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!

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.

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. 7^th. 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 21^st. 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

Opening chapter of Dances Sacred & Profane

Here's the opening chapter of my novel Dances Sacred & Profane: my sort-of-sequel to Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, by way of Hammer Films' The Vampire Lovers - the closest thing to an honest-to-goodness magnum opus I may ever have in me. The novel is available from Amazon's kindle store HERE...

1./ I woke to a quickening pulse of green light through the shade across the sleeping compartment's window. I lay and stared at the irregular flicker, too warmly cradled by the soft sheets and the lullaby clatter of the train's wheels to feel any presbyterian compulsion towards a swift rising, such as a chilly Scottish morning would have stirred. When the guard's rap on the door announced breakfast, I dragged back the covers and stepped to the window, drawing up the shade to reveal that the play of emerald glints was the refraction of sunlight off forest boughs crowding the side of the track. I supposed we must be nearing the Austrian border.

By the time I had taken my seat in the buffet car, we were slowing into the little station at the border post, the officers there very decently waiting until we first class passengers had finished dining before troubling us over passports.

My own inspection completed, I strolled the platform, taking my first proper breath of Austrian air, finding it piney-sweet with the lazy ripplings of the ocean of trees on every side. I caught the tang of wood-smoke, a thin and silvery plume unfurling amid the tree-tops banked high on the left of the track. Behind me, past the idling chuff of the engine, I discerned the roar of water through the gorge over which a bridge had just carried us. From that same direction came a clang of cow-bells, but the forest's immensest sound was the all-surrounding chatter of crickets. I raised my face to the sun and, in the instant before the glare forced my eyes to close, gained a vision of mountains staggered impossibly high above the highest firs, their grey and white crags where greens and browns could not reach melting into a paler shade of the blue the sky wore.

I was distracted by a compartment door's flapping wide and thumping against the wood alongside. Two of the station's officers were steering a young man from my carriage across the platform, his tall body hunched in its ill-fitting grey suit. He glanced my way, forcing a smile past his lop-sided moustache. Another officer opened the door of a little shack on the platform and the young man was hastened through, eyes directed forwards once again, the clench of his features reminiscent of a pupil at Burns Street Primary School being delivered to Mr. McAllion for a dose of the strap.

Our conductor was hurrying towards me, urging me to get aboard. I made the condition of my return an answer as to what was happening. "Fraulein, Fraulein, this... this is nothing for you to worry, " he said. "He is just... the man is, ay, ein Slav, ein Slavisches Kriminal, ein Serb. Or a… a suspect, to be sure, There is trouble, you see, with the, the politics today. Yes? They will put him on the next train if all is well. Now, please, we must keep time for Wien. Bitte."

I climbed aboard. We started off. Through the window of the door that had just been slammed at my back, I glimpsed the young man beyond the hut's window, caught by the sunlight blazing into the first couple of feet of an otherwise dark interior. He was taking off his jacket, an oval stain of sweat on the rear of his white shirt. I started towards my compartment, the conductor's portly wriggle along the corridor at my back closing off all other avenues. He was already forcing on me the menu for luncheon.

*

We raced on through the Salzkammergut, the Austrian equivalent of our Lake District, although far more richly-forested and steeper in its mountains, many of which still bore streaks of snow and precipitous expanses of glacier. The track snaked high above the lakes, their glassy surfaces painted the brightest of blues by the sky’s reflection.

We wound by onion-domed churches, schlosses, hunting lodges, lakeside hamlets, pausing at a few of the larger spa towns. My attention was drawn south towards the middle-distance and the jaggedness of the Dachstein alps, these marking the border between the Salzkammergut and the more secretive district of Styria, in which I had come to work.

Styria's proximity brought anxieties about my new post buzzing forth, sharper than ever in their stings to my confidence. Queen of this swarm remained the fabled Carla. Why, I asked myself for the thousandth time, was I being hired by Mr.Barsett as English tutor for his daughters when he already employed a governess who, though Austrian, had been leading the girls through their studies in English with, from the sound of things, an assured command of the language and literature? Or were Mr.Barsett's British agents merely being discreet when I raised the subject at my interview for the post? Did our shared employer bear some essential dissatisfaction with Carla's work; was he waiting merely to ensconse me in the schoolroom before dismissing her? Was my term to commence with the ugly scene of a colleague's being expelled? Would his daughters cheer her going or reject me as a paternal imposition?

