Urban Magic

Getting Out of the House Occassionally…

Posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 in London | 2 Comments

So, what with this whole RADA business, and what with Christmas back with the parents and this whole writing-Urban-Magic-3 business, I have neither blogged on anything Londonish for a while.  And while I could do a specific entry, I figured that, while I have this massive archive of photos taken before my camera broke, I may as well put them online and write about them sorta within the caption, with the photos leading the topic rather than visa versa, as a sort of taster for things to come… With which in mind…

Chinatown in London is pretty small, in the grand scheme of things.  It’s just to the North of Leicester Square, and still has many hints of the old city about it, not least in the large number of alleys and rat-runs that wiggle through the area.

Piccadilly Circus is, on the other hand, traffic-heavy, tourist-heavy, and just generally somewhere that locals attempt to avoid.  I mean, cool, in a spectacular look-at-the-shiny-lights kinda way, but unless you’ve gone there specifically to glom on the diversity of mankind, (and oh boy is mankind diverse at Piccadilly Circus) it is usually a place that is passed through on the way to somewhere else.

There aren’t many arcades left in London – proper arcades in the old sense of internally contained passages lined with shops, usually selling extremely silly items at very high prices – but the majority of those surviving are cluttered round Piccadilly and St. James, of which the Burlington Arcade is both the largest, most impressive, and silliest.  Knowing nothing about antiques, I can’t say whether the collection of cigar trimmers, silver pots, gem-studded jewelry and vases are antiques, or just… well… what they are… whatever that is…there was an antique arcade at the Angel, which from the outside looked every bit huge a yellow-brick walk-through bank, but alas in recent years, it has closed down and its fate remains, as far as I know, debatable.

Alright, Hoxton.  Or ‘trendy trendy’ Hoxton as it is less commonly known.  Hoxton went through a long period of being a dump on the north edge of Old Street, but has in recent areas been rediscovered and made into a hip and fashionable place full of converted loft flats, old Hawksmore-esque churches, vibrant street markets, ethnic diversity, artistic independence and reasonable proximity to public transport.  Now it is a place where worlds meet – every language, every age, every wealth band and every taste and style, all moving politely round each other through its refurbished terraced streets and beneath its grey council blocks.

I love this image, and regret that my zoom wasn’t wide enough to do it better.  It is the welcome sign that visitors pass underneath on their way to Guys Hospital, just by London Bridge.  Welcome to Guys – and to McDonalds.  What a union was herein made.

In Praise of… Hamlet

Posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

Okay, so as established, that Shakespeare dude knows his stuff.  In fact, as a writer, while there’s a lot of praise for him, it is intensely irritating to sit there listening to so many bloody good lines being churned out casually by this guy with the sad thought going round and round your head that whoops, that’s another brilliant idea that someone else has already done.

(Incidentally, for anyone wondering, Pericles was, from a lighting point of view, tonnes of fun, better than expected and I deny all and any knowledge of the (minor) focus hole DSL.  And I hate Strand 520s.  I mean, for any future employers out there, I can use them – hell, I have got chase effects down! – but seriously, snottiness about the ETC Ion aside, it really is a wonderful bit of kit.  But other than that, Pericles went very well!  Nerdy moment over.)

Anyway, point is, Hamlet was on TV this Christmas, with Mr David Tennant examining the skull et. al., as I’m sure many, many people spotted, and yes, I watched it, spiritually munching popcorn all the way, and yes, it was pretty bloody stonking.  Which I should have kinda expected, really, because (entirely by accident, honest) I’d seen it before.

I am not what you’d call a neurotic theatre-goer – I ought to be, considering my chosen profession – but I don’t have enough money and don’t have enough time considering that RADA likes to work us six days a week until silly o’clock and to be honest, I’m not a queing-from-3-a.m. kinda girl.  But!  The RSC does, praise be unto it, do £5 tickets for the under 25s, and I did, by accident, have a friend studying at Warwick University when Hamlet opened in Stratford and was invited to come watch a football match with her that weekend and one thing led to another… and before I really knew what was happening, it was 7 a.m. outside the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon and we were doing penguin impressions to keep warm.  And playing cheat – you would not believe the ruthlessness the cheat can produce from otherwise perfectly civilized people!  My god!

