Blood And Stone at the London Horror Festival website
Download audio drama of Blood And Stone here
..thought I'd throw in a few words about my lifelong secret love affair with 'Countess Dracula'...
THE COUNTESS & I.
We go back a
long way together, Erzsebet Bathory and I. One of my earliest childhod memories
is of a Saturday afternoon in the Govanhill area of Glasgow when I badgered my
parents to let me spend my pocket money on a book I had just seen in a shop
along the road: the novelisation of Hammer Films’ version of the Bathory story Countess Dracula. My Mum and Dad, to be
fair, were less worried about my exposure to the horrors within those pages (I
was already the kind of kid allowed to sit up in his Star Trek pyjamas to watch
the late night horror film on TV), than concerned over the waste of money on a
book surely unreadable to a child with his age still in single figures. (“Think
of all the long words,” I remember my Mum saying.) But I persevered and soon had
my hands on my very first ‘grown-up’ book, with its gorgeous front cover of a
beautiful young Ingrid Pitt and its disturbing back cover image of a
grotesquely aged Pitt shoved in her prison cell at the end of the film (which
therefore ends just before BLOOD & STONE begins.) And within those covers I
was introduced to at least a fictionalised version of the great lady, right at
the absolute inception of my literary life. She has haunted me ever since.
How could she
not? As someone who firmly believes that great horror is achieved when – and
only when - horror and beauty ring out at the same instant (No beauty? Then I’m
not interested.), this woman, simultaneously magnificent and beautiful and
monstrous beyond conception, might stand as the sheerest embodiment of that
aesthetic, less a commonplace serial killer (yawn...) than a kind of wondrous,
terrible Goddess of death, like Kali or Medea, Hecate or Clytemnestra.
Throughout
the rest of my childhood, a childhood blessed with the true writer’s ability to
promiscuously mingle ‘fact’ and fantasy, the tenement building in Glasgow’s
Catchcart Road which housed that newsagent’s shop became for me the home of
Countess Bathory. I would look at the dusty upper windows of that tenement and
visualise the Countess locked up in there – for it was the image of the
imprisoned Countess of her latter years that truly haunted my imagination.
(Likewise, the toy shop across the street where I bought a model kit of Doctor
Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde housed, in my imagination, that very laboratory
somewhere in its back shop.)
And so,
inevitably, I dreamed of one day creating my own artistic, dramatic vision of
the Countess. The basic plot of BLOOD & STONE was already at least
half-formulated in my mind by my teenage years, but I dithered over getting it
down on paper, fearful perhaps of doing justice to the great lady, but also at
a loss to think who would produce such a grim, gothic story. It hardly seemed
material for the BBC or the Royal
Court
Then, when a
backpacking trip around Austria saw me basing myself in Vienna, in a hotel room
so cheap the window looked out on a romantic airshaft heaped with dead pigeons,
I felt the Countess herself taking a hand in the matter. There’s no time to deal
with this in BLOOD & STONE, but not all the Countess’s atrocities were
committed in her Hungarian Castle. She also had a townhouse in Vienna, just
behind the Imperial Court (signifying how highly ranked her family were in the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy) and committed some of her crimes there. The monks on
the other side of the street used to chuck pots across at her window when the
screams of tortured girls disturbed their devotions – but never thought of
reporting someone so important to the authorities. Vienna doesn’t publicise her
its Bathory connection like it publicises Mozart, but after a bit of detective
work at the Vienna police museum, I worked out her Vienna address and made my
way there after dark one night.
The street is
narrow, poorly lit and with houses that seem to lean towards one another across
the street in Caligari fashion. The doorway that once been hers was large but
drably painted and many of the floors above in a building now split into
offices and apartments looked empty, derelict, buried in dust. I couldn’t help
but picture her staring out of the uppermost windows, haunting the spot still.
And, standing there, I happened to glance a few doors along to the window of a
small record shop on the same block. Two big musicals were playing in Vienna
VAMPYR ELIZABETH
It was like a
sign, direct from the ghost of the lady herself to my own imagination. I turned
away, hurried back up the street towards the brighter lights and broader byways
around the opera house. And I swear I could hear the moth-eaten folds of her
gown hissing after me up the pavement, pursuing me all the way back to the grey
shadows of that hotel room. That night I felt her crawling into my skull.
After that, I
had to write something. The first
form the idea took on paper was that of a stage play entitled Laundry, but this was a different piece
from BLOOD & STONE: the bare bones of the plot were identical, but Laundry updated the story to modern
Eastern Europe, both under and after Stalinism and was written in a surreal,
absurdist style closer to Ionesco or Kafka or Durrenmatt than to a
straightforward horror story. Inevitably, perhaps, no one knew what to do with
a play so wilfully off-beat and peculiar so the script lay gathering dust, like
the Countess’s ghost up behind those Vienna
But still I
couldn’t let go of her; or she wouldn’t let go of me. The idea came to me to
take the story back to what it had been in the first place: a pure no-bullshit
gothic horror story, 17th. Century castle setting and all. When I
took up professional storytelling, I performed a rough-and-ready 25 minute
version of Blood And Stone during one of my regular stints with the
Storytellers Of Nottingham in Nottingham’s haunted Trip To Jerusalem pub. It worked
well, but seemed too big and intense for that tiny venue and limited slot, so I
thought about developing it further as a full length piece in its own right.
Meanwhile,
I pitched it
tentatively to BBC Scotland as a radio play, but they took understandable
fright at the thought of something so dark and nasty coming on straight after The Archers. Then Mariele Runacre
Temple, who’d already produced another play of mine, Medusa On The Beach, for her Wireless Theatre Company dropped me a
line about a new audio drama company being set up specially to focus on horror
drama. And I knew in an instant that the ghost which had trailed me along the Vienna Glasgow street
BLOOD &
STONE was recorded in a spooky Norfolk church and then released, through 3D
Horror Fi, Wireless Theatre Company, Amazon Audible, iTunes etc. and was very
well received, ultimately earning a 2012 Rondo award nomination. But the tight
hold the Countess had taken of me meant it wasn’t enough to just write a script
and let others perform it – that dream of a longer storytelling version offered
me the chance to bring to fruition my own inner Countess, to fully channel the
way, years before, I’d felt her spirit creeping into me, whether in the streets
of Glasgow or Vienna. Storytelling, when it’s really going full tilt, has an
almost Shamanic quality… one feels the characters are passing through one like
spirits, like you’re a medium, an intermediary, between your audience and the
world of the dead. And, God help me, as I rehearse Blood And Stone, day and
out, as I twist mind and voice and body into the Countess’ stark contours, it
really feels as if there’s more than my imagination at work, as if
something/someone who followed me home, skirts a-rustle that night in Vienna is
slipping on my skin and bones like a ragged ballgown, a pair of dark gloves, a
tragic mask for a tragic (anti) heroine…..
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