Self-portrait

Self-portrait

24 December 2012

THE WAYS DEEP

The grate had been removed from the wide overwhelming fireplace, to make way for a fire of wood, in the midst of which was an enormous log glowing and blazing, and sending forth a vast volume of light and heat; this I understood was the Yule-log, which the Squire was particular in having brought in and illumined on a Christmas eve, according to ancient custom.
Washington Irving 
(who visited and celebrated bucolic West Hampstead)


A Very Merry Christmas 
to You All!

Photo by EP

Postscript
You might like to revisit, or indeed see for the first time, Edward’s beautifully moving performance of Dickens’s Doctor Marigold, written as a Christmas story in 1865 and here presented at Stratford’s Other Place in 1999.
KR

14 December 2012

PRE-ORDER SLIM CHANCES, THE AUDIOBOOK


The special-edition 4-CD boxed set of Slim Chances with Additions and Afterthoughts is now available to pre-order on Peth’s Staging Post.

Visit the Merchandise page and pre-order a copy at the click of a button with PayPal.

The boxed set will be shipped to you immediately on its release (we hope in time for Christmas!). The audiobook will also be available soon as a download.


Watch the trailer for Slim Chances with Additions and Afterthoughts here.

KR

10 December 2012

ADVENTURES OLD AND NEW

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. 
Somerset Maugham

I am preparing for the second week of rehearsals for My Perfect Mind, reminding you that the title is derived from King Lear and the king’s line in the waking scene of Act IV, sc.vii:

And, to deal plainly, 
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

When I say preparing for the second week, I must tell you that the previous five-day week has been so intense that the phrase should properly be ‘recovering from the first week’ rather than ‘preparing for the second’. Paul Hunter and I, aided and abetted by our director Kathryn Hunter, and watched over by our designer Michael Vale, have had a fascinating time; not at all tiring whilst it’s been happening, but on the bus and train home I always spent the time looking forward to doing nothing and going to bed early. I have done devised shows in the past, but I don’t think that I have ever quite experienced the rehearsal room becoming such a working adventure playground of the mind and, dare I say, spirit as each day we have navigated ‘unpathed waters, undreamed shores’.

I hope you enjoy watching the trailer, which Kathleen has devised, for my new audiobook of Slim Chances. Reading aloud, even the five-hour abridgement with afterthoughts and additions, was to re-visit so many people and places whilst being enabled to bring the book up to date, at least as far as the eve of the first of the rehearsals I have been – as you notice – unable to write about as yet!


Postscript
The CDs of Slim Chances, which will appear in a handsome boxed set, are being printed as we speak and we hope to announce details of their release very shortly, here on the blog and on Edward’s website. And a reminder that details of dates and venues for the tour and London run of My Perfect Mind are available on the News blog

28 November 2012

STURM UND SLOSH

Proud music of the storm!
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies!
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains!
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras!
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.
Walt Whitman


It is now less than a week till our preliminary rehearsal period for My Perfect Mind begins. I have been busily conning lines and musing … and experimenting.

Recently I was reminded of a madcap specialty painting and decorating act I saw in a pantomime years ago at Nottingham’s Empire Theatre, long demolished. Ever since I saw it I have nurtured an ambition to perform in such an act, and in fact I did paint a very large Monet Thames sunset every night to music in my one-man show Defending Jeffrey in Leeds.

What I remember about the act in Nottingham was that the team of men (who only appeared in the ‘slosh’ sequence) were in boiler suits and came on very brisk and business-like and laid a tarpaulin on the stage floor, then with ladders and copious amounts of paint, which I imagine was a special water soluble concoction whipped up into a gooey foam-like consistency, set about decorating the set. The big laughs came from classic ladder business and I still recall one man turning pink from head to toe as paint was accidently poured on him from a great height, only to be covered in green the moment he had recovered.

It occurred to me that a version of this pantomimic routine could be brought excitingly into the realm of tragedy and might even find its place in the storm scene in Lear.

Then the week before last I witnessed a less inspired form of slosh, executed with less precision and indeed less art, at a private viewing of ‘A Bigger Splash’ at Tate Modern – lots of action painting on film, often using the face and body as a surface.

