Theatre of Disillusions 2: This Time, It's Versical

I have redone the prologue as verse, to see what would happen. What has happened is that it has become rather more explicit and didactic. The ghost of Brecht peered critically over my shoulder while I was at it. I think it's certainly more striking and interesting, but then the form suggests a rather grand idiom when this is all supposed to be deliberately sordid. Well, here it is: since both end by saying that everything is up to the audience, I had better leave it to you to decide which you prefer.

Theatre of Disillusions: a burlesque show in X acts

Prologue

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: My friends! I bid you welcome to our play,

Beneath whose powerful hypnotic sway

No thing upon the stage is what it seems:

Our International Theatre of Dreams!

In this, the planet’s greatest magic-show

We mean to upturn all you think you know!

In earlier ages, primitive and poor,

Beset by famines, plagues, and deadly war,

Illusion’s art was greatly in demand

From all the greatest powers in the land:

Without our magic-tricks, the masses might

Have asked about the reasons for their plight.

But what a simple stumbling display

These early efforts seem to us today!

On viewing them, we jaded moderns smirk:

How can a priest do a magician’s work?

Then came old Shakespeare, reckoned in his time

A crafty wizard: he could spin a rhyme,

I grant you, and his rhymes could make a king

Into a noble or a monstrous thing

Just as he pleased. But, well, these words recall:

[Quoting in a melodramatic Victorian voice]‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies.’

Such simple, humble, quaint effects as these!

To gamble all his labours of creation

Upon his audience’ imagination!

Good God! This was of all his several flaws

The worst: that he would bid the audience pause

And think! [this word to be enunciated much as a camp pantomime villain would the word ‘children’] A thought will make illusion flee

And leave exposed the grim reality,

More naked yet, once robbed of its disguise

Than if it had been plain before our eyes.

But never fear! Such thought-provoking feats,

Our modern methods render obsolete.

Imagination, now, has had his day:

He slowly starves to death for want of pay.

His job has gone to us, dear friends, who can

Turn strings of simple numbers into man,

And what is more, can likewise reduce man

To numbers in our simple formulae:

Such miracles we practice every day!

Our theatres to temples we can turn,

And temples as mere theatres we spurn!

It’s true, dear friends: the world will never know

So marvellously intricate a show

As ours; and yet all that would be for naught

Without a public free from loathsome thought.

All that we do is meant to entertain

You! [sinks imploringly to his knees], audience, and all would be in vain

If ever you should you should raise a heckling voice:

All our success, or failure, is your choice.

You are the kings and queens at whose fine court

We are but jesters who must sing and sport.

You are stern Caesars, who, with one raised hand

Can life and fame, or shameful death, command

For we who strain and struggle at your feet.

You are the gods whose favour we entreat

When every night we build and sacrifice

A new-made miracle of rare device:

A whole world put together in a day

Presented to you, juggled, thrown away!

And so, like Shakespeare, we must humbly pray

That you will kindly judge our little play. 

Curtain down. 

Theatre of Disillusions

STAG elections are a-coming, and spurred by this I am beginning to write a play, although not one particularly meant to be performed with the humble (hence, we would remind you, honest, noble, genuine etc.) resources of Glasgow, or at all. The feel of it owes a great deal to a short excerpt of The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus which featured on a radio interview I heard. There doesn't seem to be any readily available English translation, boo! But even the short section of prologue struck me to the bone. It was a hysterical and darkly hilarious blurring of the line between reality and fiction - which, come to think of it, is an alright description of the official world culture of the 21st century. So I've decided to start writing something inspired by it and by Hollywood, entitled, ekhem:

Theatre of Disillusion: being a burlesque show in X Acts.


Prologue.

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, welcome to the International Theatre of Dreams and Illusions, the greatest magic-show on Earth! And those of you who have witnesses our earlier performances this season will know that this is no empty boast.

With us you have been transported, without ever leaving your seats, to every part of the globe and to all the extremes of human emotion! Not only have we made you, as that no-good amateur Shakespeare said, ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confined two mighty monarchies,’ but we have also made you believe that they both look astonishingly like southern California! These and other marvels are accomplished by our mastery of hypnosis. Any C-list hypnotist can send a theatre of intelligent adults to sleep, but only we can send them into fits of laughter or floods of tears! Not content with such trifles, we have altered the past and the future! Through the miracle of modern science, we have turned strings of numbers into human beings, and human beings into strings of numbers in our formulae! In your minds we have elevated this theatre into a temple, and reduced temples to so many theatres!

And tonight, tonight, tonight we will demonstrate and expose the greatest, most audacious illusion of them all! For you, who have marvelled at our seemingly limitless power over your very minds, do not realise that compared with you we are as nothing. You are the kings and queens before whose hundreds of rather cramped thrones we poor jesters caper! You are the stern Caesars whose raised or lowered thumbs decide the fate of we gladiators – and where the primitive Romans fought with swords, we nightly bludgeon each-other to death with Love, Adventure, Comedy, Tragedy. What! [Falls to knees, head in hands.] Kings? Emperors?! What a tasteless and inferior bunch, compared to you! Ladies and gentlemen [Springs smoothly back to feet], you are the gods for whom we ministering angels nightly create new worlds! And tonight, tonight, TONIGHT we will reveal how each of these worlds which we construct, juggle for your amusement, and toss over our shoulders in fact owes its origin to you!

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please applaud… yourselves!

Curtain down.

