Urban Magic

Pericles – What Happened Next

Posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 in Misc. | No Comments

So, did I mention Pericles?  (Or Perididdles, as for some reason is has become known in the course of a technical period that I can only really describe as breathless.)  That thing I ended up lighting… I blogged about it before, saying ‘this thing is coming’ and now that it’s been and gone I figure, well, I may as well put up the pictures.  It was an educational experience… not without its blips, let’s face it.  There were many things about the Perididdles experience that will hopefully not go down in history, not even in pictogram form… but there was also lots to be very proud of and with this in mind, I’ll throw up some pictures.  There are also plenty of acknowledgments to be (retrospectively but truly) given – to everyone who helped me rig and focus in exchange for nothing more than eternal gratitude and the chance to boogie beneath a 2000W strobe (while it worked); and to the one person who helped me de-rig for only half of the above!  To the gentleman who still labours under the belief that the Strand 500 series is greater than the Ion, and who was yet civilized enough to tell me how to apply effects to the same, and the kindly member of the lighting department who tried to knock together a pair of animation wheels out of a set of motors that hadn’t yet seen the dawn of the new millennium… and full credit and thanks go to Fran Reidy, whose photos these are that I’m putting on display!

Long Time…

Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 in Misc., Writing | 2 Comments

So, once again, it’s been an age since I blogged.

Here’s why….

RADA!  (Ate my life.)  We have been putting on a production of ‘Company’ by Stephen Sondheim which featured among its many lighting features… deep breath… UV cannons, mirrorball, 18 moving lights, 2 robocolours (thank you Royal Opera House), 1 glaciator (thank you National Theatre), 150m of festoon and 300 lightbulbs (thank you Sparks) two hazers, two wireless dimming lamps, twelve practicals and…

… and you know, a set, props, costumes, actors, musicians etc. etc. etc..

It’s been a little bit bonkers.  One of those experiences where you work 12 hours a day and then wake at 3 a.m. wondering what happened to supper.  Boritos!  How I have been dreaming of boritos!  Guacamole and grated cheese!  In the last weekend after the show went up, I’ve hardly stopped eating; it’s as if my body is attempting to compensate in 24 hours for the abuse of 15 days.  In an odd way, I haven’t really had any major, major jobs to do in the last two weeks, just a continual series of small jobs which have added up and added up until all I can dream about is DMX and the chorus line of ‘Side by side’.  (One of the camper moments in this otherwise surprisingly un-camp musical.  Glowing hula hoops?  Oh yes…)

And tomorrow, it all kicks off again, as we go into rehearsal for Measure for Measure where I am, again, you guessed it, Production Electrician.  But!  Prod LX for one of the coolest lighting designers in the country, on a play by Shakespeare The Dude, which so far promises to be nothing but an adventure from start to finish, so let’s keep those fingers crossed…

In other news, the Midnight Mayor publication date does indeed rush upon us.  Currently I’m a little bit concerned that I’ll be in a focus session on the great day itself (which is, in case you’re wondering, advertised on amazon.co.uk as 4th of March) but I herein solemnly swear that upon that day I will at the very least have a take away curry in celebration.  Lamb bhuna – is there anything in the world that lamb bhuna cannot make good?

It’s a peculiar thing being both a student and a writer at the moment.  At LSE it wasn’t something that really bothered me, since as a student I was in classes maybe 6 hours a week and the rest of the time I was reading, writing, in the theatre or with friends who cared as about as much for my literary exploits as they did for the Battle of Lepanto.  But at RADA, being a student is a relentless experience, a continual ritual that next to nothing is permitted to disrupt.  A phrase was thrown at me… ‘people who do lights professionally, take it seriously, live lighting’.  Well, here I am, taking lighting seriously, but live lighting?  I would no sooner live lighting than I would live writing, since both are equally important to me and, let’s face it, only one is paying my electricity bill.

There’s a lot to say about being a student at RADA, none of which I will say now!  It has its amazing moments, it has its absolute downers, (as radio 4 would put it… ‘and that’s like life…’) but I think all things considered, no matter how good or bad things are or may be or get, I’m ready to stop being a student now.

The Power of Yes

Posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 in Misc. | 4 Comments

So, went to the theatre!  (For the first time in far too long… amazing how the process of learning about the theatre prevents you from ever having the time or money to go to the theatre… anyway…)  And, by random chance, as most things seem to be, I ended up seeing The Power of Yes, by David Hare.  And it was very, very good!