The following film is an attempt to join up these unconnected dots, both the banal and the beguiling, precious shards of memory and exploratory visions for the show. It is not part of our Lear project as such but an exercise in lateral thinking or ‘imaginary puissance’, an experiment that might be defined as Tate Modern meets Nottingham Empire meets the Bard’s ‘unworthy scaffold’.


Photos by Dora Petherbridge

Postscript
The CD version of Slim Chances (a limited-edition boxed set) is very soon to be released. Be sure to check the News blog in the next couple of weeks for details of where to purchase. 

The tour dates for My Perfect Mind are also listed on the News Blog. General booking is now open for the London performances at the Young Vic in April. KR

10 November 2012

MODERN MYTH AND MEMORY

Beautiful as the horses of Hippolytus
Carven on some antique frieze.
Frederic Manning, ‘Transport’, 1917


My Blog this weekend is a film by Kathleen with her accompanying introduction, appropriate to Remembrance Sunday. EP


A Trojan four-horse chariot, eastern frieze, Siphnian Treasury, Delphi

In January this year I gave a talk at the Sydney Latin Summer School on the First World War Poets and their use of classical mythology. To accompany this I put together a short slideshow of images taken from Sidney Nolan’s Gallipoli series. Edward very kindly provided the voice-over, a beautiful, spellbinding reading of Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s poem ‘I saw a man this morning’. The poem was written on a blank page in Shaw-Stewart’s copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and discovered after his death. To mark Remembrance Sunday, we thought we’d give the film a wider ‘screening’.

But first, to put the words and images in context …

The disastrous Gallipoli campaign took place between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916; its aim had been to seize control of the Dardanelles straits from the Ottoman Empire, to capture Constantinople, and open a Black Sea supply route to Russia. An exact figure for the casualties at Gallipoli does not exist, but, to give you some idea of their scale: of the Australian troops, more than 8,700 were killed and more than twice that number wounded, at a time when Australia’s population was fewer than five million. New Zealand, with a population just over a million, lost 2,721 troops.


Gaba Tepe (Anzac), the spot where the Australians landed upon
the Gallipoli Peninsula. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

The location of the Gallipoli peninsula just across the Hellespont from the traditional site of Troy, the site excavated by Heinrich Schliemann only forty years earlier, carried such obvious, inescapable resonance with Homer; the British and ANZAC troops were literally walking in the footsteps of Hector and Achilles. With this tangible link with ancient tradition embedded in the very topography of the new fighting front, it was impossible not to think of the Iliad. En route to Gallipoli, Rupert Brooke promised to recite Sappho and Homer through the Cyclades and ‘the winds of history will follow us all the way.’ On 23 April 1915, two days before the fateful landing at Cape Helles and Ari Burnu, he died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite, in a French hospital ship moored in a bay off the island of Skyros. Among the scribbled fragments found in a notebook he kept on that last voyage were these lines:

They say Achilles in the darkness stirred
And Priam and his fifty sons
Wake all amazed, and hear the guns
And shake for Troy again.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart
Image: Balliol College, Oxford
Sailing on the same ship as Brooke was Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a brilliant classical scholar from Eton and Balliol. Three months into the campaign, he composed a very different poem in contemplation and anticipation of his Homeric inheritance, which began ‘I saw a man this morning/Who did not wish to die …’. 

For most of the poem, he aligns himself with the figure of Achilles and the hero’s rather bleak dilemma – the exchange of long life for posthumous glory. In the final stanza, however, it is as Achilles’ slain and unprotected comrade Patroclus that Shaw-Stewart imagines himself. The Achilles whom he now calls upon is the vengeful, flame-encircled epiphany standing between the Achaean wall and ditch, dreadful in his divinity and his grief, thrice issuing a piercing brazen cry and putting the Trojans to rout. This final stanza highlights the uncloseable distance between Ilion and Gallipoli; the flame-capped epiphany is the stuff of myth, an unattainable fiction which only emphasizes the immediacy and solitude of the modern soldier’s reality and his reflections upon that reality. Shaw-Stewart survived Gallipoli only to be killed in action in France at the end of 1917. He was twenty-nine.

