"Everyone really should set aside a moment or two for Robert's blog. It's like the potted shrimps of human knowledge."
Howard Evans, writer and masseur.
My new blog, Anatole Gribsby's Hi Class Blog, is here
During the sixth module of Gay Love Spirit's two-year training there was an open space, in which we were free to propose and organise our own therapeutic exercises.
I proposed a crockery-smashing workshop.
Two of us were sent out to buy a large crate of cheap crockery for smashing. Meanwhile I asked the other men if they would like to join me in this jolly moment.
The group was multi-national. The nations represented included Britain, Germany, Brussels, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, Italy and Spain. What was notable about this episode was that it was the Brits who felt the need to smash crockery, not the others.
Britain is an immensely energetic nation whose energy sometimes gets a little blocked. This is why we riot from time to time. This is why we have given the world football hooliganism (having previously given it football). I won't offer any solutions, because I am not a pundit. But our problems may have something to do with us being governed by people like me, who went to high-class universities and have spent most of their lives in our heads.
Image: A surreal inscription on the side of a house saying "That is on and it is complete."
I saw this around Finsbury Park station. Is it art or something completely prosaic? Are these words actually written underneath every billboard, only we never see them? I suppose once one had attached something (a "that") onto the oblong space, then the job ("it") would be complete. So is it a memo, so that the men who attach billboards to the sides of buildings will know when their job is done and they can have a cup of tea? But the Michael Atavar blue-and-white colour scheme screams conceptual apres-post-modernism. I'm confused. Can anyone help?
My housemate is generally laconic but he has his moments. Yesterday I confessed that I had accidentally left the back door open for twenty-four hours and he said, "We could have been raped by foxes!" - a wonderfully vivid image, I thought.
People are often hilarious without trying. My mother is a witty woman, but some of her best lines come from moments of innocent authenticity. I once tried to persuade her to join Facebook. My mother is eighty-two and suspicious of new-fangled things. She said cautiously, "Well, I wouldn't want to get groomed..."
And so to the Hampstead Theatre...
I am wary of saying anything about other writers that is not abject enthusiasm. But the work of Jonathan Harvey relates to experiences I have had in the past five years or so as I have been writing and putting on plays.
Of course I loved Beautiful Thing (onstage in 1993 - not the film version) - who didn’t? Who wouldn’t? And I also saw Harvey’s follow-up Boom-Bang-a-Bang at the Bush, which was directed by my friend Kathy Burke. It was splendid and contained regally funny lines that I remember to this day (I think one character, looking forward to watching Eurovision, said he was hoping his viewing pleasure wouldn’t be disturbed by the sound of heterosexuals hanging up their coats).
I loved it that Harvey wrote formally straightforward pieces - just people in rooms talking. He was talented and witty enough to make it work. But I remember Kathy telling me afterwards that a critic who saw Boom-Bang-A-Bang told Jonathan that he needed to go back to the drawing board and “learn” how to write proper plays. His structure wasn’t good enough, he’d never have another West End transfer if he went on like that. Harvey must have been in his mid-twenties. According to Kathy he took the advice on board - in other words, he didn’t have the self-confidence to tell the guy to go fuck himself. Fifteen or so years have elapsed, and now he seems to be writing the same kind of plays as everyone else. I feel angry on his behalf, but hey - it’s his life.
I didn’t see any of his plays between Boom-Bang-a-Bang and this year’s Canary, currently playing at the Hampstead Theatre. But between those two pieces there is all the difference in the world - the difference, to be frank, between the sort of theatre I adore and the sort of theatre I don’t.
Around 2005, my agent sent my play Wild Fruit to Max Stafford-Clark, one of London’s most respected theatre directors. Mr Stafford-Clark was interested enough to give me twenty minutes of his time but it was apparent that he had serious misgivings about it. He liked the subject matter (gay drug-pushers and rent-boys self-destructing in a Brighton basement) but not the structure. With meticulous tact he asked me how much contemporary theatre I had watched recently, and I confessed, through my blushes, that I had spent the last ten years holed up in Brighton writing screenplays. Ah, he said. That would explain it. And he sent me away with some contemporary plays to read, a Stella Feehilly and a Judy Upton. I went home, read the first thirty pages of each and was appalled.
There was nothing wrong with the subject matter of these plays. It was the structure that froze my young blood. The scenes all seemed to be two or three minutes long and the location changed between each scene. As a screenwriter I am aware that this kind of structure is more or less non-negotiable for the screen. But why would one want it in a theatre?
Because I was insecure I got cross and swore to myself that henceforth I would always write my stage-plays in long unbroken scenes and I would have one set only per play. I have kept this promise and, even though I am no longer cross and less insecure, I am glad I did. At least it has led me to evolve a style.
My friends sometimes talk excitedly about this or that new theatre-company that is attempting to give audiences something that TV and film CANNOT GIVE. This seems a rather odd thing to say. Every school play done for a budget of £2.50 gives an audience something that film and TV cannot give. There is nothing wrong with live theatre, except that we have become a little snooty about it now that we have 3D Imax. Trying to create new kinds of it that somehow trounce film suggests that one has missed the point.
Theatre is live. That’s all it has, all it will ever have, and all it needs. It doesn’t need to be endlessly chasing after film and TV, writing shorter and shorter scenes, spending godzillions on design and driving the audience up the wall with tricksy time-sequences and Brechtian games. If you haven’t noticed that what an actor is doing for you in a live performance is incredibly and poignantly generous, then you shouldn’t be there. If you are missing the helicopter shots and the special effects, you haven’t noticed.
It so happened that I never really liked the theatre writing of the 1980s and 1990s, and so I went sideways, into pop and film. As a gay man I had my own particular cultural needs which were not always in sync with fashion; ie, I carried on wallowing in Coward and Tennessee when contemporary theatre wasn’t doing it for me. The result was that I acquired a retro theatrical sensibility. I am the theatre equivalent of a Pre-Raphaelite: my plays turn a blind eye to the developments of the last fifty years.
My suspicion is that theatre as a bearable art-form has only two places it can go. Option One is for it to go the whole hog as an interactive ride. Carnesky’s Ghost Train in 2004 was literally a ride, a ten minute piece in which the audience rode a fun-fair ghost-train which stopped along the way to watch fabulous old-fashioned contortionists and illusionists doing their stuff. Frantic Assembly’s promenade piece Dirty Wonderland was the best fun I’ve ever had in a condemned art deco hotel. Duckie’s annual Gay Shame extravaganzas have turned nightclubbing into a mind-expanding experience. These are walk-in shows, full of magic and wit and illusion, that jolt you out of the here and now and send you home feeling refreshed and stimulated. To say that they are not primarily about the written and spoken word would be an understatement.
Option Two would be an alternative to the above, in which theatre remembered its original magic, recovered its confidence and stopped trying to be all things to all people. It happened once (in music: punk rock); it could happen again.
Yoga isn't sexy.
The part of Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication that I found most profound was where he says that we are not responsible for the feelings of others. In fact, last night I was having dinner with my family and I wanted to distribute copies of Rosenberg's book around the table. Rosenberg says:
"We think we must constantly strive to keep everyone happy. If they don't appear happy, we feel responsible and compelled to do something about it. This can easily lead us to see the very people who are closest to us as burdens."
Rosenberg refers to this as emotional slavery.
And who can disagree? I sometimes think families are the emotional equivalent of Escher drawings, a logically impossible arrangement by which everyone is a burden to everyone else. What, in the end, are we carrying? What is weighing us down? Responsibilities for illusions. Blink and it all disappears.
The alternative is emotional freedom and, as we all know, there is nothing quite so scary as freedom. If we are really not responsible for each other's feelings, whole new avenues of life open up before us. We could take the phone off the hook for a month. We could express any and every part of ourselves down the last embarrassing detail - and, as Andrew Lloyd Webber would say, devil take the hindmost.
They say that the less emotionally healthy resent the more emotionally healthy, and I think this is why. If you have chosen slavery, there's nothing quite so annoying as watching other people bounding about enjoying their freedom.
In view of my recent fugu obsession (see this blog a couple of entries back) I was very excited to hear that my friend the brilliant ceramic artist Katie Adams does a line of fugu tableware, and she has a gruesome story to go with it. I quote her direct:
"Super top high-flying hard-nosed New Yorker femme wanted to be first on the 1980s fugu eating scene - so cutting edge the Japanese restaurant hadn't treated the puffer properly and the woman was paralysed, sent to a wheel chair for the rest of her life - but apparently this experience softened her completely and she was grateful for this destiny that enabled her to experience life from a more human perspective! The client who bought my first fugu dish had known her!"
