Tuesday 14 October 2014

21st CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS at No. 28 Belper

Just announced - a week after my Halloween show 21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS at Lee Rosy's, Nottingham, I'll be performing the same show at No. 28 Belper, where I performed The Blackwater Bride back in the spring. Here's the details...

21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS
No. 28 Belper, Market Square, Belper. Saturday 8th. November 2014. 7.30 pm.
Tickets £7 / £5 concession.

Scottish storyteller & playwright Marty Ross (BBC Radio horror; Doctor Who audio) drags The Fall Of The House Of Usher kicking & screaming into the modern world, in a show already a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe & London Horror Festivals!

Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher is long-established as a classic horror tale, but Marty Ross is a ‘modernist’ on the live storytelling scene, keen to rescue this resurgent form from backward looking quaintness. Thus, in his version, Falling For The Ushers, haunted twins Roderick and Madeline Usher have left behind the misty Gothic manor of the original story to become superstars of Glasgow's contemporary art world, thanks to their macabre conceptual installations in the manner of Damien Hirst and the Chapman Bros. But when Madeline’s old art school admirer Ed shows up, their tragic downfall is as inescapable as ever. And Marty Ross's unique performing style, combining evocative language with expressionistic mime and gesture, makes full-blown theatre out of the story as he embodies a whole cast list of larger than life characters.

FALLING FOR THE USHERS has already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe and London Horror Festivals, as testified by the reviews it received:

Insanely good storytelling… a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure… Ross’ violently impressive performance make this a heart-pounding triumph… Trainspotting meets gothic horror….” – Broadway Baby *****

“…What Marty Ross does with literature’s most mystical and macabre works is make them sing with new energy and beguile an audience all over again…. poetically re-worked ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ manages, in its modernisation, to preserve and revere the original, even intensifying its impact… a bewitchingly good story that leaves a haunting reminder long after the lights have gone down.” - 3 Weeks ****

Ross has a great aptitude for suspense and terror, and he hurls himself into his tale with energy and passion, in words which ring with Glasgow rhythm. An accomplished piece of work… a chilling conclusion.” – The Scotsman

Visceral. A compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as reeling… theatre that kept you on edge… an immensely entertaining ride that scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st Century….” – Fringe Review

Well established as a playwright, particularly with dark drama for BBC radio (Ghost Zone, Catch My Breath, Darker Side Of The Border, Rough Magick & Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk; another Poe show, Moyamensing, is to be BBC Radio Scotland's big Halloween show this year, with another new play, The Dead Of Fenwick Moor, to be broadcast in the new year), plus Doctor Who & award-nominated Dark Shadows audio drama, as well as Blood And Stone, nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award (horror fandom’s Oscars), Ross also regularly performs as a live storyteller, particularly in Scotland, his native country, and in the East Midlands, where he currently lives, this year having already seen him perform The Blackwater Bride in Nottingham and Derbyshire, and 21st Century Poe: Moyamensing at this year's Edinburgh Festival. Two plays of his have been commissioned for the last two Buxton Festivals – Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots & The Woman On The Bridge.

CONTACT: 07989-746641.






Monday 22 September 2014

21st Century Poe: Falling For The Ushers at Lee Rosy's, Nottingham, this Halloween!

Just pasting in the press release for my next storytelling show....

21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS
Lee Rosy's Tea Shop, 17 Broad Street, Nottingham NG1 3AJ.
31st. October 2014, 20.00. Tickets £3.50 (pay on door)

Descend into the basement at Lee Rosy's to spend Halloween with Edgar Allan Poe -- as celebrated Scottish storyteller & playwright Marty Ross (BBC Radio horror; Doctor Who audio) drags The Fall Of The House Of Usher kicking & screaming into the modern world, in a show already a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe & London Horror Festivals!

Halloween is fast approaching, and what better way to celebrate the creepiest night of the year than with the art of the terror tale in its oldest, purest, most 'unplugged' form, that of live storytelling? Descend into a cosy basement with a modern master of the art of the storyteller's art, as he gives his unique modern retelling of the most famous tale of the greatest horror writer of all - and with a good bracing cuppa within easy reach!

Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher is long-established as a classic horror tale, but Marty Ross is a ‘modernist’ on the live storytelling scene, keen to rescue this resurgent form from backward looking quaintness. Thus, in his version, Falling For The Ushers, haunted, incestuous twins Roderick and Madeline Usher have left behind the misty gothic manor of the original story to become superstars of Glasgow's contemporary art world, thanks to their macabre conceptual installations in the manner of Damien Hirst and the Chapman Bros. But when Madeline’s old art school admirer Ed shows up, their tragic downfall is as inescapable as ever. And Marty Ross's unique performing style, combining evocative language with expressionistic mime and gesture, makes full-blown theatre out of the story as he embodies a whole cast list of larger than life characters.

