Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Told by an Idiot: The Dark Philosophers

Meet Gwyn Thomas, who is dead. He won’t lie down but he does occasionally slump on a sofa clutching the urn that holds his ashes, and often he’s to be found perched on a staircase, listening in on his father and his younger self, or eavesdropping on his neighbours. ‘Tell him to…’ he says, planting ideas in people’s heads. And who are these people he manipulates like puppets? Why, the people of the Rhondda Valley, of course, where Gwyn was born and bred, and the place that is the setting for his novels, short stories, plays, and autobiographical writings. Before seeing The Dark Philosophers, I knew nothing about the life and work of this renowned Welsh writer, but now he feels like a friend.

So here we are in the Valley, sometime in the 1930s, a place where people live ‘operatically, in shouts’. The crowded Terraces are represented by a clutter of junk-shop furniture – closets and wardrobes and chests. Wardrobe doors burst open and out come the villagers. An ensemble of seven (four men and three women) play around 30 colourful characters – and that’s not including Michael Parkinson, the goats, and the Oxford University students. They are as sharp and sparky an ensemble as you are likely to find anywhere, drawing us from one terrible – and often terribly funny – tale to another with breakneck speed and razor-sharp observation.

Told By An Idiot are masters of physical and visual modes of storytelling, and Paul Hunter’s direction brings out the best of everyone (and everything) on stage. A wardrobe door pops open, and we’re instantly in a Valley pub, witnessing a game of darts. Two people crawl painfully slowly across the floor in almost-darkness and we’re on the coal face too. A watering can is emptied over a man tugging his raincoat up to his ears, and we’re caught in the downpour with him. A broom, a jacket, and a wig are pulled together and there, looming over us menacingly, is Oscar the mountain-owner, the embodiment of capitalist greed, a tyrant who is willing to kill a poor man scavenging for coal just for the hell of it.

Some of the stories get pretty hairy: the coal-scavenging murderous-capitalist story is nasty in all sorts of ways; and one about a goat-keeper whose daughters take desperate measures to save their youngest sister from the abuse that they’ve experienced is horrible, yet told with a terrible black humour: ‘Could you love a goat?’ the goat-keeper asks the young lad who has come to work for him…

Every element of the production is beautifully realised: the characterisations (flirty barmaids, tired miners, and a shy lad ‘so thin he’s liable to fall through the cracks in the pavement’); the feisty physical action (a rip-roaring Commedia-style fight scene, a kitchen-table murder, a dodgy cabaret singer’s worst moment, seen through the eyes of her audience of male admirers); the sound (great booming crashes from the pits, gently tinkling pianos, and the odd tune on a ukelele); the design, which conjures up a sepia-tinged, earthy world – the nutty wood brown ‘architecture’ lit with street-lamp ambers. The text, crafted by Carl Grose, is both poetic and cheerily colloquial: ‘You could boil a bloody egg to those blasts, eh… Every three minutes, aren’t they?’

All this and scene-shifting too! As two actors who’ve been playing goats stop their bleating and leap up to move a large table aside, our Gwyn chimes in with: ‘You don’t see that every day, do you? Goats moving furniture’. You don’t indeed. But I’m very glad I did.

www.toldbyanidiot.org

Grid Iron: What Remains

What remains after death? Rags, bones, memories, melodies… Ah yes, melodies! Long after the piano lid has been slammed shut for the last time, the notes live on, echoing forever around the great soundbox that is this earthly world.

Grid Iron, the kings and queens of Scottish site-responsive theatre, have created a brand-new promenade piece set in the imposingly sombre antique halls, studies, and stairways of the University’s anatomy department. What Remains is performed by one live performer, David Paul Jones, with a supporting cast of a thousand ghosts and sighs. It could be described as a live horror film – or more precisely, of what might remain of a horror film if you took away the actual film. Remains encountered include the set (or site), the props, the research materials, the instruments that created the score, and of course the music itself. This is presented to us through demented live piano performances by DPJ, playing Gilbert K Prendergast, a concert pianist driven insane by the demands made upon him, and the demands he has made upon himself in his quest for perfection; disembodied fragments of sound that haunt the corridors and stairwells; and spooky moments of musical autonomy, as instruments seem to play themselves. The audience are left to construct their own narrative from the traces they encounter: the recitals, the snatches of music they hear, the letters they read, the rooms furnished or bare, the masks and the mirrors, the bones and the scalpels… And always there is sound, as sound is the heartbeat of the story.