Thanks Katie!
At the risk of appearing weird, here is some research I did last night into the dictionary definition of my favourite new word snudge.
When I googled my lovely word during last week’s shortlived moment of Googlewhacking frenzy, I was directed to The Urban Dictionary, which gives three meanings for the verb to snudge. This dictionary seems to be some sort of collection of ephemeral slang terms, a Wikipedia of argot, and so it’s exciting to find that the second meaning given is in accordance with Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century definition:
1. The art of double inhaling using both the nose and mouth.
2. To chillax (ie, chill and relax), to be lazy or idle.
3. The act of rubbing the erect penis against the side of another's nose.
4. To sniff the seat of someone, usually female, after they have finished sitting on it. Favourite targets include bicycle seats and bar stools.
The dictionary gives examples of all four usages, but for now I will only quote the example given for the “correct” meaning, number 2:
“I snudged all Saturday until my muscles dissolved. It was immense.”
Meanwhile, dictionary.com directs us to the OED for this definition of the noun snudge:
"A miser, a mean avaricious person," 1545, "very common from c.1550-1610" [OED].
I am disturbed to find the OED so flatly contradicting Johnson, whose meaning I prefer and want to adopt, so I shall ignore it.
PS: I find defintion 3 electrifying and worthy of Salvador Dali. Definition 4, though saucy, is of less interest. The Urban Dictionary tells us - as if we couldn't have guessed - that this usage originated in the University of Birmingham "circa 2004." The fact that students sniff barstools is hardly news, and anyway, a perfectly good word already exists for this, which is "pooning".
My friend the lovely Darren came to stay for the week-end. On Saturday we saw a matinée of Lucy Prebble’s much-praised Enron at the Noel Coward theatre, which we both enjoyed up to a point, although Darren felt that at moments it reminded him of a school play. Psychodrome doesn’t bitch, so I won’t tell you if I agreed or not.
That evening, for some reason, we got to talking about fugu, the Japanese dish prepared from the meat of the lethally poisonous pufferfish. Because it will kill you stone dead if prepared incorrectly, fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine.
As the evening wore on, Darren and I became more and more obsessed with this bizarre phenomenon. We googled, we plundered Wikipedia, we gorged on information. What emerges is a story of scarcely credible human decadence.
Fugu chefs are trained for many years, and it is illegal to serve fugu without a license. People do die from eating it, but not usually in restaurants or from fugu sold in supermarkets. Most deaths from fugu occur when untrained people catch and prepare the fish.
So far, so reasonable. After all, we don’t eat rhubarb leaves, do we? But the more you read, the weirder it gets.
Wikipedia has this to tell us: In some cases [people] even eat the highly poisonous liver on purpose as a delicacy. As not all fish are equally poisonous this may not always lead to death, and sometimes gives little more than the desired numbness on the lips and tongue while eating and shortly thereafter. But in many cases this numbness of the lips is only the first step of a lethal fugu poisoning.
We read that trained fugu chefs, having properly filleted out all the poisonous parts, like to dab a little bit of poison on the edible meat prior to serving it, so that diners can experience the thrill of numb lips.
This theme of flirtation with death is evident also in the style of presentation of fugu, which is often served on a dish on which is painted a chrysanthemum - symbolic, there and here, of death.
Death by fugu is not particularly pleasant. The toxin paralyses the body but does not affect the brain, so you are fully conscious for the duration of the ordeal. Eventually you asphyxiate. There is no known antidote.
What are we to make of the story of Bando Mitsugoro VIII, the famous kabuki actor who requested four servings of fugu liver, insisting that he was strong enough to survive the poison? The chef, apparently, was too embarrassed to refuse the request. The actor ate the delicacy and died horribly.
The pufferfish has to be skinned alive to ensure that the poison, which is found mainly in its skin, does not seep into its flesh.
You can get fugu in America, but not in Europe.
Do you know what a Googlewhack is? Here is the Wikipedia definition:
"A Googlewhack is a kind of a contest for finding a Google search query consisting of exactly two words without quotation marks, that return exactly one hit. A Googlewhack must consist of two actual words found in a dictionary."
Examples of once-successful Googlewhacks may be found around the internet - just google for them. "Succotash galvanometer" was one - although, for obvious reasons, this will not give you a Googlewhack any more. Googlewhacks are fleeting triumphs - they lose their validity the moment they are discovered.
Googlewhacking is an immensely enjoyable passtime. It's like playing the slot machines, although with a small element of skill thrown in. Some attempts might throw up 20,000 hits, some just twenty.
I typed in
snudging godzillions
and got a Googlewhack! - because the only website in the universe that contains both of those words is this one right here.
I then remembered that I had myself invented the word "godzillion" - or thought I had. To check, I googled the word on its own and I found, to my suprise and delught that it does indeed appear in a dictionary, namely wordnik.com.
However, as dictionary.com (the arbiter of Googlewhacks) does not list godzillion, and only lists snudge as a noun, I suspect my triumph will not get official recognition.
I was reminded of the line in Woody Allen's Manhattan, "I finally had an orgasm, but my therapist told me it was the wrong kind."
(PS: dictionary.com defines a snudge as a miser. I use snudge as a verb, according to Samuel Johnson's definition, ie, "to be idle".)
Now that the dust has settled, I can think about Relax with what I believe is called equanimity.
Over about two years of development I wrote several drafts. After the reading we did in November of last year I took the play apart like a motorcycle and reassembled it with major differences. Two of the five characters were chucked out and replaced by new ones and the houseboy’s age was tweeked from twenty-five to fifty. I’m happy with these changes, but I do sometimes hanker after some of the deleted scenes and lines. In particular I would like to preserve for posterity Raymond’s “pig” speech.
In the earlier draft the bi-curious RAC man did not appear onstage. His place was filled by a second guest, a melancholy old closet-case who was scouring the B&B’s of England (at least, the ones that advertised in Gay Times) for the boy he had loved and lost. This character was very guarded and suspicious, and resisted Sandy’s attempts at ice-breaking. Finally he opened up and delivered a little monologue about a man he had once known. You have to imagine this speech being delivered by a character who up to this moment has been monosyllabic.
RAYMOND: Well — sometimes a bloke’s got to clean up after himself. Can’t live in a pig-sty. I once knew a man who lived like a pig. Perfectly normal bloke. But the way he lived was like a pig. There was no other way to describe it. He was quite a good cricketer actually. When he wasn’t pissing in the sink.
All this stuff had to go because it was too Pinter. Imitating Pinter won’t get you your second act.
Yesterday my cold continued to rage, which I took as permission to go into over-snudge. I spent the entire day on Lulu.com, publishing, publishing, publishing. I am making five different versions of the post-Croydon edition of Relax, each one with a different member of the cast on the front cover, so that each actor can have a copy which implies that they were the best bit of the play. Those of them who don't know about Lulu might imagine that their version is the only version, and be suitably excited. I am counting on the theory that actors rarely meet up again after a production has finished.
PS: and here is a photo of Raspberry Rendezvous, just so that you know I wasn't hallucinating.
Image: The envelope for the Raspberry Rendez-vous teabag
I was very young in the 1960s but I do remember them. One day we received a free record through the letter-box. It wasn’t the usual vinyl, it was one of those super-flimsy ones. It was an advertisement. When you played it, it told you about the new Cleopatra Look from Revlon. The sleeve was a hot coral pink, and there was a Vogue-style sketch of Cleopatra looking like Elizabeth Taylor. Despite this being the era of the Beatles and the Stones, I remember this record as one of my very favourites, although even then I was vaguely aware that this pleasure was a guilty one.
Over a ravishingly exotic Cecille B. De Mille score, a purring male voice of the Victor Mature variety told us all about the Cleopatra Look from Revlon. I haven’t heard the record since I was six, but certain phrases were branded onto my consciousness, and I carry them around with me to this very day.
“These are eyes that hypnotise - eyes with a surprise!”
“And on her lips... and fingertips... the most teasingly provocative, potent pink!”
The ending was a hum-dinger. I remember it word for word:
“What will happen to the woman who wears the new Cleopatra Look from Revlon? The love of great men? Empires at her feet? It happened once... It could happen... AGAIN!!”
We like to think that marketing is less silly these days, but I want to share that today I came across a free sample of a fruit tea called Raspberry Rendez-Vous. Raspberry Rendez-Vous, which I am sipping right now, contains hibiscus, raspberry juice and “flavourings.” It tastes mainly of dish-water with, to be sure, raspberry topnotes.
