estuary

filmed a minute and thirty eight seconds of the train journey from totnes to exeter I take every morning to rehearsal for Eliza and the Wild Swans. recorded a soundtrack during my lunchbreak.

On Stepmothers

On Stepmothers

Most fairy tales are impossible problems with impossible solutions. They have that in common with the kind of theatre work that I’m interested in.

‘There is nothing in the least childlike about fairy tales,’ says Marina Warner, the novelist and mythographer, in her excellent book From the Beast to the Blonde. Fairy tales are about big, scary horrible problems; they reflect the insecurities that haunt the dark graveyards and enchanted forests of a culture’s unconscious.

Families and homes are a major theme in this. The homeless runaway with a wicked stepmother and passive, gullible father is an inversion of the traditional safe home, loving mother and strong, infallible patriarch. Of course they aren’t a reversal of reality, just of idealism: child abuse is real and has been around for longer than fairy tales. Like many scary stories, these tales are partly a way to express things that are otherwise suppressed.

In an article she wrote for the New York Times, Warner pointed out that a lot of the older versions of fairy tales have the natural parents as the bad guys, abandoning, abusing and sometimes even wanting to eat their children. Romantic editors like the Grimm brothers, however, preferred the stepmother – still essentially a subversive role (another excellent study of fairy tales and fantastical stories, Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy, is subtitled ‘the literature of subversion’) but apparently slightly safer; an external rather than an internal threat to the order of things.

Eliza’s stepmother gives her an impossible problem: she turns Eliza’s brothers into swans. Eliza finds an impossible solution: mutely sewing magical shirts from stinging nettles. Impossible problem plus impossible solution equals fairy tale resolution.

Eliza’s stepmother gives us an impossible problem: how to present an ordinary woman who is also an evil enchantress. We found an impossible solution: give her three heads, four arms and four voices. Impossible problem plus impossible solution equals…

Written for the Eliza and the Wild Swans blog: http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/Eliza/theblog/.

Eliza and the Wild Swans is on at the Bikeshed Theatre in Exeter from the 19th of December 2013 to the 11th of January 2014. For more information and to buy tickets visit http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/eliza-and-the-wild-swans/

The Male Gaze (article for Gorilla Film Magazine)

The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.

- Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, (1975)

There’s a great visual gag in the third Naked Gun movie. The camera pans slowly up Anna Nicole Smith’s legs – but exaggerates their length and gives her an extra pair of knees. Naked Gun isn’t exactly a feminist classic, but this playful spoofing of cinematic clichés highlights a key concept in feminist film theory. The joke draws attention to a moment when three ‘gazes’ are united: the gaze of the camera, filming the legs; the gaze of the other characters, looking at Smith; the gaze of the audience, placed in the same position as the characters in their presumed sexual desire for Smith. For all three, the woman is the object of the gaze.

The critic Laura Mulvey, in her beautiful, persuasive article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, is credited with theorizing the gaze in film. She divided the gaze into the three ‘looks’ described above (the camera’s, the spectator’s, the character’s). The gaze that Hollywood cinema created by manipulating these looks, she discovered, was exclusively male. It turned women into objects, with no force or power of their own other than a superficial ability to excite male desire – a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’

Rather than simply relating the (countless) examples of this in film, Mulvey used elements of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to show that Hollywood filmmaking reflected the desires of a ‘patriarchal unconscious.’ She took Freud’s notion of scopophilia – taking sexual pleasure from looking, an activity that turns others into objects of a ‘controlling and curious gaze’ – and applied it to the way in which films are viewed. The spectators, she suggested, are voyeurs, anonymous in the darkness of the cinema staring rapt at the ‘hermetically sealed world’ of the bright screen.

If this sounds like it’s taking all the pleasure out of cinema – that’s kind of the point. Sometimes you have to question where you’re getting your pleasure from. It might seem fun to enjoy the privileged position of the oppressor, but it’s not worth it. As film-lovers or filmmakers, we have a responsibility to face this kind of ugly truth.