Inspired as it is by the horror genre, with particular reference to films that use Gothic or Romantic music as the emotional driver or to push forward the narrative, it is hardly surprising that there are references galore to pick up on, from Hammer House of Horror’s Fall of the House of Usher, to Vincent Price as Dr Phibes, to Phantom of the Opera. And for anyone of a certain age, the disembodied voice of the piano pushing students further than they can handle has an instant association with the 1950s children’s recording, ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. What Remains is also inspired, in part, by the life and works of Scriabin, and by other late 19^th / early 20^th century composers such as Ravel and Mahler. A love of classical music from this era is at the heart of the work, and much of the dramaturgy/scenography of the piece is led by the music.

We start all together in a grand entrance hall, seeing Gilbert give the recital of his life, then are led off in groups (our ‘team’ denoted by musical notes – I was an A Minor). As is usual with Grid Iron, the audience are very tightly managed (no Punchdrunk-style wandering alone here!), and we are carefully guided throughout. Fine for the most part, although I did feel a little hurried occasionally ,and was particularly reluctant to leave a room filled with display cases full of bones, and featuring a pianola playing itself with wild abandon.

Our one performer is often absent – or, at least, not physically present, although his extraordinary and beautiful musical compositions stay with us throughout the journey. Along the way we are drawn into participating in a piano lesson led by a disembodied voice, scared by ominously human-sized bundles crashing from cupboards, put to bed in white satin sleeping bags (a scene I wasn’t entirely convinced by), and enticed up stairwells lit with ghostly blue light, where we are serenaded most wonderfully by Gilbert in nightdress and bloodied mask, giving a heartbreakingly beautiful (whilst simultaneously darkly funny) rendition of an Antony and the Johnsons song, ‘Her Eyes Are Beneath The Ground’.

I’ve been watching, and listening to, David Paul Jones admiringly for many years, ever since his appearance in Grid Iron’s Those Eyes, That Mouth (2003). Since that wonderful debut with the company, he has continued his work as composer, musician, and performer on numerous projects, including the award-winning Devil’s Larder and 2010 Fringe success Barflies. Programme notes tell us that DPJ and Grid Iron’s director Ben Harrison have been conspiring to create this present work ever since they met, and after many false starts and changes of direction, the piece has finally seen the light of day (or the dark of the night, it would perhaps be more appropriate to say). It may have been a long time coming, but it’s great that it’s finally happened. What Remains is very much a showcase of DPJ’s talents and obsessions, drawing on autobiographical material (such as memories of piano lessons on the path to his first career as a concert pianist, and reliving the burning desire to be ever-better), with the physical, visual, musical score lovingly guided and directed by Ben Harrison.

It’s a melee of marvellous sounds and – yes – haunting images; a wonderful marriage of sight and sound – and indeed of site and sound! There’s beauty in the darkness, and humour too. It’s a show that will remain with me a long time, I’m sure.

www.gridiron.org.uk

Theatre Ad Infinitum: Translunar Paradise

Oh heart, oh troubled heart!

An old man, recently bereaved, sits and sits, the minutes ticking by with painful slowness. He makes tea, and out of habit pours two cups, one for him and one for his dead wife. And still he sits. Watching him in anguish is the spirit of his wife, desperate to help, to tell him that it is OK to let her go. She tries to move ‘her’ cup away; she flutters round him in the house they have shared together for so many years. He makes a desolate attempt to sort through her belongings. A small case contains all her most treasured possessions – her favourite necklace, a bundle of letters – and these he lingers over sorrowfully. Each object becomes a conduit for a milestone memory from their shared life: their courtship and marriage; a baby that doesn’t survive infancy; the relived trauma of wartime injury after he is demobilised; the difficult patch in their marriage when she is given the opportunity to study or to forge her own career path. And eventually the inevitable as one partner (she) dies after a long illness and the other (he) is left to grieve.

It is a simple, universal story. Interview anyone over the age of seventy, speak to your parents (or grandparents, depending on your age!), and some version of the story above will emerge. That, for me, is a positive not a negative. At the heart of the success of this piece is the universality of the story, and the beauty with which it is executed.