But what I want to know is, what will happen to the woman who drinks Raspberry Rendez-Vous? The love of George Clooney? Wild nights in a Hamburg disco? It happened once...
Today I had a cold, so I spent some time playing on Lulu.com, publishing a book of my blog-entries. I'll get one copy printed, read it and decide whether all this blither really deserves to be printed and bound. Lulu is a slightly capricious website that doesn't always allow you to do what you want. Today I couldn't get the cover-design page to work, but I was creative and came up with a nice plain design which, I confess, owes a fair amount to Michael Atavar's How To Be An Artist. Here it is. Incidentally, the blue on the front isn't just a block of graphic colour, it's a photograph of the sky in Cornwall in August, with the saturation turned up.
Image: The cover of Blogging and Snudging
The thrill of seeing that word "Snudging" done in a hot font!
On the whole I had a somewhat cruddy Brighton festival and I wonder, did Andy choose badly or are standards slipping? On Wednesday we saw some quite talented actors (names withheld) fart-arsing about in the basement of the Sanctuary cafe, a show which would have been more satisfying if someone had felt it was worth spending more than a quarter of an hour on the script. On Friday we saw an excruciating drag troupe (name withheld!) who were probably funny back in the old days, when they started out and everyone was drunk. I drove home feeling that Jon Sheehan’s amazing rimming-and-pooing story was the most authentic thing I had seen. Yes, and that includes Hofesh Shechter’s folkdance-and-fascism extravaganza, which I would not presume to criticize, but which I found oddly unsatisfying - especially considering how much it must have cost. The good news is that contemporary dance seems to have gone into its heavy metal phase. The shame is it didn’t have a glam-rock phase - or if it did, I missed it. (I am thrilled to note, in parenthesis, that I experienced a glam-rock frisson as I spotted contemporary art god Brian Eno gliding majestically into the venue that night. Eno was the artistic director this year’s festival, and to him, I presume, we owe the pleasure of Shechter’s piece.)
Perhaps more exciting than any of this frantic artistic activity was the fact that the chickens escaped from their coop on the last day of my stay in Saltdean, and I had to corral a group of elderly neighbours to help me corral the chickens. It was a full-blown neighbourhood emergency and we all took it very seriously and enjoyed it hugely. This, I thought, is what community is! In fact I enjoyed it even more than I enjoyed the excellent fresh eggs which the little darlings gave me daily. Perhaps this is the point: keeping chickens is exciting. It is less dangerous than skiing and more socially cohesive than shooting up crack.
Image: Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother
Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother. My companion told me, "Hofesh knows the music is too loud. He does it on purpose."
A friend once said, “I hear you are a keen house-sitter.” I wasn’t sure I liked that. It is true that writers sometimes house-sit for their friends, especially if their friends live in the country, but that does not necessarily make us “keen”. I worry that a keen house-sitter would be a somewhat pathetic figure, perhaps not on the property ladder himself, flitting from house to house like a ghost, envious of other people’s living arrangements and grudgingly feeding their cats. Reader, if this is me, shoot me right now.
I occasionally house-sit for friends in Saltdean, a cute suburb on the downs outside Brighton, and I am here for a few days while they are somewhere more glamorous (Cannes, to be precise). My apologies to my other Brighton friends whom I haven’t rung: feeding cats is an all-consuming task. The Brighton festival is on, and because I am a lazy snudger, I have asked my friend Andy to choose what we will be seeing. This is the only way I can face today’s crowded festival programmes. Let someone else decide. It’s all a lucky dip anyway.
I think I have sussed Andy’s method of choosing shows. If it has homosexuality or nudity in the title, Andy will buy a ticket. On Monday we saw Adventures In Homosexuality And Other Social Diseases, in which a likeable young (apparently) straight lad (Jon Sheehan) delivered a truly eye-opening monologue about the night he decided to try gay sex. Having spent the afternoon experimenting with a dildo, he ended up accidentally defecating on the old pouf who was rimming him, and then, in his shock-horror, threw up over the guy as well. Nevertheless the old geezer begged him not to go. Our hero staggered out into the street with his shoes in his hands and didn’t stop running until he found a night-bus. One fears he won’t try it again.
This piece belonged, broadly speaking, to the straight-boys gross-out genre of comedy, but it delved so far into the realms of self-exposure as to be neither straight nor entirely comic. At its heart was a real sense of disorientation in the face of the weirdness of sexual desire, and it left one with the feeling that the book might have been closed, but the questions had not been answered.
Last night we saw a show called Naked Homo which, as you can see, contained both qualifying words in its title. This one was written and performed by the lovely Martin Lewton, who, having lured us in with the promise of naked thespian flesh, did not disappoint, at least as far as exposing himself went. I found his material less immediate than Jon Sheehan’s but my companions gave him the thumbs-up.
Tomorrow we are seeing a show with a bit of a pedigree, the premiere of Hofesh Schechter’s dance piece Political Mother, which, we are told, will be performed to a score written by Mr Shechter himself, who used to be a drummer in a rock band. Neither nudity nor homosexuality has been promised, but in Shechter's case we are happy to cross our fingers and hope.
Image: Jon Sheehan in Adventures in Homosexuality
The charming and self-evidently straight Jon Sheehan...
As one grows older, one becomes ever more worldly and sophisticated. This week I learned a new word. Did you know that people who are into masturbation - to the point of perhaps considering themselves auto-sexual - call themselves “bators”? I like this word very much. It has furtive undertones of “bait” and thrilling topnotes of “gator”. Bating is, I learn, a scene in itself. Bators meet up for conventions in Palm Springs; they hook up online. My friend excitedly told me that he himself has recently created a website called Bate-Dates. It seems that autosexuality is no obstacle to relationship; and quite right too. Why should it be any more of an obstacle than the other kinds of sexuality, the ones that supposedly involve another person? Most of the time, if truth be told, we are making love to our fantasies and the other person is simply the one who makes us breakfast, if we are lucky, afterwards.
And so back to the business of this blog: today, my lazy version of a theatre review.
God, who is known to move in mysterious ways, seems at this moment to be dragging me, “kicking and creaming”, back into the realms of music, if not actually into the dark Hades of musical theatre itself. Only last week, a free ticket to Hair, and this week a 60% discount on tickets to Priscilla. It was the housemate’s birthday, so I swallowed my pride and took the bait.
The Palace Theatre may not be unique in tawdriness, but Lord knows it is a far-advanced case of West End tat. The box office, which you reach by a separate entrance, is like the ticket-hall of a bus station, and the theatre itself, with its bouncers and merchandise stalls, is more reminiscent of a zoo than a palace of culture. If you step outside in the interval for a breath of air you have to re-present you ticket-stub to return. Meanwhile the interior has been left to slip, over the years, into a state of complete charmlessness. There are no pictures of Larry Olivier and Johnny Gielgud on the walls, not a lot of red plush, no tinkly chandeliers that I noticed. Just people buying and selling. You start to worry that if you don’t buy a souvenir mug, or a cocktail in a glass with a phosphorescent stem, you won’t be allowed back to your seat.
The stage version of The Adventures-Of-Priscilla-Queen-of-the-Blah-Blah-Blah is, oddly enough, less awful than one might have feared. It does not plumb the depths of some other shows I could mention (Psychodrome doesn’t bitch). The book contains real jokes that actually make you laugh, and no attempt has been made to disguise the fact that this is a story about homosexuals. The actors, including a hang-dog Jason Donovan, do behave very much like the men in Old Compton Street round the corner, and for this we should be at least slightly grateful. And yet, as one sits witnessing this elaborate lip-synch show, one cannot help thinking, if God decides to destroy the human race right now, we will richly have deserved it.
I never thought the original film was particularly coherent as a narrative, but the stage version, where 95% is “hilarious” drag routines and 5% plot, is even less so. The story’s one and only idea, that drag queens are out of place in the Australian outback, is all very well in a film, where the outback can be portrayed in all its paunchy horror. The problem is that for the musical version it becomes necessary to create a glamorous, “showtunes” version of the Australian outback, and this, alas, is an environment in which drag queens are entirely at home. Let’s face it, one man in make-up beating up another man in make-up for being a pouf is a fairly meaningless spectacle. As one might have feared, the whole disco-choreographed homophobic violence sequence is a nightmare of poor taste.