This article was written for Gorilla Film Magazine. To find out where you can get your (free) copy, check their distribution map at http://gorillafilmmagazine.com/issue5distribution/

goodbye psychedelia; hello child soldiers, love letters, self-determination, insemination, shark mutilation...

This is just a quick snapshot of where things are at.

(the Ablutions cast and crew after the last show of the tour, in Chippenham)

Goodbye Ablutions. It was a glorious, strange little tour; probably the show I've felt most personally attached to since way back when we did By the Bog of Cats at university. Lots of amazing reviews, one award, and currently booking our tour next spring.

In the meantime, this is what I'm doing at the moment:

Like Enemies of the State - Be Frank Theatre - a new show about child soldiers in the DRC, based on the playwright's own journey there - on in Stockholm this month and in London in the Autumn; I've just started working on the compositions and sound design.

Touched... Like A Virgin opens in Edinburgh next week. I'm won't be there with it, but my arrangements will be and I'm in the rehearsals this week as Musical Director.

As understudy to their excellent Musical Director/Songwriter, I'm joining Kilter Theatre's The Last Post at Towersey Festival this month.

Kill the Beast's brilliant The Boy Who Kicked Pigs is doing great up at Edinburgh at the moment - great audiences and reviews. It features lots of music by me, with help from Joe Campbell; another work that feels quite close to my heart.

Timezone Theatre's stark, radical take on Taming of the Shrew starts rehearsals this week for their run in London next month. I've just joined them as composer/sound designer.

A Something Else That Stirs Man

‘A Something Else That Stirs Man’: A Fourth of July Appreciation of Charles Ives

(written for Stockhausen Syndrome)

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them…

-        The Declaration of Independence, 4^th July 1776

Music is one of the many ways God has of beating in on man –

his lifes, his deaths, his hope, his everything –

an inner something, a spiritual storm,

a something else that stirs man

in all of his parts [and] consciousness, and "all at once" –

we roughly call these parts (as a kind of entity) "soul" –

it acts thro or vibrates or couples up to human sensations in ways

(or mediums) man may hear and know:

that is, he knows he hears them

and says (or thinks or feels) he knows them. –

further than this,

what this inner something is which begets all this

is something no one knows –

especially those who define it

and use it, primarily, to make a living. –

all this means almost nothing to those who will think about it –

music -- that no one knows what it is –

and the less he knows he knows what it is

the nearer it is to music – probably.

-        Charles E. Ives, memo on notepaper of the St. James's Palace Hotel, London, June 1924

America was less than a century old when Charles Ives was born. Hearing his work, which is rich with quotations, you’d guess he spent his childhood lapping up music; folk ditties, popular hymns and the patriotic tunes his father’s marching band probably played are heard alongside key motifs from European classical compositions. As the critic Christopher Ballantine noted, Ives’ use of quotation was interesting because he seemed to choose his sources for their semantic connotations rather than their musical qualities: their meaning and associations outside of their musical context. They relate to ‘a way not only of hearing,’ Ballantine suggested, ‘but also of responding, feeling, relating, thinking.’

   There’s little doubt that, as a composer, Ives was ahead of his time. As Leonard Bernstein said (when introducing a performance of Ives’ Symphony No. 2), Ives ‘experimented with atonality way before Schoenberg, with free-dissonance way before Stravinsky, with quarter-tones way before Alois Hába.’ His work remained obscure for most of his lifetime, with many of his published works going unperformed until after his death in 1954. But looking at Ives’s music and his writings, it’s clear that his particular modernism was an exploration of his own Americanness: still a new idea in Ives’s time, and by its nature an idea that embraced newness.

Bernstein introducing Ives’ Symphony No. 2

   Ives looked to the literature and philosophy of his nation for inspiration. Responding to the Transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott, he dreamt of a music that (as he wrote), would be ‘a language so transcendent that its heights and depths would be common to all mankind.’ He wanted a music free even from its physical boundaries of what can be played or what can be heard –

My God! What has sound got to do with music! [And] is it the composer’s fault that man has only ten fingers? What can’t a musical thought be presented as it is born – perchance ‘a bastard of the slums’… That music must be heard is not essential – what it sounds like may not be what it is.