*

It was late afternoon when the train reached Vienna's Westbahnhof. Gathering my three cases, I descended to the platform. It was, of course, a faux pas for a first-class passenger to stumble under the burden of her own luggage and a bull-like porter was soon wrestling the cases from my arms. He strode ahead, leaving me to keep pace as best I could. The platform itself was a torrent of dismounted passengers and greeters of passengers, amid which my eyes flitted in search of an employer I had never seen before.

The arrest of my porter just short of the gateway onto the concourse, seized by a figure darting from the thickest concentration of neck-craners and arm-wavers, prompted a flutter of anticipation in my stomach. But no: this little man, small and thin-boned in his fussy movements as one of the pigeons fluttering overhead, the sags and wrinkles on his gaunt face combining with the white stubble under his bowler hat to indicate the further end of middle age, jarred unacceptably with my hypothesised image of Mr. Kenneth Barsett.

All the same, the fellow was submitting my porter to an interrogation under which the bulkier man tilted and nodded like a tree given brisk chops halfway through its trunk. As I drew close, the little man faced me. "You are, excuse me," he asked, his accent the softest shade of German, "Miss Isobel MacMurdo?"

"Yes, yes, I - " I had begun, when a broad arm, jacketed in dark blue, stretched between us, its powerful hand, a hint of dark hair on the back, passing a half-smoked cigar to the bowler-hatted man, who took it not to smoke but to cradle, dutifully.

"Of couse you are," rumbled a voice to make me think of a bear taking its honey-fatted ease against a sun-warmed rock. The distinctly English intonation, a hint of the rural south-west buried, perhaps, beneath generations of refinement, made me turn with a shiver of certainty as to whom I should meet.

Mr.Barsett, dwarfing my anticipations, doffed his Homburg hat from a head of dark brown hair thinly templed with grey.

"One catches instantly the accents of Caledonia," he was saying. Although in early middle-age, he retained a hint of youthful muscularity, his square-boned face boasting a full but smoothly-trimmed moustache, its dark brown showing hints of the darkest reds.

"I'm Kenneth Barsett," he said, “your affectionate correspondent.” His warm paw of a hand closed about the slip of skin and bone I sent to meet it, his deep brown eyes staring into my waterier specimens as if he were taking a professional interest in the precise shade of their blue.

"Shall we trot?" he continued. He signalled the other man, who nodded and completed a muttering of instructions to the porter before sending the fellow before us, the little man then passing the cigar back to his master and facing me with a nod and a doffing of his bowler.

"This is my man Clemens," Mr.Barsett explained. "Valet, majordomo, guardian angel."

"Miss," nodded Clemens before popping the hat back on his head and scampering after the porter, whom he appeared to correct upon the holding of one of my bags at an inappropriate angle. With the slightest touch at my elbow, Mr.Barsett signalled that we should follow.

"How was your journey?" he asked. "You certainly had a pleasant day for hurtling the width of Austria."

"Yes, yes, it was beautiful, very... very beautiful," I replied, struggling to keep pace with his stride. "I look forward to seeing Styria tomorrow. Oh... will it be tomorrow?"

"What? Oh... oh, yes. I apologise for this roundabout route, but when your arrival coincided with my bringing Anabella here, well, I thought it might be as well for you to make the trip to Scharlachklippe with us. And it does afford you the chance for at least a glance around the capitol. Before we hasten you to less civilised parts."

"And tell me, your daughter... has the doctor here been able to help?"

"Oh, he's looked into this and that without, you know these experts, commiting himself to a straight answer. Nonetheless, she's perked up since we've been here. I suppose Anabella’s at that stage of young womanhood where they’re susceptible to all sorts of... influences. Perhaps it was just in her mind. We did get rather cooped up out there this last winter. At any rate, we can be off after breakfast tomorrow."

We had reached the doorway of the station and an onward view, over the cluster of motor cabs and horse-drawn carriages by the foot of the steps, to where sunlit streets streamed together from several directions, rumbling on into a broad main street, this leading towards the centre of the city, the richly ornamented facades of the buildings gleaming above the traffic like foam-bows.

A further touch at my elbow steered me down the steps and towards one motor cab in particular, Clemens shepherding both porter and driver through a geometrically precise loading of my cases. Mr.Barsett ushered me into the cab's back seat, squeezing his larger form through to join me as soon as he had clinked change into the porter's hand. Clemens and the cabbie climbed into the front seats, the former muttering what sounded like not merely the name of our destination but instructions as to the avoidance of every intervening bump in the road.