And so the show gives us everything the film gave us, but writ large so that even an old lady of eighty-two can get it. In fact, being eighty-two probably helps, because it’s all about the pleasure of the familiar. The songs are all old handbag classics. This would be horror enough, but things are made even worse by the fact that, this being the West End, we are not allowed to play the original recordings: they have to be reproduced by the house orchestra and sung by real people. So the drag-queens don’t lip-synch to recordings, they lip-synch to other singers, who, having no role to play in the story, hover above the stage in angel costumes: women dressed up like female impersonators, impersonating vocal performances of the past so that the men impersonating female impersonators below them onstage can pretend to be female vocalists of the past... and... ahem...
The one thing about this production I liked was that the actors wore what I can only describe as make-up masks - some kind of advanced face-furniture that you could just clip onto you like a pair of glasses and hey presto! suddenly you have Danny la Rue eyes. I want to know where these things may be purchased and how much they cost.
Image: Priscilla queen of the desert
Evidence that drag has perhaps lost its way: the London stage version of Priscilla
... that the plot of the new Tilda Swinton arthouse smash I Am Love is more or less the same as Louise Malle's 1992 melodrama Damage... [spoiler alert: I am about to give away the plot, so if you haven't seen it and want to, read no further] ... in which a middle-aged person falls in love with the girlfriend of his son, and the son, on discovering the affair, reels back in horror, falls into the stairwell and dies. If you change the sex of the middle-aged person, substitute "buddy" for "girlfriend", and "swimming pool" for "stairwell", you have the new film.
Reading Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication." And he says: depression is the price you pay for being good.
A friend's cousin opened a pub with her partner. After a year they did their accounts and it transpired that they had made a healthy profit. So the woman spent the profits on a boob-job, feeling, perhaps, that her enhanced figure would be an asset to the business. It was only after the surgery had been carried out that the couple realised they had forgotten to factor in their VAT liability, and they weren't in profit at all. Modern times! This anecdote, although not a side-splitter in itself, feels like it could work well in the context of a stage comedy. Tits and tax.
And so to the "divertissement de ce soir" (as they once said on the eve of some horrendous pogrom in France) - namely the election. The lovely Ken Wilber makes some unexpected observations about conservatives and socialists in his blog-style tome One Taste. He points out that while socialism does indeed represent a more advanced form of consciousness, nevertheless, by a quirk of evolution, conservatism tends to have a stronger connection to what you might call spiritual roots. It FEELS more grounded - because a lot of the time it is. Conservatism is intuitive, irrational and emotional, whereas socialism, in theory, is rational, clear and just. This analysis has helped me to deal with my own nagging feeling that socialism, while it ought to feel less slimy than its counterpart, often doesn't. For socialism to have integrity (perhaps congruence is a less loaded term), your socialist would need to have profound emotional and spiritual balance - qualities not hugely in evidence in the leafy cloisters of Westminster. Exasperated by the bossiness and fantasticality of socialists, one could be forgiven for occasionally finding the naked self-interest of conservatives strangely refreshing - except, of course, that they are only refreshing in the sense that wolves are. One wouldn't want to be governed by them.
By the time you read this, it will be obsolete, but for what it's worth, I suspect that a lot of people will be voting for the Liberal Democrats today - not because of who they are, but because of who they aren't.
Spotted on Gaydar today: "I want to be an escort's houseboy."
A trip to the swishy Dean Street clinic for my “annual” sexual health check-up (that happens every other year). The Dean Street clinic, if the wallpaper is anything to go by, seems to be intended mainly for gay men. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was told off by the doctor for having come into close physical contact with more than one person in the recent past. Just by touching a person, he told me severely, I could contract chlamydia or gonorrhea - and then just by touching someone else I could pass it on. The nurse was much nicer - cracking jokes and making friends as she inserted various probes into various parts of me, sometimes using orifices I already had, and sometimes creating fresh ones.
From here, down to Shaftsbury Avenue with the trusty housemate to have a gander at the revival of Hair.
The wilder the music, the less audible the lyrics - this was always the riddle of rock ‘n’ roll. In rock’s heyday lyrics were never more than half audible - which might have been a deliberate strategy, as anyone who has checked out the song-sheet to a popular hit like Brown Sugar will know. (Would it ever have been played on the radio if people had been able to hear those slave-whipping words?) Even with today’s recording techniques, it is not always possible to strike the perfect balance, and in concert it is usually difficult to hear what is being sung.
The current production of Hair in the sepulchral Gielgud Theatre is going down well with the tourists, because the dear things don’t expect to understand a word, but there are some long faces among the English-speaking punters. And especially considering that this, we are told, is an authentic Broadway production that has been shipped across to London with its cast intact. Aren’t the Yanks supposed to be good at audibility? Perhaps the acoustics of a West End theatre are simply beyond redemption.
The result is that the first half comes across as a meaningless barrage of Brechtian codswallop as the hippies rush around the stage and into the audience, belting out their rock showtunes and rubbing their hair (aka wigs) in your face, and we are none the wiser as to who they are or what they are up to. There is almost no dialogue.
The design is pleasing but sanitised: in actual fact it looks nothing like the sixties. People were much less fit in those days and had much worse hair, and jeans were not actually cut, as they are today, to fit the human form. Hippy culture didn’t pride itself on its cleanliness - rather the reverse. It was considered an act of significant rebellion not to wash. Thus a certain scuzziness became an essential element of the style. Of course, all this has now been corrected. Everyone in this production looks fit, clean, well-styled and attractive, which a cynic might construe as a return to exactly the kind of conformity that 1967 was trying to oppose. But let that go.
The elegaic second half is much better - very good, in fact. The sweet hippy boy has his hair cut (aka wig removed), is put into uniform, sent to Vietnam, shot dead and sent home in a box. The music is pretty sublime and we can now hear enough of the words to suspect that this is sharp, witty, serious stuff. The climax is a heartbreaking sung version of Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man!” speech, and the show’s hits, when heard in context, are revealed to be much smarter than one had previously imagined. Let The Sunshine In, for example, is a funeral hymn rather than a silly feel-gooder.
All of which brings us back to square one: can musical theatre ever work? And by work I mean, can it ever have half the emotional impact of proper popular music, rock or otherwise?
Personally I only like two musicals, and one of them is the Rocky Horror Show. Much of the pleasure of The Rocky Horror lies in its witty and cultured lyrics, and Richard O’Brien and his collaborators worked hard to come up with musical modes and arrangements to solve the audibility riddle. They went for a retro Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll feel, and although electric guitars were included, they were never allowed to compete with the vocal. Between the 1973 stage version and the 1975 Picture Show, the sound of the guitars was thinned down further to make space for the voices. The result was a rock mix that was light on its toes without being “lite” - a genius hybrid of 30s cabaret, 50s pop and 70s glam. And although it proved to be one of the inspirations for punk rock, no-one, not even O’Brien himself, was ever able to pull off this fusion again.
Hair (I am delighted to be able to say) was before my time, and as I loathe musicals I never listened to the soundtrack. But watching it last night I wondered if it could be a kind of missing link - a vital clue for the construction of a non-naff musical theatre. At least it proves that a musical doesn’t have to be middle-class clap-trap.
Image: The cast of Hair
A still from the current revival of Hair. Note the completely anachronistic jeans
A friend of mine eats a lot of vegetables but can’t afford organic ones, so yesterday I took him to the local farmers’ market, where everything is super-fresh and some of the organic stuff is reasonably priced. But he obviously wasn’t used to markets and, faced by so much riotous produce, froze like a rabbit in the headlights. All he bought was a meagre slice of coconut cake. Later he confessed that he had been disturbed by the sight of so many “unfamiliar vegetables.”
Also this week-end I finally sat down and watched a DVD for the first time in about four months. It was “Greek Pete - A Year In The Life of a Rent-boy.”
I can’t decide whether it would be kitsch of me to review Greek Pete or an unforgivable omission not to. Do we need another documentary about a rent-boy? Do we need another review of one? Awful as it may seem, I think the answer to question one is yes, and the answer to question two is “Maybe, but make it snappy.”
The film is good. Pete is a handsome, uncomplicated lad saving up for his fish and chip shop by selling his dick at (as far as we can tell) the bargain rate of £120 an hour. We see him shag a punter. I can reveal that he does it rather like the Duracell Bunny that went on and on (mechanically but energetically), as you might expect of a twenty-four-year old. We see him hanging out with his amazing posse of loser renter chums and trying to have a relationship with one of them. We see him go to LA and win the title of Escort of the Year - the film’s least convincing moment. Given the fact that every tawdry amateur strip contest is fixed these days, one can’t take this bit seriously. Pete won because he was being filmed. But let that go.