This glorious, impossible ambitiousness is there in his unfinished ‘Universe Symphony,’ which was ‘to be played by at least two huge orchestras across from each other on mountaintops overlooking a valley’ and would tell the story of the creation of the universe.

   But for me, Ives is addictive not only for his astonishing ambition but also for his ability – like Whitman’s – to contain his vast ideas within understated, deceptively simple forms: the ‘Alcotts’ and ‘Thoreau’ movements of the Concord Sonata, for instance, or the haunting ‘Unanswered Question’. Their glorious strangeness, their sensitivity, reflect the best qualities of American identity, worth celebrating on the 4th of July.

The Unanswered Question

Concord Sonata: Movement IV: Thoreau

The Ablutions Diaries

Ablutions by Fellswoop Theatre
Adapted from the novel by Patrick Dewitt
Devised and performed by Eoin Slattery, Fiona Mikel, Harry Humberstone and Ben Osborn.
Directed by Bertrand Lesca.
Music by Ben Osborn.

Touring 2013-2014. These images taken from various diaries, notebooks, etc. The show has filled several.

 

More information at http://fellswooptheatre.com/current/

there go the warm jets

Hollywood studios refused to finance Soderbergh's - totally brilliant - Behind the Candelabra - a biopic of Liberaci, as seen through the eyes of his lover/employee/[almost]adoptive-son - because of its subject matter. In Britain, you can watch Matt Damon getting it on with Michael Douglas on the screens of mainstream cinemas, but American cinemas have decided they aren't ready.

According to Soderbergh, 'they said it was too gay.' Maybe they imagined walking through a foyer that advertises Man of Steel & Pacific Rim & decided they'd overdone it. Anyway, the result is that it's gone straight-to-TV in the USA, premiering on HBO. Some critics have said this 'may mark the moment when TV overtakes film in the cultural relevance stakes.' I guess it might; some people think that's already happened [well, in my mind, TV's kind of on the way out too, & I'm just hoping some really good books get written soon, & that everyone starts coming to see theatre productions & gigs a lot more].

Aside from my sadness at the conservativism, bigotry & pessimism that such a decision implies... I'm just sorry that many people will miss the glory of the sound design in this film. TVs & laptops aren't going to do it justice. The moment when applause begins just a few seconds before the scene in which the crowd is clapping - but starts on the left speaker, only to pan across gradually as the shot changes - alienating us as listeners, making us deal with the sound as this strange, rippling, disconcerting thing; the subtle shifts between sound quality in the schmaltz-virtuoso piano-playing; the moment when a long take - one of many beautiful long takes in this film - follows Liberaci out of the jacuzzi but then stays with his lover, Scott Thorson, as out-of-shot Liberaci switches off the water jets - so the gorgeous bubbling that had underscored their conversation abruptly vanishes into a kind of stunned silence...

I urge people to go hear this film in cinemas.

[NB - the Eno's only here because of the coincidental title - as far as I know, he had no involvement in this film - this is a beautiful song though]

reflected lent

(images from Lent 2013's daily writing splurge)

Thatcher & Sexism

(iron [Lady] showing pol[itical pol]arisation)

Margaret Thatcher’s death shows something that should have been obvious, but is often overlooked; mainly, I guess, because the national press has a strong London bias. That is, that the UK has such deep divisions within it that the experience of being British is so ferociously different for different groups of British people.

Furthermore, it reveals how polarised the right and left are – something that isn’t obvious in the actual policy of the mainstream parties. In this sense, it’s a similar effect to that of Obama’s recent re-election in America. In policy as in practise, the democrats aren’t the left; often, they’re barely even liberal; their economic, social & political priorities are a lot closer to those of their republican opponents than people like to remember. But the two-party system provides a central space in which a deeply-felt division within the people can be neutralised (& thus, in a practical sense, ignored).