Anyway.  Stratford Upon Avon is, in many ways, a Very Silly Place.  For a start, you have to take a train from Marylebone and, I kid you not, I was delayed forty minutes because there was a cow on the line.  This may not seem a particularly radical thing, but as someone who grew up in Hackney, I only ever really see cows on the side of milk bottles, and even then struggle to find the connection.  On arrival in the station you step out into the typical car park designed to destroy any optimism, walk up to a road of fairly standard houses that could be anywhere in the world, turn right for cheap B&B land and left for Yea Olde Historicale Centre.  And yes, before you know it, you’re sitting outside the Shakespeare Arms drinking coffee from a mug adorned with a porcelain ruff and being offered a souvenir quill.  Walking round the town, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that this is a place made economically viable by only two things – Shakespeare and swans.  And let’s not under-rate the swans!  The swans are not just numerous and impressive, but they know their market and have an almost cat-like appreciation of humanoids.  (Towit; they appreciate our usefulness but fail to fully grasp or care what we get from the relationship.)  When I was still of that special age when you had that special haircut known as Mum-Did-My-Fringe, I had an aunt who lived in nearby Banbury, and whenever we visited we would go to Stratford to ride the waterways and look for kingfishers and dragonflies.  Let’s not underestimate the swans.

However, remove the swans and Shakespeare, and this canal town would quickly, I suspect, lose its economic rationale.  But if ever the Royal Shakespeare Company justified its presence in Stratford, it did it with Hamlet.  Commercially and for sheer stonking theatrical value.  I was, I admit, a bit weary of seeing it, not least because of the sheer mass of publicity surrounding the fact that David Tennant was playing the lead part.  There’d been so much speculation that actually, in the midst of almost too much information, I kinda felt I knew nothing at all.  My expectation was both increased and dented by the fact that by 11 a.m. on the day we got our tickets, there was a queue stretching around the block behind us, and the thought just kept on sneaking into the back of the mind that at least some of these people might be willing to commit unlawful acts with sharpened sticks to get their hands on my ticket.  Getting my ticket, by the by, was almost KGB-esque in its enforcement – it turns out that the under-25 Shakespeare crowd have quite a history of duplicity on their side.

Anyway, we got it, and while waiting for the play to begin sat, in the mild drizzle, eating fish and chips and looking at the swans as, we felt, was our purpose.  (And if any of you are wondering about the football match, the blue team from the Shakespeare Institute beat the red team hands down.  Tragically.)  While this was happening, I discovered the other reason why me and the countryside have never really got on; I am allergic to it.  People think I jest when I say this – I really don’t.  Take me away from the exhaust fumes of any major city and I become asthma attack ground zero.  I just can’t cope with all that oxygen, it’s like suddenly trying to force-feed a starved pirahna.

Which leads me, entirely irrelevantly, to another sideways rant – what idiot, what total git, decided to make asthma patients pay for their medications on the grounds that it’s a ‘controllable condition’?  Sure, it’s controllable – so long as I don’t walk faster than four miles an hour, do any strenuous physical activity, laugh too heartily, or enter any environment to which my body is not already perfectly adapted.  It’s controllable, in much the same way clothes only need washing if you wear them.  Anyway – end of rant.

By the time we got into the theatre – many pictures of many people looking dramatically fraught on many walls – massive quantities of drugs had brought my respiratory system under some kind of control.  We did the regular trawl of the souvenir shop, failed to buy wooden swords, maps of Yea Olde Englande or teaclothes stitched with the face of Mr Shakespeare himself wearing a smile almost worthy of the Mona Lisa for its ambiguity.  When the bell went we were bundled inside, and every seat in the theatre was pretty much packed even before we’d worked out where the student seats were kept.  I couldn’t see a spare.  I kept on wheezing a bit.  The lights went down.  The play kicked off.