What is really fun about Greek Pete is reading the reviews and watching the interview with the director on the DVD. There’s a hilariously sniffy piece on the Film 4 website that does its best not to be shocked, yet refers to “male prostitution” as a “an age-old subculture about which relatively little is known or documented.” Reader, was there ever a subculture about which so much was known and documented? What more do you want to know? A thousand words later, the reviewer concludes, “the overriding image we're left with is that of a rather shallow young man, operating in a depressingly dreary, soulless and risky environment about which we glean no real insights.” Honey, which insights were you hoping to glean? Stock-market tips?
The interview with the director (Andrew Haigh) is similarly confused. Haigh is asked if he worries that he could be accused of endorsing prostitution. Like, duh! It’s the sort of question you would expect of Harriet Harman. In fact the film does more than endorse prostitution. It does its bit to destigmatise it, and demonstrates how sex-work can be conducted in a sane, cheerful and self-respecting way. This is Pete’s way, and it is offered in contrast to the dysfunction and self-oppression of his friends and his lover. Pete is that rare and long-awaited thing, a role-model for escorts - the first, perhaps, since Joe Dallesandro.
Greek Pete is a fabulous film, because it is a nicely-shot piece about a fabulously entertaining phenomenon about which we know a considerable amount but would always like to know more. Pete is chirpy, funny, nutty, unspoiled and has the perfect looks for the role. With his cartoon-like features, huge neck and pleasantly protruding ears he is more Tom of Finland than Tom Cruise and probably won’t become a film star (although God knows he would if I had anything to do with it). It’s a very English story and it presents a refreshingly scuzzy version of the London we love. This is a London where the renters may be paying £500 a week for that flat in Covent Garden, but they still manage to make it look like a squat. It’s a MALE story, in which the softer things in life are blithely ignored and everyone pursues his agenda with a merry disregard for emotional consequences - and gets away with it, up to a point.
It is these supposed emotional consequences that the puritans among us want to hear more about, because they are forever searching for reasons why we shouldn’t have as much fun with our bodies as we can fit in. But really, are the emotional consequences of selling shags so much worse than the emotional consequences of selling insurance? And is charging for sex any more unnatural than charging for food or shelter? Contrary to popular belief, there is evidence that prostitution exists in the animal kingdom. I have seen with my own eyes documentary footage of a female chimpanzee offering sex to a male who had some monkey-meat she wanted. Either we’re sharing everything, including our bodies, or we’re not.
The final super-tasty detail of this film is that Pete is said now to have given up hustling and to be all set to open that fish and chip shop. To which all I can say is, “Mine’s a medium cod and mushy peas.” Why would a hustler retire at precisely the moment at which he could quadruple his rates? My suspicion is that Pete might well open that chip-shop - but that the lovely proprietor will be forever on the menu.
Image: Greek Pete
OK, so I’m at dinner and my friends start talking about the latest breakthroughs in medical science. I always know that this topic is going to be good for a laugh. Apparently there is research being done into the process of ageing. The boffins have more or less cracked it, and soon they will be able to REVERSE this process. It may be a bit late for old dogs like us, but babies being born today will live to the age of five hundred.
We live in a bitterly hilarious age. I sometimes think we don’t need comedy at all - it’s all around us! It’s in the air we breathe! Let me tell you about the babies being born today. They will be shot up with twenty vaccinations. They’ll be fed a cocktail of sugar, white flour, cow’s milk and genetically modified crap for the rest of their lives - in fact there won’t be any non-toxic food in the future, because the organic crops will all have been raped by GM pollen. Our babies will spend their days glued to a variety of screens, and their nights surrounded by microwaves strong enough to boil a kettle. They will bathe in chlorine and gargle with fluoride. They won’t take any exercise, but they will take aspirin, antibiotics and steroids. They’ll be asthmatic by six, psychotic by twelve and diabetic by eighteen.
They’ll be lucky if they make it to fifty.
In the central hall of the Clacket Lane Service Station on the M25 (anticlockwise side) there are two cash machines. The two machines are right next to each other. RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. The one on the right charges you £1.50 to withdraw cash. The one on the left lets you withdraw for free. They both accept the same cards, and both, when I last checked, were in working order.
People use both. It seems the free machine is no more popular than its daylight-robbery twin.
This troubling phenomenon has been gnawing at my soul for some time. I feel better now that I have shared it with the godzillions who tune into Psychodrome.
[PS: not everyone who frequents service stations is in a zombified daze. Last year my friend (call him "A") picked a man up at the Costa Coffee franchise while we were queueing up for our decaffs, took him into the loos and briskly exchanged details. Later they met for a tantric afternoon. Perhaps this is what people mean when they go on about sex being an anarchic energy. You have to be wide awake to pick up strangers on busy public concourses. And fired up with the excitement of your impending tantric afternoon, you are not likely to part with that unnecessary £1.50]
Another grey day in London!
Another grey day in London!
Another grey day in London!
I’m going home!
So goes the classic old tune by the Pop Tarts. In their case home was New York, which, for all its many horrors, no-one could accuse of being grey. Those of us who live in London cannot sing this song with conviction - for home, for us, is just another grey part of our grey city.
On such days as these, the Londoner casts about for ways to brighten things up. He could have a cup of coffee, but it would leech all the calcium out of his bones. He could redecorate, but the fumes might give him cancer. He could go to Brighton, but what would he do when he got there? Blogging springs to mind. It’s free, it’s a waste of everyone’s time and it annoys people who are suspicious of innovation. What more could one ask?
This blog has a number of threads and one of them, surprisingly, is lexicography. Today, in the spirit of defiant triviality that makes this blog special, I am going to talk about a word which I didn’t invent but which I would like to help shepherd on its way into the language.
The word is “gaslighting.”
I was introduced to this invaluable term by my friend Ceci Dempsey, arguably London’s most glamorous film producer. It refers to the film Gaslight, which starred Ingrid Bergman as an heiress whose evil husband tried to get her out of the way by convincing her that she was insane. Who can forget the outrageous scene where, using some kind of home-made Victorian intercom system, he contrives to whisper into her ear as she sits in her room believing herself to be alone, “Your mother was mad! Your mother was mad! She died in an asylum! She died in an asylum!”?
To “gaslight”, then, is to attempt, by underhand means, to convince another person that he or she is two coupons short of a toaster. And what useful word it is!
To some extent we all gaslight each other every day of the week, but it seems to me that relationship is the arena in which gaslighting romps most free. I can think of at least one boyfriend I have had who, rather than admit he was wrong, would go to great lengths to try to make me believe I was losing my mind. Later, in the cool light of reflection, I did some research and discovered that many of the things he accused me of having forgotten were things that either I had never known or that he himself had remembered incorrectly. Step by laborious step I pieced my sanity back together. I am now more or less immune to gaslighting, and can spot it a mile off.
A term like gaslighting is fun because it has such a colourful provenance. Why not try using it instead of the usual abuse? For example, instead of “That’s a filthy lie, you prick!”, say, “Don’t you try gaslighting me now, you naughty thing!” The person you are talking to will be so interested by the background of this term that he may pause in his gaslighting activities and turn his attention to film history. Better still, he may be so excited to learn a new and useful word that, instead of being defensive, he may admit that he is indeed a gaslighter, after which you will both be able to laugh about it.
The more background you have up your sleeve, the better your chances of cooling that marital meltdown. So when you next see your boyfriend reaching for the frying pan with murderous intent, tell him this: “Gaslight was originally a modest but successful British movie made in 1940 based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton. It was remade just four years later by MGM with Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotton. MGM then tried to suppress the British version, to the extent of buying up and destroying prints and even attempting to destroy the negative. But the British film survived, and is deemed by Halliwell to be the superior version.”
[Note: this piece was written yesterday. It's not my fault that the sun has now come out, spoiling the effect of the first paragraph.]
The set has been torn down and thrown into a skip, the costumes tossed into a large suitcase and entrusted to Muggins here for laundry and safekeeping, and the morning after the cast party, my living room looks (as my mother would say) like the monkey-house at the zoo, all wine-stains and macaroon-crumbs. Like Mud’s Women in Star Trek who ran out of the drug that made them beautiful, I shall now go back to being what I was before: a dull, mousy, stay-at-home person who spends the morning in his dressing-gown. Ie, a writer.
The reviews for Relax were excellent on the whole (see the Relax page on this website) but I did notice what I call the Marmite syndrome rearing its frightful head. Let me explain.
My band The Mystery Girls prompted one music critic to say he would like to line us up against a wall and gun us down; but I also knew of enthusiasts who tattooed our name on their arms. A friend of a friend was of the opinion that my novel State of Independence had the worst opening sentence he had ever read in his life; yet I received letters from readers telling me that the book had helped them through periods of despair. My work resembles Marmite - people either love it or hate it.