I don’t want to compare & contrast a list of positives/negatives of Thatcher’s legacy. I don’t think that’s necessary & I don’t think it’s intellectually useful. At the beginning of Paul Preston’s brilliant The Spanish Civil War he says that he can see no positive element of Franco’s victory that does anything toward outweighing the negative, & admits that such facts make him ‘biased’ in a sense - & I occupy similar (though less extreme, as she’s not actually a fascist) ground when it comes to Thatcher, her politics & her symbolism. But I think, for me, it would be better to say that she, as a figure, is more than one figure, she played more than one part, & the memory of her, or the understanding of her legacy, is more than a single memory, more than a single legacy. & I think a key component of this is Thatcher as a woman.

I don’t want to know this, but I know it: the left is uncomfortable with the first female prime minister being the model for neoliberalism, conservativism, free-market economics, aggressive foreign policy – because the left see themselves as the ones who look out for women, basically. To those on the left, & I include myself in this very much, the struggle for gender equality & representation is suppose to go with the need for economic equality, for fair trade, for public education & healthcare, the struggle for international peace – they are all supposed to be one struggle.

I don’t want to know this, but I know it: lefties hate Margaret Thatcher more because she’s a woman; because she doesn’t conform to the struggle’s idea of what a female icon should be.

Her gender causes equal, or worse, trouble on the right; though strangely enough, it seems harder to spot. The old school & the new school right unite to praise her – but they are the same people who stand for tradition, for family values (i.e., traditional gender roles, i.e., disempowered women), for a business & financial sector dominated by men & by masculinity; they are, after all, the Camerons and the Boris Johnsons, the posh boys club. So they use her gender as a weapon to show the left that policies that – by definition – benefit the minority & not the majority can contain within themselves so much mobility, so much potential for members of the majority to, if they work hard enough, join the minority, that even their most obvious victims are willing to support, advocate, lead, author such policies. In this sense, her gender is being tokenised by the right, even exoticised. ‘She’s an inspiration,’ conservatives are saying, ‘because she succeeded against all the odds, as a woman’ – that is to say, she is a beautiful, exotic anomaly within the system of oppression that they created & continue to support.

So now people are singing Ding Dong the Witch is Dead; calling her a bitch, a cunt – so now people are praising the success of the Green-Grocer’s Daughter, the woman who ‘didn’t feel theneed to make a fuss about the very real obstacles she faced and overcame - and without any help from the 'sisterhood'

… We have to face the obvious here; such terms don’t have equal meaning for men & women - there are not, nor will there be, equivalents. Their use stems from a position of privilege & prejudice. Thatcher’s legacy is horror enough, in terms of the inequality she represented & promoted; we have a huge responsibility, moral, social & intellectual, to condemn the sexist element in both sides here, & to build a better frame for our understanding.

the boy who kicked pigs returns

Very excited that Kill The Beast's The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, that had an amazing & critically acclaimed initial run in Manchester last year, is coming to London in a matter of weeks to play at the famous Jacksons Lane theatre, before heading up to Edinburgh's Pleasance this summer.

I'm editing the tracks at the moment. The soundtrack was composed primarily on an old casiotone keyboard, which had a gloriously editable sound though produced mad amounts of hiss and kept switching itself off. The score was composed after listening to a lot of old Hammer Horror soundtracks, as well as loads of Bernard Herrmann, who is kind of the master of simple, unresolving diminished melodies and harmonies that swing between disconcerting & lush - I'm always trying to do that...

This was what working on the score back then looked like - note the League of Gentleman box set, their music was another key inspiration -

After watching a runthrough last Sunday, this is what working on it now currently looks like -

You can hear a bit of the music in this teaser trailer - but more importantly, you can see a snippet of the show, which is a really well-written black comedy, created by a group of great performers complimented by fantastic design:

Get your tickets here - http://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/whats-on/event/2013/the-boy-who-kicked-pigs/

the first sunday of lent

It is Lent again, and as always for Lent I give up notwriting, and I write something everyday. Writing a sentence still counts, as does editing existing work or writing the music for some existing lyrics, though a whole song is advisable, or a story, or a paragraph of a story / verse of a song.

This is my Lent diary so far. When I'm a bit more comfortable with these I will put some listenable recordings up.