In 1955, inspired by his reading of Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths and Homer’s Iliad, Australian artist Sidney Nolan began to work on a Trojan War series. It was the novelist George Johnston who gave him the idea of looking instead at the Anzacs as a modern reworking of the classical story. The Nolans would spend a few months staying with the Johnstons on the Greek island of Hydra in 1956. On the nearby island of Spetsae, another Australian, Alan Moorehead (now buried in West Hampstead Cemetery), was completing what would become his best-selling book on the Gallipoli campaign. At Johnston’s urging, Nolan had read Moorehead’s New Yorker article which discussed the geographical proximity of Gallipoli and Troy and the similarities between the two campaigns.


Sidney Nolan, Gallipoli Riders

Sidney Nolan, Gallipoli Man
Nolan’s own research led him to the archaeological museum in Athens, where he became absorbed by classical sculpture and the depiction of ancient Greek warriors on vases. Around this time he also paid a brief visit to Gallipoli and the site of ancient Troy. His reading of classical Greek literature inspired his depiction of Australian soldiers as ‘reincarnations of the ancient Trojan heroes of mythical times.’ His paintings and drawings of the Australians on Gallipoli recall the vase images of Greek heroes fighting naked and without their armour. They also recall novelist Compton Mackenzie’s famous description of the Anzacs’ classical beauty:

Their beauty, for it really was heroic, should have been celebrated in hexameters not headlines. As a child I used to pore for hours over those illustrations of Flaxman for Homer and Virgil which simulated the effect of ancient pottery. There was not one of those glorious young men I saw that day who might not himself have been Ajax or Diomed, Hector or Achilles. Their almost complete nudity, their tallness, and majestic simplicity of line, their rose-brown flesh burnt by the sun and purged of all grossness by the ordeal through which they were passing, all these united to create something as near to absolute beauty as I shall hope ever to see in this world.

In spite of their classical sources, however, Nolan’s soldiers are not larger-than-life beings, but, instead, ordinary, anonymous figurines buffeted by the forces of destiny.


Note: The title of our film, ‘Arma virumque cano’ is taken from the very first line of Virgil’s Aeneid (‘Of arms and the man I sing’). It was a Latin tag used by War Poets such as Wilfred Owen to expose jingoism for what it was and to reveal the disquieting ambivalence intrinsic to poems such as the Iliad and the Aeneid. Bernard Shaw used the phrase too of course!


Postscript
Be sure to check Edward’s News blog for the latest news, including an exciting announcement about a soon-to-be-released audio edition of Slim Chances.

31 October 2012

OCTOBER'S END

The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, sc.i

An occasional sonnet:


On this All Hallows Eve, I leave you with a work in progress, a painting I have lately revisited:

West Hampstead Nocturne.
Acrylic on canvas, 2012.

27 October 2012

IN MEMORIAM: MARIE LLOYD

When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, When every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramaphones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motor cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bed-time stories through a wireless receiver attached to both ears, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians. You will see that the death of Marie Lloyd has had a depressing effect, and that I am quite incapable of taking any interest in any literary events in England in the last two months, if any have taken place.
T. S. Eliot, The Dial, December 1922

Ninety years ago this month, Marie Lloyd, ‘Queen of the Music Hall’, was laid to rest in (West) Hampstead Cemetery at the age of fifty-two. Her grave is still festooned with colourful floral tributes.


T. S. Eliot, who devoted his ‘London Letter’ of December 1922 to Marie Lloyd’s passing, was a former resident of West Hampstead. After his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, he lived for a year or two with his in-laws at 3 Compayne Gardens, a house he described as rather gloomy, with long dark corridors and imposing iron gates, and a stout garden wall.

Photo by EP

Photo: State Library of Victoria,
Australia
Among those who sent wreaths to Marie’s funeral were the ventriloquist Arthur Prince, whom you may remember as the subject of my first Graveyard Ditty, and the Edwardian stage stars Fred Terry and Julia Neilson. All three are buried in West Hampstead, not far from Marie’s grave.

Neilson and Terry, circa 1907

Coming soon: a special Halloween blog!

West Hampstead Cemetery at sunset.
Photo by EP