FALLING FOR THE USHERS has already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe and London Horror Festivals, as testified by the reviews it received:

Insanely good storytelling… a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure… Ross’ violently impressive performance make this a heart-pounding triumph… Trainspotting meets gothic horror….” – Broadway Baby *****

“…What Marty Ross does with literature’s most mystical and macabre works is make them sing with new energy and beguile an audience all over again…. poetically re-worked ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ manages, in its modernisation, to preserve and revere the original, even intensifying its impact… a bewitchingly good story that leaves a haunting reminder long after the lights have gone down.” - 3 Weeks ****

Ross has a great aptitude for suspense and terror, and he hurls himself into his tale with energy and passion, in words which ring with Glasgow rhythm. An accomplished piece of work… a chilling conclusion.” – The Scotsman

Visceral. A compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as reeling… theatre that kept you on edge… an immensely entertaining ride that scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st Century….” – Fringe Review


Well established as a playwright, particularly with dark drama for BBC radio (Ghost Zone, Catch My Breath, Darker Side Of The Border, Rough Magick & Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk; another Poe show, Moyamensing, is to be BBC Radio Scotland's big Halloween show this year, with another new play, The Dead Of Fenwick Moor, to be broadcast in the new year), plus Doctor Who & award-nominated Dark Shadows audio drama, as well as Blood And Stone, nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award (horror fandom’s Oscars), Ross also regularly performs as a live storyteller, particularly in Scotland, his native country, and in the East Midlands, where he currently lives, this year having already seen him perform The Blackwater Bride in Nottingham and Derbyshire, and 21st Century Poe: Moyamensing at this year's Edinburgh Festival. Two plays of his have been commissioned for the last two Buxton Festivals – Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots & The Woman On The Bridge.








Friday 8 August 2014

21st Century Poe: Moyamensing continues at Edfringe

My Edinburgh Fringe show 21st Century Poe: Moyamensing is doing well at this year's Edinburgh Fringe. We filled the venue, Paradise In The Vault, the old vault of St. Augustine's Church in other words, on the first two nights and Friday and Saturday look like they'll be similairly packed with decent sized audiences inbetween. No disasters or catastrophes to report and I've got a great tech to back me up this year in Craig Black. Audience members I've spoken to seem to have enjoyed the show. It's a challenging piece: where last year's 21st Century Poe stories were essentially straightforward horror tales, this show is more complex, more allusive, more poetic, more surreal, its logic the associative logic of nightmare rather than conventional A + B = C plotting, a portrait of the inside of a the soul of a very complex man, not just a blunt 'boo!" shouting shocker. It's directly based on Poe's own reports of the dreams and hallucinations he suffered while imprisoned in Philadelphia's Moyamensing prison. Some incidents which might seem like ghoulish invention on my part (live dissection! Prospective cannibalism!) are actually pretty much verbatim from Poe's own reports. Anyway, here's a couple of backstage photos. The show continues at Venue 29 till 17 August. Here's a link for tickets: TICKET LINK

Wednesday 30 July 2014

21st Century Poe: Moyamensing photos

Just before setting off for Edinburgh for my super spectacular storytelling show 21st Century Poe: Moyamensing at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, I trimmed up my brand new moustache (which my wife hates, by the way) and got into costume for a few photos. Frankly, the resemblance between me and the Divine Edgar is starting to look slightly creepy.... Tickets for the show can be booked HERE....




Friday 11 July 2014

GHOST ZONE - The Making Of... PART TWO

(With my serial GHOST ZONE back on BBC Radio 4 Extra this Sunday at 6pm & midnight - CHECK IT OUT HERE - I'm just giving a bit of background here. In the last installment, I talked about the background to the writing of the piece. Here I'll talk about the actual production....)

BBC Scotland was still without a radio drama recording studio, in the protracted run up to the construction and opening of the Glasgow Pacific Quay studios that are used today, so as with a lot of my plays of the time we recorded at an independent studio the BBC rented in the village of Pencaitland, a drive of the better part of an hour outside Edinburgh. It was a quaint, quiet little place, almost like a real life Inchbrae (the fictional village's name, by the way, is down to no more or less important a fact than that I happened to lose my virginity, many years before, in a place called Inch House in Edinburgh). Those of us who weren't driving through used to meet in Waverley Station in Edinburgh and get mini-bussed (or maxi-taxied) out to the village.

I remember stepping into the converted school house that was the studio on the very first morning to be greeted by an almost psychedelic, swirling soundscape of strange sounds. Going along the corridor to the control booth, I found director Bruce Young and sound man Lee McPhail playing about with abstract alien soundscapes with all the happy glee of two schoolboys hopelessly lost in a game with Star Wars toys. If there's an unsung hero to Ghost Zone, it's certainly the sound man Lee McPhail. By the time Ghost Zone was recorded, it wasn't customary to credit technicians, so none of the countless people who've heard the serial have ever heard Lee's name, which is a bit like leaving Douglas Trumbull's name off the credits of 2001 or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. A big, bluff, down-to-earth Scottish bloke, the sort of guy who'd snort derisively at any attempt to characterise him as an artist, he was an artist on Ghost Zone, nonetheless. It was kind of wonderful: often on bog-standard realist BBC radio drama, a technician like him often doesn't get to do much more than evoke a soundscape of kettles boiling, toasters popping or cars passing in the street, but here suddenly he had the chance to conjure this whole fantastical, phantasmagoric soundscape.

Anyway, we got down to the readthrough with the assembled cast, the whole five episodes in one go, at which point it became clear we were STILL going to be running short here and there. I can recall having to run out to the desk in the corridor, typing up an extra couple of scenes, printing them and then passing them to Carrie, Bruce Young's assistant, to distribute. I recall the 'helicopter landing' scene which introduces both Beth and the Captain in Episode 1 was written in exactly that way: it's quite a nice intro to two major characters, and I do love the sound of a helicopter, but it was written from scratch about five minutes before it was recorded. People hearing about this after the fact have said "Ooh, that must have been terrible, weren't you stressed?" But in fact I found writing new material much less painful than cutting existing material.