LENT 2013

11/2
CLEAN MONDAY

Songs written with Fellswoop : THE HOME SONG, DIVOT IN YOUR HEART

darling whenever
the wind shakes the heather

->

a hole in the pavement trips you up

12/2
SHROVE TUESDAY

Wrote melody and guitar part for WISHING WELL (lyrics I wrote a few days earlier, then workingtitled DEATH BY DROWNING)

the interlocking web of teardrops

13/2
ASH WEDNESDAY

Wrote a song, 'CHARM'; just the lyrics and a vague sense of the melody

for sinners we’re beginners
but we’ll learn quickly

14/2
FEAST OF ST VALENTINE
Wrote a song, 'BE MY VALENTINE MRS MILESAWAY'

a little time in space

15/2

a meteorite explodes in Russia

recorded / wrote music for BE MY VALENTINE MRS MILESAWAY

16/2

mixed messages from the universe

17/2
FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT

wrote melody for / recorded (accapella) CHARM - renamed it SINNERS

then, later, wrote the guitar part - just realised it's quite similar to the melody for the Valentine song - that is the danger of Lent, especially when you don't have access to instruments...

wrote two verses, something as yet unnamed

inkblots face off blank stares

=
✈ & ✈ & ✈

a stretch of the Rocky Mountains

Literary history can give us a bit of a Tralfamadorian view of significant events.

While I was at university I attended a class taught by China Mieville, the sci-fi author, on ‘Weird Fiction’ – the kind-of-movement, kind-of-genre in the early part of the twentieth century associated with HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, etc. China described the First World War as a ‘shotgun blast’ in this context: emanating outward in its influence in both directions in time, a peppering of shot around a central explosion.

Literary history is good for this. It shows, paradoxically, the influence of future events on the sociological moment; it also doesn’t quite allow the event to have changed everything that happened after it, peppering its influence outward in bursts and blasts, sometimes hidden, sometimes direct and explicit recreations of that past moment.

China Mieville was talking about the First World War; I wish to talk about the Second, and about other things as well. But while we’re thinking about the First: Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, famously thought of the First World War as a watershed for European culture, a blast that even changed the meanings of words - forcing innuendos upon innocent language, a kind of original sin for culture to bear from then on. He quoted that brilliant Larkin poem, MCMXIV, the one which describes the crowd of young men signing up as volunteer soldiers for the Great War; its final line, ‘never such innocence again’, summed up the influence of that war for Fussell. Here is the last stanza of that poem:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Fussell’s book is very good. It was in the papers again recently, because he died of old age last May. So it goes.

But these poet eyes of Larkin’s are kind-of-significant in terms of how time kind-of-folds-over-itself. The innocence, actually, hadn’t existed before that moment of the photograph either – yet it has a kind of infinite quality in it, encased as it is within the stillness of the image – it seems to stretch out repetitively, like holding a mirror to a mirror – in it we see the ‘little while longer’ of the thousands of marriages in time, the tidied gardens in space. The moment of departure from one world into the next reverberates in all directions. The watershed is not part of a linear progression, it is a shattering of time, the violent dispersal of a shotgun blast.

Two very famous accounts of the Second World War, and the American experience of it, take place in shattered time. There is Heller’s Catch-22, about American bomber crews; where things seem whimsical at first, a kind of anarchic humour, but there is an underlying order gradually being revealed to the chaos, revealed through a totally non-linear approach to time. There is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, about the bombing of Dresden as seen by American POWs; here, the central character ‘has come unstuck in time’, living the moments of his life in a random order. He also encounters aliens, the Tralfamadorians, who see every moment at once,

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamodians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Let’s say each of these books has pure trauma at its heart, encapsulated in a single moment (though one which sums up a series of moments, perhaps all moments, leading outward in both directions in time) - like the photo that Larkin is looking at. The traumatic event is so vast, in its own magnitude as in its significance upon other events, that it cannot really be approached unless it is approached by all angles, surrounded on all its chronological flanks.

I wanted to read and write about the Second World War because tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day and I believe in memorial days.