We roared from the kerb, swerving into that great shop-lined street, the cab weaving through a dense fabric of motor cars, wagons, carriages, hansoms and electric trams, the bright wood, metal and glass of all these dazzling in their play with the late afternoon sunshine. I glimpsed curvaceous rooftops with gilded slates; palatial shop-fronts with extravagant window displays; blue-robed madonnas and pinkish-plump cherubs painted immensely on church-fronts, the heavenly figures seeming to float on the intervening telegraph wires as surely as on their painted clouds, these jostled by the scarcely less numinous goddesses of artful, but somewhat immodest, advertising hoardings. Accustomed to the dour Protestant architecture of my native Glasgow, I felt as if I had stumbled into an operetta with a whole city for its stage.

Our path crossed the Ringstrasse enclosing the city’s medieval heart, the sky-impaling steeple and zig-zag patterned roof of St.Stephen's Cathedral rearing above the chocolate box facades like a Dies Irae disrupting a performance of Die Fledermaus. As our car turned by the Opera House - achitecturally, more fist in imperious gauntlet than gilded temple of frivolity - and swerved along narrower streets, the cathedral’s soot-dark sonorities kept reasserting themselves between the gaily-coloured shopfronts.

Our final swerve and halt swept away all intervening architecture, leaving me, as Mr. Barsett helped me climb out, peering up from close quarters at the cathedral’s rowdy gargoyles and grimy sculptings of saviours and angels and Our Ladies, my gaze reeling all the way to a roof and steeple seen from the perspective of a beetle in a giraffe’s shadow.

So thoroughly did the building seize the attention that I thought for a moment Mr. Barsett's influence must have allowed him to gain accomodation for us under that towering roof. It was only with another touch at my elbow that he drew my attention to the other buildings in this cramped corner of the plaza. The nearest of them, a short flight of marble steps climbing to a gilt-edged doorway in its butter-yellow facade, was our hotel.

 

ANOTHER CHAPTER FROM "DANCES SACRED & PROFANE" MY NOVEL, AVAILABLE FOR AMAZON KINDLE AT THE COUNTDOWN PROCE OF £0.99 THIS WEEK ONLY! GET THE BOOK HERE...

I was almost at the car when a cry from Herr Taut made me glance up. A figure in overalls had bounded into view from the shadowed doorway and was hurrying down the steps, leaping two or three of them at a time. I think I was aware at once where I had seen him previously, but closer confirmation came when he reached the foot of the steps, ran around the rear of the car and, busy glancing sidelong at the alley I had just left, dashed straight into me, throwing both of us to the ground.

The shock of being plunged on my back amid lukewarm mud was superseded by the realisation that, in falling, my right arm hand had lost its grip on the glass unicorn. Wriggling about to look for it, catching the voices of Herr Taut and Jurgen as they shouted from the top of the steps, I saw the unicorn lying a yard further on from where I had landed, inches short of the scrambling hands and knees with which the escapee from the factory was raising himself. Drenched with the sandy brown mud though his clothes and face and dark hair and bushy moustache were, he was unmistakeably the figure I had seen lurking in the trees by the Barsett house the night before.

On his feet by the time I could struggle to my knees, the fellow glowered at me; I was unsure whether it was simple anger at my obstructing him or awareness of my recognition pressing such bestial furrows into his countenance. I heard Herr Taut call for the "Polizei!", the shout succeeded by the sound of several pairs of feet hurrying down the factory steps. The fugitive glanced to his right hand, expecting to find more than the empty palm he showed himself. He cursed in a language other than German, swivelling to survey the puddled ground.

When he lunged for the area where the unicorn lay, I was seized by the irrational supposition that theft of this was his intent; I threw myself flat across the mud to reach it before him. In this I succeeded, but only for his heel to fix that hand and the unicorn under its weight, probably quite unthinkingly, as he stooped to seize another object a few inches further on.

It was as he rose again that I suffered the fullest burden of his weight, my first reaction to the resultant cracking sound being that this was my bones splintering, a sharp pain piercing that left palm, forcing a cry from me, this in turn prompting a slippage aside of his heel. I looked up to see him stare quizzically down at me while wiping mud from an object in his hand, brushing it back and forth against the breastpiece of his dungarees, the better to confirm it as a revolver.