I’m not a huge fan of didactic writing – I’ve always been of the opinion that the story should be put first, and any profound moral messages should emerge as a result of the story, rather than as a thing imposed on the narrative as prime purpose.  I’m definitely not a fan of putting the writer into the story, since it seems anywhere between a cop-out and utterly wanky.  But!  In praise of The Power of Yes, the one hour forty five minutes I spent watching it may have gone a very long way to reforming my opinion of both.  The story was, from line one, put first, but the passion, anger and morality of the story was always its heart, and the device of having the writer directly telling it became practically charming as the characters unfolded.  In brief, it’s the story of the financial meltdown that’s been the source of so much of so much for the last… well, more than a year now, eighteen months, perhaps?  Of how, why, what, who.  The fact that it spends so much time trying to maintain an open mind means that by the end, when the sheer outrage that, for the sake of the rich many, the poor many have had to pay up trillions – trillions - to bail out the banks, makes what could have otherwise been a cold lesson in fiscal politics a far more emotional experience.  I know very little about economics – although, I suppose in my defence, I have a fair grasp of how it has affected history and politics, even if I couldn’t tell a hedge fund from a government bond – but came away from this play feeling both enlightened and, perhaps more importantly, determined to find out more about just how the governments of the world, the UK included (if not especially) found themselves in the pretty mess we’re in now.

As for what a pretty mess we’re in… this is possibly the first election campaign I can remember (not that the election has been called, but hell) in which there’s competition over who’ll bring in the better cuts!  Yeah; we’re in that kind of a mess.  I’ve always kept out of political debates… I think my problem has always been that the people I’ve been arguing politics with are so passionately committed to their views that I lack the ability to sway, or the willingness to be swayed by arguments that are practically religion.  My own views are, alas, perhaps too simple to serve as apt policy – trouble about being a wishy-washy left-wingish environmentalist liberal is that you want everyone to just buckle down, be nice and do the right thing, and when the unlikelyhood of that is presented, the reality of complexity and difficult decisions tends to corrupt any argument before it even gets off the ground.  It is extremely difficult for a liberal like myself to admit that sometimes, perhaps more often than we’d like to admit, the big decisions are being made by people who just don’t care about the bigger picture.  Perhaps because to concede that, particularly when it comes to matters like the environment, is to look a little too deep at a future none of us want to live in.

One last thought on The Power of Yes… as a graduate of the LSE, I’d run into one of the play’s key characters a few times, and it was a deeply strange experience seeing someone I’ve known being portrayed on stage.  I can’t help but wondering… did he go and see himself saying these words up on the stage?  And if so… did he recognise himself?

I’m told that no one ever does.

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.

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…

Minarets

Posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 in Misc. | 2 Comments

Alright, so another post that veers towards the political, despite my pledge not to do so…

In Switzerland, a law has been passed prohibiting the construction of any more minarets.  As I understand it (being very much not Swiss) mosques may still be built, but the minaret, the more visible symbol of the faith, will not be.  There are currently 4 minarets in Switzerland, and a Muslim population of 400,000.

I’m an atheist and should declare this at once – not only does the idea of a god offend what few scientific instincts I have, for blimey the proof is lacking, but the idea of a god as embodied by man’s theology terrifies me.  As expressed in the holy books of practically every faith, god, in any size shape or form, varies from the hugely self-contradictory to the downright bloody-minded.  I cheer entirely for those passages of text which promote charity, compassion, understanding, mercy, brotherly love etc., but man’s capacity to find in those self same passages justification for expressing all of the above to everyone except the guy who doesn’t conform to whatever the current social fashion of the time is, has led to atrocity throughout history.  Politics may inspire nations to go to war and kill and murder and do all the stuff we know humanity is more than up to, but more often than not religion – or perhaps more specifically, dogma and interpreted theology – make it that much harder to put out the fires once they blaze.  The separation of church and state was written partially for this reason, since the law of the state may be written to the nth comma of exactness whereby all men and all women are bound by the same term, whereas church law is a constantly shifting battle ground based upon texts thousands of years old, within whose conflicting words may be found justification for pretty much anything.  And worse – within religious law what battles have raged and rage still, of Orthodox versus Reform, Protestant versus Catholic, Sunni versus Shia – whereby each may find in the self-same text of the self-same page of the self-same book, justification for entirely different policies.

If there is a god, and as established, I wait with baited breath for that bush to burn on the side of the road, I can only hope he/she/it is much, much more than man’s current understanding, otherwise eternity is a very very long stick with a very sharp point.

Faith in god I can have plenty of time for; generally in my experience people who express faith in god tend to do it followed by offers of cups of tea and a chat, no strings attached.  Faith in theology I have a much harder time with, since that is usually followed by the inevitable philosophical slide into the ‘yeah but how do you know?’ argument which must inevitably fall back upon the ultimate statement ‘because it is written in the holy book which is the word of god’ and there an end to any sort of scientific reason.  Faith without dogma has always been more tolerant, since the predominating feature or aspiration of god in mankind’s history has been one of mercy, a characteristic that has been heavily tempered by politics and economics looking for religious justifications for its less than merciful deeds throughout the course of time, and boy have they found them.