In the case of Relax, Gaydar Nation singled out the line “I’m house-proud but I’m not anal” as a complete lapse of taste, whereas WhatsOnStage.com singled the same line out as an absolute humdinger. Reader, that is quite some phenomenon, considering how many lines there are in a 100-minute comedy. I can only conclude that my dialogue is beyond good and evil - that it strikes the human ear in a way that demands a response, yet defies qualitative judgment.
I have yet to work out how to harness this energy - how to turn it into a steady income. Surely something that is beyond good and evil should be earning me at least fifty grand?
If anyone can think of a way of bringing this about, please send me a postcard.
A long Gay Love Spirit workshop this time - six days structured around the theme of family. Of course the word family cuts both ways for a gay person. On the one hand, most of us experienced at the very least a measure of alienation as it dawned on us that we were not the person our parents assumed us to be. On the other, there is such a thing as family of choice, and this is where things get more fun. You are at liberty to go out and get yourself a partner. You could add close friends to the mix. You could include your Hungarian cleaner within your definition of the word (the primary meaning of family, in the Oxford Dictionary, is “Members of a household.”) And it has not escaped our notice that Gay Love Spirit is becoming a family of sorts.
The two-year training is an ambitious project and occasionally cracks appear in the structure of the erection. We experienced some turbulence during this third module. It seemed less sensational than the first two, but that may just be because we are getting used to it. This is still ground-breaking stuff, very Cronenberg, very Videodrome. Kai came right out and said, bold as brass, that he does not consider the evolution of the human race to be complete... and then went on to demonstrate some avenues of self-transformation that I must say worked for me.
I am beginning to find GLS more coherent than Alain Forget (my non-guru guru) and I sense that at some stage I may come to a fork in the road. Forget encourages self-psychoanalysis, which I have found does work up to a point, and which I would recommend over actual psychoanalysis any day of the week. But Kai is teaching us a method of bringing conscious awareness into the cells of the body, a branch of mind-expansion that, when it works, can be a door to another level of awareness that can be opened and closed at will. Both methods are savvy and contemporary, and both point in the same direction. But Forget’s approach is cerebral, and he does ask you to immerse yourself in dry metaphysical texts that are beginning to strike me as provocative for all the wrong reasons. My problem with authority is such that I cannot accept any kind of it except myself - not even if my immoral soul depends on it.
Mystical texts are pesky things. If a sage is truly enlightened he tends to have nothing very concrete to say, as anyone who has read Ramana Maharshi will know. And if he still has one foot in the real world he will always be to some extent full of crap. Enlightenment, contrary to popular belief, does not spring-clean the mind. Nisargadatta Maharaj thought sex was something one should “grow out of.” Terence Grey (aka Wei Wu Wei) believed in benevolent dictatorship. Krishnamurti merrily contradicted himself on every page - often in the course of a single paragraph - and urgently advised us to observe ourselves “without observing ourselves.” Even the saintly Mother Meera (not on Alain Forget’s reading list) turned out to be, it is said, a non-believer in gay equality. Faced with this babble of gnomic white noise, one can be forgiven for rushing with a sense of overwhelming relief into Kai’s morning embodiment class.
This is a method that makes no attempt to provoke or tease, that speaks plainly, that doesn’t buy into guilt, and that is respectful of and curious about the body and what it naturally wants to do and say.
I got exhausted during this module because the sessions overran and there wasn't enough time to sleep, and at times I just collapsed on the sofa, husk-like and spent. But then I looked at what was happening in the room, and the madness of it was so fabulous that I was drawn back in again, like a moth to a flame.
Jeanette Winterson wrote on the body - well I am writing on an airline sick-bag. One day the sick-bag will be auctioned at an enormous price, an art-object straddling the worlds of Samuel Pepys and Tracy Emin.
This blog entry was written last week but I have been away from my computer. At time of writing, Relax is still playing at the Warehouse, but I am off to Berlin - I’ve had enough. A playwright shouldn’t hang around - it’s in poor taste and it puts the actors off. Tennessee Williams (whom I regard as the arbiter of all things except sexual self-respect) used to attend his first nights and then immediately bugger off to Key West. He didn’t wallow. The fact that the most glamorous and talented actors of his day were speaking his lines nightly was of no further interest to him. The play had been realised, and that was that.
I think it must be hard for non-playwrights to imagine what a completely nerve-shredding experience it is to witness one’s masterpiece being performed. The screenwriter undergoes similar anxieties, but at least in his case he knows that the thing has been nailed down. In the theatre nothing is ever nailed down. Performances can blossom or rot. An actor might argue with his wife before leaving for the show; the stage manager might be delayed at London Bridge. I watched ten performances of Relax. It was fun, but it was enough.
Since about ten weeks ago, I have been seeing a guy, and throughout this entire period I have been insanely busy, simultaneously producing and re-writing Relax and working on two screenplays. There haven’t been enough hours in the day. I have been sleep-deprived and I have neglected my friends and family. One day I said to this guy, “I’m usually quite a lazy person” - thinking he would say, “Are you? I really can’t imagine that.” But instead he said, “Yes, I thought you might be.” Reader - how could he tell? I haven’t wasted five minutes since January the First - but I am still, it seems, easily identifiable as a slacker. Perhaps it’s because an authentically industrious person would do the same work without making a fuss.
I’m actually not at all proud of my ability to run round like a blue-arsed fly and get by on six hours’ sleep. I regard such behaviour as unnatural and a bit of a waste of a life. Homo Sapiens is a peaceful, contemplative monkey who is designed to exert himself for maybe a couple of hours a day - a little blackberrying perhaps, or the occasional mammoth-hunt. Farming is unnatural, commerce is unnatural, and so are sophisticated stage comedies set in seaside guesthouses. But at least comedy helps us to relax, and reminds us that we should be picking berries and staring into space.
[Note: my report on the latest Gay Love Spirit workshop - the reason for my Berlin trip - will be posted tomorrow.]
Ever since my late twenties I have had pretensions to spirituality. Recently my current non-guru guru Alain Forget has been teasing me by saying that it is more spiritual to pursue career success than retreat to a monastery - because, of course, there's no point in repressing and denying your desires. Forget thinks that there is only one solution to the problem of success, and that is to go out and get it. If you are unified within yourself, it will all fall into place.
This theory is all very well when things are going your way, but when they're not it's the most annoying theory in the world.
However, the events of the past week have suggested to me that he is right. I have been meditating daily now for about two and a half years, and indulging in all sorts of mind-expanding activities, yet I can report that nothing made me feel as good as getting good reviews for my play. This confirms that I am after all a shallow person whose happiness is entirely dependent on outside factors. I am no more spiritual than a gnat.
"It's a difficult age to be single."
It's 12 days since my last bloggerie, and everything has happened since then, but I can report that I am still alive.
Relax is playing to good-size audiences, who, I can report, seem to be made up largely of local theatre enthusiasts. This is a new experience for me. Lovers From Hell and Wild Fruit were attended almost exclusively by gay men in their forties, but this is something slightly different: straight couples who enjoy watching a story unfold onstage. At first I was terrified that they would walk out, but then as the week wore on I began to realise that, as the Gaydar Nation reviewer put it, the play has more in common with Rising Damp than with traditional gay theatre.
In fact, so far there has only been one instance of audience members not returning after the interval, and this was a group of three gay men who were heard muttering that the cast wasn't sexy enough. Presumably they had paid their £12 in the hope of the traditional glimpse of cock - the sixpence in the Christmas pudding of queer theatre. But no. If they had stayed, they would have seen the lovely Mark Leeson (a stylish actor who gives us, in Relax, a kind of English suburban Stanley Kuwalski) in his underwear. But not his bits. Because you know what? I'm through with gaysploitation. Tried it, didn't like it.
Image: Mark Leeson in his underwear in Relax, admired by james Holmes
Mark Leeson in his underwear, admired by James Holmes. Photo by Michele Martinoli
The level of your creativity is determined by your ability to tolerate chaos.
Today I go to Clapham to buy a wig for the role of the ageing houseboy. Of course I am excited. It has taken me all these years to realise that a comedy without a wig is not really a comedy at all.
The more you write, the more specific you get. Or the madder. About two years ago I decided that a comedy wasn't really a comedy unless it was set in a hotel, guesthouse, or other place of public accomodation. Now I would go further. What a good comedy needs is a duel of wits between two conflicted middle-aged closet-cases, stuck in the middle of nowhere and lusting over the RAC man.