It was then I noticed that the sound of feet descending the factory steps had ceased, but also that the cries accompanying them had multiplied, grown shriller, and now seemed to be coming from both sides of the road. The figure above me cursed, then turned and and ran off along the street, heading toward the railway station.

I attempted to lift my hand off the unicorn, only to feel it stuck there by thin strands of pain. Raising myself onto the support of my knees and the other hand, I looked down to see that the unicorn had cracked in two, the blood stung from me by the sharp ends of either half thickening into a puddle. I staggered upright, pressing the palm with my other thumb to staunch the bleeding. The loudest call yet boomed from behind me on the side of the street opposite the factory, followed by the sound of running, splashing feet. I was about to turn and see who approached when I noticed that the fugitive, still no more than fifty feet from me, had stopped, turned, and was aiming his revolver in my direction.

I wondered if I was supposed to raise my hands and beg for mercy, but neither arm nor tongue could shift, burdened as they were by the thought of what the gun's barrel would look like, in a second or so's time, when a shot would likely blaze, immense, from its tiny dark spot, some scrap of metal, smaller still, snapping forever the life within me. At my back, the loudest of the footsteps had audibly accelerated yet sounded now as if they had the distance between Scharlachklippe and the moon left to cross.

White fire blasted from the barrel. I thought I glimpsed the approaching bullet amid a spray of pale smoke. I flinched my head to the right, closed my eyes, felt a punch of air through the curls above my left ear and found myself dropping to a squat, eyes opening to take in the sight of the imprint I had lately left in the mud. I put both hands out to steady myself, dizziness surging through my skull, the echo of the shot rolling by and leaving me stranded in absolute silence. The smell and taste of smoke and burning metal wrapped themselves about me. A bead of wetness seeped down my brow, along the bridge of my nose and dripped into the mud. I watched for the colour of the drip. It seemed transparent.

The silence began to recede, disclosing the sound of a pair of splashing footsteps. These, passing into the distance, seemed those of the man who had fired; a cautious look upward confirmed his figure as already a good deal further on towards the stockyard of the train station.

Rising, I glanced and felt about myself, making sure no wound was soaking through my hair or clothes, the sluggish ooze from my left palm the sole source of pain and bloodiness I could find. Becoming aware of a swelling babble behind me, I turned and saw the bullet's actual victim.

I knew instantly, across the distance of a good fifteen feet, that it was the blonde policeman earlier encountered in his arrest of the older man, recognition facilitated - as I hastened towards his sprawl - by the fact that in being hurled on his back by the shot he had lost his helmet, this leaving his blonde locks - in need of a trim, perhaps, given his station - standing out like spilled gold against the whiteness of his face and the powdery blue of his uniform.

Clustering about him were Herr Taut, Jurgen and several of the factory workers, the foremost among them striving to raise him to a sitting position, each pull on his shoulders evoking a wail of pain. Calling out that he ought to be left flat, I squeezed to his side, dropping to one knee and extending a hand I hadn't quite the nerve to lay upon him. A blot of purplish wetness was spreading through the blue of his tunic at the left side of his chest, a dark rip in the serge where the bullet had torn through what I took, from his laboured "hnnn... hnnn..." gasps and the bubblings of blood at the left corner of his greying lips, to be some portion of the lung.

The skin of his face was sweating to a blueish-green, his chalky-blue eyes wandering, blinking to clear spattered blood and perspiration, around those leaning over him, his look wary, childish, questioning, as if he had just wakened into his situation and was unsure if it wasn't we who had imposed it on him. He tried raising his right hand towards his head, either to tug his collar from the labouring muscles of his throat or to mop his face with his sleeve; but the exertion on that side briskly communicated pain to the wound on the other and he almost choked on the next breath, the hand stalling half way, Herr Taut easing it back to his side. A blow-fly buzzed around the salty beadings on his face, Herr Taut and Jurgen flicking at it, although one could hardly blame it for reacting so to the sour and earthy odour.

More splashing footsteps approached. Looking up, I saw most of the policeman from the other street come running into view, casting their comrade glances as they hurried past us and opened fire on the assassin, who had, by that time, shrunk to a speck against the sooty machineries of the stockyard. As the din of the shots hit him, the wounded officer squirmed against our attempts at restraint, thicker gouts of blood belching up, coursing down his cheek and puddling on the mud.

