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...

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!

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 20^th. 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 21^st. 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.

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.