I aim to go on to chart the creation of a Hollywood film in a sort of surreal allegorical music-hall fashion. My Big Idea is that at the end, the rather grotesque finished product is presented to the audience and they are, once again invited to give it their applause - begged, even, with great stress on how without their approval the whole edifice will crumble. The ending is left up to them. 

From the Glasgow stage, we present...

Just back from Student Theatre At Glasgow's production of Cinders; mah-juck! (as we say in Glasgow, dear).

Since my small readership aren't in a position to go and see it, I won't dwell on the details of the production over-much and will merely say that everybody excelled: the stars, the small roles (but!, I hear you cry, there are no small roles; quite right, of course), the tech, the music, the make-up people (everybody was gaunt and blear-eyed, *shiver*...); everything clicked together so precisely, in such an intimate space, that it became very difficult to consider the play as a production at all. So I won't! You come here for the Dark Forests of the Slavic Soul.

The play concerns a girls' reform school in 50s Poland: a film-crew are making a documentary around a production of 'Cinderella' by these hardened - or apparently hardened - juvies. I wondered early on whether time and place particularly mattered - I knew that the playwright was Polish, but not the context in which he'd written it - and whether you couldn't have put the same story in a similar institution in, say, Ireland. But somewhere in the second act I knew this wasn't the case, and the reason why hit me during the applause. Indulge me a reading: this is only looking at a very complex work from one angle, of course, but I like it. After a year of squeezing texts in medieval instruments of torture to yield up thematic life-blood, its nice when a thesis just hits you. I shall try and avoid spoiling.

The setting is very low-key: a bored party official we only see at the start, short references to the war, 'Ah... only before socialism...'. And indeed the play makes fun of the direct approach to making horror out of totalitarianism, and at the people who fall for it: '"Hitler shot my father and laughed as he did it", I can't use that!' get's a guilty laugh. This is a very self-conscious play all through, and it takes a bloody good playwright and an equally good production to squeeze your bleeding heart with a play about the dangers of squeezing bleeding hearts. But it triumphs, and as the boundaries of the play-within-the-play break down, so do those of the outer play until in the last scene people wanted to jump onto the stage and do something, dammit.

But I realised at the end that, although you probably could have the same characters and events in any country, they'd signify something quite different. Here we see very different two men - a teacher and the film-director, the latter idealistic to the point of fury and the former tragicomically neurotic - who have both become so obsessed with creating something that it's become more important than the mere humans caught up in it. And in the end, as will inevitably happen, losing sight of the harm they're doing for principles makes them lose sight of principles as well. We are in fact witnessing the story of communism in the 20th century.

Anyway, go and see it if you ever get the chance. Of course it won't be as good as STAG's: nothing ever is (at least before socialism).

Meanwhile, in the Dark Forest of the Slavic Soul...

So I was having a poke around in Slavonic Studies in the library today, as it feels sufficiently close to doing my Russian project to fool my guilty conscience, and I found the adapted-for-stage version of Bulgakov's The White Guard in the English translation by Glenny, the same chap who did the novel so well. I did not even know such a thing existed!

It's a great read. A lot more direct and in-your-face than the novel: in large part this is the nature of the form, and of course the hand of the Soviet censors is visible in places. The past - both of the characters and of their society - has been largely cut out, the subplots removed, and several characters merged. Everything has been made explicit that in the novel was mouthed suggestively, and of course we've lost the gorgeous dream-sequence history of the civil war in Ukraine. But the fierce, embattled humanity of these flawed and noble souls shines through just as clearly. The play makes up for what it can't do by putting the spotlight on what was only one feature of the novel, the sheer energy and sometimes fun of the characters interacting: Alexei and Nikolka discharge much the same roles as in the novel, but Elena has considerably more crap not to take because she doesn't take any crap, and Myshlaevsky gets even more zingers. You have to love Myshlaevsky. He knows he's trapped in The Tragedy Of A Nation and he's not going to let it spoil his fun.

I want to see it now! (In a clear demonstration of the basic rottenness of our capitalist system, it was on in Edinburgh about two years before I'd ever heard of Bulgakov.) But here is a thought. In Shakespeare's day it seems to have been customary on the English stage to represent two separate nations by giving one lot the broad Scots accents just made familiar by King James. In the particular historical context Scots as Ukrainian seems to me spot-on: a language or dialect with its own history and literature but considered by educated society to be slightly ridiculous in the mouths of anyone but the Unwashed Masses. And of course the prospect of watching fuzzy-hatted cossacks striding about the stage shouting in Taysidese is its own attraction.

Surely this means that our White Guards, who disguise their Ukrainian origins and connections by adopting authorised Russian elite culture more fervently than any mere Russian, can only possibly be played with southern Edinburgh accents as thick as treacle? The fact is, our tribe need more cultural exposure. I have the greatest possible admiration for both The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Maisie MacKenzie the Morningside cat; but we need to be cast out of type, and a setting so soaked in blood, vodka, and white wine is about as far from type as you could get without losing the things so essential to our brand: black comedy and acute bourgeois neurosis.

So how about it, then, lads?


(No fiction? No. I had a vague idea of creating Maisie Comes to Kiev, in which our young feline heroine goes to stay with her cousins the Purrbins and their friends such as Meowshlaevsky and Whiskervinsky, fighting against the Ukrainian nationalist forces of Petlyura, who history has already furnished with an absurd cat pun. But I couldn't make myself do it. I too had a childhood, you know,)