"Mein Helm!... Mein Helm..." he whimpered, glancing about, lips curled back across pink and scarlet teeth. Jurgen darted to where his helmet lay, close by the heel of the rearmost of the firing policemen. In snatching it up, he brushed the jackbooted heel. The officer turned, grabbed the chauffeur and pressing a smouldering gun barrel to his temple. The rest of us shouted in protest, but the loudest protest came from outwith our number and in brisk anglo-saxon.

"Bloody bullying bastards!"

Mr. Barsett raced to Jurgen's side, pushing the policeman aside, startling him into a defensive flinching of the gun under his left arm pit, as if he feared the newcomer might break his toy. Jurgen scrambled back to our little group, laying the helmet on the wounded man's chest with the awkward tenderness of one proffering a condemned man his final cigarette. The recipient, his head slightly raised as it rested on the knees of one of the factory workers, looked at the helmet with a tired thoughtfulness.

Then, with a grunt, he grabbed the helmet, tossing it, at arm's length, back in the direction from which it had been retrieved. The effort splashed a cough of phlegm and black blood across his chin. He spasmed onto his left side and out of the hands of those attending him. The left side of his face splashed into a shallow puddle, his last breath snorting crimson bubbles through the yellow water.

It was only then, with the shallowed blue of his right eye staring sightlessly up at the deeper blue of the sky, that I found I could touch him, laying the most tentative of hands upon the crumpled serge about his knee. Even through the thick, rough fabric, I could feel the leaden hollowness into which his form had already hardened. The clatter of the guns continued. I cursed them inwardly.

It was now Kanoff's turn to reach the scene, thumping through the mud like a circus elephant on its hind legs. He had a repeater rifle in his hands and had no sooner pushed his way to the forefront of his men than he was blasting off shot after shot. What efficacy this was intended to have was beyond me, for the gunfire had, by this point, choked the air in front of the line of officers with a gunpowder mist obscuring any view of the quarter into which the assassin had fled. But still they fired, reloaded, and fired on, as if the thickening of the mist, with its awful metallic odour, had become an end in itself.

Finally, realising perhaps that his men might run out of the bullets they would need for any sensible assault on their quarry, Kanoff yelled for them to cease and then ordered them into a swift advance on the stockyard. As they charged off through their own smoke, not a few of them succumbed to a coughing fit. Kanoff himself turned to face Mr. Barsett.

"You see?" he said. "Murderous vermin! And what, I ask, is to be done with them? I pray no man who should know better was such a fool as to give the serpent warning. Such a man would find this boy's death was his... his..." Clicking his plump fingers as he searched for the word, he looked down at those of us about the body. "Der knab ist tot?" he asked.

"Jawohl, Herr Kommisar," Herr Taut replied.

"The boy is dead," he said to Mr. Barsett, before pointing to four of the fitter men amongst our huddle and telling them to carry the body to the wagon. “We'll let, shall we, the slav pigs ride down the mountain with the stench of their victim, hmm, Herr Barsett?"

"That's your decision, Kanoff," said Mr. Barsett, striding to where I remained on one knee. "I’ve no vocation for undertaking. - Come along, Isobel."

He guided me to my feet. "Let's get home," he said, signalling to Jurgen. I wriggled from his grasp, hurrying to where I had abandoned the broken unicorn. But that was the area where the firing policemen had assembled most thickly and I found the spot trampled to a deeper swamp and littered with singed shell-cases. At first I thought the horse had been buried altogether, but then a few glints signalled its having been smashed past semblance of its moulded shape, the fragments scattered just enough distance to make a battlefield mock of its previous coherence.

The wound across my left hand panged. Mr. Barsett caught that hand by the wrist, raising the redness of the wound for examination. "Come, let's get this patched up," he said.

He steered me to the car, Jurgen doing an excellent job of bandaging before driving us clear of the town. Before long, we were crossing the bridge by the waterfall and climbing past the factory’s smoke, emerging into the purer sunlight of the upper mountainside.

DANCES SACRED & PROFANE £0.99 on Amazon Kindle - this week only!

My novel DANCES SACRED AND PROFANE: A Gothic Romance... my deepest, richest, most ambitious work is available for Amazon Kindle all this week at a reduced price of £0.99. You can GET IT HERE... Here's a sample chapter to whet your appetite.

15./ I resumed my search for Anabella, clutching at her elder sister's suggestion that a second look at her bedroom would likely find her back beneath the sheets. Reaching her door, I found it closed, as I had left it, no illumination showing beneath. I pressed my ear to the wood, heard nothing, gave the door a discreet knock and then, when this went unanswered, clicked open the door.

