THE BALLAD OF THE DRIFTWOOD MERMAID No.28 Belper Derbyshire 5 Dec

As promised, here's a little more detail on my next storytelling show, which is being performed at my regular performance haunt of No. 28 in the Market Square, Belper, Derbyshire. This is THE BALLAD OF THE DRIFTWOOD MERMAID.

This is my contemporary version of one of the classic Scottish folk tales, that of The Haunted Ships, as first collected - so far as I'm aware - in Allan Cunningham's "Traditional Tales Of The English And Scottish Peasantry" in the early 19th. century. The tale is native to the Scottish borders, to the area of the Solway Firth, that great sweep of water between South West Scotland and North West England. I've always felt a strong connection to that area - my Dad's boss used to have an upmarket log cabin in the area and we would go there for weekends away. Years later, it was in that selfsame log cabin that I had my honeymoon!

My version is set on the very edge of the Solway, at the tip of the Mull of Galloway (the same region where that other classic Scots horror tale, The Wicker Man, was filmed.) and is very definitely set in contemporary times. In the original, the fairies who haunt the Haunted Ships out in the Solway get their eye on the wife of a country Laird and try to tempt her from her husband into their underwater kingdom. The Laird does what he can to stop this happening... but the story comes to a rather abrupt end when the ghosts / fairies come up with a cunning plan to steal her away that is never actually put into practice. I decided, therefore, in my version to not only update the story to a contemporary setting but to develop the plot further - though of course I don't want to give too much away at this stage!

Anyway, in my story Jenny and David, making a fresh start after some marital difficulties in Glasgow, make a fresh start in a state of the art house they've had built on the Galloway cliffs. But they aren't quite over the problems with their marriage, these difficulties compounded when Jenny gets closer to Finn, a young fisherman who makes a hobby of carving extraordinary beautiful sculptures out of driftwood. And out among the great heap of sunken ships not far off the coast, the ghosts and the fairies are still covetous of human beauty....

The show was performed at the London Horror Festival where one wag said it was like "Scots folk tale meets H. P. Lovecraft" and maybe there's something in that. Certainly it's intended, for all its modern setting, to have the rich mix of romance and spookiness, beauty and the uncanny, that typifies the greatest folk tales.

The show is at 7.30pm on Dec 5th at No. 28 Market Square, Belper, Derbyshire DE56 1FZ. Tickets are £7 full price & £5 concession. More details on the poster above.

THE BALLAD OF THE DRIFTWOOD MERMAID at No.28 Belper Dec 5th

Hi, full post to follow on the subject, but in the meantime here's the poster for my next storytelling show, which is THE BALLAD OF THE DRIFTWOOD MERMAID at my familiar haunt of the No.28 arts centre in Belper Market Square on Dec 5th. It's my radical contemporary reinvention of the classic Scots border folk tale of The Haunted Ships. Details of booking etc. are on the poster anyway....

LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK back on BBC Radio 4 12.11.15 at 2.15pm

Hi just a quick post to let you know that my radio play LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK, adapted from the story by Nikolai Leskov is back on Radio 4 today at 2.15pm (and available through iPlayer / BBC website etc for a full month thereafter) and to post links to my two previous MAKING OF posts, which are here....

LINK NO ONE:
http://martyrossstoryteller.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/lady-macbeth-of-mtsensk-bbc-radio-4.html


LINK NO TWO:
http://martyrossstoryteller.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/siberia-in-north-london-recording-lady.html

21st CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS at Glasgow's Britannia Panopticon Music Hall October 10th.

Just announcing....

21^st. Century poe:

falling for the ushers

sat. october 10^th. 7.30 pm, britannia panopticon,

113-117 trongate, glasgow, g1 5hd.

TICKETS £8 / £6 CONCESSION.

BOOKINGS:

judith@britanniapanopticon.org

info@britanniapanopticon.org

0141-553-0840

Scottish storyteller & playwright Marty Ross (BBC Radio horror; Doctor Who audio) drags The Fall Of The House Of Usher kicking & screaming into contemporary Glasgow – in one of Glasgow's most atmospheric locations, the world's oldest surviving music hall. What better show to get Glasgow in the mood for Halloween?

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, audaciously relocating the tale to his own era and his own Glaswegian 'back yard'. 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.

21^st CENTURY POE has already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe and London Horror Festivals, as testified by the reviews below, but it has never enjoyed a more atmospheric location than the Victorian grandeur of Glasgow's – and the world's – oldest surviving music hall. This is sure to be one of the highlights of the run up to Glasgow's Halloween.

“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

“…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 ****

“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 *****

“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, Moyamensing, The Dead Of Fenwick Moor), 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 throughout Scotland and England. Two plays of his have premiered at the last two Buxton Festivals – Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots & The Woman On The Bridge. A new play Crooker's Kingdom, has been commissioned by Cromford Mill for premiere this Halloween. Another audio drama, Romeo & Julian, has just been commissioned by Amazon Audible.

TICKETS £8 / £6 CONCESSION.