First impression was sympathy for the lighting designer.  The director of Hamlet was clearly a man who believed in practical on-stage lighting and had thus armed all of Act 1 Scene 1 with torches that they could point this way or that rather than using any actual rigged lamps.  Which worked brilliantly!  But must have been rather boring for the lighting designer to plot.  Then lights up and in trot the cast and off they go and it was all warming up nicely right up to the moment when everyone buggers off and Hamlet goes centre stage, takes a deep breath…

… and collapses.  I mean, we all know that Hamlet isn’t going to end well, it goes from bad to worse and then some.  But there was that moment, when suddenly out of no where there was bundle of pure grief curled up centre stage, that I forgot I was in a theatre, forgot I was having asthma troubles, forgot that my socks were soggy and the seats were really a bit too  close together and was just a gonner, completely caught up in the play and everything that happened.  I’ve seen some brilliant stuff in my time, and a lot of merely very good stuff, but the thing that separates the brilliant from the very good is that I don’t remember the brilliant stuff as if it was in a theatre.  I don’t remember the crowds or the queues or the interval drinks or the lighting or anything like that; I just remember feelings and images that have stuck with me to this day.

Hamlet may be the greatest play ever written – I dunno, I don’t know how you’d go about judging.  There are bits, let’s face it, which could do with the blue pencil.  But there are bits of everything that could, and even the blue pencil bits are more about bladder control than actual textual content.  And even the best play ever written can be ballsed up by a rubbish production.  (And arguably the worst play in the world cannot be saved by a brilliant production.)  I’m sure there are plenty of people who left the theatre – and turned off their TV on boxing day – feeling that their day had not been brightened and their heartbeat had not reached triple figures, or that a stage play for TV is something that will never be as alive as the real thing.  And there were differences; of course there were, and that is to be expected and probably, looked for.  But for those who found themselves sitting on the edge of their seats, trying very hard to remember to breathe, I hope that you and I both were part of a large crowd, tempted to feel indefinable things that we might never have felt before, or feel again.

Teenage Snogging Vampires

Posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 in Writing | 2 Comments

I suspect I may cause mild offense to some with this post, so let me say right here, right now, the necessary truths.

Stephanie Mayer has sold more books, is more read and beloved, than I have imagination to fully grasp.  The fact that people read her books like they were sent from Mount Sinai are a testimony to the fact that they have tuned into something that most writers, myself include, haven’t tapped, and that is a remarkable achievement, whether intended or otherwise, and she deserves nothing but respect for it.  Vampires can be cool… certainly of all the fantastical creatures to waltz across the silver screen, they seem to have the best dress sense and weaponry, and the vampire myth has in its time offered, and continues to offer, cool and interesting ways of telling cool and interesting stories.

But!

… and this is an entirely personal but…

I am so bloody bored of hormonal teenage snogging vampires.  In fact, I am bored of so many kinds of vampire… dark, broody vampires who answer with a maximum of three words at any given time…

“How’s the bloodlust?”

“Under control.”

“Did you enjoy your book on the philosophy of Socrates?”

“Yes.”

“Are you concerned about killing your own brother in order to stop occult powers of evil sweeping across the world?”

“No.  Crossbow.  Now.”

In much the same way often the best way to appear smart in the face of sheer intellectual befuddlement is to nod and smile as though you are wise enough to appreciate the argument being presented, without wishing (though it is within your power) to tear it to shreds, so it seems the key to being cool vampire-style is saying almost nothing at all while looking quietly tormented by What Must Be Done.  Black leather is in; cardigans are out.  Blood is being drunk because of insatiable lust, and you can just bet that there’s a lot of heavy breathing and cleavage happening at the same time.  I mean, I’m not a fan of the vampires = sex argument, because I think vampires if done well can = something more, but I gotta say, the recent trend is certainly towards the sex end of bloodlust, ideally with a bit of emotional trauma thrown in.  Ultimate relationship challenge!  Brad, I love you… but if we fall in love truly one of us will have to die…!  Generally, if your vampire is wearing leather, s/he is into technology, reacts badly to ultraviolet light and has really straight hair.  At the other end of the spectrum, there’s your vampire in big-flowing-robes-with-knobbly-bits, who likes intoning in ancient languages while standing in the middle of occult symbols, and will often speak in sentences of more than three words, but without any particular meaning…

“How was your book?”