My lamplight fell across Anabella. She lay face down beneath freshly-smoothed bedsheets, body animated solely by the slight rising and falling of her upper back in time to breaths drawn in deep slumber. I crossed to the bed, the doll on the wickerwork chair by the window watching me with those inescapable eyes often dispensed to humanity's simalucrums.

I sat on the edge of the bed, stroking aside a few wine dark curls that sprawled across the white pillow, better revealing the profile beneath, Anabella’s youthfully plump features bunched in sleep, a tiny sheen of saliva on the fabric below her half open lips. I turned to rise and found myself facing the figure in the wickerwork chair.

This was not the glass-eyed doll that had sat there a moment before, but the seated form of a tall, thin man, wizened skin taut across his skull, a widow's peak of dark grey hair equally tight across his scalp, a crumpled black suit loose as shovelled earth about his bones. His position in the chair suggested his staring at either myself or Anabella, but for the single moment I saw him the sockets of his eyes appeared either sunk in shadow or obscured by black spectacles, like those of a blind man. He was rising from the chair, or so I suppose, although my impression was more of his remaining seated but elongating his top half towards us, accompanied by a half sweet scent suggestive of wet earth and withered flowers.

I noted too, in that same instant, that his lap was heaped with what I took for half a second to be dead leaves, but which I then realised was a mingling of the corpses of small and scruffy birds with the limbs and severed heads of torn-apart dolls, all burnt black or bathed in oil, eyes of glass and eyes of flesh staring at me from the tangle. As the man’s lap began to rise in pursuit of the upper half of his body, this mess slid from his knees. As it slid, I saw two of the doll-eyes blink as if alive and helpless.

A bolt of flame flared up my lamp's glass chimney, dazzling me, then plunging me into darkness. 

CATCH MY BREATH - BBC Radio 4 Extra - Behind The Scenes - Part 2

My gothic horror serial CATCH MY BREATH is on BBC Radio 4 Extra once again this coming week, Monday 21st - Friday 25th October, 6pm every day, with a midnight repeat (and then each episode available digitally for 7 days afterward). So I thought I'd write a bit about the background of the story....

(Meanwhile, if you catch CATCH MY BREATH and like it, catch me LIVE at the London Horror Festival in my two shows there, the very vampiric BLOOD AND STONE: A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/blood-stone/ on Oct 30th and my Edinburgh Fringe hit 21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/21st-century-poe-falling-for-the-ushers/ on Halloween.)

...So one night, while guiding up in the Cairngorms, I got the news - courtesy of a public phone booth in a remote highland village (a mobile signal - don't make me laugh....) that we were commissioned by BBC 7 (later Radio 4 Extra). My play about the expressionist poet Else Lasker Schuler, My Blue Piano, had been commissioned by Radio 4 around the same time, so it was a busy autumn shifting back and forth between the two projects. Director once again, as with all my BBC projects up to that point, was Bruce Young: we were a good partnership, in part because we were in many ways opposites in terms of aesthetic temperament, Bruce very pragmatic, keen on straightforward, coherent storytelling and an economical use of language, me the baroque fantasist, the reckless head-in-the-clouds dreamer. Even now, when I haven't done a production with him for some while, it's always a useful exercise to me to ask myself "What would Bruce say?" about this or that scene or speech or individual line of dialogue. He's certainly the guy who taught me the proverbial ropes in terms of radio storytelling and I owe him a lot.

A key contribution Bruce made was in pressing me to keep Strachan from being too straightforwardly villainous - my concern in the first draft or two was in making sure he was genuinely scary, but Bruce was insistent there be more to him than that. BBC directors are always too respectful of writers to tell you what to write, but they're good at discreet nudges - and so scenes like the attic scene between Strachan and the old man in episode 3, a scene in which we begin to get a sense of what an utterly lost soul Strachan is, a scene that's one of my favourites in the whole story, was very much my response to Bruce's promptings.