The cast performed well, but I know it was a challenging experience for them, particularly because all those fantastic sound effects we could hear up in the control room weren't audible to the actors - because you need the 'cleanest' possible audio on the voices, they had to perform to a completely silent background. Gayanne Potter playing Jill said it was like "green screen acting": they never really knew what the background was going to be, on top of which - for her character especially - there's a super intricate psychological journey, through the anguish of loss to all kinds of interwoven layers of reality and unreality, present tense and memory. I suspect at times the experience was as bewildering for her as for her character. Also, of course, if you're a Scottish actor, you're used to doing a lot of social realist drama: science fiction isn't a genre you get much chance to work in, not like it would be in blockbuster-era Hollywood. There was a running joke between Gayanne and Lesley Hart, playing her daughter, over who might be playing their characters if it was a Hollywood blockbuster: they pretty much decided on Sigourney Weaver and Christina Ricci - which wasn't the way I saw it all! (Maybe Diane Lane and some-brilliant-but-completely-unknown-kid-from-nowhere). Afterwards, I know that many of the actors were astonished to hear the final result: Simon Tait (a.k.a Dan) played Arnold Schoenberg in my play A Breath From Other Planets shortly afterward and was raving in the green room about how impressed he'd been (he also said he'd met Gayanne and she'd told him how impressed she'd been: Bruce sighed and said 'She never told me she was impressed...')

Anyway, it went out at the very tail end of 2004 and seemed well received: I noted there was a warning about disturbing scenes being tacked on for the Seventh Dimension, and it was only then I realised how dark and intense, how bloody and tortured, some of it could seem - I wonder if there wasn't some faint echo of the then-ongoing and bloody chaos in Iraq, the intricate and seemingly endless living nightmare, the out-of-our-depthness, of it all: science fiction is a sort of litmus genre that compulsively reflects its era even when it seems to be spiralling off completely into self-contained fantasy. There's nothing explicitly about cold war tensions in It Came From Outer Space, about McCarthyite witch hunts in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, about Harold MacMillan's government in Quatermass 2, yet they're all there as surely as in any documentary of the era.

But it's all maybe more personal than that: this is a science fiction / horror story in which the worst horror is not the extraordinary, the alien, the 'other' - the creepiest thing is the sheer oppressive normality of at least the facade Inchbrae presents: I wanted a story in which a back garden barbecue or a village fete would be as creepy as that vault full of slimy facehugger eggs in ALIEN. Jill is a woman who's escaped a conventional domestic role and the creepy thing is that the alien force doesn't want to eat her alive or plant a chestburster in her belly... it wants to drag her into the 'good little wifey' paradigm she's escaped in the outer world. I suppose this ties in to my feelings about the world in which I grew up: Newton Mearns, my childhood home, is in the Scottish lowlands rather than highlands, but I'm struck now by how similar it is / was to Inchbrae: a sunny, well-behaved place of the most conformist normality - with deep veins of poison running underneath, like underground currents. If you want my direct vision of Newton Mearns, you should check out my novel Aztec Love Song http://www.weathervanepress.co.uk/page2.htm to see my direct take on 'the Mearns', but it occurs to me there's as much of the Mearns in Ghost Zone.

How do I feel about Ghost Zone now? I suppose I'm ultimately happier with CATCH MY BREATH: that was developed from a screenplay written several years before, so by the time it got into the studio I'd literally had years to polish my ideas about it, while GHOST ZONE had to be written from scratch at very short notice: it's bursting with rich and interesting ideas (probably more so than CATCH), but I would have liked a bit more time to polish some of them. And I suppose I'm ultimately more of a Gothic Romancer than a hardcore SF writer: as I said in the previous installment, when it comes to SF I definitely see myself as on the surrealist wing of the genre, rather than the nuts'n'bolts serious scientific speculation end: Ghost Zone, I think, probably makes more sense ultimately if seen as a kind of surrealist psychodrama, closer to a Strindberg dream play or Bergman's Hour Of The Wolf than to Arthur C. Clarke. But it's probably the best received of the Radio 7 / 4 Extra pieces I've done and I know is highly regarded here and there - I even recall coming across on some BBC message board or other the suggestion that it was where the US TV series LOST got all its ideas: I can't remotely see the connection myself (though I only ever watched the first episode.), but if there's a brilliant lawyer out there who thinks he get me some money out of this completely groundless suggestion, he's welcome to try.

I kind of liked the ending: it seems a sort-of happy ending, but the moment you start to think about it, the darker and more complex it gets: what's going on there is most definitely NOT a strategy a psychoanalyst would recommend for getting over a loss. I even toyed with an idea for a sequel, called Ghost Land, that would have shifted the action to a run-down seaside resort (just like Losey's 'The Damned!'), but as with my Tunguska idea all those years ago, I never got past the first act!

Wednesday 9 July 2014

GHOST ZONE - The Making Of.... Part One.



I see BBC Radio 4 Extra have finally got round to putting GHOST ZONE back on. It's on at 18.00 this Sunday 13th July, plus a midnight repeat, with presumably the other 4 episodes at the same time on the four Sundays that follow. You can access it HERE on the BBC website. So, as I did with CATCH MY BREATH, I thought I'd do a little behind-the-scenes piece on the genesis of the piece. Here's PART ONE....

It was mid-2004 and I'd been trying to sort out the pitch for my Arnold Schoenberg play A Breath From Other Planets as a Radio 4 piece when there suddenly came the news from Bruce Young, my regular director at BBC Scotland, that BBC 7, as the digital channel then was, was looking for new material for their Seventh Dimension slot. Well, I'd always wanted to do science fiction, and on as grand a scale as I could get away with, and so I immediately said I'd give it a shot.

The only problem was they wanted pitches in quickly, so there wasn't a lot of time to go off and think. I racked my brains and remembered something from my very beginnings as a writer.