“I read between its pages the firey truth of the fall of our kind, and tasted the dust of damnation.”

“So… good, then?”

“As good as moonrise to the wolf.”

“That good, huh?”

“The moon is to the wolf what the falafal is to the lonely traveller upon the suburban highstreet at two a.m..  Both hunger.  Neither are grateful in the morning.”

And so on.  Only without the sensible connotations.  Yet this is still a generalisation – vampires have taken every possible form.  If you were a teenage girl at roughly the age I was, you would have had to bury your head in the syrup sponge and custard not to have found out every detail of the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at any average school dinner; vampires then went through a period of killing werewolves and visa versa, they fell in love, the conducted horrible experiments, they walked in the day, they walked only in the night, they walked in the day and the night but didn’t like either, they had swords, they had guns, they had magic, they had machines.  Dracula’s a fine example of this flexibility, and also, perhaps, of why vampires endure so long in our literature.  The guy is just next to impossible to kill!  Crosses, stakes, garlic, sunlight, even when you think you’ve got him there’s always some prat who goes and spills blood in the wrong place and poof, there you are, back dealing with an intractable enemy again.  The rules are there to be perpetually bent.

A historical footnote… there was indeed a Vlad the Impaler, who was killed in the fifteenth century by the invading Ottomans, thus, in my mind, giving brownie points to one of my favourite collapsed empires… even if they didn’t make it into the literature that followed…

All that said!  Like a hypocrite (and attempting to disguise my shame by admitting to it) I can see the use of vampires.  I’m even prepared to use them in the world of Urban Magic.  But my question is this… if humans can only take blood types that match their own, surely the same rule should be applied to vampires?  Imagine how difficult it would be to haunt the night if you had to stop in front of your prey with a cry of…

“Now, trembling mortal, I shall drink your blood!  But can I just check… it is A- isn’t it?”

Let’s not get excited…

Posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 in Writing | 5 Comments

Alright, I’ve known about this a long, long time, but haven’t blogged about it for the very good reason that, in all honesty, it will probably never happen.

What will probably never happen?  (I hear the strangled cry.)

To quote a sage… make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait…

After all, the reasons why it’ll probably never happen are numerous and complex!  The sheer amount of money involved, the constraint of time, recession, the credit crunch, the demands of the market and the audience, studio’s whims, development hell, the struggle of getting together a team, the decided lack of teenage vampires snogging, I mean, the odds against it ever happening are immense.  Douglas Adams, when it happened to him, took twenty five years to get anything done and even then the budget was cut and he was, sadly, dead, by the time anything came of it.  People have spent years and years of their lives hoping that there’ll be movement and then when, if it does happen, as usually it doesn’t, it goes straight to DVD with an embarrassed cough and occasionally gets borrowed from the local video shop by men in dirty anoraks who pretend its for a friend.  There are many, many forces against this, which brings me back to my original thesis…

… don’t get excited.

But on the other hand, if something does come of it (and let’s face it, it’d be absolutely fantastic if something did, and I have officially promised to buy the most ridiculous pair of socks ever made by man in the eventuality) (and a new plug for my sink – thinking big here)  … if something does come of it then people might raise their eyebrows and say ‘why Kate, you must have known about this for eons, why didn’t you say something’ and then how daft would I look?

So yes.  A producer in Los Angeles has bought the film option for A Madness of Angels, and now that ink is actually on the contract, I will freely admit that I am absolutely thrilled and delighted by this development.  With, of course, the caveat as stipulated above!   In pratical terms, from where I’m sat, this means very little.  I will sit and carry on writing as usual with my fingers crossed and if something does come of it, there shall be much rejoicing, and if, despite all the best work of the producer (who seems, in case you’re wondering, extremely lovely and passionate about the project, hurrah!) the studios just go ‘you want to do what to the streets of London?’ then…

… I am still young, and this bodes well.