We recorded at a former school in a former school in the tiny village of Pencaitland in eastern Scotland. The old BBC radio studios in Edinburgh (where my first BBC play A Hundred Miles was recorded) had been shut down when the Beeb sold the property and while the BBC offices that now stand on Pacific Quay in Glasgow were being laboriously completed, with their own in-house studios, we used this tiny independent studio: all but Hundred Miles and Rough Magick of my BBC Scotland work were recorded there. I loved Pencaitland - cast and crew without their own transport would meet in Waverley Station in Edinburgh and be mini-bused for the better part of an hour out to this tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere. The studio was actually alongside a graveyard, where I used to go strolling in the coffee breaks, maybe a better setting for recording this sort of story than the corporate offices on Pacific Quay.

We had a good cast. Claire Knight was in BBC Scotland's soap River City, a good strong presence to hold the thing together. Suzanne Donaldson was more of a newcomer to radio, but I really liked her performance. I remember Suzanne telling me that she was a major Marilyn Monroe fan - and maybe there's a teeny whiff of Marilyn's influence in the way her characterization combines a sort of breezy sexual self confidence and a deeper vulnerability. We had Eileen McCallum as Isla Thorwald - a bit poignant for me as my grandmother had died just a couple of weeks before the recording: she was the biggest influence on me both as a human being and as an artist and she'd been a big fan of Take The High Road, the STV soap on which Eileen was the star, so she missed by a couple of weeks hearing one of her soap favourites appear in one of my dramas. (She was an even bigger fan of Frazer Hines - on account of Emmerdale rather than Doctor Who: if only she'd lived to hear Night's Black Agents a couple of years later....).

But another crucial bit of casting came with the character of Strachan himself. Bruce had an actor lined up - a very good actor who'd been in a couple of my previous pieces, but a middle-aged character actor, not necessarily the sort of radio presence who'd make you swoon over every syllable. There was, however, a scheduling conflict and with about a day to go, that actor pulled out and Bruce had to recast: maybe, as with Rochenda Sandall in Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, all major roles should be cast last minute, because as with Rochenda we wound up with someone brilliant, in the form of Liam Brennan.

I confess that when Bruce told me over the phone who he'd cast, my response was "Liam who?", Liam being primarily known as a classical actor on the Scottish stage, rather than TV or film. But he was utterly brilliant, all I could have asked for. Crucially, he connected with that aforementioned 'lost soul' aspect of the character: without his changing a single word of the script, I could see and hear him, day by day, deepening, expanding, the character beyond my own vision of it. That's the greatest part of being a playwright - when an actor, while respecting your text, gives it a richer life than you could ever have envisioned. It's like a parent seeing his or her kid doing something you never guessed the kid had in it. Just listen to him in the final scene between Strachan and Isla Thorwald in episode 5 and you'll hear what I mean....

As with Ghost Zone, we found an episode or two running too short in the recording, what with the hectic pace, so I had to write a couple of extra scenes at short notice. But one of these, the scene in episode 4 where Strachan does Colleen's make up for her, is almost my favourite in the whole thing. There's nothing overtly sexual in the scene, but it's a deeply creepy, sensual, fetishistic moment, more pervy and disturbing than any overt sex scene. That's one of the joys of writing a sexually-charged story in a very tightly censored medium - like Josef Von Sternberg in all those 30s Marlene Dietrich movies, you have to constantly find metaphors for the sexual aspects you can't portray directly. And the way Bruce directed the scene, so that in contrast to the material either side of it, it's all very S-L-O-W and hushed, almost if the actors were whispering in a trance, a kind of 'underwater' acting even, is really effective; I think it's almost my favourite bit of direction from Bruce on any of the shows we did together.

(Again, the scene in episode 3 with the horse falling over the cliff and dying very slowly and audibly while Strachan embraces Colleen above, shows how that kind of outrageous, bizarrely displaced imagery can be more sexual than any sex scene, that broken backed horse belching out blood and froth and screams a hundred feet below the lovers a bolder image of sexual violation than any sex scene could ever be: a kind of 'blatantly indirect' surrealist sexual fetishism.)

Things I wasn't happy about? Well, we had a genius doing the sound effects on Ghost Zone and we didn't quite have that this time around - the 'demons in the forest' FX could have been much better. I wish I'd breached recording studio etiquette and jumped in front of the mic myself when some of those demonic voices were being recorded (although I do appear as one of the cackling party guests in ep.4.) But all told, it was one of the productions I was happiest with - and it meant a lot, after all those years, to see my Primal Scenes trio of Kate, Colleen and Strachan gain the fullblown dramatic life so many other dream projects of those early years failed to achieve... an ongoing dramatic life given how often the BBC repeat it. Do tune in and listen at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007k378