When I left school at the age of 16, the world very strangely refused to take seriously my ambitions to be a writer and I found myself shoved into a work experience job with Eastwood District Libraries, just south of Glasgow (you want to be a writer - well, be a librarian, instead! You still get to live in the world of books!). It was perhaps the most concentratedly dismal six months of my life: I had to wear a shirt and tie, which meant the hyper-sensitive skin of my neck was raised in red welts by the end of a working day - and the single consolation I found in actually reading the books was frowned upon. I recall one day being caught by the chief librarian of Mearns Cross Library secretly reading James Dickey's Deliverance on the floor behind the bookstacks. I had just got to the famous male rape scene - with its extended musing on the internal damage being sodomised by a hillbilly might induce - when that frowning visage loomed above me, more intimidating still than any mountain man protecting a still.

Alas, this didn't even get me sacked, so I had to persevere. But one further consolation emerged when I got the chance to search through a box of old books due to be dumped. In there I found a dog-eared copy of the tie-in book for the old Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World TV series. And in that was a chapter devoted to the Tunguska Incident in early twentieth century Siberia when a great big 'something' (meteor? asteroid? alien spaceship that crashed while taking on water?) exploded, devastating a vast area of the remotest Russian countryside. The Clarke book (yes, I know it's ghost written...) even had evocative photographs of whole stretches of Russian forest laid flat by the blast. Well, this stuck in my mind and, during my lunch breaks I would escape from the District Library offices into nearby Rouken Glen Park, there spending a brief, blissful hour wandering the atmospheric ravine, making up in my head the stories that - I supposed - would one day win me fame and fortune.

And I particularly played around with the Tunguska incident. What if - I thought - you had a story where, within weeks of the Tunguska explosion, a group of Russian scientists wander through all those miles of catastrophically blasted landscape... and find, in the middle of it, a little Siberian village where nothing seems to have happened, where peasant life is going on as normal, not a single building damaged. How did you survive the blast? - ask the scientists. What blast? - say the villagers. But of course there was going to be more to it than that....

Yet I was a long way short, at the age of 16, of developing the discipline of getting things solidly down on paper, or even carrying an idea through to a proper conclusion. So all I wound up with was that pretty decent 'first act' without any idea of where to take it thereafter. It got shoved on a shelf along with so many other almost-brilliant ideas from that era.

And yet, years later, when Bruce Young asked for a science fiction idea - and quick! - that old Tunguska 'first act' popped back into my head - and I thought, what if I finally come up with the remainder of that story? I didn't, by this point, want to do a period piece set in Siberia a hundred years ago (I'd already done a Russian drama in A Hundred Miles just a couple of years before and Bruce didn't like me to repeat myself). But what, I thought, if I took my Tunguska story and set it instead in contemporary Scotland? It also combined with a more recent idea that I'd never got as far as formally submitting, an idea called "Can Just Vanish", about a Scottish village that simply vanishes off the face of the earth one day, with those left behind trying to explain the mystery and understand the loss but never managing to do so: a piece designed more as Kafkaesque parable than science fiction adventure: I suppose we were all still trying to process 9 / 11 back in those days (which I suppose leaves its own ghost in Ghost Zone in the form of that immense dust cloud.)



I wrote a quick, but detailed pitch (not quite the same as the final serial: I remember the alien ship successfully taking off at the end) entitled, rather wonderfully I thought at the time, "A COLD PLACE BETWEEN PLANETS". Yes, I know that's the most pretentious title a science fiction story ever had (and that's saying something), but I rather liked it, thought it had a poetic quality. Bruce Young, probably quite rightly, thought it was horseshit and told me to come up with something simpler. GHOST ZONE, I patched together in about two minutes flat, a kind of tip of the hat, I suppose, to 'La Zone', the ghostly otherworld in Cocteau's 'Orphee' and the Forbidden Zone in the original Planet Of The Apes (the scenes therein a very definite influence on the first episode). I was never that happy with the title, but it stuck and that's that.

A few weeks later I had dropped in to see Bruce at the BBC's grand old studios in Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow: he dragged me into his office, sat me down and told me he thought he had good news - although BBC 7 hadn't formally accepted the idea, they'd just been on the phone wanting a finalised budget. So we were effectively commissioned -- but this was late August and we were going into the studio in early November, so I didn't have a lot of time to write a five part drama. Classical music's always been my drug of choice when it comes to getting writing done, so I headed back through central Glasgow, impulse-buying a couple of CDs: Gyorgy Ligeti (whose music I desperately, ineffectually, wanted as the background score: it worked for Kubrick, after all) and Tristam Cary's score for the Hammer film Quatermass And The Pit -- and then I had to head up into the Scottish highlands... because at this point I was having to supplement my writing income by guiding walkers on the long distance hiking trails... so Jill's job in the story is a direct rip-off from my own life.

This added further pressure to my writing schedule: I was basically spending long days guiding people up and down mountains and then sitting down in the evening for two or three ours in the quietest spot I could find in some claustrophobic youth hostel to scribble out long-hand the next few scenes of Ghost Zone,and then typing it all up at the weekends when I got home. But in other ways, of course, it helped the piece: those moody scenes in the first episode of clambering across the dust-swathed mountainscape were informed by the fact that I actually was spending my days clambering through misty mountain passes like the Devil's Staircase above Glencoe.

Influences? There's clearly a bit of Andrei Tarkovsky's two science fiction films, Solaris and Stalker, in there: the alien intelligence that uses people's memories as raw material and the idea of the guide leading people into an alien wasteland (although, as I say, my own experience as mountain guide was a more direct influence there.) I HAD been a big Tarkovsky fan, but frankly by the time of Ghost Zone the passion was spent, at least as far as those two films was concerned, and so Ghost Zone was almost a direct contradiction of, rather than homage to, those films: I was a bit weary of the pious puritanism with which Tarkovsky drained out all the traditional thrills and spills of less pretentious science fiction - and was determined to put them back: to do a kind of kick ass Roger Corman version of Stalker, as it were.