There is just one last thought I have to share on this subject, which comes from the gentleman in his life, who, on hearing about the contract, cackled shamelessly and in between his gasps of breath intoned in his most booming Hollywood movie-trailer voice…

‘Vin Diesel IS Matthew Swift!’

He then, needless to say, went on laughing.

Butin a good way.

Merry Christmas!

Posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

So it’s that silly time of year again.  Another solar cycle elapsed, another Christian-pagan-Western celebration thingy celebrated, ridiculous amounts of food eaten, presents unwrapped hurrah! and more silly TV watched than the mind can comfortably conceive.  And maybe some singing.  If you’re lucky.  Or unlucky.  Depending on your point of view.

Anyway, despite being a decent not-quite-Jewish-enough atheist, and despite knowing that yes, it’s essentially a commercial binge-fest, I love Christmas.  It’s one giant conspiracy to have, for just one day, as much fun, brotherly love and familial affection, yay, though said affection be manifested in TV box sets and the ritual watching of Dr Who, as is possible.  And all of this seems like an excellent thing.

So, to all you lot out there who may find yourself wandering onto this blog during the ad breaks, or sat at your computer wondering whether that wasn’t a bacon-wrapped cocktail sausage too far…

Merry Christmas!

In Very Grudging Praise Of…

Posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 in Misc. | 1 Comment

… Battlestar Galactica.

Now!

This entry will hopefully be brief, because I spent many, many months arguing with my editor about the merits or otherwise of the TV-remake of Battlestar Galactica that has graced screens for the last few years.  My position being that it was rubbish; his position being that it was the greatest thing ever made.  My conviction that it was rubbish was, I fully admit, based on dubious information.  I’d seen some of the original series, which was, let’s face it, not exactly Shakespeare Does Robots, and I’d seen bits of the new series, which seemed to involve more sombre staring into the vacant beyond and more sweaty vests than I’d thought one little screen could ever contain.  And my god the vests are sweaty, I mean, let’s not beat about the bush here, more artily-disshevelled-gleaming-sexy-people-having-a-horrid-time-on-the-edge-of-breaking you’re unlikely to ever meet.

But…

… since then, Battlestar Galactica has come to my local library…

… and thence to my DVD player…

… and so, after all this, I grudgingly and with all the grace of a wounded buffalo, reform my position.  I would still argue that perhaps it takes itself a little bit too seriously… ‘light relief’ are not words you’re likely to run across in the course of any of Battlestar Galactica’s series… but on the other hand, in the absence of light relief, it does an absolutely brilliant job of retaining ‘crushing tension’ right up to the very, very end, as humanity, and along the way, the other lot too, battle against each other, themselves, the possibility of exctinction, death, misery, and all the symptoms of all the above on the way.  When there’s action, it’s utterly thrilling; when there’s betrayal, it’s soul-wrenching; when there’s politics, its savage; when religion, it’s fanatical.

And it says a lot about Battlestar Galactica that my one lingering caveat now that the series has run its course, is, naturally, a caveat about the nature of god.  But, if you wish to find out why this is my last narrative concern, you’ll just have to watch it, won’t you?

In Praise Of… West Wing

Posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 in Misc. | 4 Comments

There comes a point at the end of every show role when a girl’s just gotta unwind.  For the first time in six weeks, massive, regulated cycles of laundry are done (I promise, I do wash my socks more than once every six weeks… but panic is the motive, not systematic hygiene…) floors are scrubbed, bulbs are changed, kitchens are cleaned, windows are scrubbed, paperwork is tidied, filing is done.  And when all of that domestic upheaval is completed, there settles in a moment of… well, what now?

And there’s the answer… West Wing.

Had I known the day I staggered into HMV armed with a student discount card, a gift token value 25% and a determination that my weekend would be long and lazy what a discovery I would make there…

… well, I would have staggered in a little faster.  For lo!  The complete West Wing, all seven seasons, were there on offer for a ridiculously low price tag, and I had not a moment’s hesitation in buying it.  Back home, I turned down the lights, fired up the computer, wrapped myself in a blanket, got out the hot chocolate and started watching.

