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NOT EVERYTHING IS SIGNIFICANT
An Edinburgh
show takes a lot of planning from at least six months ahead, and, after
Coelacanth in 2005, I found that for the next couple of years other
projects took up a lot of time. The two series of Undone, Dollby City,
my work for Teachers TV – all these things came up at a stage in the
year when I could have been working towards an Edinburgh show in either
2006 or 2007. And I didn’t want to do a show I didn’t totally love, so
I skipped those years. But in early 2008, things looked right for a new
production – there was no news on Undone and it just felt like the
right time again - so I knuckled down, talked to the Pleasance about a
slot and ground out a concept, a script and a title. All around the
February and March.
I’d had an idea about a
biographer who receives the index of his own biography and I’d noodled
on it for a while, but it wasn’t quite coming together. It needed a
central tension, something driving the story. So the index became a
diary, an unfinished one – something that had to be investigated over
the course of its own time scale. Which brought in ideas of time and
fate; a lot of the images and joke particles I jot down over the course
of a year were, interestingly, related to this theme and could
therefore be built into and around the story. But it still needed an
extra element. One of my favourite books is House of Leaves by Mark Z.
Danielewski, and I guess at the back of my mind I recalled the levels
of storytelling he mixed up. I’d written a piece for All The Rage’s
October 2007 issue about great outfits in comics as if it was a series
of footnotes for an unwritten, longer article, and so thought, why not
footnote the biographer’s story with an extra layer of information,
disinformation and maybe a new layer of plot.
The title came to me
while I was walking to Dalston to tell the story of the Museum of Lost
Gloves at Robin Ince’s School for Gifted Children – it just seemed to
be a phrase that summed up what the show could be about, as well as
being striking and memorable. And once the title was there and the
structure, the script came together fairly quickly – it was a little
less a month between the first messy draft and a version I could send
to The Pleasance to try and book a performance slot.
The story is
deliberately ambiguous. It’s written in such a way that an audience
member can decide one thing about the events as presented in the piece,
and the next person might come to a totally different deduction. I
don’t want to go into too much detail to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve
come here for an answer as to what happened to who or who wrote what
and when, well, there is no exact answer. There are at least valid
three solutions to the mystery that are consistent with “the facts” but
every time it looked like the story was untying itself, I consciously
added a level of entangling. Not for the sake of frustrating anyone,
just to make it more open to consideration. And after the show I spoke
to lots of people who told me their interpretation of the story, and
all of them were as good as each other. I don’t think I even know what
exactly happens in the show, but it touches me when people put time and
thought into coming up with a solution.
So the show: the
head-dress was a gift from a close friend who had seen an old shot of
me wearing one at a Cowboys and Indians party and knew I loved it. How
brilliant was she for getting me that? A Lovely Person. I bought a hat
stand from a futon shop on Tottenham Court Road and re-used the table
from Coelacanth. The laptop had been left behind by a former flatmate
and, like all the paper in the show, was blank. I got a diary (also
blank) and bought a piece of material to create a space for the
footnoter.
Andy Lane took a great
set of photos in my flat, featuring the head-dress and my miserable or
confused face, and we got a few very striking images. Stephany Ungless
then created a wonderful poster and flyer – more than a few people at
the Fringe told me it was their favourite image. If you want a poster
by the way, email me and I’ll see if I can get one to you. Then Simon
Oakes wrote some deeply beautiful music (with Mark moloney, also of
Suns of the Tundra) to go along with the slightly downbeat but
mysterious nature of the piece. Erica Whyman was waiting for me in
Newcastle as I was on my way up to Edinburgh and we spent a long
weekend, taking the play apart and once she’d put it together again
with her touch it was a hundred times better. It’s like working with a
watchmaker who knows how each tick should sound and adjusts and
tightens a piece you’d never notice was wrong. And Malcolm Rippeth then
lit the show for the Pleasance Upstairs as if the room was designed for
it. Some gorgeous moments – isolating the footnoter, the Essex carpark
– brought out the theatrical side of things terrifically. And then
there was Jen Lunn who operated the show sensitively and made me look
great out there. Lisa Keddie also helped with publicity and the selling
of the programmes to benefit Shelter.
Despite a London
preview in June and a couple of performances at the Latitude festival
in July (when Simon and Mark played the music live) the show opened in
Edinburgh a little raw. I was getting very small houses for the first
week or so and, although audiences were generally enjoying it, it
didn’t quite get to where it could be. Also, the weather the first part
of August was dreadful – as a one man leafleting team (as well as
producer, actor, writer etc) it was hard to drum up the right crowd.
But I knew the show was strong, it just needed a bit of confirmation.
Then a lovely review in The Guardian came out and that marked a turning
point. Numbers picked up and other reviewers came in a state of mind to
appreciate something that isn’t quite comedy, nor theatre, nor straight
storytelling, but a bit of all of those. By the end of the run, the
show was going very well and the fact I sold out the last day of the
entire run gave me great satisfaction.
So it’s coming to
London in October 2008 for a short run at The Etcetera – book tickets
here. And hopefully I’ll take it to a few other places in the new
year.
And then in April 2009 it’s going to be published alongside Coelacanth
and A Supercollider for the Family by Portobello Books. More details to
follow.
Oh and I promised to
put up The Curator of the Echoes on this page.
I will. Watch this
space.
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