There is not a second of Translunar Paradise that hasn’t been plotted with infinite care, nor performed with immaculate craft and precision. George Mann as the widower and Deborah Pugh as the spirit wife are a perfect match, their wordless storytelling exhibiting the expertise in mime and physical performance that a Lecoq training gives you, yet going way beyond the technical into a really gifted subtlety and expressiveness. Handheld masks are used beautifully to represent the characters in old age, the masks flying away as memories unfold and the characters become their younger selves. Each moment of transformation is seamless, and there are some particularly lovely sections where a removed mask takes on a puppetesque quality, the older character observing a younger self or partner. Objects are manipulated with tender care: a cup fought over between the real and spirit worlds; a necklace that dances with exquisite joy; the little suitcase that has its own narrative in the play, representing the one thing that she (when younger) has to hang on to, and that he (when older) has to let go of.

The physical action is supported by an onstage, visible accordionist (Kim Heron) who provides the perfectly-pitched soundtrack – playing or whistling snatches of songs that have accompanied the couple’s life journey, from ‘We’ll Meet Again’ to ‘Girl From Ipanema’; tapping out the interminable ticking of a clock with the accordion buttons; providing the labouring breath of a dying woman with the instrument’s bellows.

A word also about the audience. I don’t think I have ever seen a more attentive audience, at the Edinburgh Fringe or elsewhere. From the opening image of the widower sat at his kitchen table to a closing ‘life flashes by’ whirlwind of reprised memories as the ghost departs, the whole audience is almost holding its collective breath, and as the lights come up to rapturous applause, it is clear that there is hardly a dry eye in the house.

A near-perfect example of contemporary wordless theatre – and proof (should anyone need it) that theatre without words can engage the head, touch the heart, and nourish the soul just as effectively as any other form. A little taste of paradise on earth!

www.theatreadinfinitum.co.uk

Paper Doll Militia: This Twisted Tale

This Twisted Tale is a modern fairytale, a coming-of-age story played out with vim and vigour by two female performers using a whole toolbox of theatrical tricks that includes circus (aerial and pole), puppetry, projection, shadow theatre, verbal storytelling, and dialogue – with feisty physical performances binding it all together.

First we meet Chloe – platinum pigtails, white bloomers, and an innocent air – the type of girl who floats through the world, teased by her peers for being childish and dreamy. Chloe’s mother, we learn, is ‘too tired’ to play with her, so she tells herself stories using her precious puppets (Wayang Kulit style flat figures on sticks). So there are numerous little plays within the play as Chloe tells the tale of Mary who ‘dove into the sea to see how mermaids pee’.

Chloe doesn’t really have any friends, other than her puppets, and spends a lot of time alone in the playground – which is represented very beautifully onstage by a an oversized swing, a set of monkey bars, and a lampost that doubles as a ‘Chinese pole’, all ready for the climbing…

Enter the ‘tumbling and whirling’ Luce (short for Lucifer, we suspect) – all punk posturing and petulance, a glorious mess of red curls, Cleopatra eyeliner, and black leather boots. She’s the devil incarnate: the new girl in town, or Chloe’s imaginary friend, or her alter-ego – choose your interpretation – a Peter Pan character who stays just where she is whilst Chloe grows and changes, yet is catalyst to those changes through her provocations.

The relationship between the two characters (or perhaps we should call them archetypes) is played out on the playground-cum-circus equipment in a series of acrobatic and aerial duets, and in the spoken text that is sometimes delivered a little breathlessly with rather too many crackles and clicks as the radio mics respond grumpily to the shaking about afforded them by the aerial work. This all augmented by the simple but sweet shadow puppet vignettes, played on a little portable booth, and supported by a very lovely soundscape of distorted music-box melodies and toy piano arpeggios composed by Grid Iron associate artist David Paul Jones. Talking of Grid Iron, their director Ben Harrison has also had a hand in this as a co-director/dramaturg.

It is a charming and poignant piece that tackles the marriage between circus skills and theatrical storytelling with great gusto. It doesn’t always succeed: the text needs a lot of work, both in the editing and in the delivery, but This Twisted Tale is adventurous in its aims and can thus be forgiven a few glitches.