And it’s brilliant.  Utterly brilliant.  I mean, sure, I can sympathise with those who say it’s bewildering, too fast, makes no sense to anyone who doesn’t have a degree in American politics or isn’t a supporter of the Democratic Party.  But on the other hand, for decades, programs like Dr Who and Star Trek have specialised in talking utter nonsense at very high speed while being shot at by aliens with unknown motives – hell, anyone who’s ever watched 5 minutes of House or ER will know that it is a) utterly gripping and b) utterly non-sensical.  I’ve sat through I don’t know how much House (enthralled) and to this day can’t tell you the difference between a PET, CAT, CT or MRI scan.  (But I’ll not tell you the difference in a very urgent voice.)  With West Wing at least there’s a hope that if you concentrate very hard, you’ll get an insight into the workings of US politics.

Not that this is the point…

… I know only two people who might be accused of watching West Wing for its political insight…

No, the reason you watch West Wing is because it’s a fantastically constructed, break-neck bit of television, full of intelligent, sympathetic, complicated characters, performed brilliantly, which in its seven years of running swept up and down the gauntlet of political debate, probed those issues that no one really wants to probe, delved into every corner of the American psyche and came out with hands dirty and the conclusion that in governance, there’s really no such thing as an easy answer.  And yes, while we were cheering for the Democratic inhabitants of the West Wing who made up the leading characters, there weren’t really good guys or bad guys (except perhaps for the odd Bush-shaped Republican Senator…) … just people with passionate and opposing views that they struggled to reconcile in an ever-changing and complicated world.  And it’s funny.  I mean, like all good drama, it’s all other things besides, but even when it’s not actually making you laugh out loud, the sheer speed and wit of the dialogue keeps you entranced, and you’ll catch yourself grinning even when you should really be and probably are feeling something else.  For punchy one-liners, I have rarely seen anything better, and for intelligent argument delivered as gripping drama, it gets full marks.

If I have one single complaint against the West Wing, it’s this…

That President Bartlet (who the LSE proudly claims, incidentally, as one of our proudest (if fictional) alumni) seems perpetually to be haunted by a twelve piece brass band.  This brass band tends to only make its presence known at the end of episodes, and usually in the presence of morally ambivalent moments, but, at the very last, there it will be, the trumpets firing up in sombre and portentous manner as President Bartlet pulls off his glasses, looks up seriously to camera, and begins to declaim about the nature of morality in politics.  And as his speech, usually extolling truth, virtue and honour, reaches its crescendo, so this invisible brass band will also reach its crescendo, and if you’re really, really unlucky, I mean, having a really bad day, there might be an American flag in the background, and if you’re in serious trouble, someone, heaven help us, might go so far as to proclaim, ‘god bless America’ and that’s it, the entire EU audience rolls its eyes and cringes in the sofa.  But this is something of a rareity and I can, in fact, only think of one ‘god bless America’ moment in the entire, otherwise utterly brilliant series, when I’ve found myself making rude and fruitily inappropriate sounds at the TV screen.

If you’ve never seen it…

… pop down the local library, borrow season one, get yourself a warm sofa, a big blanket, a cup of hot chocolate and a ‘Dummies Guide to US Politics’ and buckle down for an addictive experience…

Pericles

Posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 in Misc. | 5 Comments

This entry could be called ‘In Praise of Shakespeare’ but alas, circumstances means it’s about Pericles.  I am lighting designer on a (very small) production of Pericles being put on at RADA by the exchange students from the NYU who’ve come over for 8 weeks of how-to-do-Shakespeare, culminating in a performance.  I nagged and nagged and wheedled and generally blew a lot of karma to get lighting designer for this show, because while I knew it was small, I also had a few lingering recollections of there being shipwrecks, thunderstorms, temples, palaces and brothels, all of which are more interesting that your middle-class-sitting-room-in-Hampstead-on-a-summer’s-day lighting designer’s fare, and lo, here I am.