I know I'm probably wrong, but such is the effect of slaving obsessively over a project for a number of years, and then finally - tremblingly - approaching the first night. (Friday, Reader. Buy your tickets via the link above...)
Image: The "Relax" banner on the wall of the Warehouse Theatre
Click here to see the "Relax" trailer!
Today I gave an interview to Gaydar. It was just one of those email interviews but I noticed that after doing it I felt so much better. Presumably this is because, along with the rest of the human race, I am an attention-seeker. Who cares that in order to experience the thrill of being interviewed I had to write a play, find a theatre and pay a press agent an undisclosable sum? - it still felt good. Afterwards I sat back and noticed that I was breathing properly again. Big, deep, satisfied breaths. Ah, Reader! - the oxygen of publicity!
The irony is that one spends nine-tenths of one's life gasping for that oxygen, and then the play goes on and one positively hyper-ventilates. There is, I would argue, no literary form quite as exposing to a writer as a play. (No-one cares who wrote a movie, and books don't have opening nights). Playwrights are like Shakespeare's rats that "ravined down their proper bane." We gasp for it, we lie, cheat and steal for it - and then when it comes we run screaming from it.
I can't decide whether this entry is a sober record of my production (ie, a plog) or a philosophical nugget (ie, a blog). So I shall put it on both pages.
My grandfather used to say, the difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional can do it even when he doesn't feel like it - and the amateur can't do it even when he does.
Today was the sort of day that, in the normal course of events, I would spend in bed. Splitting headache, mind foggy, damp weather. But I am in full-scream-ahead mode, so bed was not an option. I re-wrote the end of Act One of my play and started a new draft of my screenplay, ignoring the headache. On these occasions you may not be intuitive or brilliant, but you can get a lot of donkey-work done.
In the middle of the day I had to take a short bus-ride to return some keys, and this afforded me with an opportunity to switch off and let my tortured mind wander a little. I looked out of the window and enjoyed my random thoughts. For example: how nice it is that men stand in doorways outside offices to smoke cigarettes! It makes them look like hustlers!
And then I thought, well, obviously that doesn't apply to all the men who stand in doorways smoking. Wearing a cheap suit does diminish the effect. But it is surprising how many men you can imagine turning tricks once the thought gets into your head. Presumably this is because men's dress is so much less expressive than women's. Women have to spend their lives agonising about how provocatively to dress, whereas a man's less sensual clothes give him the freedom of ambiguity.
Week 2 of rehearsals comes to a close. For two weeks we have been in a kind of limbo. For one-and-a-half days a week we have had James Holmes (our lead), and for the other three-and-a-half, because James is doing a Pinter in Derby, we have had to rehearse the four supporting actors with a stand-in (the lovely Antonio Castaldo). Now things start getting interesting. Phil and Dom, Tony, Mark and Nadia are going to Derby for a full week to rehearse with James. Next week, finally, James comes back to London.
All this would be a frightful inconvenience - well, it is - but the point is, Mr Holmes is worth it. He played the role in the one-act version five years ago and has stuck with the project through various revisions and readings. So now he's really good at it - it's like he's been playing the part for five years. He can pick up a new page of Sandy dialogue and get it deliriously right first time.
We did some press shots on Monday. James sometimes photographs well, and sometimes the camera misses his gorgeous subtlety. We got a few pictures of him that I like. The one below, I think, looks like the picture of a star - which is what he is.
Image: James Holmes in Relax
photo by Michele Martinoli
Today, a riotous photo session down at the Warehouse, with trusted friend Michele Martinoli snapping. We did some posed-set-ups for the press in the theatre itself and then went back to the rehearsal room for some casual shots for the programme. The actors, of course, understood exactly what was required: not so much a rehearsal as a series of glamorous moments that will look like a rehearsal when reproduced in tasteful black and white. The five cast members are clever and talented and totally get the play. The atmosphere is good.
There's no such thing as:
- a free lunch
- an ex-rentboy
- a famous contemporary playwright.
Yesterday I ran out of cheques. Last week the bank's fraud department went onto red alert because I paid for my advertising campaign. Welcome to the world of off-West-End theatre production.
If you are a Pyschodrome completist, you may be interested to know that I am currently writing two blogs, both on the same website. Alongside this one (which I am reserving for my more philosophical side) I am also keeping a production log (a plog?) on the Relax page. There you can read about our new cast, brushes with the press and other excitements. But when the production makes me philosophical, I shall blog about it here.
Last night I smoothed out a glitch in my account at Lulu.com, so I can now proceed with my limited edition of the play, which I am producing as a gift for investors and angels. (Hurry! It is still not too late to invest in this show!) I have decided to dedicate it to my grandfather, because it's a full-on comedy, and it was from my Grandad that I learnt my stage-comedy first principles.
My grandfather taught me two things. Firstly, that comedy should be played straight - not such a secret, but always worth bearing in mind. Secondly, and far more important, he came from an era when playwrights wrote for actors rather than for themselves - a profoundly profound factor in the equation. He made sure his plays were fun to act, and always fixed things so that each member of the cast would have at least one moment when they were the centre of the action. As a result, his plays have never stopped being performed. Somewhere in the Australian outback or the wilds of Reigate there is always a group of people, amateur or professional, doing a Kenneth Horne. I know, because I get a share of the royalties.
And this leads me to further profound thoughts about performance-based writing. Most artists have to ask themselves if their first loyalty is to themselves or their audience. A playwright has a third alternative: he can write for the actors. And if you do, it's a great feeling. An audience will always contain both critics and the critical, but an actor's agenda is to be open to all the good qualities in your play. Actors love good writing, love being given a decent character to sink their fangs into. The moment an actor picks up your play is the moment when all your hard work starts to be rewarded. Hooray for actors.
(PS: Of course you have to choose the right ones. During the Relax auditions, a rather grouchy guy came in and read for us. After, Phil said, "So what did you think of the play?" The guy replied, "Actually, I thought it was a bit long. Have you thought of cutting it?" We didn't cast him.)
One of the best bits of Michael Atavar's book How To Be An Artist (see the final entry of my 2009 blog for a full review) is when he suggests that you pretend to be someone else when making difficult phone-calls. Well, he doesn't quite say that. His concept is that you create a character for yourself, a persona, preferably confident and colourful and likeable, and you put this on like a mask as you face difficult challenges like asking for money. You dramatise yourself, see yourself as a character in a work of fiction. This gives you distance and allows you to experience both success and failure with equanimity, which in turn gives you reserves of strength and resilience. If it's just a fictitious character who gets turned down for a big grant, it hurts less. If it's just a character who maybe comes across as eccentric or clownish once in a while, that's less humiliating. You can't always get it right.
I think this is profoundly profound. It's more than just a handy tip. It's a way of living your life. It could only have been suggested by someone who had done a lot of meditating.
Tomorrow is the Tooth of the month, a day on which I always blog if I can because I like to call it that. So if I have a moment I shall share some fascinating thoughts about the secret of performance-based writing.
Want to know how to get through a cold winter? Take on a project that you really care about and that really stretches you. You won't feel the cold. Or at least, you won't care.
This genius solution is adapted from the venerable scientifically-proven fact that if you stub your toe in a disco it is less painful than if you stub it at home. Because you don't care.
One could extend this theory indefinitely. For example, if someone pushes ahead of you in the queue at the post office, well, it makes a difference if it's George Clooney or just any old loser.
One could while away a pleasant hour (if one had one) musing on these things. For example, how glamorous would someone have to be in order for them pushing ahead of you in the post office to be a pleasure rather than an annoyance? Clearly if Peter André queue-barged it would just be annoying. But what about those in-betweenies? Would one be annoyed or charmed, if it was, for example, Gwynneth Paltrow? (annoyed). A member of Take That? (charmed). Mick Jagger? (can't decide).
Sorry if I scared you with Wednesday’s blog. I am currently living what I believe is known as a rich emotional life, and sometimes things just come out.
I am pursuing a course of action suggested to me by my spiritual advisor Alain Forget, and confirmed by my experiences on Gay Love Spirit’s two-year training. The idea is that pursuing your desires is the first step, if not the only step, of the spiritual life. Monsieur Forget advocates it on the basis that any kind of spiritual pretension is nonsensical if you are carrying repressed or denied agendas around with you. The boys at Gay Love Spirit go one further: our desires are in themselves holy, and will take us exactly where we need to go.
People have such a warped idea of what desire is. They imagine that a (broadly speaking) tantric practice is just an excuse to fuck around. But desire takes other forms. There is the desire, for example, to live the life that you yourself actually want to live, to go beyond fear and walk away from the limitations of the past, to take a walk outside your mind.