My one major criticism is that although it is good to have the story pulled into Chloe’s future (with a very lovely girl-to-woman transformation scene that is done with great clarity and elegance), the inclusion of strictly adult content in such lines as ‘maybe if you were that passionate with your husband he’d fuck you more’ means that the show cannot be marketed at the audience that would be an ideal target – young people in the 11-15 year-old age group, just hitting puberty and really interested in the subject of self-discovery and self-determination. I’d advise the company to rethink some of the script decisions – a story about the development and empowerment of young women is just what the world needs, and although the dark elements are key to the narrative,it is possible to represent this theatrically in a way that could bring the show to its widest audience.

www.thepaperdollmilitia.com

bluemouth inc.: Dance Marathon

They shoot horses, don’t they? In America during the depression era of the 1930s, young men and women took part in dance marathons, which gave a cash prize to the last pair standing after – well, it could sometimes be weeks rather than hours or days! Canadian experimental theatre company Bluemouth inc.’s Dance Marathon is a mere four hours: an interactive performance event that plays with and parodies the dance marathon model.

So, we are all gathered in the foyer of the Traverse, and we have been issued with numbers to wear on our chests. I’m number 136. Everyone is chatting excitedly and wondering what’s going to happen. I’m on my own and wishing I had a dance partner with me. But never fear, for bluemouth are here, and once we’ve been led off to a location around the corner we find ourselves in a large hall with hundreds of pairs of dance-instruction feet marked on the floor, and – you’ve guessed it – we have to go and find our own feet. So, come in number 135 – a nice young man from Edinburgh called Euan. We stand facing each other a little nervously, do the introductions thing, and meanwhile the Mistress of Ceremonies for the evening, resplendent in a sassy red shirt and black trews topped with a titfer, sits on a plinth musing on the situation around the room: ‘So maybe you came here tonight on a first date and that lovely blonde girl is now on the other side of the room gazing into someone else’s eyes…’ I wonder if Euan is wondering how come he’s ended up with someone old enough to be his mother… But now the first dance track has started (The Bee Gees, fromSaturday Night Fever) and off we go in a bit of freestyle. As we warm up and take off on the dancefloor, it’s clear that we both love dancing and aren’t the shy retiring types, so we grin happily at each other. And so it goes… there’s waltzing and slow dancing and charlestoning and swing-dancing, courtesy of the live jazz band – but mostly there’s disco classics on the decks, the sort of tracks that everyone loves to dance to: Michael Jackson’s ‘Billy Jean’, KC and the Sunshine Band, Chic’s ‘Le Freak’. There’s a constant flow of games and challenges: learn the Madison, start a Snowball dance, do a Derby round the dancefloor. People are eliminated, sometimes for slacking but often completely randomly after being thrown a general knowledge question. When eliminated, nothing too dreadful happens to them: they have their numbers taken off, but can stay in the dance. They are interviewed on camera, Big Brother style, and given gift tokens donated by local businesses as a consolation. And there are ‘second chance dances’ where, if they want to, they can try to win a number back. Everyone’s a winner!

But for the competitively minded, there is the opportunity for glory. Euan and I are acting like we don’t care, but are pretty pleased when we make it to the semi-final. The last eight, out of all these people! Wow! Unfortunately our Hawaiian Hula dance is deemed not quite there, although we have the audience on our side and ‘you were robbed’ is said more than once. Oh the pain of losing at the last hurdle! But when I see what the final involves – the last two couples pitted against each other in a kind of go-kart race – I’m pretty glad it’s not us. It all ends with one last dance, a great big love-in to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ – what else could it be?

What makes Dance Marathon such a rip-roaring success is the care and attention they’ve paid to the dynamics of the evening and the management of the audience-cum-participants. The show has a lovely rhythm and pace, with plants (company members from bluemouth plus a dozen or more Edinburgh-based dancers) interspersed throughout the crowd and ‘giving themselves away’ in incremental steps, from just being better at the taught dance routines than anyone else, to creating small ensemble interventions, to performing a number of solo performances or interactions (spoken or danced) that reflect on loneliness, partnership, ambition, and following your heart’s desire. The evening is held together by our MC, charismatic singer and dancer Lady Jane, and a flag-waving roller-blading referee.

Perfectly paced, thoroughly thought through, a delight and a privilege to witness and take part in. Top class entertainment that is simultaneously a gentle investigation of issues of intimacy, shyness, bravado, and competition. A true theatre of the people!