BOOKINGS:

judith@britanniapanopticon.org

info@britanniapanopticon.org

0141-553-0840

VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT @edfringe review by Donna Foulis of TVBomb.co.uk

Just posting here the first review in of my Edinburgh Fringe show VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT, written by Donna Foulis of TVBomb. I'll post a link to the website here: http://www.tvbomb.co.uk/2015/08/vampires-in-the-vault/

Donna here is reviewing one of the two stories I'm doing under the Vampires In The Vault heading, namely Blood And Stone, the real life 'Countess Dracula'. I'm performing that show every second day, tonight (i.e Tue 11 August) & also Thur 13 & Sat 15 at 17.55. The other story, The Gorbals Vampire, very warmly received last night, is being performed, same time, same place, on Wed 12 & Fri 14. Venue is Paradise In The Vault, 11 Merchant Street, venue 29, just uphill from the Grassmarket, just down the hill from Greyfriars Bobby, turn the corner at the Oz Bar and go under the bridge. You can book through www.paradise-green.co.uk (0131 510 0022) or the edfringe office at: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/vampires-in-the-vault

But also for convenience's sake, I'll paste in the review text below. Thank you, Donna!

We all like a good story. We tell them to each other every day, emphasising the key details to excite our friends’ attention. Marty Ross has perfected this art of storytelling and will captivate your attention for an entire hour leaving you imagining that you are sitting in the depths of the ancient, mouldering castle where this thrilling tale takes place.

The show alternates between two pieces, with tonight’s performance telling the thrilling tale of Blood and Stone. The story provides a sequel to Hungary’s infamous tale of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, unravelling the layers to the countess’s story as the mystery of this seemingly vampiric woman, is picked apart by an intriguing visitor to the castle.

The performance moves at a seemingly impossible speed and with a furious energy. Ross seems to have no need to stop and come up for air, effortlessly switching between characters to deliver a fluid and captivating sequence of events and detailed imagery. The pace of the narrative is well-timed to add mystery and intrigue that really draw the audience in. There is barely any evidence of movement from any of the audience members—no fidgeting or turning of heads to read others’ reactions—as Ross has their full attention throughout the performance.

This show is a must see for lovers of gothic and ghostly tales, the cave likevenue adding to its authenticity. It’s certainly intriguing enough to make one want to go back and listen to his other tale The Gorbals Vampire, which has Glasgow as its gothic setting.

Me in my 17th century Gothic clobber

VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT: Blood And Stone at the Edinburgh Fringe

Well, my 2015 Edinburgh Fringe show VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT has begun its run as of last night. Last night I performed one of the two vampire tales I'm presenting on alternate days this year, The Gorbals Vampire. That's on again on Mon 10, Wed 12 & Friday 14 August. You can read the background on that elsewhere on this blog. But tonight Sun  9 August, and also on Tue 11, Thurs 12 & Sat 15 August, I'm presenting Blood And Stone in which I bring back from the dead the fearsome 'Bloody Countess' aka Countess Dracula, Elizabeth Bathory, and so I thought I'd reprint here my piece on my lifelong passion for the Countess. (Here's a LINK for booking for the show: T I C K E T L I N K

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 that year: one of them, Elizabeth, portrayed the tragic 19^th. Century empress ‘Sissi’, Austria’s very own Princess Di. The other show was Tanz Der Vampyr, a musical based on Roman Polanski’s film Dance Of The Vampires (aka Fearless Vampire Killers). But the way the posters for the two shows were juxtaposed in the window, one above the other, meant that what I saw when I glanced that way was the dim lamp light falling across two words only:

                                    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 windows.

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, 17^th. 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 streets that night, which had maybe been trailing me all the way from that Glasgow street of my childhood, had found a home.

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. Here's a link for downloading the audio drama version... BLOOD AND STONE AUDIO 

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…..

CATCH MY BREATH on BBC Radio 4 Extra & VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT at Edinburgh Fringe

Up to my eyeballs in preparations for heading up to Edinburgh for my Edinburgh Fringe show VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT, which runs from 8 - 15 August, with me performing my story THE GORBALS VAMPIRE on 8, 10, 12, 14 August & BLOOD & STONE on 9, 11, 13 & 15 August. Here's a link for booking tickets: B O O K I N G L I N K

But, MEANWHILE, if you want a free sampler of my distinctly Scottish brand of Gothic horror, BBC Radio 4 Extra are putting on my 5 part serial CATCH MY BREATH on again this week, running over 5 days, Mon 3 - Fri 7 August, playing at 6pm, with a midnight repeat. The show should then go on BBC iPlayer etc for a whole month, so no excuse not to catch up with this dark and disturbing contemporary retake on the darker side of Scottish highland mythology.

Here's a listening link to the BBC Radio 4 Extra. First episode should be available from 6.30 pm UK time today - and then after that, as I say, for a whole month. If you want to check out the 'behind the scenes' story of my writing the piece, check out this couple of entries from earlier posts on my blog:

CATCH MY BREATH behind the scenes part 1: LINK

CATCH MY BREATH behind the scenes part 2: LINK

It should put you just in the mood for catching up with me in Edinburgh!