroscience and, well, all manner of other things. This is the official blurb:

So there’s this writer.

Thirtysomething, gay, lefty metropolitan writer. Atheist, obviously. History of mental health problems, but those are all in the past.
Sure of himself and his world view. Comfortable in his assumptions.

And then one day, suddenly, without any warning…

There’s God.

In this brand new documentary piece, award-winning writer and storyteller Chris Goode explores the flipside of the familiar crisis of faith: what if there really is a God after all?

GOD/HEAD is a humane, candid, radically unsettling piece about the tensions between religion and neuroscience, and about the limits of language and the edges of desire.

Each night a different guest performer participates in the piece. I’m very excited to be the guest on March 1, so if any of you can make then, it would be lovely to see you afterwards! And, if not, there are plenty of other nights to choose from!

The piece is on at Ovalhouse at 7.45 Tuesday to Saturday from until March 10. You can book tickets via the Ovalhouse website.

Maybe see you there.

I don’t really know why I hadn’t read it before now. It was Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ (that one with the butterfly) … in ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’ short story collection my English teacher Mrs Martin shoved in my direction in the first year at secondary school that got me going on science fiction. That and ‘Doctor Who’, when it was square.

But now I have finally read ‘Fahrenheit 451′. Jeepers. I spent the first few pages just gaping in utter disbelief. It’s astounding. It was written six decades ago and it’s got today taped. It’s all there; wall-to-wall TV, the disappearance of ‘real’ interaction’, people with constant stimulation of some sort delivered via things stuffed in their earholes, reality TV, interactive entertainment, a loss of respect for human life, constant ‘fun’ seeking, constant advertising, the reverence of the superficial and the inane, the suspicion of anything ‘serious’. All in a small book. That was part of the pleasure – short books often contain whole worlds of wonder. Length isn’t everything; it’s depth that matters. As the bishop said to… well, anyone who would listen.

And then I read the afterword in which Ray Bradbury mentions that, – and apologies if this is one of those commonly known facts that I’ve managed to miss – in 1954, Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in the 4th, 5th and 6th issues of a new magazine called  ‘Playboy’.

I’ll just say that again.

Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in ‘Playboy’.

I had no idea that Playboy even had a literature section, let alone that it took risks and published daring, anti-authority, government-challenging works! Why does no-one ever talk about this? Or maybe they do, but not in front of the ladies.  I’ve just investigated further and other Playboy alumni include Margaret Atwood, P G Wodehouse, Arthur C Clarke and Vladimir Nabokov. My extensive Wikipedia research doesn’t indicate which contemporary literary greats grace the pages of its more recent issues, but I do hope that the current Playboy team still recognise that entertainment for men can include the occasional caustic, crafted, gripping, terrifying, prophetic work of literature destined to become a classic, as well as nice knockers.

The Woolwich Grand has been the source of great joy and pain for me over the past year. Sadly, lately it’s been more of the pain, to the extent that I’m no longer really affiliated with the project. I mean, you may well see me up a ladder painting, or cleaning chewing gum off the floor, but I’m no longer any more involved than any other volunteer who’s giving up some time to help a local cause.

The reasons aren’t particularly complicated or interesting and are of the ‘artistic differences’ ilk. To me it was always simple: ‘We’re making a theatre; let’s put theatre in it!’, but I’ve gradually come to understand that that isn’t how the project is viewed by everyone. And I shall stop there. If you desperately want to know any more, then I’m happy to talk about it to you privately. To my mind, the separation has been amicable, so I hope Adrian feels that way too.

Also, I am currently, for various reasons, attempting to avoid stress, rather than actively seeking it out like a crazed cortisol junkie. Interestingly, the days when I would find myself alone in a state of fight-or-flight with not a lot to fight with or flee from are gone. Now, I just have those heart-pounding, wild-haired Palaeolithic moments in company. Great. Really great. Not all compay, you understand, but some. So, in the deeply selfish interest of self-preservation, I’m trying to keep contact with those, um, companies to a minimum.

But it’s been great fun! Those early days of battling the pigeons, the damp, the cold to make the building fit for human occupation were an absolute blast. If you don’t know me well, that might sound ironic. If you know me well, you’ll know it most definitely isn’t. Here’s hoping the project is a great success!

In 2011, I had a lot of people hunting for information on ‘Diogenes syndrome’ and ‘extreme hoarding’. Then there were folk searching  for cute and cuddly things such as a ‘baby field mouse’ and a ‘curled up mouse’, though life wasn’t all roses in 2011 for these mouse-lovers, as evidenced by the  tragic ‘baby mouse squashed’.

There were also the random requests: ‘mending old anglepoise lamp oxford’, ‘two level terrarrium’, ‘theathre face for child’.

And an abundance of people desperately seeking entertainment in southeast London: ‘independent escort woolwich’, ‘prostitute south london’, and my favourite: ‘hore house woolwich’.