I like this Shakespeare dude.  The guy has got something, and there have been many, many productions of Shakespeare where I have caught myself forgetting to breathe.  Why do so few playwrights put ‘Battle’ in as stage directions these days?  The technology has surely improved since 1595, come on guys, a bit of a battle, a bit of a ghost, the odd sword fight, betrayal, death, the torment of the mind, the anguish of the soul, blood, torment, violence, slapdash and a bit in rhyming couplets about seeking after a beautiful yet unobtainable woman, what’s not to love? I have a friend in Saudi Arabia who is planning to teach Macbeth on the basis that it still one of the most exciting bits of drama ever to abuse the Scottish accent; I nearly fell off my chair at the end of a performance of Henry IV (a king who, according to 1066 And All That, wisely resigned half way through his reign in favour of Henry IV Pt 2… nerdy joke, sorry…) and will always remember being forced to stand at gunpoint in a production of Richard II in honour of Bolingbroke’s victory.

Then again… Pericles is what the Reduced Shakespeare Company once lovingly tagged an ‘obscure’ or ‘lesser’ or simply a ‘bad’ bit of work.  It’s not that bad!  I’ve seen some rubbish stuff – hell, I’ve even contributed my time and torchlight to many, many a bad bit of theatre, and Pericles is doing well by comparison.  But neither is it the kind of thing you find being regularly trotted out for the audience to sing along with.  For those who haven’t had the Pericles experience… in brief it’s the story of a king who sets forth to marry a woman, discovers through means of a riddle said woman is sleeping with her father, runs away from both of the above, gets shipwrecked, meets the real woman of his dreams, marries her, has a baby, gets shipwrecked, abandons (presumed but not actually) dead wife, abandons daughter, sails away to feel miserable.  Daughter grows up to be sexy beautiful and wise, at which point surrogate mother decides to kill her; daughter is saved from said fate by being kidnapped by pirates, ends up in a brothel where by means of her virtues turns all the men from sin and is generally virginal and pure.  Meanwhile, Pericles sets forth once more, is told daughter is dead, gets… you guessed it… shipwrecked again, conveniently at the same place where daughter is living, and is reunited, hurrah.  If you think this is a happy ending oh no… because then the goddess Diana appears (and is lovingly lit, in case you’re wondering) and tells Pericles to go to her temple where lo and behold, he meets the wife he thought was dead and mother, daughter and child are all happily reunited hurrah.  Oh yes… and the incestuous king and daughter we met in Act 1, Scene 1, spontaneously combust off-stage.  I kid you not.

Pericles is, in short, one of those plays where the director really, really needs an interpretation.  I’m all in favour of directors doing crazy shit to plays, if the writing is not up to the job… although that said, I’m really really not in favour of the writing not being up to the job, and fail to this day to understand why so much of it isn’t.  Ask me the day after I graduate from RADA for further thoughts on this delicate topic…

As a result of all this, our production of Pericles is having interesting things done to it.  The staging is interesting, there’s dancing, there’s singing, there’s interludes, there’s a strobe bigger than my head suspended in the lighting rig for those pesky difficult moments, there’s choruses being all choral and stuff, it is, all things considered, taking a bit of a hammering and this may not be any bad thing.  The actors are, obviously, all American.  My greatest fear, I must admit, was that these poor American exchange students would get into rehearsal and be forced to drop their American accents, at which point I might have cried.  I am all in favour of people reading stuff in their native accent, since not only does it usually sound grand, it will invariably sound better than people reading stuff in a forced and entirely fake upper-class English one.  Thankfully, sense has prevailed, and our production of Pericles, set in the original locations, will be performed in perfect New Yorker accents!  Thank god.

From a lighting design point of view, it turns out that this production is more than a bit of a headache, as our turn-around time between the first read through and the actual rig was 48 hours.  I am, therefore, flagrantly, shamelessly and with every certainty of having to move stuff later, guessing entirely at what my lighting needs are going to be, throwing up as much of the most flexible equipment with the most adaptable colours as I can get my grubby mits on, as quickly as I can.

Will it work?

… watch this space…