The most crucial influence was a very particularly British tradition of science fiction drama. Heaven knows, in radio it would be easy enough to simulate a spectacular clash of galactic empires on a modest budget. But I was much more interested in the aesthetic of the Hammer science fiction films of the late 50s and early 60s: the Quatermass films (one commentator pointed to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers as an influence, but I'd point more relevantly as far as 'alien takeover' stories are concerned to Quatermass 2, where the journey to the remote spot where the takeover has happened is a journey by outsiders across a remote ghostly grey British landscape), X- The Unknown (set on a Scottish moor, albeit actually shot in some quarry in the home counties) and, supremely, Joseph Losey's The Damned. There's no real plot cross-over between the latter and Ghost Zone but it was supreme in my mind as a stylistic, atmospheric model: my dear old Granny had cable TV and every time The Damned showed, crudely panned and scanned, on Bravo or TCM or whoever it was that was had it in their repertoire, I'd hurry to her house and commandeer the TV. Nigel "Quatermass" Kneale's The Stone Tape actually gets a direct reference: I'm not sure I'd actually seen it at this point, but I'd heard of the theory behind it. You could also throw in Village Of The Damned, and by extension the work of John  Wyndham (such as the Kraken Wakes, a set book when I was at school.)

But what that all adds up to is a very particularly gritty, down to earth aesthetic of British science fiction: no fancy costumes or futuristic sets, a contemporary setting, tight-lipped and unglamorous characters, a particularly bleak and otherworldly use of British landscape, edgy political undertones.

Listeners nowadays can be excused for thinking the references to Iraq are to the more recent war there, but in fact back in 2004, that conflict was still ongoing and so the references are to the Desert Storm conflict of the early 90s. But certainly the sense of 'Iraq' as a symbol for a kind of moral and pointlessly violent chaos that would scar and haunt anyone who survived was very much in my mind.



So anyway I wrote and wrote and got the script finished on schedule. As we neared production, it became clear we might be facing an almost unique problem in my radio experience: the script might actually be too short. It was just fine in terms of page length and word count, but a lot of the dialogue was so fast, so rat-a-tat-tat, that in a couple of episodes at least we seemed set to run a few minutes short. Like I say, this was fairly unique with my scripts: usually you aim to be, and are, just a teeny bit long, allowing room for manouveur in the edit suite, and at least two of my plays Olalla & Rough Magick had to lose whole chunks in the final edit just to fit the slot. But here Bruce was asking me to write extra material the weekend before we went into studio.

In one particular instance this was fortuitous: on the Friday before we started, I went to a concert of classical music in Glasgow: Holst's The Planets was on the bill, a bit of a war-horse but a piece I'd been fond of since childhood. And as the final piece, with its ghostly female chorus, filled the Royal Concert Hall I let my mind drift and free-associate and came up with the scene in the fourth episode where Jill gets a momentary vision of the planet the alien intelligence comes from. I couldn't, frankly, give a toss if it's scientifically feasible for a planet to descend into a kind of Arctic winter every night and thaw out into tropical lushness every morning: the image came to me, instantaneously complete, like a kind of pure and perfect surrealist vision... and I'm of that school that's closer to surrealism than to Scientific American in its approach to the science fiction genre. The scene was shoved in at the last minute to pad out that short-running fourth episode... yet it's my favourite scene in the whole story, and by a country mile. As in my horror work, sheer beauty is always the highest aspiration.


IN PART TWO, I'LL TALK ABOUT THE PRODUCTION OF GHOST ZONE.... TO BE CONTINUED!

Friday 4 July 2014

21st CENTURY POE: MOYAMENSING poster

Liam Proctor has just completed a great poster for my Edinburgh Fringe show so couldn't resist posting it here. Tickets already shifting and you can book here:  https://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/21st-century-poe-moyamensing

Here's the poster:


Saturday 7 June 2014

21st Century Poe: Moyamensing at Edinburgh Fringe: Press Release

Just pasting in press release for my show 21st CENTURY POE: MOYAMENSING - which comes to The Vault@Paradise Green this Edinburgh Fringe...

21st Century Poe: Moyamensing

The Vault @ Paradise Green 4 – 17 August 2014 (no show on 11th) 17.50, Tickets £8 / £6 conc.

Edgar Allan Poe - widowed, weeks to live, a little the worse for drink – finds things getting worse still as he is locked for the night in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison... where his worst nightmares are waiting for him. A little known but true incident from the closing stages of Poe's tragic life inspires Scottish playwright / storyteller Marty Ross' sequel to his sell-out show at last year's Fringe.

In last year's 21st. Century Poe, Ross reinvented three classic Poe tales in his uniquely visceral, wildly theatrical style. This year he takes on the persona of Poe himself, a desperate and drunken Poe keen to tell you the tale of his latest, strangest adventure. Poe left behind an account not only of his overnight incarceration in Moyamensing Prison, but also of the hallucinations he suffered therein: scenes and horrors to match anything in his fiction, from live dissection and cannibalism to a vision of a sublimely beautiful woman echoing more than one of the women he loved and lost. Ross has taken this as the basis of a psychological, metaphorical portrait of Poe that captures the inner life of the tormented genius as no conventional, realistic 'biopic' treatment ever could. Dark humour, surrealism, Gothic horror and stark tragedy promiscuously intermingle in a one man show that aims to outdo even the acclaim for last year's show....