In summary:

The best of times:
- Feeding mice with a paintbrush at 4 in the morning.
- Spending hours scraping all the chewing gum off the carpet at The Woolwich Grand Theatre only to be presented with a steam cleaner that had been there all along for the last section, which took moments.
- The glorious day trip to Cambridge to vote for the new Chancellor (Brian Blessed woz robbed): lunch in the Maypole, an impromptu tour of the new (to me) ADC, a spot of dressing up in gowns, tea and cake and memory lane.

The worst of times:
- Well, clearing houses of heaps of stuff.
- And repeatedly trying to guess what the church might actually permit on my father’s gravestone. (Still haven’t managed a good guess).
- And being in the middle of a riot zone.
- (And some other stuff that I talk about in an anonymous blog which I might link to one day)

So, pretty much on the pants side of poo.

Roll on 2012!

Theatre-wise, I’ve been mostly ambivalent about things I’ve seen this year. I loved The Adventures of Wound-Man and Shirley, which is touring in 2012, I believe, so take a gander at that. And a Cinderella at the Battersea Mess and Music Hall was absolutely delightful, but big shows pretty much left me cold this year as so many lacked heart and humanity.

For example, two shows which have been raved about left me feeling empty. The Animals and Children Took to the Streets was beautiful to look at, technically superb, but just lacked heart. I felt no emotional connection to any of the characters – well, OK, maybe the caretaker a little bit – but the rest of the world thought it was amazing. And it was. Technically. But surely there’s only so long you can marvel at a person’s ability to pat the head of an animated dog? Actually, there might not have been an animated dog, I can’t remember, but ultimately, this play would have been the same if it was a cartoon. There’s no doubt that all the members of this company are hugely accomplished, but the fact that there were some real, live, breathing, thinking people in this piece didn’t seem to add to it. The piece had  to be precise and regimented because of the technical side of it, and that left no room for it to be fresh each time. No room for real connection. It has to be replicated each night rather than performed. If that makes any kind of sense.

I was also one of apparently only two people in the world who thought London Road (a verbatim musical about the residents of the road where the man who committed the Ipswich murders of 2006 lived) was bizarrely tedious and unexpectedly nasty (sorry, Adam – you’re brilliant, but even you admitted in the programme notes that it was, by its nature, boring) in stark opposition to the rest of the world who seemed to side with the critics and deem it the most wonderful musical ever. Like The Animals and Children… it was undoubtedly technically superb, but it was uncomfortable to watch, not as in ‘Heck, I feel uncomfortable because this is making me confront all sorts of uncomfortable issues’ but uncomfortable as in ‘Heck, I feel uncomfortable because I cannot fathom why they made this’. Some of the choices made by the creative team seemed bizarre. For example, the big musical comedy set-piece was all about a reporter trying, failing and eventually succeeding to not say the word ‘semen’. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s a rude word and everything. But his report is about the bodily fluid found inside women who were raped and murdered. Context does matter. Some might say it’s everything. But this didn’t stop half the bloody National Theatre audience roaring with laughter and clapping when he finally managed not to say semen. Yes, we all know funny, inappropriate things happen in the direst circumstances, but this song didn’t point that up; it was a comic number about a man getting frustrated with his inability to not say a certain word. The context had been forgotten. As people around me guffawed, I was sitting there muttering ‘This is disgusting’. Disgusting and boring! Wow! Bring on the awards!

Verbatim theatre seems to have gone mainstream now,  but a verbatim piece that is, well, verbatim, will surely always need work (beyond editing and, in this case, composing music and setting conversations and [endlessly] repeated phrases to it) to become a play, otherwise, why not just make a documentary? You can make compelling documentary theatre – ask Richard Norton-Taylor. I found it incredibly telling that the one time when London Road really came alive with humanity was when recordings of interviews with local women working as prostitutes were played. This was directly after, if my memory serves me correctly, the actors had delivered the same words, with the same vocal nuances, but with no connection to the words and therefore no soul. That brief burst of recorded speech highlighted how unreal the rest of the piece was. And demonstrated beautifully that replicating vocal patterns aint enough  – you still need to connect body, mind and soul to the words otherwise you end up with a bunch of people shuffling about looking and sounding like they’ve had lobotomies. Which is sadly, what I saw when I witnessed London Road.  And all the way through, I couldn’t help wondering about what Alecky Blythe, the verbatim theatre practitioner who co-created this piece might have been thinking when she started travelling up to Ipswich to record interviews while bodies were still being found. It reminded me of how, when I finished reading In Cold Blood, I felt that the title also applied to Mr Capote.

I will accept that 2011 has been pretty extreme in very real ways for me, so maybe I’m just over anything theatrical that’s gimmicky or, for some other reason, doesn’t reach my heart.

On a happier note, I discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2011 (yes, that’s rather more than fashionably late to the party, I know) and its sheer brilliance, wit, intelligence, inventiveness, compassion and character development  pretty much knocked all the theatre I saw into a cocked hat. I have a suspicion that it might be quite tragic that I’ve never identified with a fictional character as much as with Spike (seasons 5-7). Or maybe everyone feels that way?