Back to Switzerland…

… it’s none of my business (since when did that stop a nosy blogger?) but I, like, I suspect, most wishy-washy liberals muddling quietly by the EU as a whole, was more than a little nervous to discover a country I have always considered open-minded and tolerant, to not only pass a referendum in which not only one religion, but perhaps even more absurdly, the symbols of one religion is penalized.  It is not a bill which forbids the practice of Islam, but it is a bill which prohibits any visual demonstration of that faith, and its campaign has been fought on the basis that Muslims in Switzerland are not merely Muslim first and Swiss second, but that their belief in Islam is a violent evangelist one, in which the contradictions of a religious text are resolved only by taking the most extreme interpretation possible.  It is the same logic which in Istanbul in the 1500s forbid the ringing of Christian church bells or the construction of synagogues; it is a statement that in this land, one faith is dominant, and the rest is second-class.

I apologise now if anyone feels offended by my opinions here; yet they are mine and it is a blessing of being a wishy-washy liberal in a (mostly) wishy-washy liberal state that I can freely express them.  I have as little faith in the doctrines of Judiasm, Christianity, Islam as I do in Zoroastrianism, Shinto and Confucianism; but freedom of expression, and the freedom to express belief even if I don’t happen to believe in it, are two things I will cheerfully fight for.  I am sure that there are arguments against all I have said and I welcome them, and will be convinced by them if they can manage to be convincing, but in the mean time I am worried that in the 21st century, in the heart of Europe, a bill has been passed in which it would appear, religion and politics are not as separate as I thought.

The Protection of Children Act 1999

Posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in Misc., Writing | 7 Comments

I have always tried to be as non-political as I can when writing this blog, and on this matter in particular, will try and step as carefully as possible, since this is one of those cases where not only can I see both sides of the argument, but I don’t yet know enough about it, and the subject matter is entirely emotive.

I’ve been invited back to give a talk at my old school, which I left about 5 years ago, to a group of children attending as an arts festival thingy.  I’ve given talks at dozens – possibly verging towards the hundreds – of schools in the UK and elsewhere, and naturally agreed because, you know, it’s my old school.  The talk is scheduled to last 45 minutes on a day like any other in February, and my plan, as it stands, is to arrive, go in, say hello to the art teacher who taught me AS-Level Drama, and the mathematics teacher who I drew with when playing chess every Wednesday for 7 years.  (Except for those rare and largely wiped-from-memory Wednesdays when he utterly trounced me.)  I will then, under the beady eye of my old English teacher and, I suspect, a few others, give my talk to the children, and leave.

Now…

… for the first time in my life, I have been sent documentation to fill out under the Protection of Children Act 1999.  I must go into my school and under the beady watchful eye of an employee, give over my passport, birth certificate (which is in my parent’s possession, not mine, owing to a domestic bureaucractic hiccup), P60 from my present employer (I have none) and a recent utility bill showing my current address.  Furthermore, in the form I am requested to supply marital status, bank details, employment status, occupancy status, mother’s maiden name, and a referee to testify to my character.  The school will then pay £31 to a company called Capita who will, on behalf of the criminal records bureau, do a background check on me to ensure that I don’t have any criminal convictions, and after 4 weeks, I will be cleared to give my 45 minute lecture.  This disclosure, according to the government websites I’ve been skim-reading (and I apologise if I have any details wrong here, it has been one of those browsing-the-internet-while-burning-disks weeks) will only apply once, to this one event, on the basis that the next time I’m invited to talk at a school, I may have acquired new convictions.  (I have none, I hasten to add.)

Now…

… I have to step so carefully here, because in principal, I am all in favour of this law.  It is the ultimate, ultimate horror, one so horrifying that we hardly dare speak or write or think of it, the thought that children can be put at risk by the adults that surround them.  No parent would hesitate to take any measures necessary to protect their children, no one with a whit of humanity would expect anything less.

But if I am to deliver my passport, birth certificate etc. in person to every single school I visit, is this not the end of my ever visiting any school outside zones 1-4 in London?  Is this not the end of trips to Dundee and Wrexham, of Bristol and Reading?  How does this affect the Edinburgh Children’s Book Festival, or the festival in Bath?  I have been lecturing at and visiting schools since I was 15 years old; had this law come into force five years earlier, would I have been bound by it when still legally a child and yet also a visiting author?  For 45 minutes of supervised attendance at the school where I studied for 7 years, I must slog to the other side of town with documents I don’t even have to be vetted and cleared of crimes I have not committed and yes, I applaud the protection of children, but I also applaud reason in the execution of law, and I begin to wonder whether we are not teetering on that fine line of a law that could shut down through its sheer complexity and red tape a whole culture of bringing the world the school, as well as the school to the world.

Let me repeat; I lack sufficient information on this subject to make a final judgment, an absolute statement of too-much, too-little.  The protection of children is an unspoken law, the ultimate unspoken law – that children must not be harmed and it is the duty of the old to protect those too young to protect themselves – but I question whether this particular law may not do some damage, in its effort to do good.

I welcome all comments and debate on the subject!