2013 reviews:

Broadway Baby: Review by Gwen Sims-Williams (5 stars)
An insanely good piece of storytelling.... Ross is a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure, painting vile pictures and weaving a grotesque spell... Trainspotting meets Gothic horror…. The storytelling is utterly convincing... Ross’ violently impressive performance make this a heart-pounding triumph which demands appreciation.

3 weeks: Review By Katharine Wootton (4 stars)
Marty Ross delivers a bewitchingly good story that leaves a haunting reminder long after the lights have gone down.
*
Fringe Review: Reviewed by Donald C Stewart
This was visceral. Marty Ross is a compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as reeling… An immensely entertaining ride that scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st Century….

The Scotsman - review by Claire Smith
Ross has a great aptitude for suspense and terror, and he hurls himself into his tale with energy and passion, in words which ring with the native Glasgow rhythm... an accomplished piece of work which builds towards a chilling conclusion.

MARTY ROSS is author of a string of BBC radio dramas, including the series The Darker Side Of The Border and the serials Ghost Zone and Catch My Breath. He is also the author of two Doctor Who audio dramas and an award-nominated Dark Shadows drama. Two new radio dramas will be produced by BBC Scotland this autumn, including a radio play version of Moyamensing, to be broadcast on Halloween after a live performance in Glasgow. He also performs widely and to great acclaim as a live theatrical storyteller.





Saturday 19 April 2014

The Blackwater Bride at Belper Arts Festival May 4th!!!

My Gothic mystery storytelling show The Blackwater Bride returns for another outing on May 4th at the Belper Arts Festival in Derbyshire, at No. 28 in the Market Square. Here's the details:

THE BLACKWATER BRIDE
A Dramatic Storytelling Performance at Belper Arts Festival
Sunday May 4th. 2014 19.30 Tickets £7 / £5 
Tickets via: http://www.belperartsfestival.org/THEATREEvents.php

Belper Arts Festival, Number 28 Arts Centre, Belper Market Square
A Victorian Gothic mystery tale in the tradition of Conan Doyle & Robert Louis Stevenson – brought to the stage as an epic one-man drama by master storyteller & playwright Marty Ross!
Over the last few years, Scottish (but Nottingham-based) storyteller Marty Ross has established himself with a series of shows combining his mastery of the traditional art of live storytelling with a playwright's sense of theatre, in dramatisations of Thomas Hardy & classic ghost stories for Chilwell Arts Theatre, in performances of his own stories rooted in Scots folklore, as well as with 21st. Century Poe, his 5 star sell-out at this year's Edinburgh Fringe and London Horror Festivals, updating three classic Poe tales to our times and his own home town of Glasgow. But now comes his most ambitious show yet.
Ross has a parallel career as a playwright, particularly with radio drama for the BBC, including his series of Scottish Gothic tales The Darker Side Of The Border, the popular serials Catch My Breath & Ghost Zone and single dramas including 2012's Rough Magick, 2013's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk & 2014's forthcoming The Dead Of Fenwick Moor. He has also written Doctor Who audio dramas, an award-nominated Dark Shadows drama and last year had Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots commissioned by The Buxton Festival. This new show, The Blackwater Bride, reworks for solo-storyteller format the first play he ever had produced, a tale close to his heart, rooted in the Victorian-Gothic atmosphere and backstreet folklore of his native Glasgow.
The Blackwater Bride begins when a young woman comes to Glasgow to investigate the mysterious death of her father. A young policeman helps her negotiate the great city's shadowier back streets – even as his superior officer seems to have his own private reasons for obstructing the investigation. The clues point towards the mysterious figure of the Blackwater Bride, a ghostly figure of local folklore who simply can't be real... or can she? What begins as a murder mystery shades towards the eerier, more uncanny world of both Celtic folklore and the 'gaslit Gothic' of tales like Jekyll & Hyde and Dorian Gray, Sweeney Todd & The Woman In Black, Ross shifting with chameleon fluidity, and Dickensian vividness, through a whole cast of characters good and bad, male and female, mysterious and dangerous, evoking a dramatic vision of the smoky, shadowy, bustling, labyrinthine Victorian city. Where his previous Chilwell shows have presented 'double bills' of shorter stories, here he presents a single full-length story in two acts, in the grandest manner of Celtic storytelling, where a single story would indeed often occupy a whole evening (or several evenings, but he's not quite that ambitious – yet!)
Reviews of Ross' previous storytelling shows give a taste of the high octane theatre a storytelling evening with Marty Ross offers:
Ross has a great aptitude for suspense and terror, and he hurls himself into his tale with energy and passion, in words which ring with the native Glasgow rhythm.” - The Scotsman
Visceral. Marty Ross is a compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as reeling… Never less than compelling this was theatre that kept you on edge... It is the utter conviction with which Ross performs that draws you into his world. Immensely entertaining – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st Century.” - Fringe Review
Insanely good storytelling. Ross is a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure. The storytelling is utterly convincing.” - Broadway Baby




Thursday 6 March 2014

21st Century Poe returns to Edinburgh Fringe

After my successful run at last year's Edinburgh Fringe with 21st Century Poe, my three radically updated, and very Glaswegian, updates of classic Edgar Allan Poe horror stories, I'm returning this year to my old haunt, The Vault at Paradise Green, to present a whole new Poe show 21st Century Poe: Moyamensing. It's on from 4 - 17 August (with a day off on the 11th; 17.45 each day, performance 1 hour). What on earth does 'Moyamensing' mean, I hear you ask? Well, it was a prison in Philadelphia into which Poe was thrown for being drunk and disorderly, one night during the last few weeks of his life. While imprisoned therein, he experienced hallucinations as strange as anything in his fiction - hallucinations later recounted in detail to a friend. In my play, Poe recounts those strange and terrifying adventures, that single night locked in Moyamensing prison becoming a metaphor for his whole tragic life. It's going to be quite a show. I'll obviously update when tickets become available. Meanwhile, here's a rough poster image...