Alain Forget said, Play with your fear.
Kai Erhardt and Volker Moritz said, Play with your edge.
Alain Forget is splendid because he is a spiritual advisor (a contemporary secular mystic, to be precise) who wants his pupils to be ambitious and successful in the real world. Gay Love Spirit are fabulous because they are conducting an experiment in love. To be enrolled in just one of these two schools would be enough to make a boy’s head spin; to be enrolled in both simultaneously...
So much has been lost, and we live in a pigsty of a world.
Here is a list of unusual terms used on this website. One I have personally created for your pleasure. The others I have mined from the obscure depths of our race memory. Unlike the man who took out a copyright on the words “gay tantra”, and who presumably expects us to pay him a fee whenever we tickle our boyfriends’ arses, I offer these words to the public gratis and free of charge.
TO SNUDGE: a verb meaning to be idle, as in “She snudged around the house until teatime.” This word, with its definition and example, are taken direct from Dr Johnson’s dictionary, which recently celebrated a centenary, despite the fact that it was published 255 years ago (I’m being facetious: the centenary was Johnson’s). You can imagine how excited I was to discover this word. It is particularly good in conjunction with hyper-modern coinings such as blog. For example, “I spent the morning blogging and snudging.”
TO GLOTZ: a verb meaning to look at or watch, as in, “I spent my gap-year in Florence glotzing the marble buttocks of Michelangelo statues.” I like it because it can be used to emphasise or question the act of looking, as in, “I would not normally glotz this kind of thing;” or, “I have completely stopped glotzing TV.” I cannot find it in a dictionary, yet I do not remember inventing it. Did I hear it in another language? Dream it? Is it yiddish? Is it from Nabokov? (It appears not be from A Clockwork Orange). All I can say is that I suspect it of being a hybrid of “glut” and “goggle,” suggesting a greedy or even addictive mode of looking. Any information as to its origins would be gratefully received.
GODZILLION: a bona fide creation of my own, this new noun was crafted for your convenience by the careful splicing of “zillion” and “Godzilla”. Of course we will always continue to coin new words to signify a number more huge than the previously coined one. However, “a godzillion” may be confidently used to signify a monstrously huge amount - an amount so huge, in fact, that catastrophic consequences are subtly implied. To some extent this is the noun equivalent of “humungous”, but with a useful topnote of anxiety which the older word lacks. As such it is a very contemporary word, which I fully expect to see hoovered up into the vernacular. Example: “Please tick the box indicating how many sexual partners you have had in the past 12 months: 0 - 5; 6- 10; 11 - 100; a godzillion.”
(PS: Some months after writing this blog entry, I took the trouble to google "godzillion" and found that people have been using it all over the place for some time...)
Because a week without blogging is like a lumberjack without a moustache, I shall soldier on, exhausted and husk-like though I currently am. Just don’t expect me to be coherent.
Today’s nugget of wisdom is once again from Wei Wu Wei, whom I found, this morning, on uncharacteristically jolly form:
“So when we realise the truth, when the understanding, crowding in upon us, bursts into flame and illumines our vision, what is our reaction? What could it be but an immense roar of laughter? If it is not that, if it is any other kind of reaction to knowledge - beware of it!”
I celebrated New Year with Gay Love Spirit in Berlin. It was of course beyond sublime. I was out there on the roof at midnight in three inches of snow, wearing only a small pendant designed to stabilise my vibrational field. Cold? Who cares when you’re warm inside?
I am, broadly speaking, a comedy writer, and to some extent the glories of Gay Love Spirit can be discussed in the comic style (see quotation above). Irreverence is the cornerstone of Zen. But my way of writing cannot really do justice to what is going down in that lovely airy warehouse. The programme is both as easy as rolling off a mattress and as hard as riding a tiger.
Kai Erhardt remarked, “There’s nothing new about sex, but maybe there could be new ways of dealing with it.”
There is a rhythm to a GLS workshop that is profoundly disturbing, in the best sense. A class in erotic massage is one thing, but to do it immediately after playing a subtly terrifying mind-game is quite another. I was disturbed to my marrow, then I had all my ambivalences prodded, then I was force-fed pleasure, delight, excitement and connection. Finally I dissolved in a quivering pool of psychosomatic goo, just like Dr Jessup in Altered States. “Alles in Ordnung, Dr Jessup?”
It seems that the medicine being offered is entirely suited to my constitution. I can’t get enough. Four times a year I arrive back in the UK, wild-eyed and sleep-deprived, feeling that I will never be quite the same. And I won’t.
A few of us stayed on for an extra night after the workshop had ended, and the following morning we discovered a new way of having fun - as you do. We decided to stop fussing about trying to remember each other’s names and instead address each other nationally. Thus our Italian friend is now just called Italy, our Mexican friend Mexico, and so on. There are a number of Brits on the course. One of us has bagged “England” and I have bagged “London”. Others who join the game later will perhaps have to make do with less glamorous nicknames such as Holloway Road and Ealing Broadway
We know that the use of our family name, on its own, makes us feel formal and unloved (I wonder why?). But how does the use of nation-names make us feel? So far it seems to feel rather racy. Who can forget that Shakespeare’s Antony called Cleopatra Egypt? How telling it was when he used the form in his death-scene! Was he in love with her, or with some idea of Egypt which he had formed long before they ever met? “I am dying, Egypt, dying...” - marvelous stuff! And wouldn’t it be fun to use it during sex, as in, “A little more lube, Mexico?” Or, “I am coming, Belgium, coming!”
Ah, New Year!
I remember from long-ago Shakespeare lessons a great moment in King Lear, when the silly old monarch, enraged by the disrespect of his daughters, blusters and threatens: “I will do such things...!” He adds that he’s not quite sure exactly what things he’ll do - but he’ll do them. And I often feel like that.
I used to be embarrassed by this feeling. Shouldn’t we all know exactly what we are going to do? Shouldn’t we announce our plans and stick to them? But now I am looser in so many ways. Surely it is rather charming to be a little unclear as to one’s intentions. This insight is very liberating.
For example, people have occasionally encouraged me to write my autobiography, and I have always found this a dreadfully alarming idea. The very thought makes one want to lie down. But I am letting go of anxiety. Yes, there will shortly be a splendid life-history, full of charming anecdotes and observations. There will be memories of the drag bars of divided Berlin and tales of the beer-soaked carpets of the rock‘n’roll dives of 80s London. There will of course be sexual revelations, increasingly scandalous, climaxing in the present day. It will be called “Refusing to be Fabulous.”
I will publish a slim volume of poetry called “Recently Closed Windows.”
I will write a medium-thickness “how-to” book, full of clever strategies for living your life without going stark staring mad. The working title is “How To Get Through The Day Without Screaming” although I appreciate that I will have to come up with a better one.
One of my most exciting projects is a review of all my discarded projects, entitled “All Those Wasted Years.” This will be a tome as fat as War and Peace. There will be synopses and critical appraisals of everything I have ever written, down to the last beer-mat scribble, along with a candid record of the response of my agent, producers and publishers. I will include works that for one reason or another I never even showed my agent, including my five-volume sci-fi epic, The Life and Opinions of Larry the Dog, which I wrote during the years when I didn’t even want to be a writer, and photocopied and gave out to my friends. (Note: the things you write when you are trying not to be a writer have a particular charm.)
I will write another how-to book, all about the erotic massage of the male body (clue: which part of the male anatomy is massaged most frequently and with least skill?) When it is published my family will disown me.
I will publish my blog (this, of course, will be a “blook”) under the title Blogging and Snudging. I like this because it sounds a bit like Shopping and Fucking.
I will put on a collection of short plays, six over two nights, called The Festival of Neurotica. The collection will contain Complex (my incest play from Lovers From Hell), an extended version of Donut that spans twenty years, and four new one-act plays. Evening One will be called Mystery Girls and Evening Two will be called Fear of Pleasure.
I will write a long novel in the verbose nineteenth-century style about a bunch of high-class people whose lives are wrecked by a series of unfortunate coincidences. It will of course be called Snot Fair.
I will write to twelve famous people and ask each one to confess his or her filthiest sexual fantasy. Then I will commission Roger Payne to make illustrations of each. I will produce a set of dinner-plates with Roger’s illustrations on them, sell a limited edition of 100 at £1,000 a pop, and give half the money to lobby-groups to fighting the criminalisation of sex-work. The project will be called “Licking The Platter Clean.” (The other half of the money will fund my Festival of Neurotica).
I appreciate that this is all a bit post-modern, but hey, if you can’t beat ‘em you might as well join ‘em.
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