Thursday 6 February 2014

Blackwater Bride production photos

Had technical rehearsal yesterday for The Blackwater Bride, my epic storytelling show at Chilwell Arts Theatre in Nottingham this Friday, 7.30. Like any performer, i've been through nightmarishly protracted tech rehearsals in the past, but this went very smoothly, thanks to my technical crew of Ted in the lighting booth and Stuart fitting the very ambitious set together. I'll include here some behind the scenes photos taken by our producer Michael Schillinger... - Another rehearsal today - and then it's opening night!







Tuesday 4 February 2014

Programme note for The Blackwater Bride, Friday Feb 7th, Chilwell Arts Theatre

Just composing programme note for Friday's performance of The Blackwater Bride at Chilwell Arts Theatre, Nottingham this Friday, Feb 7th. at 7.30.

The blackwater bride
programme
A Chilwell Arts Theatre production

Principal characters in the drama:
James Miller – a bank manager
Catriona Miller – his daughter
Constance Miller – his wife, her mother
Detective Sergeant Bryan Culley – a young policeman
Detective Inspector George McGavigan – his superior officer
Mrs. Hubbard – proprietess of a very exclusive establishment for gentlemen
The Blackwater Bride – a mystery

The setting is Glasgow and, briefly, Dumfries in the year 1893.

As a teenager, after school, I would sometimes catch a bus from the Glasgow suburb where I lived, travelling to 'inner city' Govanhill to stay overnight with my Grandmother. On autumn and winter nights I would often get off the bus a stop or two early and walk the rest of the way, this taking me through a maze of Victorian tenements lit against the dark by the amber, almost sepia, light of the street lamps. I developed this slightly peculiar habit because, as a precocious devourer of Sherlock Holmes stories and Victorian Gothic tales from Jekyll & Hyde to Dorian Grey, I could almost feel as if I had stepped, there in the latter 20th. Century, directly into the Victorian landscape of those tales, making up stories of my own as I went along. After all, my Bancroft Classics edition of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, bought in the childrens' section of Woolworths, featured a pen and ink illustration of Mister Hyde evading the police by jumping a fence into a tenement backyard... which was the exact spitting image of my Grandmother's yard.

And then I would reach my Grandmother's tenement and settle by her gas fire and, after tea, she would teach me the art of storytelling, spinning extravagantly detailed yarns that ranged from fairy and folk tales to her own retellings of the old black and white films she loved so much... Gaslight, The Spiral Staircase, Frankenstein: the films themselves, when I later saw them, would often pale by comparison with the vivid, thrilling images she put in my head with simple word and gesture. I suppose tonight's show is a kind of tribute to her, Jessie Downs, my first and greatest master in the art of storytelling.

It was inevitable, when I began to seriously write and perform myself, that I would want to bring all those influences together in a single story... Celtic myth and legend, the whole genre of 'gaslit Gothic', and the Victorian Gothic landscape of Glasgow itself. I first wrote tonight's story as a conventional play – and in fact it was the first piece I ever had performed. But I always longed to give it a second life, to rework it for the particular form of one man storytelling I have made my own. In that first stage-play version, in fact, I had my young Scots heroine from Dumfries travel to London for her mysterious adventure. Living in Glasgow at the time, Glasgow suddenly seemed too familiar to me to play the role of a city of bewildering strangeness. Now that I have been living in the East Midlands for more than a decade, however, still joined at the heartstrings to Glasgow but separated from it by hundreds of miles, my home city exists for me more as a city of the mind, of memory embroidered by imagination, than a place of direct daily experience. Thus it has taken on, in my mind, just that quality of 'otherness' necessary for the city in this story. Sigmund Freud, in his essay on the supernatural tale, said that 'The Uncanny' (or in German, the unheimlich, the un-homely) is not simply the utterly strange, the wholly alien, but the homely that has become 'unhomely', the familiar that has been rendered strange, as our dreams spin fantastic landscapes and adventures out of things we knew very common-sensibly hours or years before in the wakeful day. Glasgow was my home and is now my un-home... it haunts me, simply put, like a ghost.

And it is, therefore, now the perfect setting for my uncanny tale -- which means a journey back to my roots as a storyteller, walking those Govanhill streets on lamp-lit winter evenings, imagining the strange and wondrous characters who might step out of the shadows at any moment – and begin telling me their story. To those Glasgow shadows, I likewise dedicate The Blackwater Bride.

MARTY ROSS is a Glasgow-born, Nottingham-based storyteller and playwright, best known for a string of BBC radio plays, ranging from 2002's A Hundred Miles to 2012's Rough Magick (available from the BBC's AudioGo site) and 2013's Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, as well as the Radio 4 series The Darker Side Of The Border and the Radio 4 Extra serials Catch My Breath & Ghost Zone. Commissioned for 2014 is a drama for Radio Scotland, The Dead Of Fenwick Moor, to be broadcast later this year. He has also written two Doctor Who audio dramas, Night's Black Agents & The Lurkers At Sunlight's Edge (available on CD and as download), as well as the Dark Shadows audio drama Dress Me In Dark Dreams (nominated for a 2013 Scribes award). The Wireless Theatre Company have produced Medusa On The Beach, Blood And Stone (nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award) and Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots, which was commissioned by the 2013 Buxton Festival. A new play, a ghost story set at Chatsworth House, has been commissioned for this year's Buxton Festival. His novel Aztec Love Song is published by Weathervane Press. Two other novels, Glasgow, Like A Stranger and Dances Sacred & Profane are available from Amazon's kindle store. His stage plays have been performed at the likes of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, the Liverpool Everyman & London's Finborough and Warehouse theatres.

As a live storyteller, he has performed everywhere from traditional theatre spaces to Scottish and German mountainsides, having first developed his storytelling skills while working as a guide on long distance hiking trips. The Blackwater Bride is his third show at Chilwell Arts Theatre and he has also performed in Nottingham's libraries and a couple of its classier cafes, as well as two years running at the London Horror Festival. Last year, at the Edinburgh Fringe, his show 21st. Century Poe was a considerable success and he will be performing there again this August. His repertoire runs from folk tales to his own versions of literary classics to his own stories. His website is: www.martyrossstoryteller.blogspot.co.uk and he tweets at @martyrosswriter

Special thanks to Michael at Chilwell Arts, to Stewart and Ted and Emma, to Helen & Ceri, & to all involved with the original Jordanhill production, especially Jill & Laurance.


Friday 31 January 2014

Behind The Scenes at The Blackwater Bride

Been working intensively on my new storytelling show The Blackwater Bride, which premieres at my home base of Chilwell Arts Theatre a week today, Friday February 7th. Been rehearsing all week, while set designer Stuart and lighting designer Ted busy themselves all around me. Stuart has made a particularly effective job of creating a corpse for the mortuary scene. I'll post a few photos here. You'll also see him and my producer Michael Schillinger carrying the corpse away at the end of rehearsal - the theatre is used by schoolkids during the day, and they didn't want to frighten anyone!





Wednesday 15 January 2014

The Blackwater Bride poster

Just pasting here poster for my Victorian Gothic storytelling show The Blackwater Bride, which is on at Chilwell Arts Theatre on Friday February 7th... All details on previous blog.

Monday 6 January 2014

The Blackwater Bride - Press Release

Here's the press release for my next storytelling show, THE BLACKWATER BRIDE, which is on at Nottingham's Chilwell Arts Theatre on February 7th.

THE BLACKWATER BRIDE

A Dramatic Storytelling Performance at Chilwell Arts Theatre

Friday Feb. 7th. 2014 19.30 Tickets £8 / £6 concession

Telephone: 0115 925 2698 Queens Road West, Chilwell, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 5AL

A Victorian Gothic mystery tale in the tradition of Conan Doyle & Robert Louis Stevenson – brought to the stage as an epic one-man drama by master storyteller & playwright Marty Ross!

Over the last few years, Scottish (but Nottingham-based) storyteller Marty Ross has established himself with a series of shows combining his mastery of the traditional art of live storytelling with a playwright's sense of theatre, in dramatisations of Thomas Hardy & classic ghost stories for Chilwell Arts Theatre, in performances of his own stories rooted in Scots folklore, as well as with 21st. Century Poe, his 5 star sell-out at this year's Edinburgh Fringe and London Horror Festivals, updating three classic Poe tales to our times and his own home town of Glasgow. But now comes his most ambitious show yet.

Ross has a parallel career as a playwright, particularly with radio drama for the BBC, including his series of Scottish Gothic tales The Darker Side Of The Border, the popular serials Catch My Breath & Ghost Zone and single dramas including 2012's Rough Magick, 2013's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk & 2014's forthcoming The Dead Of Fenwick Moor. He has also written Doctor Who audio dramas, an award-nominated Dark Shadows drama and last year had Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots commissioned by The Buxton Festival. This new show, The Blackwater Bride, reworks for solo-storyteller format the first play he ever had produced, a tale close to his heart, rooted in the Victorian-Gothic atmosphere and backstreet folklore of his native Glasgow.

The Blackwater Bride begins when a young woman comes to Glasgow to investigate the mysterious death of her father. A young policeman helps her negotiate the great city's shadowier back streets – even as his superior officer seems to have his own private reasons for obstructing the investigation. The clues point towards the mysterious figure of the Blackwater Bride, a ghostly figure of local folklore who simply can't be real... or can she? What begins as a murder mystery shades towards the eerier, more uncanny world of both Celtic folklore and the 'gaslit Gothic' of tales like Jekyll & Hyde and Dorian Gray, Sweeney Todd & The Woman In Black, Ross shifting with chameleon fluidity, and Dickensian vividness, through a whole cast of characters good and bad, male and female, mysterious and dangerous, evoking a dramatic vision of the smoky, shadowy, bustling, labyrinthine Victorian city. Where his previous Chilwell shows have presented 'double bills' of shorter stories, here he presents a single full-length story in two acts, in the grandest manner of Celtic storytelling, where a single story would indeed often occupy a whole evening (or several evenings, but he's not quite that ambitious – yet!)

Reviews of Ross' previous storytelling shows give a taste of the high octane theatre a storytelling evening with Marty Ross offers:

Ross has a great aptitude for suspense and terror, and he hurls himself into his tale with energy and passion, in words which ring with the native Glasgow rhythm.” - The Scotsman

Visceral. Marty Ross is a compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as reeling… Never less than compelling this was theatre that kept you on edge... It is the utter conviction with which Ross performs that draws you into his world. Immensely entertaining – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st Century.” - Fringe Review


Insanely good storytelling. Ross is a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure. The storytelling is utterly convincing.” - Broadway Baby